I had started to get involved on the help-the-village projects as a hobby, with a view to eventually and very gradually making them become my full-time work. Given the choice, I would have launched into them full time with my full energy at once, but I couldn’t because I was still committed to running my film company.
For some months, I seemed to live in three entirely disparate camps: in one camp there were movies, documentaries and TV, another camp was entirely literary and the third was only for the ‘sustainable development’ of northern Mozambique. At first there seemed to be no link between them except for the original travel documentary, funding for which was proving hard to find. In fact, funding for all and any documentaries proved hard to find and movie finance wasn’t exactly growing on trees.
I didn’t enjoy fundraising in the business world and nor was I very good at it. I was, I suppose, better than some because I was able to raise the funds to start one of the only development companies in Europe with any money to spend and also to squeeze a few deals in the private sector for film finance. Selling films before they are made (which has to be done in order to make them) is a bit like selling the fabled emperor’s new clothes without even providing the spectacle of the naked emperor.
Millions of dollars change hands on the promise of almost certain failure and the triumph of hope over experience that your movie will be the one in a hundred that makes a profit. Without the sheltering canopy of banks that bankers have, or established businesses that most businessmen have, without any bricks or mortar and with a dismal track record, movie-makers and producers go to market every day and still manage to sell their invisible and ephemeral ‘product’. To do this requires enormous amounts of energy. So much so that the entire film world survives on a high. When it works (which is not very often), the artificially pumped adrenalin gushes into extraordinary activity.
Selling movie concepts requires endless analogy. A story that can ‘green light’ will tend to be described in terms of one particular movie meeting another. Sometimes the mind boggles at these comparisons, but the Money People like to hear that a new concept is not all new but really China town meets Apocalypse Now, or Ocean’s Eleven meets The Full Monty.
I began to wonder what would happen if the energy and creativity of the film world could meet the lethargy and money of the development world. Then in the summer of 2004 I was invited to attend a conference at the end of the year in San Francisco. It was to be organized by the UNDP and it was all about Eradicating Poverty through Profit. The more I worked in the isolated camps of media and development, the more convinced I was that the solution for each lay in somehow merging them. I enrolled for the conference and dived back into work, corporate battles, scripts and schools.
In my office in Amsterdam, I was slowly designing a way not to change the world but to change one little bit of it. Somewhere within the equation of how it could be done, media and aid had to meet. While trying to puzzle out how this could be achieved, unfilmed but not unnoticed, a soap opera was playing out on both fronts.
IX
When Business and Pleasure Are One
BETWEEN THE INTERSTICES OF office politics, some of our projects in the fiction factory office in Amsterdam were slowly taking shape. Despite this, we were still a long way off from actually filming anything. Complex deals were stacked and crumbled and new investors were found and wooed, but, increasingly, no one investor seemed willing to finance an entire budget and to complete each deal we kept hitting the stumbling block of being too new – of not having a track record. So we had to choose one of our projects, make it and sell it in order to make various other bits of our financial jigsaws fall into place. Rather than waste any more time and energy trying to pre-sell as yet invisible products, we decided to auto-finance the first steps of a corporate calling-card.
Most of our projects depended on third parties to be able to start filming even a few minutes of footage. Despite this, by December 2003, we had managed to film some of the material we needed on a South African documentary about Don Mattera, the enigmatic and charismatic hero of Soweto. Several attempts were made to get to the next stage and add some African footage to the Dutch film, but there was no budget to do so. Both the director and the producer/ initiator were Dutch, while the subject and 99 per cent of the material were in South Africa.
Given his decades of struggle, I felt obliged not to let him down. Despite dearly wanting to get the Don Mattera documentary made, to get through financial red tape we had to show a track record and to get a track record we had to show a film. The one film we could make without having to mobilize outside forces was our first one: Out of the Woods in Mossuril. The copyright was mine, the script was mine, we could safari camp for free instead of having to pay for accommodation and we could crew a pilot documentary film using family and friends.
While private investors from the business world could be lured into finding the potential gains of feature films a sexy investment, virtually no one from inside or outside the media industry seemed interested in picking up the tab for the probable financial loss of a documentary. Even when the subject was a gift to the genre, it proved well nigh impossible to sell it. Maybe an established company could have done it, but our new Dutch one couldn’t. This depressing conclusion has been drawn with hindsight. When we embarked on our Mozambican documentary it was with rose-tinted spectacles and the firm belief that the folders of fabulous documentary subjects that our keen Colombian office cleaner dusted down weekly would eventually be gobbled up gratefully in its wake.
Although this was not to be the case, I gained invaluable insights into Southern Africa via the intense effort to transpose some of Don Mattera’s spirit onto film. While I regret not having succeeded, I don’t regret any of the time or money spent trying to do so because Don Mattera is such a remarkable man. His Italian grandfather, Giuseppe, jumped ship in South Africa and married a Zulu woman, defying all the social rules of his day. Then, far from being punished for his audacity, he not only flaunted his black wife and mestizo children, but he also started the first bus company in Soweto and made himself a small fortune. His grandson, Don, was sent to a Catholic boarding school where he was beaten and humiliated in the time-honoured fashion of such colonial establishments. As a young teenager, Don joined a street gang and became a formidable fist and knife fighter. By the time he was eighteen he was the leader of the most feared gang in Soweto, where he was the kingpin of the ‘kill or be killed’ underbelly of that apartheid society.
