Re-presenting Africa: an interview with Sorious Samura

openDemocracy: How do you think the western media portray Africa? How did you start to think about your own work in relation to that?

Sorious Samura: When I saw documentaries about Africa made by, say, the BBC in the poorest and most filthy-looking countries I thought: yes, it’s true, these things need to be exposed. But what about the good things that were happening? I always wanted to see the other sides of our continent being shown.

Also on openDemocracy.net: Caspar Melville's profile on Sorius Samura

I was always full of stories about the continent – who, what, why, how. I grew up in Sierra Leone. There was no proper local media. We were entirely dependent on international media like the BBC and CNN; I never saw the full picture, or the proper context, in stories about Africa. I wanted to tell the African story from within to the world beyond.

The western media find it very hard to say what is really going on – they are hamstrung by post-colonial guilt, by the danger of being accused of racism or imperialism. I am not. In Africa I can point fingers, I can blame the Africans who are responsible, I can condemn people like Yoweri Museveni. I get away with it because I’m an African, and I can do likewise with the west.

openDemocracy: We published an article by the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene. He says that while he has an audience in the west he is making films for Africa. Are you telling Africa’s story to the west or to Africa?

Sorious Samura: Both. It was a blessing for me that my footage of what was happening in Freetown was first aired by CNN. CNN is like the world’s biggest fish for us. In Somalia, there is almost no electricity but they watch CNN on satellite.

Surviving Hunger

When I was working on Return to Freetown. I went to Kono in Sierra Leone, which was controlled by the rebels. They had all already seen Cry Freetown. They had no shoes but they had satellite. It is appearing on CNN – this so-called western media – that actually brought me on TV in Africa, and gained me the respect of Africans.

openDemocracy: But you declined a job offer with both CNN and the BBC. Why was that?

Sorious Samura: Well, their convention is the three-minute report from the region, and that is something I have always condemned. Africa is such a big continent and these short reports are just inadequate for giving the background and context of a story. I insisted that I want to continue with Insight News TV because they allow me the space, hour-long programmes, really to explore an issue.

When I first came to Insight with the footage for Cry Freetown, the director, Ron McCullagh, just said to me: “You started it, it’s your story, you tell it.” That for me is everything.

War and balance

openDemocracy: We have been debating the question of balance in relation to reporting war. A central issue has been the difference between objectivity and advocacy. How do you negotiate between these?

Sorious Samura: I don’t think any journalist will ever be able to cover a war and tell a balanced story. With the rebels in Freetown, I would have loved to film certain things, but I had to play by their rules. It was the same situation with the peacekeepers. Most stories in Africa depend on who you’re working with.

That’s Africa. If you cross the line you lose your livelihood, your income, or your life. It has become easier for me now that I live outside Africa. I am able to some degree to say things I could not if I still lived in Sierra Leone.

For example the film I made in London about tensions between Caribbean and Africans, Black on Black, which caused quite a bit of controversy, but no one tried to kill me. Maybe if this had been in Sierra Leone I would be history by now.

openDemocracy: We published a reflection by Harun Hassan who was a journalist in Mogadishu, Somalia. He also talked about the difficulty of telling the truth when you are reliant on the patronage of warlords. So being part of the western media gives you a privileged position?

Sorious Samura: Don’t forget I was in prison in Liberia for attempting to understand the suffering of people there. I have had a certain freedom to challenge, but I can’t go back into Sierra Leone on my own. I can only enter Freetown with a film crew or some western friends. I have had threats made directly against me and my family. I’ve been threatened in Sierra Leone, in Uganda, in Somalia.

I’ve been accused of being a sell-out. Some politicians in Sierra Leone told me that I was being used by the media. I replied, who is using who? In this case I think we Africans are the ones who desperately need that platform. Asians, Americans, European, Australians are now telling their own story in the global media – it’s only Africans who’ve never been given that platform.

In relation to balance and telling the truth I think what I have learnt is that there are some stories that you just cannot tell. If I can’t tell the truth, then I won’t touch it because I don’t want to be just another number.

