Review of Keita (1995) directed by Dani Kouyate

Keita (1995), Burkina Faso, directed by Dani Kouyate

As the griot Djeliba is leaving his young pupil Mabo’s home, he tells him, “Do you know why the hunter always beats the lion in the stories? If the lion told the stories, he’d win sometimes too.” This statement is at the heart of the conflict in the film between “tradition” and “modernity” and also hints at an aporia that opens the claim of any foundational story to deconstruction. The hunter and the lion of Djeliba’s proverb seem in the context of the two entwined stories to be as follows: hunter=the colonizer/neo-colonial ruler; lion= “traditional” ruler/his griot. (As D.T. Niane notes in an endnote to his transcription of Sundianta: an epic of old Mali, “the lion is the totem and ancestor of the Keitas” (85). Thus the lion in the proverb represents the history told by the griots of the Keitas).

The conflict manifests itself in the struggle between the “modern” teacher at the government school and the “traditional” teacher, the griot Djeliba. In school, Mabo learns that he “descended from gorillas,” that Christopher Columbus discovered America, and that the ancestors of the French, “the Gauls” were to be considered his ancestors as well. But, of course, Christopher Columbus did not discover America any more than Mabo’s ancestors were the Gauls. Because the Europeans conquered the Native Americans, their own history ceases to exist in colonial classrooms. Mabo’s history is similarly threatened by the story of the Gauls. It is significant that after Djeliba begins the story, Mabo is unable to answer his teacher’s question about the ancestors of the French—indicating that the history he has been learning from Djeliba is interfering with the hegemonic European version of history he is supposed to learn at school. Djeliba tells him that “your ancestors were not gorillas. They were kings.”

There is a tension between Djeliba’s notion of destiny and the teacher’s adherence to “the survival of the fittest.” The teacher maintains that if Mabo were to write that his ancestors were kings rather than gorillas he would fail the state exams; therefore it is beneficial not to question too closely what one is taught but “assimilate” to the expectations of those in power. Djeliba, on the other hand, encourages Mabo’s questions, and the story he tells emphasizes the coming to power of one who was most “unfit” because it was his destiny. In Darwinian theory, the ugliest woman in the kingdom who refuses the sexual advances of her husband for an entire year is the least likely mother of the king. A disabled boy who is unable to walk for years is the least likely king and founder of a dynasty. The idea of destiny, which in one reading could encourage an unthinking fatalism, here encourages a resistance against the story told by those in power—the grasping of power by those who initially seem most unlikely to succeed. The lesson Mabo learns, therefore, is that even those in power must bend to the dictates of destiny—that a previous history can undermine that taught by the conqueror. This is the significance of Djeliba ending the story of Sunjata as he and his mother and siblings go into exile. The powerful brother may have won this round, but as Sunjata claims, he will return. Similarly, although Djeliba chose to leave Mabo’s house after the open conflict with Mabo’s teacher and mother, this is not the end of the story. Now that Mabo knows the beginning of the Sunjata story, he will be sure to return over and over to this oral history to further understand his identity. Djeliba left the story near the beginning; Sunjata did return to regain control of the kingdom and become emporer of the Mali empire. Likewise, the film implies that the story of his history and his “destiny” will give Mabo and his friends, to whom he relates the story, the tools with which to overthrow the hegemonic knowledge of French education and create their own nation that acknowledges their own rich history.

However, the binary oppositions established between the ideas of “gorillas” and “kings,” between the “hunter” and the “lion,” are complicated by the existence of another aporetic space in the proverb Djeliba tells Mabo as he is leaving. If the lion is able to overthrow the hunter, the lion merely replaces the hunter’s hegemony. After all, the lion is a hunter as well. Perhaps the antelope that he hunts also has a story. In Djeliba’s story of the beginning of the world, he says that “Wagadou was the theatre of all creatures.” Mabo’s ancestor said “The world cannot go on without a leader. Do you agree?” With this, he offers himself as their leader, and the creatures “said together, ‘No one hates you.’ So he proclaimed himself king.” At the heart of this triumphant creation story, told as a way of legitimizing the kingship of the Keita clan, is a profoundly ambivalent moment. Mabo’s ancestor has proclaimed himself king, but while his proclamation was not challenged (at least in the telling of this story), neither was it enthusiastically welcomed. Although this ur-ancestor rises to the top in his story and the stories the griots tell about him, there are a whole host of creatures whose stories are subsumed in his, leaving the question: is it necessary to have a leader? Is it destiny that causes Sunjata to come out on top, or does the story maintain that it was his destiny because he did come out on top? What, ultimately, is the difference between destiny and survival-of-the-fittest?

The existence of the resistant women in the story, Mabo’s mother, the two stubborn buffalo women, and even the first wife of Sundiata’s father, reveals other voices that have been suppressed and twisted by one telling of history. Sundiata’s father “has to” rape his wife before the prophesied son can be born. Djeliba chuckles that women in the village who couldn’t do housework wouldn’t have been able to find husbands. As Djeliba tells the story, he and Mabo recline in the shade, while the servant girl washes dishes in the background. Djeliba’s story, while questioning the superiority of the new French colonizer, also reinforces stereotypes of the jealous co-wife, and the necessity of quelling a stubborn woman. Perhaps some of the resistance of Mabo’s feisty “modern” mother to his initiation comes from her resistance to the idea that her fate is ruled by her “destiny” as a woman. The housegirl remains at the bottom of the “food chain,” for even if Mabo’s mother claims “liberation” through the modern lifestyle of the urban Francophone environment, can this subaltern speak? And does the story she overhears, which is meant for part of a boy’s initiation, speak to her?



Works Cited:
Kouyate, Dani, dir. Keita: The Heritage of the Griot. Burkina Faso, 1995.
Niane, D.T. Sundiata: an epic of old Mali. Essex: Longman, 1986.