Nka

SACRED PLACES
and ARLIT:
DEUXIÈME PARIS
Reterritorialization in
African Documentary Films

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 32 • Spring 2013

70 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-2142269 © 2013 by Nka Publications

Published by Duke University Press

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Jean-Marie Teno, Sacred Places, 2009.

Sheila Petty Cameroon/France, runtime 1:10:00.
Courtesy Jean-Marie Teno

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Published by Duke University Press

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C ontemporary African filmmakers are trans-
forming African cinema as they move beyond
the social realist aesthetic directives of inde-
pendence times to explore the struggles and tri-
umphs of Africans living in globalized contexts. In
particular, documentary filmmaking stresses the
interrelationship between multiple histories (colo-
nial, national, and personal) as they collide with
social, political, and economic imperatives. Dating
back to the inception of African cinema, the docu-
mentary impulse stems from the filmmakers’ need
to document “the new historical path of their coun-
tries.” Early African documentarians were motivated
to overcome significant barriers “to visually articu-
late their cultures” in an emerging film industry
with little professional production support.1 Perhaps
more to the point, documentary film offers a crucial
entry point for early African filmmakers to explore
their own issues within contexts they control. As
Olivier Barlet notes, “At the time of Independence,
film was about reappropriating one’s own gaze, one’s
own space, one’s own modes of thought” from “the
ethnologist’s external or colonialist’s propagandis-
tic gazes.”2 In addition, American and British films
such as Tarzan the Ape Man (dir. W. S. Van Dyke,
United States, 1932), Sanders of the River (dir. Zoltan
Korda, Britain, 1935), and The African Queen (dir.
John Huston, United States, 1951) often depicted
Africans in denigrating ways. Thus the early devel-
opment of African filmmaking was fueled by a desire
to reconfigure racist depictions and claim identities
that spoke to African realities. For example, Afrique
sur Seine, arguably “the first sub-Saharan documen-
tary,” was produced in 1955 “by a West African stu-
dent collective led by the Senegalese director Pau-
lin Soumanou Vieyra.”3 This film documents and
re-creates the experience of African immigrants in
France, opening debate on issues such as racism and
employment discrimination later taken up in Afri-
can fictional films such as Ousmane Sembène’s La
noire de . . . (1966) and Med Hondo’s Soleil O (1969).
The mixture of fiction and documentary in the film,
a hybrid form described by Maria Loftus as “docu-
fiction,” demonstrates African documentarians’
desire to uncover forms depicting Africa as a unique
discursive environment.4 Thus, as is the case with
African fiction films, African documentary finds
its foundation in the need to reterritorialize and/or
72 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 32 • Spring 2013
Published by Duke University Press
deterritorialize cinematic space to meet specific Afri-
can cultural, historical, and political needs.
How, then, are these needs to be mapped? Start-
ing with Édouard Glissant’s concept of relational
poetics, this essay explores reterritorialization and
deterritorialization in Jean-Marie Teno’s Sacred
Places (2009, Cameroon/France) and Idrissou Mora-
Kpai’s Arlit: Deuxième Paris (2004, Niger/France).
Although relational poetics as a concept was initially
intended to describe the process of identity construc-
tion in Caribbean societies, Glissant’s theory presents
a starting point because it visualizes the production
of culture and art as an unfolding process in which
the “synthesis-genesis” of identity and aesthetics
evolves continually.5
Although Sacred Places and Arlit are both set in
African cinematic spaces, their filmmakers use deter-
ritorializing and reterritorializing aesthetics to forge
a targeted African cultural space within a global
flow of histories, and seek to reconceive postcolonial
Africa as a space of intersecting global histories. In
particular, I consider how the films reterritorialize
documentary aesthetics through the use of landscape
and testimony as metaphors for Africa’s postcolonial
struggles. In doing so, the documentaries create an
inner space for spectators to consider the social and
political costs of global exploitation from an African
perspective.
