King Ampaw: Traveling by Lorry

Set in the aftermath of the 31st December Revolution in Ghana in 1981, King Ampaw’s Kukurantumi: The Road to Accra (1983) deserves much more critical attention than it has received. In African film scholarship, Kukurantumi seems to have been overshadowed by Kwah Ansah’s Heritage Africa (1986), internationally perhaps the most widely recognized Ghanaian film to appear before the emergence of Ghana’s video industry. In the 1980s Ampaw and Ansah, both working outside the state-owned Ghana Film Industry Corporation, attempted to make serious politicized African films that would resonate with global and local audiences. Ansah cobbled together funding from various private sources to produce Heritage, while Ampaw collaborated with the Reinery Film Production and NDR Television of Germany to make Kukurantumi. And while Ansah looks back at colonialism in his film, Ampaw engages the immediate political context in a daring and honest portrayal of the mixed outcomes of Ghana’s 1981 “People’s” revolution.

The 31st December Revolution was a military coup orchestrated by flight lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings and the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC). An ambitious campaign against fraud, illicit accumulation, and social injustice, the Rawlings “revolution,” according to the historian Maxwell Owusu, was nothing less than a “crusade against the destruction of the moral fibre of Ghana as a nation” (1996:318). Its major objectives were an end to decades of corruption and government mismanagement and the return of power to ordinary Ghanaians in order to bring about a more equitable distribution of the nation’s resources and wealth. Historians agree that initially it garnered a wide base of popular support, although the optimism that surrounded the early days of the PNDC regime quickly gave way to cynicism as the economy stagnated and revolutionary enthusiasm degenerated into extreme acts of violence against market women and others perceived as “enemies of the revolution.” Paul Nugent notes that efforts to root out corruption and build a more integrated national economy failed because the PNDC neglected to “address the immediate realities of the situation, which where the collapse of basic economic infrastructure, a crippling shortage of foreign exchange and the acute fiscal crisis of the state” (1995:90). During the PNDC’s first year, manufacturing output declined and endemic shortages of spare parts and raw materials were ongoing. Trying to ward off inflation, the government withdrew the fifty cedi note from circulation, an event to which Kukurantumi refers directly; Mary, a character in the film, remembers that on the day the note was invalidated “the sea was full of money” because many disgruntled Ghanaians who had been unaware of the impending demonetization or unable to change their money before it went into effect tossed their suddenly worthless bills into the sea.

Ampaw’s film eclipses the physical acts of violence carried out in the name of revolutionary discipline and concentrates instead on the persistence of economic decline and corruption under the PNDC. In this way, the film situates the hardships of one family within the larger national context of scarcity, and though it chronicles losses of love and friendship, Kukurantumi remains steadfastly political, never giving way to trite sentimentality. The film’s protagonist is Addey, a lorry driver who transports passengers between the capital city, Accra, and the village of Kukurantumi, where he lives with his wife, Seewaa, and daughter, Abena. The film undoes the colonial teleology that naturalizes time as a spatial relation in which the village represents African tradition while the city signals Western modernity. In Kukurantumi the village is no more or less modern than Accra, but it is a place where people are impoverished and where economic opportunities are few. Seewaa complains to her husband that she needs more money to buy rice and meat. The palm-wine tapper, Bob, Abena’s boyfriend, wears rags and worries that because he is poor, Addey will not allow him to marry Abena. Addey and others leave the village to escape its...