Dial Ouaga for African Cinema

• Inema very two years a unique kind of film festival takes place in the heart ofAfrica. Called FESPACO or the Pan-African Film Festival of Ouagadougou, it attracts more than 500,000 spectators, doubling the size of the population of the city. Unlike the Academy Awards, where stars wear toxedoes and gowns as badges of belonging, in Ouaga, as people endearingly refer to the picturesque capital of Burkina Faso, filmmakers, politicians and the culture elites come bedecked in multicolored traditional bouboues. Film is seriously linked to tradition, and this cinema festival enleashes traditional manners of dress, demeanor, and customs that are proudly exhibited in both the films and in reality during the rendez-vous. The festival and the films communicate the ideal vision of Africa as united, economically and culturally strong, and equal to its counterparts in Asia, America and Europe. FESPACO also attracts movie fans from the remote villages of Burkina Faso, and the middle class from other African COUI1tries . The devaluation of the CFA (French African franc) made this year's festival (the 14th) particularly attractive to tourists B:mJournal of Contemporary African Art· Fall/Winter 1995 MANTHIA DIAWARA from Europe and America. The African American contingent, formerly a strong and emotional presence, has become smaller and smaller since the bloody coup d'Etat that ended the regime of Thomas Sankara, kn0W11 for his support of Pan-Africanism. This year's celebrities included Winnie Mandela and Wole Soyinka, both now controversial media personalities in their own countries, whose attendance created a diplomatic controversy fanned by gossip and rumours in a city where oral tradition sweeps everything like a bush fire. Because of her radical opposition to Apartheid, Winnie Mandela was considered a threat to South Africa's smooth integration into Africa's most important media event. Mandela's cotmtry arrived with films that denounced the violence of a post-Apartheid society, but stopped short of racializing the issue. Meanwhile, a South African TV news network, M-Net, was busy selling its programs to different countries. It is rumored that M-Net's ambition is to replace CNN in Africa. Ouaga busts loose in every direction during the week ofthe FESPACO. The major streets around the Hotel Independance, center of the main activities, are closed, and vending stands are placed along both sides of the streets to peddle anything from tourist arts, local fabrics, grilled brochettes, and condoms. The hotels in Ouaga count one thousand rooms in total, and the number of reservations exceeded three thousand this year, as in the past, forcing the festival organizers to reopen temporarily some hotels which were forced out of business after the devaluation of the CFA currency. Everywhere there's music in the streets-from seven in the morning to three in the morning-there are people to eat it all up as if their very existence depended on it, leading one to wonder whether the economic and cultural buoyancy of FESPACO is not what Africa desires most but what has most eluded it. For the day after the festival the consumers will vanish and the venders with them. The African films will coyly cede their place to American, Indian, European and Kung Fu films for two years until the next FESPACO, and Ouagadougou will be deserted like a movie set after the shoot. This year's festival was celebrated under the theme of "Cinema and History" in commemoration of the centenary of film. Burkina Faso received a check of more than $400,000 from the European Funds to organize the 1995 festival and an additional half a million to start building a cinematheque to house African films and ethnographic films about Africa. Because of FESPACO and the new cinematheque, many people are jumping on the bandwagon and calling Ouaga the "Hollywood of Africa:' In fact, there is a conflict growing around the construction of Ouaga into a symbol of African cinema, which some filmmakers perceive more and more to be the ploy of the government of Burkina Faso to consolidate itself into a visible regional power and less as an attempt to emulate Hollywood. African cinema, long established as an auteur cinema, in which the spirit of Pan-Africanism dominates other...