Black Business by Osvalde Lewat (review)

Born in Yaoundé in 1977, Osvalde Lewat completed her university-level studies in Paris at the famed Sciences Po. She returned to Cameroon in 2000 to work for the government’s daily newspaper Cameroon Tribune, and at the same time began to make politically motivated and formally innovative documentary films. Black Business was Lewat’s first feature-length film, although she had already shot several documentary short subjects, including The Forgotten Man (Au-delà de la peine) (2002) and Love During War (Un amour pendant la guerre) (2005). Currently splitting her time between Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and France, Lewat served as the president of the Jury for Documentary at the 2013 FESPACO film festival in Burkina Faso.

Barely thirty years old when Black Business was released, Lewat is not only a notable but also an unusual African filmmaker, as a woman as well as for her almost exclusive focus on documentary. In this film, which was screened at Cannes and at the Vues d’Afrique Festival in Montreal, Lewat examines the repressive nature of the Cameroonian government via a question posed by the Nigerian Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka that she reproduces on screen just before the closing credits: “They say Africans are not ready for democracy. So I wonder: have they ever been ready for dictatorship?”

The first words of Black Business are not spoken until five and a half minutes into the film, after the opening credits and after we have watched a group of people, mostly women, prepare a burial in silence. The grave, we discover, will contain not a body but a leafy branch cut from a nearby tree; this is a symbolic burial ceremony for a young man who disappeared years earlier and is presumed dead. Lewat then describes for us in a voiceover the creation of the “Commandement Opérationnel” in January 2000. This special unit was charged by Cameroonian President Paul Biya (whose name is never mentioned in the film) with controlling crime; it was composed of policemen and soldiers who killed, in a single year and mostly in secret, more than one thousand people. Lewat has met with many families who lost loved ones to the Commandement’s indiscriminate and murderous methods. She says, “I wanted to forget them. I could not. Since then, I know. I know that I have no other choice but to make this film.”

Although we hear Lewat in her voiceovers, we see her only once in the film, and then only from the back as she is entering a house to conduct an interview. Over the course of the film she interviews family members of men killed by the Commandement, legal and political representatives who speak out against its actions, and rare survivors of a jail called “Kosovo.” In between these interviews she narrates her desire to understand their experience, stating that “I try to imagine.” As spectators, we visit the scenes of the crimes with her, the different neighborhoods and villages from which men were taken, the fish market and dirt roads where their dead bodies were found.

Lewat conducts an astounding interview with Rigobert Kouyang, a former member of the Commandement who describes in detail his work and the joy he and his colleagues felt at a job well done. His declaration that he contributed to the death of approximately four hundred people is immediately juxtaposed with still images of the bloody corpses of the Commandement’s victims. Lewat also shows us notes and letters sent by prisoners to their families asking for money and medicine, newspaper headlines, and photographs of victims before their arrest. In addition to this documentary evidence, several of Lewat’s interviewees bring the past to life in the present. Richard Nzamyo recounts how he witnessed his son’s death and shows us exactly where everything happened, pointing with his machete. Kouyang similarly reenacts history...