Relational Poetics Introduced
By advancing the concept of “the poetics of Relation,”
Glissant seeks to move beyond the notion of the colo-
nizer oppressing the colonized, a dichotomy in anal-
ysis that he regards as “a limitation from the begin-
ning.”6 Instead, Glissant proposes to create “a poetics
that is latent, open, multilingual in intention, directly
in contact with everything possible” and that offers
the greatest possibility for mapping intersecting his-
tories, politics, economics, and cultural impulses.7
This dynamic still leaves room for tackling the lega-
cies of colonization but offers expansion beyond
these eternally polarized concerns to seek contem-
porary and globalized concepts of identity and terri-
tory within a flexible framework that recognizes dif-
ference as well as similarity. From this perspective,
each text, regardless of media, occupies a specific
territory wrought from its own expression of history
and culture. Colonialism and its attendant legacies
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(operative in Arlit directly and implied in Sacred
Places) are often expressed by territory: geographic
boundaries that delimit nation and movement. How-
ever, territoriality can be expressed in more insidi-
ous ways: by the different relations between eco-
nomics, politics, and cultural spheres that augment
or challenge notions of stable or monolithic nations.
Moreover, the interactions between these compet-
ing spheres can often result in reterritorialization
or deterritorialization of culture and nation. This is
particularly evident in the process of decolonization,
where “the conquered or visited peoples are thus
forced into a long and painful quest after an identity
whose first task will be opposition to the denaturing
process introduced by the conqueror.”8 The central
question becomes how conquered or visited peoples
can reclaim their territories (historical, geographic,
political, economic, and social) for local purposes
and imperatives.
In film, aesthetics hold the key to this process:
how aesthetics are used, reformed, and transformed
provides structural support for reterritorializing
space and deterritorializing ideology. Like global-
ization, which is at once local and worldwide, film
aesthetics allow African films to mobilize local
imperatives for audiences that may be both local and
worldwide. As Martin Mhando and Keyan G. Toma-
selli argue, “A cognate concern is with how African
Published by Duke University Press
films reveal formal signs conditioned by structures
of social organization, cultural affinity, and immedi-
ate conditions of interaction.”9 In terms of the poet-
ics of relation, therefore, African documentaries in
particular are adept at creating unique methods for
exploring African concerns. Like weaving threads
into a fine piece of cloth, each aesthetic strategy in
these films contributes to the creation or reclamation
of African territory on local and world screens.
Rhizome or Baobab Tree?
Jean-Marie Teno’s Narration in Sacred Places
Glissant argues that rootedness “is very much the
image of the rhizome, prompting the knowledge that
identity is no longer completely within the root but
also in Relation.”10 Based on the image of the man-
grove tree, Glissant’s metaphor raises the notion of
meaning below the surface of a text. In African cin-
ema, with its frequent pedagogical focus, the image
of the baobab tree with its roots spreading to the sky
is more fitting: ideology is often not concealed but on
the surface, revealed in relation to multiple ideologi-
cal possibilities. The spectator is left to navigate the
different relational values on the way to determining
meaning for herself or himself. From this perspec-
tive, African filmic structure offers a kind of “circu-
lar nomadism” that “makes every periphery into a
center; furthermore, it abolishes the very notion of
Teno, Sacred Places.
Courtesy Jean-Marie Teno
Petty Nka • 73
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center and periphery” by placing the spectator in a
position to determine the relation between meaning
and what is presented on the screen.11
Cinema in sub-Saharan Africa is in a state of
crisis, particularly in terms of local distribution. As
Barlet notes, “Movie theatres have seen better days;
they are notorious for their peeling exteriors and
interiors, trouser-snagging worn chairs, unsanitary
toilets, echoing or inaudible sound systems, yellowed
screens, and hazy pictures.”12 The screens are colo-
nized by a variety of competing international pow-
erhouses, such as Hollywood, Bollywood, and Asian
martial arts films, usually delivered by DVD tech-
nology.13 Access to these theaters is, at times, dan-
gerous and is often beyond the means of the poor.
