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14 - Youth and Média-engagé: Is This West Africa’s Heterolinguistic Cinéma-monde?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2021

Michael Gott
Affiliation:
University of Cincinnati
Thibaut Schilt
Affiliation:
College of the Holy Cross
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Summary

La parole, c’est quelque chose. Quand tu l’as sur le coeur, ça te saisit. Si tu ne la sors pas, ça ne va pas … Ma parole ne restera pas en moi’.

[‘Speech is something powerful. When it's in your heart, it grabs you … My voice will not stay inside me.’] An elderly witness (played by Zégué Bamba) spoken in Bambara to the court in Bamako. (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006, Mali/USA/ France)

‘J’ai toujours essayé de me servir de ma voix, que ce soit en chantant ou en parlant, pour combattre l’injustice et les inégalités.’

[I have always tried to use my voice – singing and spoken – to fight injustice and inequality.]

Angélique Kidjo

On 17 March 2014, #TweetUp226, Sawat Production and Adiska Entertainment published the lively music video entitled ‘We Are Happy From Ouaga’ on YouTube. Using Pharrell Williams's ‘Happy’ as a soundtrack, the filmmakers beautifully shot and edited a video of citizens from the capital city of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou, lip-synching and dancing to Williams's words of joy and insouciance. While there are many ‘Happy: We Are From …’ videos on YouTube that use this same conceit of lip-synching Williams's song, this one had particular poignancy in Burkina Faso. A mere seven months later, these images of citizens offering a soundless lip-synched ‘Happy’ became the active voice of a nation during the October 2014 insurrection against president Blaise Compaore as he tried to change the nation's constitution in order to run for office yet again. Something had to give and it would not be the Constitution. People took to the streets in a popular grassroots movement called Le Balai Citoyen (The Citizen's Broom), initially waving push brooms and then small hand-held brooms, familiar to many in West Africa for sweeping away, both literally and figuratively, unwanted pests and debris. Images of this popular uprising and of a government overturned were captured on cell phones and amateur and professional cameras throughout the crisis.

Type
Chapter
Information
Cinema-monde
Decentred Perspectives on Global Filmmaking in French
, pp. 304 - 320
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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