Surviving Hunger

openDemocracy: How does your current film – Surviving Hunger [called Living with Hunger in the UK] fit into your series of films on Africa?

Sorious Samura: We went to South, West and North Africa to film Exodus with the migrants; then East (Uganda), for Walking on Ashes and West again (Liberia) to try and interview Charles Taylor. After Liberia we started looking for really big stories to cover. The Ethiopian famine was one of the biggest, and it has never been told properly.

For the last twenty years, since Live Aid, the moment you say “Ethiopia” you summon a picture of tall, skinny men and women, starving, waiting for food: the images of the famine in the 1980s. The image was always one of hopelessness, dependence, the need to be saved. There are no other images – what else has been said about Ethiopia in the media since then?

I wanted to add context. I have a right as a member of a so-called ‘one world’ to know what happened, how people put their lives together.

I grew up in poverty in Sierra Leone but I was shocked when I saw the way people in Ethiopia are living. They have nothing. They don’t have access to education to understand how they might improve their agriculture. They know nothing of crop rotation.

These are people for whom poverty is passed on from generation to generation. But even though they lack all the necessities to keep their farms going they don’t want to depend on handouts, they want to do things for themselves.

They don’t want to be dependent, but they do need help. You guys in Europe got support after the second world war from the Americans. That’s what I believe the Ethiopians want. It’s the Marshall Plan they need, so they can become self-supporting.

‘Real’ reality TV?

openDemocracy: One of the reasons the western media reproduce the narrative of African disaster is that it is compelling television: images of people starving and dying, flies all over them. You avoid those kind of images, but you do use the techniques we associate with ‘reality TV’ like Survivor. Was that conscious?

Sorious Samura: We tried for ages to get commissions. It didn’t work because the conventional documentary form, according to the big players, doesn’t get ratings, and it’s all about ratings for them. We thought it’s a shame that Big Brother and Survivor had stolen ‘reality’ on TV – there is even an African Big Brother – so we consciously decided to try and redeem reality. A working title for this film was Real Reality.

We thought we can’t quite play into the hands of so-called ‘reality TV’ but perhaps we can beat them at their own game by going in there and spending time with real people and letting real people tell their own story? Of course we were worried about the moral aspect of it. But by going to Ethiopia and experiencing directly what these people are going through, it would help me get empathy for them. I hope I’m somehow able to relate that to the viewers.

openDemocracy: Did you feel at any time uncomfortable that you were exploiting them? In the end, you can get into a car, or have a good meal. They have to stay there, that’s their life.

Surviving Hunger

Sorious Samura: It’s a question that I knew would come as soon as the film was shown. This is something I thought about even before I went in.

We thought about taking money with us, but what difference would it make in the long run? The best way to change things is to get millions of people to see that in the 21st century there are members of our ‘global village’ who don’t have any access to medicines, to water supplies, to hospitals, to schools, to roads. These people are living here on earth while you have governments who are coughing up millions to set up scientific programmes to go out in space to look for new neighbours. We already have neighbours who need only a fraction of what is spent to go to outer space.

I thought if we can make this argument strong enough to make people see and understand, maybe more pressure will come on governments.

If people think that this is exploitative, fine. But I think the best and most important thing for these people is for the first time to get them to tell their own story, let them be the celebrities. These are real people, real stories. I want to shock the audience into understanding that these things are happening, right now.

There was a question of respect, of trying to live like the people I was staying with. I’ve always tried, wherever I go in Africa, not to sleep in big hotels, not to disrespect the people I am with. Somehow the moment you do that it just opens doors.

While I was in Ethiopia I was very aware that if things got very bad for me I had a doctor standing by, and I could leave. I’m an African of course, but I’ve been out of Africa for about ten years and my immune system is way down. I was worried about the water, because these places don’t even have running water or electricity. I was a complete stranger to hunger. We carefully assessed all these and I decided not to bring my own food or water, although they did have to boil water for me, which used up their precious firewood.