Burkina Faso, the setting of Sacred Places, demon-
strates the difficult realities faced by both consum-
ers and makers of sub-Saharan African film: despite
the presence of the world-renowned Panafrican Film
and Television Festival that takes places in Ouaga-
dougou, “two opposing circles exist.”14 The first circle
comprises “private cinemas,” geared toward the film
festivals and upscale clientele.15 The second circle
involves “privatized theaters that had once belonged
to government-owned cinema company SONACIB,”
but these have rapidly disappeared after overwhelm-
Teno, Sacred Places. Courtesy Jean-Marie Teno
ing debt in 2003 and corruption led to closures.16 The
cost of these cinema tickets is prohibitive for many in
Ouagadougou, who make do with cinema clubs, or
cine-clubs, run by locals under makeshift conditions
and often using pirated DVDs. It is this third, under-
74 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 32 • Spring 2013
Published by Duke University Press
ground cinema that Teno focuses on in Sacred Places,
by questioning what cine-clubs mean to the com-
munity and ultimately to the future of sub-Saharan
African cinema.
Sacred Places explores the social importance of a
cine-club in Saint Leon, one of the poor communi-
ties at the center of Ouagadougou, and creates such
a narrative space by constructing a complex relation
between Teno’s narration and the interviews of his
subjects. Presented in voice-over, Teno’s narration
near the beginning of the film identifies him as a
privileged filmmaker who stays at “fancy hotels” dur-
ing Ouagadougou’s famous film festival FESPACO.
This implies that he occupies an economic position
well above that of his documentary subjects, who
inhabit the impoverished quartier the film focuses
on. At first, this approach establishes little connec-
tion between the filmmaker and his subjects, but as
the narrative unfolds, the relation between the nar-
ration and the film’s interview subjects challenges the
notion of whose point of view constitutes center and
whose evokes periphery.
Early identification of the economic gap between
filmmaker and subjects suggests that Sacred Places
represents a personal journey for Teno that invites
the spectator to travel along with him as he learns
about the Saint Leon community. In a sense, this is
also a nostalgic quest, formulated out of a desire to
rediscover the Ouagadougou of the 1980s and 1990s,
when filmmakers traveled from around the world to
the city to share their work and debate the notion
of African film. What remains, Teno wonders in his
narration, of the original concept of African cinema
as a pedagogical impulse that both entertains and
teaches? This esoteric quest seems to further distance
Teno from the film’s more realistic subjects, whose
art is directly incorporated into their living and lives.
In contrast with Teno’s lofty aims, a scene early
in the film opens with a group of men gathering
together to drink tea. As the tea is prepared, the men
discuss unemployment among the young, and one
argues that they must vote for politicians who under-
stand that the young men of the country desire the
opportunity for work. Although the group is split on
whether or not voting in elections leads to effective
change, it is clear from their discussion that these
individuals would rather have gainful employment
than share tea. The scene foreshadows how Saint
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Idrissou Mora-Kpai, Arlit: Deuxième Paris, 2004. Niger/France, runtime 1:15:00. Courtesy California Newsreel
Leon will be reterritorialized: unlike a Western
depiction that would focus on images of poverty,
victimization, and deprivation, the comments of the
men, their desire for work, and their political astute-
ness demonstrate that they are a resilient people pre-
pared to strive to better their economic positions and
those of their families.
Sacred Places depicts the people of Saint Leon
as concerned less with the separation of art and
real life than with live experiences in which art is
both a natural occurrence within their cultural
milieu and a true bread-and-butter economic issue.
Near the beginning of the film, Teno introduces a
djembe player. As he creates striking rhythms with
his djembe, the camera follows him in a medium
shot, moving through the social space of Saint Leon
announcing to the populace upcoming films at the
local cine-club. The connection between this older
communication of art and film is discussed at length
in a later scene where the djembe player describes the
importance of the cine-club to the community as a
social gathering place. When Teno asks if he believes
that cinema has replaced djembe players as social
entertainment, he says he regards the interconnec-
tion between the djembe and film as that of a koro
(older brother) and dogo (younger brother), sug-
gesting a relation between past and contemporary
mediums of art. Teno objects, insisting cinema is the
older brother. The djembe player does not dispute
this arrangement but simply smiles in silence. As the
Published by Duke University Press
scene ends here, his silence allows the spectators to
consider both perspectives and determine their own
relation to the question. The djembe player’s com-
ments thus reterritorialize the spectator’s perception
by refusing djembe playing and cinema as separate,
unconnected arts; instead, he reconceives their rela-
tionship as a continuous cultural space where influ-
ences flow from one to the other. In this sense, art
and African life are relational to one another, signal-
ing the importance of seeing African cinemas as out-
growths of multiple African histories.
