HERITAGE . . . AFRICA (1989, Ghana, 110 min.), directed by Kwaw P. Ansah, screenplay by Kwaw P. Ansah, cinematography by Chris Tsui Hesse, edited by Roger Hagon; with Kofi Bucknor (Bosomfield), Ian Collier (Snyper), Anima Misa (Theresa Bosomfield), Peter Whitbread (Governor Sir Roger Guggiswood), Tommy Ebow Ansah (Kwame Akroma), Evans Oma Hunter (Francis Essien), Harry Owusu (Archiebold Bosomfield), Alexandra Duah (Ekua Atta Abokuma, Bosomfield's mother); in English and Fanti with English subtitles.

"You know, we cannot actually move forward if we don't look back to see what has affected us. Why are we behaving the way we are behaving today? How did we start?" --Kwaw P. Ansah

The Cascade Festival of African Films is pleased to welcome the acclaimed Ghanaian director, Kwaw P. Ansah, to Portland to open our Tenth Festival. For nearly thirty years, Ansah has been active as a writer, director, producer, promoter, coalition-builder, and visionary for African filmmaking.

Ansah chose to set Heritage...Africa during the last days of the colonial period, during the late 1940s or early 1950s. He clearly found in this period the source of many of the negative tendencies that he observed in Ghana in the 1980s. To understand what he is trying to do in this film, it is important to review the colonial background from which it comes.

When most Americans think of the terrible mistreatment that Africans have suffered at the hands of the West, they immediately think of the horrid institution that was slavery. As well they should. However, in many ways, colonialism--the system under which Western countries exerted direct economic, social, and cultural control over the people of Africa--left a much deeper and more burdensome legacy on contemporary Africans. This system came to Africa after the demise of the international slave trade in the nineteenth century; in Ghana it began in 1873, when the British wrested power from the Ashanti rulers (though it would be many years before Ashanti resistance was completely crushed) and declared the Gold Coast a crown colony. Within a few years, the major European powers had gathered together in Berlin and effectively carved up nearly all of the continent.

Although the particularities of the colonial system varied somewhat from colony to colony, its basic properties were the same. Colonialism was a system designed for the exploitation of resources for the benefit of the colonizing nation. The colony was to be a source of raw natural resources, which were exported to the West for manufacturing and finish work, then sent back to be sold to the colony at inflated rates. The cost of the colonial administration was borne in great part by the Africans themselves through taxes and forced labor.

The colonial system was extremely disruptive to the traditional social, cultural, and economic systems that were in place. Traditional diversified agriculture was replaced by single-crop plantations (cotton, coffee, etc.) for European consumption. Aside from the cultural disruption that resulted from this change, mono-culture made the colonized much more vulnerable to plant diseases and pests. Also, they needed to enter the cash economy in order to buy the food that they could no longer grow, as well as to pay their taxes. This often resulted in the break-up of the family, forcing men away to work in the new cities or in the mines, leaving the women home in the villages to bear the burden of food production.

The boundaries of the new colonies were drawn for the convenience of the Western countries, cutting across ethnic and linguistic lines, often bringing together groups that were historically hostile to one another. In addition, the colonialists tended to favor certain ethnic groups over others, thereby promoting a state of dependency among the favored and resentment among the disfavored. All this would be a recipe for inter-ethnic violence.

The new colonial leaders of course came from the "Mother" country, and the ranks of the administration were filled with middle-class Europeans, many of whom would not have amounted to much, or been victims of unemployment back home. In Africa, however, they could live like aristocracy, lording it over their African servants and subordinates.

Still, to make the system work, there needed to be a class of Africans with enough education and knowledge of the European language to fill the lower rungs of the civil, military, and business administrations. In exchange for their willing participation in the system, they found themselves in an advantaged position.

To be successful within the new system, an African would have to embrace and internalize the values of the colonizer. The educational system taught the superiority of European history and culture (Africans were regarded as having neither), European religion (traditional religious practices were considered heathenish idolatry and devil-worship), European language (African languages were considered simple and incapable of poetry and abstract thought), and European medical and social practices (traditional herbal lore and respect for the wisdom of ancestors was considered ignorant and retrograde). The successful African felt great pressure to devalue or forget his or her heritage in favor of these new, superior values; anything Western was to be considered superior.

The system obviously was built upon a sense of the superiority of the White race, and race mixing was naturally frowned upon. Thus, the educated African would tend to consort with others of his or her own class (the African elite). And, as a result of their having internalized the colonialist values, they tended to look down upon their non-elite brothers and sisters. They spoke the colonialist language among themselves, and came to cling fiercely to their positions of relative privilege. To a greater or lesser degree, they suppressed their cultural identity and became alienated from it. The great analyst of colonialism, Frantz Fanon, described the process in this way: "The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle."

This phenomenon serves as the backdrop to Heritage Africa, as Kwah Ansah shows the tragic effects that this alienation can have on an individual. Its central character, a man named Kwesi ("Sunday-born") Atta ("a twin") Bosomefi ("an illustrious ancestor has been reborn"), prefers to be called Quincy Arthur Bosomfield. The perfect product of colonial education, Bosomfield embraces English culture in all forms, rising within the colonial administration to become an African district commissioner (a rarity) and member of the black educated elite. In the process, he abandons his African heritage and all that has real meaning to him, to the point that we see him humiliate his own mother (his rejection and betrayal of her is symbolically a rejection and betrayal of "Mother" Africa) and give away a treasured family heirloom, his family legacy.

However, the status quo of Bosomfield's privileged position becomes troubled over the course of the film. Through encounters with a jailed revolutionary (probably based on Kwame Nkrumah, the man who ultimately led Ghana to independence), his estranged wife, and his own guilty conscience, Bosomfield suffers a true identity crisis and begins to change direction, moving away from servile dependence on the colonialist, back to the heritage that he has long suppressed,.

For Kwaw Ansah, this man's story is obviously representative of a larger phenomenon, a larger struggle for his people, as the following quote makes clear: "I have always felt that Africans as a people have their own values. We've gone through a colonial experience and definitely the colonial master had a program to brainwash his subject so that he can be subjugated. This system has eroded a lot of the confidence of the African. And this is where Heritage comes in--to let us turn round to see what has gone wrong and use the goodness in what our ancestors left us." This last sentence wonderfully captures the essence of Kwaw Ansah's vision, of his identity as an African filmmaker.

Notes by Michael Dembrow

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