What defines Africa's poor?

Mali film puts West's blueprint for Africa on trial
Jan 12, 2007 8:29am ET

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DAKAR (Reuters) - Africa's poorest are even worse off than they were a quarter of a century ago and despite years of debt relief, humanitarian aid and the goodwill of fund-raising rock stars, the West is to blame.

So say the witnesses who line up to testify against Western financial institutions in "Bamako", a scathing film by Mauritanian-born director Abderrahmane Sissako, due to be released in Britain and the United States next month.

The plot is simple. Mostly poor Africans who have had no say in how their economies are run plead their case against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, accusing them of imposing rules that have kept their nations mired in misery.

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Set in the dusty courtyard of his father's family compound in Mali's capital Bamako, Sissako's fantasy trial gives a voice to the voiceless, those who have felt the effects of measures imposed by Western economists but have had no easy way to reply.

"It's not so much about identifying who is guilty as denouncing the fact that the fate of hundreds of millions of people has been sealed by policies decided outside their universe," Sissako says on the Website www.bamako-film.com.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a theatrical gesture by an intellectual blaming his continent's ills on outsiders.

But what makes Sissako's film compelling is that his roll-call of witnesses are not actors but real local people, including a would-be illegal migrant, an elderly villager and a former minister. Continued...

© Reuters 2007. All Rights Reserved.


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