Under the Baobab Tree:
Landscape as Narration in Arlit
As noted above, Teno’s narration provides a central
organizing principle to the narrative structure in
Sacred Places. In Arlit, however, narration is nonex-
istent. Instead, Mora-Kpai organizes the film around
visual motifs composed of landscape and other long
shots that replace the role of narrator, offering non-
verbal spaces in which spectators may consider the
relational values between interviews of compet-
ing and complementary content. As Mhando and
Tomaselli acknowledge, the cinematic medium offers
“experiences of encountering the ‘real’ ” through its
use of aesthetic strategies, allowing spectators to
experience “a phenomenological sense of ‘being
there,’ or ‘having been there.’ ”17 In this context, the
use of landscape images and other long shots may
be viewed as a reterritorialization of a space domi-
Petty Nka • 75
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Mora-Kpai, Arlit: Deuxième Paris. Courtesy California Newsreel
nated by global interests into one representative of
the Africans who live with the consequences of that
domination.
Arlit explores the history of the town of Arlit
located in Niger on “the route de l’uranium,” a road
that winds “from Arlit, through Agadez, then on to
Tahoua on the edge of the Sahel.”18 The area is sig-
nificant for the discovery of uranium in 1968 and for
the presence of two major open uranium strip mines
at Arlit and Agadez, which were developed in large
part by French and other global nuclear interests.19
Initially, Arlit experienced an economic boom, as
the price of uranium was high and the mine drew
in capital from around the world. In 1981, however,
“the spot price” of uranium “began to decline” and,
thus, at the time depicted in the film, Arlit was in the
“bust” phase of the cycle, despite the continued pres-
ence of the strip mine.20 The film’s narrative struc-
ture, composed of both the landscape/long shots
and interviews, demonstrates a conflicted relation
between the nuclear history of the town and its resi-
dents. At once nostalgic concerning the boom days
and understandably resentful of what they view as
the failure of the global corporate entities to care for
Arlit’s ongoing needs, the interviews evoke a sense of
abandonment that reflects the stark isolation of the
landscape shots.
The structure is subtle and slowly builds over the
course of the film, reflecting, as Glissant describes
it, a “totality” of identity created “through the accu-
mulation of sediments” that “begins first with the
country in which your drama takes shape.”21 For
example, a series of extreme long shots depicts a
bus arriving at Arlit. The landscape is harsh, com-
posed of sand and distance. Human figures move
through this isolation, often clustered together in the
76 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 32 • Spring 2013
Published by Duke University Press
protection of the sand-colored architecture of the
town. These landscapes are followed by long shots
of the uranium strip mine, depicting it as a techno-
logical monolith rising above the sand, demarcated
by piles of slag and yellowcake. Unlike the earlier
landscapes, human figures are not represented in
the shots of the mine except as invisible drivers of
vehicles, giving the mine an inhuman quality. Arlit
thus creates two territories: the town, which is pop-
ulated by African interests, and the mine, which
is representative of global interests beyond local
control.
The question of control (who has it now and
who should rightfully possess it) runs like a thread
through the structure of the film. As long shots of
the mine are first revealed, they are coupled with a
voice-over of an interviewee from the Tuareg culture,
who comments, “We’ve no idea what they do in the
facilities. We know that people work in them. We’re
not really sure but we’ve heard they remove stones
from the sand and send them somewhere else.” The
comment indicates both the secrecy of the mine and
the lack of control the local population has over its
undertakings. The film then cuts to a close-up of the
interviewee, who adds that none of the profit from
the mines returns to the local population. This inter-
view is significant because rebels, under the auspices
of the “Mouvement des Nigériens pour la Justice,”
have “responded to these developments by demand-
ing a greater part of uranium revenue and jobs for
the Tuareg nomads who inhabit the desert into
which the mines were carved.”22 The interview thus
demonstrates an ongoing resistance to the global
exploitation of a local resource that fails to enrich the
community from which it is drawn.
