Ayanda dir. by Sara Blecher (review)

Sara Blecher’s feature film Ayandaopened the 36th Durban International Film Festival in July 2015 after receiving special mention at the June 2015 Los Angeles Film Festival (where it was screened as Ayanda and the Mechanic). Filmed on location in Johannesburg, Ayandaintertwines several narrative threads. The eponymous protagonist (played by Fulu Mugovhani) is an indefatigable twenty-one-year-old artist who welds scraps into art pieces in the garage of her late father, Moses. Devastated by his early death, Ayanda refuses to surrender the relics of the past: the garage and her father’s Cortina Mark 3.

What “drives” the narrative are the questions posed about Afropolitanism alongside the film’s recognition of cultures of mobility within Africa. The film’s Afropolitanism is filtered through the lenses of Anthony Bila, “the Expressionist,” a young Johannesburg-based photographer, videographer, and artist who either plays himself or, depending on how one looks at his performance, plays a supporting character of the same name. Anthony interviews most of the characters in the film and his photographs punctuate the film’s snapshot montages. Anthony calls his project an “installation,” and the film itself might be interpreted as such. As Achille Mbembe writes in his essay “Afropolitanism” (in Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, edited by S. Njami and L. Durán, Johannesburg Art Gallery, 26–30), recognizing histories of itinerancy, mobility, blendings, and superimpositions counters fundamentalist and xenophobic ambitions. Arguably, one specter that haunts Blecher’s film is the recent violence against African migrants to South Africa in Durban, Johannesburg, and elsewhere. In Ayanda, the Afropolitan counternarrative to national insularity is found in what Lindsey Green-Simms might term its “automobility” (“Postcolonial Automobility: West Africa and the Road to Globalization,” Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2009). Intercontinental voyages are presented in fantastical animated scenes with cars, spinning pineapples, and tongues that turn into tunnels as their drivers escape various hazards. Anthony interviews characters originally from Angola, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia, in addition to a tailor from Entebbe Road in Kampala, who worked for Obote and Idi Amin before fleeing to South Africa in his Karmann Ghia. African mobility is also projected in the interviews with various migrant characters in the suburb of Yeoville: Ayanda’s father, Moses, arrived from Lagos with $20 in his pocket, and the mechanic David, Ayanda’s boyfriend (played by the Nigerian actor and musician OC Ukeje), is a recent immigrant from Nigeria who left when his father faced political persecution. Yeoville, Anthony recalls, is a place that has long been a “melting pot of cultures”: There are “people from Senegal, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Ghana, Nigeria. …” The allegorical dimension of Blecher’s film is voiced through Anthony’s installation project; amidst the rebuilding and remodeling in a new South Africa, the country’s Afropolitan roots and routes provide its most dynamic contributions. The characters in the film who refer to Nigerians as “foreigners” are clearly misguided.

Sleek sports cars are often perceived as symbols of class status or middle-age crisis, yet in this case the autos function as comments upon the migratory histories of Yeoville’s inhabitants and the processes of rebuilding new lives from the scraps of the past. On its own, the narrative about a woman mechanic who manages to keep her deceased father’s garage financially afloat might have been tighter, but it would not have been nearly as interesting without these various narrative threads. Like the contributors to Sarah Nuttall and Mbembe’s Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis(Duke 2008), Blecher’s film positions Joburg—and more particularly Yeoville—as the site of Afropolitanism par excellence—a place whose “politan” status is not dependent on inhabitants who travel outside of the continent.

Anthony initially asks “what it means to be African” amid widespread misrepresentations: “It’s not all civil war and kwashiorkor.” The film’s embedded, shifting responses engage in varying degrees with contemporary debates on “Afropolitanism”: Is it a commercial, consumerist aesthetic that takes its cues from European and...