LOVE BREWED IN THE AFRICAN POT (1980, Ghana, 125 min.), directed and produced by Kwaw P. Ansah; screenplay by Kwaw Ansah; cinematography by Chris Tsui Hesse; music composed by Kwaw Ansah and Sammy Lartey; edited by Tony Palmer & Bernard Odjidja; with Anima Misa (Aba Appiah), Reginald Tsiboe (Joe Quansah), George Wilson (Kofi Appiah), Jumoke Debayo (Araba Mansah); Kofi Yirenkyi (Mr. Bensah), Emmanuel Agebenowu (Atta Quansah), Kwesi Kay (Fred Dickson), Emmanuel Dadson (Kolo Appia); George Browne (Councillor Benson) In English.

Boiling water is poured onto a heap of tea leaves resting on the bottom of a teapot, sending them swirling and roiling until they eventually settle again at the bottom. But the water is now suffused with the traces of their pungent, complex flavor. This is the very apt central metaphor evoked by the title of Kwaw Ansah's first feature film. It is an appropriate metaphor for all good drama, but particularly so for a film set in an African country in transition, trying to achieve a new blend of the traditional and the modern, of values old and new.

Ansah set this film in 1951, during the last years of the colonial period (independence would finally come in 1957), but his interest here is not in the politics of colonialism, nor in the struggle for independence. Rather, he shows us the way that the conflict between the traditional and the modern plays itself out within individuals, in an individual family. Appropriately, he chooses a middle-class family, a member of the emerging African "elite," caught in the double-bind between conflicting allegiances to their African heritage and to their new European-imposed values. In this film, unlike Ansah's later film Heritage Africa (1988), little of this conflict is directly articulated. On the surface, the film appears to be a fairly straightforward melodrama, but the complexities in its primary characters make it much more than that.

Aba Appiah is a young woman who has just returned from her studies at the exclusive Cape Coast School. She has been sent there by her father, Kofi Appia, a retired bureaucrat, so that she can "learn to be a lady." She has qualified for university, but instead chooses to become a seamstress. For her parents, her real destiny is of course to marry into a good family, thereby guaranteeing her a happy life and giving themselves peace and contentment in their later years. When they receive an offer from an important politician, whose son is a promising young lawyer, they are happy beyond words. However, Aba's heart is already elsewhere--with Joe Quansah, a young fitter (mechanic), the son of fishermen. For them, it was the classic love at first sight.

Kofi finds himself in a predicament. His impulse is to insist that his daughter marry the young lawyer, following in the traditional practice of arranged marriages that worked well for himself and his wife. But at the same time, he is a "modern" man, a good Christian, and he feels that he must allow his daughter to decide. Also, beneath his bluster he is passionately devoted to his daughter, clearly the favorite of his four children. He ultimately yields, a decision that is spurred after he has a confrontation with his uncle, who has come to berate him for failing to honor his tradition and allowing the things he learned in school to supercede the wisdom that has been passed down from the ancestors.

Joe has his problems as well, for his own father is equally against the match. Like Kofi, the father feels that the young people should stick to their "own kind." And Joe himself has his doubts about whether or not he is good enough for Aba. Although he is bright and had been a very good student when young, he had stopped his schooling early, following his father's orders, and is barely literate. To those who have adopted a middle-class culture that valued good language (i.e., English) and good manners (i.e., British), he is substandard, and he has internalized those prejudices. He is a fitter and will always be a fitter; he can never give her the world in which she grew up, and is afraid that she will never really value him. Aba reassures him that she loves him just as he is (she reminds him that her own father's father was a fisherman, that everyone in the middle class had come from people who were either fishermen or farmers). She is clearly the stronger of the two.

They marry in a traditional ceremony (which her father fails to attend, instead staying home and daydreaming of giving his daughter away to the lawyer in a Christian wedding, surrounded by important people, in which the champagne flows freely and the wedding cake is topped by a white couple). Still, he comes the next day to bless their union. Soon, troubling signs begin to appear beneath the surface of the apparently blissful marriage. Disturbing dreams, suspicions, and doubts begin to draw them apart, despite their obvious affection. The jilted lawyer begins to harrass Aba, and the pressure on their marriage mounts. Through it all, Kofi becomes increasingly supportive, but he can do little to prevent the eventual confrontations.

The conflict between tradition and modernity, between traditional brotherhood and colonial class segmentation, is there throughout the film, and the director certainly finds much to fault in the individuals who deny their heritage. However, the film gives us no easy answers. Was Aba right or wrong to marry Joe? Who can say? The director does not judge, just as he does not judge any of the major characters. Underlying the film is a deep humanity, a deep caring for his characters and their situations. This is an attitude that is ultimately evidenced by Kofi himself. In the end, he does not make his choices based on what is traditionally appropriate or what is appropriate to his class and status; he acts out of a deep affection for his daughter. And he grows as a result.

Unlike many African filmmakers, Ansah did not look to agencies and co-producers outside Africa for help in financing his film; he was committed to funding this film entirely through internal commercial means, through bank loans. He believed that this was his best chance of retaining artistic control over the project. He finally received a loan of two million ceddis (about $50,000) from the Social Security Bank, but he had to put up his father-in-law's house as collateral! Fortunately, the loans were paid off in a timely manner, and his father-in-law was able to keep his house! And Ansah was able to make the film that he wanted, one geared to a Ghanaian audience, not a Western one.

The primary roles in the film were all played by veteran stage actors. George Wilson, who plays Kofi Appia, was one of Ghana's foremost actors and a leading force in the promotion of Ghanaian theater. Jomoke Debayo (Kofi's wife, Araba Mansah), from Nigeria, was well-known for her dramatic work with the BBC, with British ITV television, on the radio, and at the Royal Court House Theatre in London. Reginald Tsiboe (Joe) had also performed extensively in Britain with the Royal Shakespeare Company and on the BBC. Anima Misa, (Aba), is a product of the University of Ghana's School of Dramatic Arts; she would later play the role of Bosomfield's wife in Ansah's 1988 film, Heritage Africa).

Ansah's hope in making the film was that it would prove to be both popular with African audiences and well-regarded by critics and peers. He was successful on both counts. The film was an immediate popular success throughout English-speaking Africa, handily beating all previous attendance records for a film by an African director, in Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. At the same time, the film earned critical acclaim and respect. The film earned awards world-wide, including the prestigious Omarou Ganda Prize, for "most remarkable direction and production in line with African realities" at the seventh Pan-African Film Festival (FESPACO)--the first to be awarded a film from an Anglophone country; the UNESCO Film Award in France, and the Jury's Special Silver Peacock Award, "For a Genuine and Talented Attempt to Find a National and Cultural Identity" at the 8th International Film Festival of India.

Ansah had a third hope in making this film, that its success would help to provide the impetus for the creation of a stable film industry that would assure ongoing film production, freeing directors from having to spend years scrounging for money to make their films. In this, sadly, he was not successful. It would take him nearly ten arduous years to make his second film, and he would not make another feature film after that one.

But there, we tread upon the larger problematics of filmmaking in Africa and the Third World, not to mention the even larger problematics of the global economy today.

Notes by Michael Dembrow

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