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African women and cinema: A conversation with Anne Mungai
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Anne Mungai is one of a growing number of African women filmmakers other than pioneers like Safi Faye (Senegal), Sarah Maldoror (Angola/Guadeloupe), Therese Sita-Bella (Cameroon), Salem Mekuria (Ethiopia), Flora Mbugu (Tanzania), and recent comers such as Mariama Hima (Niger), Ngozi Onwurah (Nigeria), Lola Fani-Kayode (Nigeria), Deborah Ogazuma (Nigeria), Funmi Osoba (Nigeria), Jane Lusabe (Kenya), Fanta Nacro (Burkina Faso), and a few others. Like some of their male counterparts, these women film-makers engage the broad range of issues and topics thrown up by the experiences and challenges of life in post-colonial Africa. However, unlike many of their male counterparts, some of these women film-makers bring to these issues and topics a particular female and gender sensibility whose absence in previous male-directed films severely handicapped the filmic discourse on these issues and topics. Moreover, many of these women film-makers open up new spaces of discourse, focussing on subjects and raising questions on which many male film-makers maintained a long silence.
Saikati (1992) is the first feature film by Kenyan film-maker Anne Mungai. (See the synopsis of the film at the end of the interview.) It casts a particular glance at the conditions of women in rural and urban Kenya, especially contemporary tourist Kenya. Two different worlds are set up in this film, one inhabited by Saikati's sister, Monica, and the other inhabited by Saikati and her parents and family members. Monica's world is the modern world of urban Nairobi skyscrapers, plush hotels, paved streets overflowing with people and vehicles of all makes, rural tourist spots, safaris in game parks, white male tourist companions/customers, Western-style dress and cosmetics, and a cramped one-room apartment in Nairobi. Saikati's world is the world of the Maasai "maara" surrounded by vast plains and animals of all sorts, a family enclosure within a small village, daily treks to...