As the above example indicates, the landscapes
and long shots develop meaning through relation,
often in response to interviews that unfold over the
course of the film: in some cases, repetition of simi-
lar landscapes is later revealed to possess a surprising
significance by foreshadowing ideological or personal
points of interest. For example, the unearthly, blasted
landscape of Arlit becomes a source of menace in the
film. Wind is featured in many shots, whipping sand
and battering humans and buildings. At first, this
may be read as a symbol of Arlit’s isolation and aban-
donment. Later, however, in relation with images of
blasting in the open pit mine, the dust and smoke
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that rises in plumes and drifts with the desert wind
raises the issue of contamination and poor environ-
mental controls subsequently discussed in interviews
with ex-employees and townspeople. Throughout the
film there are many long shots of abandoned equip-
ment and sheet metal littered throughout the town.
Half-buried by the desert, these technological bones,
as it were, seem to be artifacts of Arlit’s past prosper-
ity as “the second Paris.” Later in the film, however,
these scrap piles are identified by an interviewee as a
source of contamination. In one example, the inter-
viewee points out a large scrap part, identifying it as
the type of scrap metal that is cannibalized by local
inhabitants for use in the home or garden. In addi-
tion, he reveals that such scrap metal is used as build-
ing materials and pounded into cooking vessels and
utensils, without knowledge that radiation contami-
nation from its use is possible, perhaps even prob-
able. The landscape shots are thus reterritorialized
from a sign of abandonment to a source of radiation
sickness in the community.
Another function of the landscapes is to provide
spectators with meditative moments for considering
the validity of facts presented by an interview. In one
significant example, a doctor in charge of health at
the mine states definitively that illnesses such as sco-
liosis do not occur at the mine because water is used
to extract uranium ore. He assures the spectators that
the most common illness he treats is eczema. This is
followed by a sequence of long and medium shots of
empty courtyards and townspeople sitting and wait-
ing patiently, and culminates in a medium long shot
of the mine hospital exterior filled with a throng of
people waiting for treatment. The absence of com-
mentary invites the spectator to create her/his own
relational value between the interviewee and the sub-
sequent images, and thus offers the opportunity for
spectators to actively participate in meaning making.
Orality in Sacred Places and Arlit
Sacred Places and Arlit both emphasize the tes-
timony of the spoken word as an act of social or
community affirmation. Significantly, neither film
names its interviewees as individuals: testimony
thus reterritorializes individual space as public,
and the narratives come to symbolize more than
personal experience. In Sacred Places, for exam-
ple, Teno reterritorializes Saint Leon from a place
Published by Duke University Press
of poverty and loss to a place of entrepreneurial-
ism and striving through the oral statements of its
inhabitants. One scene features an intense sequence
of the djembe player making a djembe. Visually, the
scene is striking because of dense use of close-ups,
a departure from the looser framing used through-
out the film. The close-ups, which focus on hands
and the physical labor of making the djembe, empha-
size the humanity of the djembe maker as well as
depict art as legitimate work. In one section, the
djembe player is depicted in a loosely framed close-
up as he sweats at his work. He says, as he wipes sweat
from his brow, “As the saying goes, if you don’t sweat
in life, you don’t eat. You have to sweat to eat.” The
use of the proverb, a mark of African orality, con-
nects him to culture that is orally taught and now
transmitted to the spectators. Later, as the djembe
player tightens the laces of the djembe and manipu-
lates the sound of the drum, Teno, offscreen, asks him
what he is doing. Instead of answering directly, the
djembe player offers the comment that “sometimes
you begin something but don’t know how to end it,”
adding “I hope I can complete what I’ve started.” The
comments portray djembe making as a process of
composition and an artistic risk, without which no
art can be made. There is no guaranteed buyer for
this djembe, and no promise that the djembe player’s
labor will be rewarded. Yet through this sequence
of gentle wisdom and determination, all art space is
reterritorialized as sacred and connected relationally:
in short, like the making of a djembe, a film is also an
act of composition and manipulation that takes place
in an ever evolving cultural context.
Vignettes of the cine-club proffer a similar
notion of sacred place. The proprietor of the cine-
club speaks with pride about his commitment to
the community and the need to provide entertain-
ment. The physical space of the cine-club supports
this pride: however makeshift, the space is clean and
organized. The proprietor may survive on a ration
of kung fu, Bollywood, and Hollywood action films,
but he remains committed to bringing in African
films whenever he is able, because he sees the impor-
tance of providing African images and narratives to
his community even though they cost significantly
more to show. In one scene, the proprietor explains
that his clients really like African films, but they are
expensive to rent. He adds that “they are made here,
Petty Nka • 77
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but we can’t access them” as easily as foreign films.