It was risky, once or twice I felt ill. I was nowhere as strong and as fit as them, I don’t have that survival instinct. These people were amazing. You’ve got to try it because this is real education, these people are not faking hunger; they don’t have food, they go two, three days without food.

We thought if one really experiences the life they lead you’ll be able to represent their thoughts and feelings a lot better, you’ll be able to express what they are going through a lot better by doing it yourself.

openDemocracy: So it was conscious to imitate the ‘reality TV’ video-diary style, but you also deviated from the norms of documentary in other ways. You introduce the idea that aid is unfairly distributed, and at one point you interview the local man responsible, but you don’t follow the chain up to regional or governmental level, or interview any aid agencies. Was this deliberate?

Sorious Samura: Initially we had wanted to do that. But in Africa there is the problem of ‘the big men’ – the politicians and those who run things. If you start including them you get bogged down in all kinds of games and distractions. We wanted to stay focused on the story of the villagers.

Coffee prices and celebrities

openDemocracy: At the same time, there is an economic story that underpins why these people are starving. Ethiopia is a major producer of coffee, coffee prices in the world are way down, so the Ethiopian budget is much smaller than it needs to be and it can’t provide. You could do an analysis and discuss globalisation and debt, you chose not to do that in the film. Doesn’t that leave you, and the audience, with a feeling of hopelessness?

Sorious Samura: We quite carefully planned to focus on one village which is representative of hundreds of villages in Ethiopia. We didn’t bring this political dimension into it – first, because it is very complicated and second, because governments and aid agencies dictate what you can discuss, and you can waste a lot of time perusing them. We left the political and economic analysis out, and just kept the story of the people living with the consequences.

The reason we didn’t step out of the village or its immediate environs was that we wanted it, the village and its people, to be the celebrity. We only went to the city, Lalibela, once and then only to show how the young people were trying, and failing, to find work. It was both an editorial and my personal decision that once I am in the village I don’t go out.

The bottom line is that in the last twenty years everyone has supported the sending of aid to Ethiopia. But the people we show in the film, who receive aid, can’t survive on it, or only barely.

Has aid worked? Maybe not, so what should we do? Maybe listen to people, and you’ll hear the story. Then think about what you can do.

openDemocracy: My reaction was this feeling of “why, what can they do?” Maybe that was what you wanted?

Sorious Samura: I like to leave the viewers with some questions. I engage them. I always like it when viewers ask me: “why did this happen, why did you do that, why didn’t you put the camera down and help.” That at least will stimulate debate. It’s more than television to me. I want it to create debates all around.

Whether that works to my benefit I don’t know, because I get really attacked, but as long as I get the debate I know at least they engage. Not everyone is longing to tell a story and get people to pick up the phone or go in the media and start arguing; so I’ve been a bit lucky with the style.

openedmocracy: Controversy?

Sorious Samura: Yeah [laughs]

The cost of hunger, the uses of film

openDemocracy: The staple diet of the village seemed to be wild cabbage, which you shared with them. What does it taste like?

Collecting cabbage

Sorious Samura: It’s a terrible thing. When I was growing up we used to chew rubber bands when we were hungry, but this is worse. Its poisonous and you have to cook it for something like six hours and eat a roomful even to get the nutritional value of a normal meal. Also they don’t have much fuel, so when we didn’t have wood for that day we didn’t eat. Obviously the cabbage would have tasted a lot better had with salt or pepper or meat. But it’s just the leaves by themselves, that’s all you eat, and it’s so bitter. When you chew it it’s slippery and you’re running to the toilet all night. It just gives you that sense of eating something for the day, but it’s not enough.

openDemocracy: What would ‘success’ mean for you in relation to this film?

Sorious Samura: We have four big broadcasters involved – the Discovery Channel, CNN, Channel 4, and an Australian channel. But that’s not the end for me. If I can get a few million people watching and discussing this film, maybe even starting to influence the debate on the way in which aid is distributed, then that for me is a success story. If this film can make a difference for a few villages in Malawi, or for some of the rest of the 40 million people starving all over Africa, I would see that as a measure of success.