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Elements of the Bissau-Guinean army staged an uprising in Bissau on Thursday night, setting up roadblocks and attacking the residence of Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Jr., who was likely going to win the run-off vote for the presidency which was to be held in a few weeks. As of this writing, Gomes is maybe in the custody of the mutinous soldiers, along with current interim President Raimundo Pereira. Maybe. The soldiers, whose leadership is unknown, but who don�t appear to be working with the country�s top military leadership, are likely acting against Gomes because they feared he would try to curtail the power of the army if elected. (Now why would he want to do that?) According to the BBC, they also claim that Gomes �had done a �secret deal� to allow Angolan troops to wipe out Guinea-Bissau's army.� There were approximately 200 Angolan soldiers in the country, providing training to the Bissau-Guinean army, but they were withdrawn earlier in the week.
Now, a military coup, lamentable though it may be, is nothing new for Guinea-Bissau. In the relatively short time since it became independent (in 1974), no president has ever completed a full term. The latest elections, now unlikely to come off, thanks to the coup, were being held following the surprisingly non-violent death of President Malam Bacai Sanha, who died of complications from diabetes. President Raimundo Pereira took over as interim president following his death, and this was not the first time Pereira had had to do this. He also became interim president in 2009, following the assassination of President Jo�o Bernardo Vieira by mutinous soldiers (there is a pattern here).
Now, there aren�t that many cinematic representations of (or references to) Guinea-Bissau out there, but I can think of three, throughout all the movies I�ve seen, and I�d like to touch on each of them briefly.
First off, there is the 1992 film The Blue Eyes of Yonta (Udju Azul di Yonta), directed by the Bissau-Guinean filmmaker Flora Gomes (who is a man, despite the Flora). Now, Lusophone African films�and African films in general�don�t make their way to the United States very often, but I was lucky enough to see this movie in 2009 when I took a course on Portuguese-speaking African cultures at the University of Minnesota. Gomes�s film, released a mere 18 years after Guinea-Bissau�s independence, strikes a remarkably optimistic tone as it depicts the lives of a well-to-do Bissau-Guinean family and the people in their social circle. The title character, Yonta, is the young adult daughter of this family, and she is smitten with her father�s friend Vicente, who made a name for himself in the war against the Portuguese. Vicente, who has become quite wealthy since independence, is oblivious to Yonta�s affections, and we spend much of the movie watching him suffer a quiet emotional breakdown as he contrasts the revolutionary ideals that animated him in his youth with his subsequent embracing of bourgeois capitalism. Yonta is similarly oblivious to the affections that she�s sparked in a young man of her own generation, who writes her anonymous love poetry based on European models (which leads him rather incongruously to praise her �blue eyes,� hence the title).
The tone of this film is a combination of optimism for the future, evidently still fired by the energy of the revolution, mixed with a wistful melancholy that comes from confronting the reality of Guinea-Bissau�s position near the end of the twentieth century.
This is the only film I�ve seen that was made by a Bissau-Guinean and which focuses its attentions entirely on �Bissau-Guinean themes.� Flora Gomes, in a career spanning decades, has only been able to make a handful of films, as it is always difficult to secure funding for an African film, and even worse for a Lusophone African film, which will tour the festival circuit but generate little in the way of box-office bang. Gomes still aspires to make an epic film about Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean independence leader Amilcar Cabral, which brings me to the next two films I want to consider, Sans Soleil and Colossal Youth.
First, a few words about Cabral. Cabral was born in 1924 in Portuguese Guinea (later to be Guinea-Bissau) to Cape Verdean parents, and there was such close cultural intercourse between Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde that they would gain their independence under the aegis of a shared independence movement, the Partido Africano da Independ�ncia da Guin� e Cabo Verde (PAIGC). Cabral founded the movement in 1956 and they launched their uprising against Portuguese colonial rule in 1963. Most of the fighting took place in Guinea-Bissau, and by the early seventies, indepedence for Portugal�s colonies seemed increasingly inevitable. Portugal was the last major European colonial hold-out in Africa (they were the first to arrive in Africa and the last to leave). In 1974, a left-wing military coup (the Carnation Revolution) would topple Portugal�s right-wing colonialist government, setting the stage for the independence of a united Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde later in that same year. Cabral, however, would not live to see it. He was assassinated on January 20, 1973, by a Portuguese-backed rival within the PAIGC. This would be the first of many assassinations to plague the nascent state of Guinea-Bissau.
Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde split away from each other in 1980, since which time Cape Verde has become one of the most democratic and most livable countries in Africa, while Guinea-Bissau has become one of the poorest. In his landmark 1982 essay film Sans Soleil, French filmmaker Chris Marker briefly sets his roving sights on these two former Portuguese colonies. One of the iconic images from this movie is of a Cape Verdean fisherwoman staring intently back at Marker�s camera (she appears on the cover of the Criterion Collection�s La Jet�e/Sans Soleil DVD release), but Marker does stop off briefly in Guinea-Bissau. I suppose he doesn�t actually do much there. As I recall (and it�s been a few years since I last saw this film) he just recounts in brief the story of Cabral�s rise and of his assassination, and of how sad it was, given that Cabral was so close to realizing his dream of an independent Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. So that�s Marker�s take on Cabral.
The other cinematic reference that I�ve seen to Cabral comes much more recently, in Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa�s 2006 film Colossal Youth(Juventude em Marcha, which Wikipedia tells me translates to �Youth on the March;� I do not pretend to know at present where the title �Colossal Youth� comes from, although I do think it�s a good one). The film follows elderly Cape Verdean immigrant Ventura, as he transitions from the Lisbon slum of Fontainhas where he�s made his home for many years to a clean and shiny new apartment building (the Portuguese government is tearing down Fontainhas and transferring its denizens to a bright and antiseptic new housing project). Ventura visits his various friends, both Cape Verdean and Portuguese, as they transition to their new homes, and in one scene with a fellow Cape Verdean, we are confronted with the legacy of Amilcar Cabral. Ventura plays a record for his friend, and the song they hear is a revolutionary anthem, which extols the freedom and happiness they can hope to enjoy after independence, and which at one point exclaims, �Long live Cabral!� We know almost nothing about Ventura�s background, but it seems likely that Cabral�s war, in which Ventura may have once been a believer, has not brought him much in the way of freedom or happiness. Even an African state as relatively successful as Cape Verde has sent a remarkable number of its citizens overseas to seek a better life in the former colonial hub of Portugal, where they often end up marginalized, eking out a living at the bottom of Portugal�s socioeconomic ladder.
When we see what might have been and contrast it with what has come to pass, the song of Cabral becomes a song of almost unspeakable melancholy. In the light of yet another coup in Guinea-Bissau, this melancholy persists, raising its voice from the past and echoing into the unknowable future.