He emphasizes that “in the ghetto, in the neighbor-
hoods, everyone wants to see African films” because
“these films tell our stories, show our traditions, our
history.” Despite the expense and difficulty of access,
when the proprietor of the cine-club is visited by the
man who distributes the DVDs the cine-club shows,
the proprietor is delighted to find Idrissa Ouedraogo’s
Yaaba in the mix of American and Asian films, say-
ing that his “film fans are spoiled tonight.” Later, dur-
ing the screening of the film, clients of the cine-club
are shown laughing and staring with rapt attention at
images of their own Burkinabé culture on the screen,
indicating the demand for such content. Teno’s later
narration on the subject is instructive, however, as
he points out the irony that the proprietor’s films are
bootlegged, which means that African filmmakers
do not profit from the showing of their films. Still, the
proprietor’s interviews reterritorialize what might be
described as a purely commercial space into a cul-
tural one where the community gathers to see itself
reflected on the screen through the work of African
filmmakers. It is within this social space that Teno’s
mournful concern regarding the death of African
filmmaking is answered: it is still relevant, although
access to such works remains difficult.
In Arlit the interviews provide the backbone of the
documentary’s narrative structure. As noted above,
Arlit’s testimonies are not mediated by a structuring
narration, unlike those in Sacred Places. This aes-
thetic strategy places powerful emphasis on orality as
testimony and deterritorializes Arlit as a globalized
corporate space by reterritorializing it as a space of
the people who live there. From the beginning of the
film, one gets a sense of Arlit as a community created
from intersecting global histories. This is achieved
by three narrative threads. The first represents Arlit
as a nostalgic construct based on recollection of the
town’s history as the second Paris and its economic
prosperity prior to the crash in uranium prices. The
second concerns illegal immigration and the ferrying
of illegal African immigrants to Algeria. The third
portrays Arlit as an adulterated space, a commu-
nity exploited by global corporate interests and then
abandoned to deal with the radiation contamination
of its township and peoples with scant resources.
Nostalgia threads its way throughout the film
through numerous comments describing Arlit as
78 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 32 • Spring 2013
Published by Duke University Press
“the second Paris” and allusions to the multinational
makeup of Arlit. For example, a Tuareg tribesman
recalls with pleasure the days when forty planes
landed in Arlit for the road races. Two friends recall
the times when money flowed freely and those in
the community who prospered assisted others of
less financial means. Another resident remembers
when Arlit had prosperous restaurants filled with
patrons. Each of these recollections, however, is jux-
taposed with images of Arlit in its current rundown
condition. The relation created by these juxtaposi-
tions allows spectators to ponder the notion of what
responsibility, if any, the global interests running
Arlit’s uranium industry owe to the town’s residents.
The interviews also align Arlit with other mining
boom towns that are exploited and then largely aban-
doned by global commercial interests.
In the case of illegal immigration, Mora-Kpai
portrays Arlit as a dangerous space where illicit activ-
ities go largely unregulated by law. In one interview,
an illegal immigrant headed for France via Algeria
speaks of being robbed of all his money by local
police. Now stranded in Arlit with little financial
future, he struggles to survive. In contrast, another
interview centers on a Tuareg tribesman who aug-
ments his living by smuggling illegal immigrants and
then terminating his obligation to them by leaving
them in the desert. Both the illegal immigrant and
the Tuareg tribesman emblematize the breakdown
in Arlit’s social order caused by economic hardship.
Again, spectators must actively weigh the moral
implications of Arlit’s unraveling community.
