African Imaginaries, political memory and diverse stories in JOMBA!’s “African Crossings” Programme
By Mlungisi Magcaba and Slindile Mchunu
JOMBA!, this week provided festival audiences with a little taste of diverse Africa with its “African Crossings” platform. Four works commissioned for this platform offered a representation of our storied continent through the work of Robert Ssempijja of Uganda, Bernardo Guiamaba from Mazambique, Gaby Saranouffi from Madagascar and Benin-based Marcel Gbeffa.
Robert Ssempija’s Alienation kicks off the programme. Set in a dilapidated abandoned structure, Ssempija situates his work as firmly decolonial, refusing work in the colonial structures that history has imposed on the continent and in his country. Uganda, under colonial rule restricted certain races from travelling to certain areas and places, and for some, inherited scars remain due to possibly unhealed trauma and as sense not belonging in ones’ birth place. Ssempijja’s work is testimony to the sentiment that “the body always remembers” his own body a site, marked by history and its influences and impacts on the here and now. The choreography speaks, through Ssempijja’s body, about a history that hasn’t accommodated Black bodies, even in their home-lands. Colonial structures are enduring, and Ssempijja offers us a stark reminder of this, and opens space for debate about a future decolonial African heritage.
Bernardo Guiamba from Mozambique dedicates his performance IN-BOX!! to the hopeful and the hopeless, to the resilient and persistent. The performance centers around being stuck or held captive “in a box”, it is about a human who is searching for the will to fight for better, the human spirit that is resilient, a longing for an emotion that once was, or kept a piece of him alive. Locations shift throughout, one might say that he is searching for hope and sadly cannot find it because of being in a box, a figurative box, so it could be an entrapment of the mind. The person who is in captivity is lonely and helpless and needing a breakthrough. These ideas elevated through performance are off-set contextually in the now — hinged on experiences of living during a pandemic, in a world where “one size fits all” solutions are offered. What does this mean for Africa and her people?
Malagasy born choreographer, dancer and dance teacher Gaby Saranouffi offers Face(s) of Basadi. A work centered on the rites of passage women take, and journeys to womanhood also explores traditions of Virginity Testing and associated traditions that serve patriarchal cultures. The piece is explorative, multidimensional, mystery driven and Avant-Garde-African. It investigates the rich complexities of life from the point of view of a woman, still an all too rare occurrence.
Benin-based Marcel Gbeffa’s In my mind closes off the programme with its gentle interrogation and exploration of the imagination… dare one say a kind of “African imaginary”. In the stillness of the body, the mind wonders, the mind has no borders or boundaries unless self-imposed. Gbeffa’s is a piece that explores imaginative potential, defying all logic (a Western construction?), creating an African imaginary where rules can be broken. The mind will wonder off where the body can’t take it, and travel through space and time.
The “African Crossings” programme offers a taste of our storied histories on the continent, a diverse reckoning that affirms pluralities of existence that are firmly and politically situated within an African consciousness that refuses to remain silent.
