Searching for elusive Africa
By Tumelo E. Phali | Posted: August 03, 2005
Manthia Diawara
This month we honour, rather, we are honoured to write about one of Africa’s greatest sons, filmmaker, scholar, worldly thinker and literary activist Professor Manthia Diawara.
A native of Mali (Bamako), West Africa, Prof Diawara left home on a self-imposed exile and relocated to Paris, France, upon finishing high school in 1972. In France he enrolled as part-time student at the Université de Vincennes where he received his academic education.
A chance encounter, while attending a performance at Paris's Shakespeare and Co., with African American Beat poet Ted Joans changed the course of his life. At the end of his reading session, the popular poet selected the young Diawara amongst the crowded audience and anointed him as the only one who really had a sense for poetry.
It was Joans who advised Prof. Diawara to leave France and go to America, fearing that Diwara could end up frustrated and on the streets – a fate which faced many of his African contemporaries in France in the sixties.
Heeding the life-changing advice, Prof. Diawara landed in Washington, D.C in 1974 and had to work illegally in restaurants and as a street vendor peddling African artifacts to survive. Here too he had to deal with the daily fear of a deportation and witnessed many of his compatriots being hunted down and sent back home by immigration officials.
Being from a French background, Prof. Diawara had to begin elementary studies in the English language at a community college and his academic brilliance eventually got him a scholarship to study at the American University.
From there he enrolled at the University of Indiana, earning a Ph.D. in comp lit and film. His thesis on the politics and aesthetics of African cinema formed the basis for African Cinema, published in 1985 by Indiana University Press.
By the same year he got the title of Professor and he later married a fellow foreigner who was from Zaire with whom they have two children. They have since separated and Prof. Diawara later got married to a law professor from the University of Pennsylvania.
A man who has always had his heart very close to his motherland, he is presently chair of the Africana Studies Department at New York University, where he is also editor-in-chief of Black Renaissance Noire, a journal of arts, culture and politics, as well as an author and filmmaker whose areas of specialization include Africa, the United States, and the Black Diaspora in Europe.
As well as the vast journals published under his name, Prof. Diawara has edited a volume called Black American Cinema, which was a publication by Routledge in 1993.
He has also been a lecturer at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Pennsylvania.
Prof. Diawara is also engaged in “Black Cultural Studies” a project pioneered in Britain by figures like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy in the early 80’s. Although mostly dedicated to the subject of materialism amongst Blacks in the Americas, Diawara’s name has always been mentioned alongside prominent thinkers like Greg Tate, Houston Baker, Arthur Jafa, Paul Gilroy, Tricia Rose and others who have written profusely on Black nationalism and issues of Black Intelligence.
He is linked to the Cornel West-Henry Louis Gates wing of black studies, which advocated a change in America through black art, literature and film which is in philosophical conflict with the Afrocentric wing known for intense studies of hermetic languages and for delving in African mysticism.
“Black Studies/Cultural Studies: Performance Acts”, his well-known critique on Black cultural studies, offers a direction in the re-structuring of such studies in the ever evolving societal structures.
Known mostly for his inexhaustible writings on black film like Black-American Cinema: Aesthetics and Spectatorship (1993), African Cinema: Politics and Culture (1992), In Search Of Africa (1998), Prof. Diawara is a prolific writer on the topic of film and literature of the Black Diaspora and has a number of films to his credit – films like Bamako Sigi Kan (2002), Diaspora Conversation (2000), In Search of Africa (1997), Rouch in Reverse, a German produced documentary film he directed in 1995.
He also played a pivotal role in the making of the documentary: Sembene Ousmane: The Making of the African Cinema done in collaboration with Kenyan famous literary activist, Ngûgî wa Thiong’o in 1993, as co-director.
His well-read memoir, “We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World (Basic/Civitas)” an angry yet nostalgic narrative on his bitter-sweet life in the free and racist West, articulates his angst about the treatment of fellow Blacks who are in the same state of affairs he used to be over twenty-five years ago when conditions pushed him to leave Mali - this in the face of global paranoia sparked by terrorist attacks that have resulted in tougher and sometimes unfair immigration legislation enforced on people of certain ethnic groups, including Africans seeking better life overseas.
In “We wont barge”, whose title is taken from Malian popular afro pop musician, Salif Keita’s song "Nous Pas Bouger, Prof Diawara declares that in spite of America playing the privileged arrogant brother, he does not, however, see an end in sight in the connection between America and Africa since the bond was created centuries ago when Americans shipped Africans in chains across the Pacific.
Prof. Diawara returned to the place of his “cultural awakening” in Africa in 2003 - after four decades - for the filming of ‘Conakry Kas”, a documentary engaging the lives of local luminaries and ordinary people on the streets of Conakry, Guinea in the face of globalization and recent political tides.
However, as he found out in Conakry Kas, even at home the “real” Africa continues to elude him.
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