One of the most powerful aspects of the film
focuses on the testimonies of former uranium mine
workers who now suffer from a variety of cancers
and other ailments likely exacerbated by exposure
to radiation. As Gabrielle Hecht notes in her essay
“The Power of Nuclear Things,” to normalize ura-
nium mining as a nonthreatening endeavor, “the
industry sought to make itself mundane: radioactiv-
ity was part of nature, nuclear power merely a form
of energy among others.”23 In the case of the Niger
yellowcake industry, which attracted labor forces
from across Africa, the miners “have begun to think
about their work as a specifically nuclear activity”
with the attendant risks to health this entails.24 Now
“concerned about the effects of radiation exposure
on their health and environment,” workers con-
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tacted international experts, who found “exposure
levels in excess of international norms.”25 As Arlit
demonstrates, however, the uranium industry still
denies the presence of radiation contamination and
its accompanying ills. For example, one of the inter-
viewees speaks of his brother, Malam Sani, who had
been a driller at the mine. Exposed to radiation, he
died in the company hospital in Arlit. The inter-
viewee expresses annoyance that the doctors “ran
us all over the place,” giving his brother many dif-
ferent medicines until he was bedridden. He also
notes that after his brother’s death, “they never said
it was due to radiation,” suggesting that the global
corporate interests running the hospital cover up
the extent of contamination and radiation-based
illnesses. Another interviewee points out that the
companies hide behind AIDS as an explanation for
illnesses that are likely radiation-related. This is fol-
lowed by an interviewee who details his symptoms
and states that he has only been treated by saline
intravenous drips, paid for at his expense. At the
end of the interview, the film cuts to medium shots
of a pile of medicines that give the spectator time to
weigh the interviews in relation to one another. The
testimonies thus offer what Mhando and Tomaselli
have described as a “memorialization” or “a search
for meaning through the performance of community
rituals of mourning,” as each community member
offers his or her experience.26 More important, the
interviews reterritorialize the notion of mining for
uranium as a normalized and safe mining process
run by responsible corporate citizens into a space of
health risk, exploitation, and secrecy.
As Arlit and Sacred Places demonstrate, docu-
mentaries by African filmmakers successfully reter-
ritorialize cultural spaces into expressions of local
imperatives. Whether driven by narration or by
images, these films offer a brief glimpse into the var-
ied aesthetic expressions of African documentarists.
Most important, the films discussed here bring Afri-
can experiences to both local and global stages and
reset preconceived notions of African communities
from those often depicted stereotypically by West-
ern media. The people of Arlit and Saint Leon may
struggle against barriers of poverty and economic
exploitation, but in the end they offer testimony to
their own courage in keeping these cultural spaces
alive despite their struggles. Finally, Arlit and Sacred
Published by Duke University Press
Places offer a relational view of aesthetics that contin-
ues to place emphasis on active spectatorship and by
so doing continues to expand the precepts of African
social space that have undergirded African cinema
from its earliest inception.
Sheila Petty is professor of media studies at the Uni-
versity of Regina (Canada). She has written exten-
sively on issues of cultural representation, identity,
and nation in African and African diasporic cinema
and new media and has curated film, television, and
new media exhibitions for galleries across Canada.
She is author of Contact Zones: Memory, Origin, and
Discourses in Black Diasporic Cinema (2008). She is
coeditor of the forthcoming World Directory of Cin-
ema: Africa.
Notes
Special thanks to the late D. L. McGregor for her creative assis-
tance with this article.
1. Maria Loftus, “The Appeal of Hybrid Documentary Forms in
West Africa,” French Forum 35, nos. 2 – 3 (2010): 37.
2. Olivier Barlet, “Africultures Dossier: African Filmmakers’
New Strategies,” Black Camera: An International Film Journal 1,
no. 2 (2010): 64.
3. Loftus, “Appeal of Hybrid Documentary Forms,” 40.
4. Ibid., 37.
5. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 174.
6. Ibid., 32, 17.
7. Ibid., 32.
8. Ibid., 17.
9. Martin Mhando and Keyan G. Tomaselli, “Film and Trauma:
Africa Speaks to Itself through Truth and Reconciliation Films,”
Black Camera: An International Film Journal 1, no. 1 (2009): 31.
10. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 18.
11. Ibid., 29.
12. Barlet, “Africultures Dossier,” 84.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 86.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Mhando and Tomaselli, “Film and Trauma,” 31.
18. Gabrielle Hecht, “The Power of Nuclear Things,” Technology
and Culture 51, no. 1 (2010): 10.
19. Ibid., 10 – 13.
20. Ibid., 17.
21. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 33.
22. Hecht, “Power of Nuclear Things,” 18.
23. Ibid., 4.
24. Ibid., 19.
25. Ibid.
26. Mhando and Tomaselli, “Film and Trauma,” 34.
Petty Nka • 79