During the anti-apartheid battles, Don Mattera was politicized. He became the Head of Explosives and worked closely with the ANC. For several years, if a bridge was blown or a railway track detonated, or a car bomb went off anywhere in South Africa, then Don Mattera had a hand in it, if only at an organizational level. As a gangster, he had survived on his wits and his forward planning. As a guerrilla leader, all his past experience kept him in good stead. He was arrested dozens of times, tortured and beaten and placed under house arrest, but he was too smart for the police to ever place him at the scene of any crime.
Meanwhile, he wrote; what had begun as a boyhood hobby became a way of life. He wrote about his own life and about his South African people. He wrote and recited poetry. He began to see that his ability to lead and to make things happen had to go further than it had before. When the battle was won, apartheid was officially ended, and his friend and colleague Nelson Mandela sat in power as the President of a new South Africa, Don Mattera decided to continue battling against evil and to keep fighting for what is good.
Unlike most of his fellow partisans, he refused to settle down. Unlike most of his fellow partisans, he was not a member of the ruling ANC party. He had been a communist for many years and stayed loyal to his party. In the new South Africa this was tantamount to economic suicide. A fraction of the country’s wealth was being shared and opportunity was being given to blacks for the first time in the country’s history. But both jobs and wealth were for ANC members only, and black
ones at that.
Over ten years of new rule, some things changed. The world inside and outside South Africa had nothing but praise for the new regime. It became politically incorrect to breathe a word against the new rule. Don Mattera stands out as a lone figure of dissent. He monitors every step forwards and every step back. He complains that: ‘Three per cent of the blacks here climbed up the wealth ladder and then pulled the ladder up after them.’
Although he is still friends with some of his former comrades, he has also made many enemies by being so outspoken and not toeing the party line. After decades of martyrdom on ‘the long road to freedom’, and a decade of freedom, not much has changed for millions of black and coloured South Africans.
‘Coloureds today are too white to be black and too black to be white. They are worse off than they were under apartheid.’
Don Mattera is an internationally acclaimed writer and the winner of numerous South African and foreign honours and awards. He doesn’t drive a fancy car or live in an exclusive villa in Johannesburg. He lives in the township where he grew up. He serves his people via over thirty community projects he has founded, such as the Westbury Project, where former drug-dealers, converted to the Good Cause by Don himself, donate their ill-gotten gains and use them to campaign in the streets to persuade kids to stop dealing and using drugs, and also to give food and job-training to the poorest of the poor. All Don’s own money goes to support the thousands of people he helps. And not only can he not get any government support for his projects, some of them, like the Westbury Project, were under threat from the authorities by means of extortionate rent demands for the derelict buildings they use. Hopefully, the causes and the people he champions are now getting more support, but judging from my own last visit to him, that seems about as likely as World Peace spontaneously taking over from World Strife.
Back in 2003, our mini crew passed through South Africa en route to northern Mozambique to film the first part of our first documentary. We paused to try and tap a little money at source for our Don Mattera project, and then moved on with what was left of our equipment after a thorough mauling at the airport in Johannesburg between being offloaded and circling on the baggage carousel. With what became monotonous regularity, our various bags tended to get torn, bashed or slit open and semi-gutted unless we camouflaged them inside cheap and nasty plastic or canvas sacking many layers deep.
The trip was like a catalogue of Lost and Found. We lost equipment and endless time; we lost our second cameraman before we even arrived. We lost one of the main characters from our script, and we lost the possibility of recharging our equipment on location when the one and only generator gave up its ghost. So the operation became a test in ingenuity. With help from local assistants, Mees filmed while I presented. And Alex and Francesco, who should have been with us assisting on location, made relay trips across the Mozambique Channel laden with valuable equipment to recharge on Ilha. Alex’s summer job as a runner for us involved more wading than running. Shouldering laptops, camera batteries, mobile phones and so on in a waterproof bag, he picked his way through the rivulet paths on the long beaches to a waiting dhow. Francesco, a native of Pesaro on the Adriatic coast, has the typical Italian obsession with immaculate clothes, perfect hair and designer luggage. He had never been anywhere in the Third World before, never been confronted by poverty, and he was quite simply horrified by what he saw. He did his utmost to conceal his distaste but I could see from his first day that he would never, through choice, become an Africa Hand.
Despite not being able to stick to our original schedule or even our script due to unexpected absence, loss, interruption and illness, we managed to bridge our gaps, rewrite and re-plan until we got enough footage to make a five- to ten-minute trailer comprising some of the key moments in the film. And in the list of what was Found, speaking only for myself here (although I know that the trip also had a profound effect on our whole group), that was the visit that turned my life on its head. Quite simply, things that I had thought mattered before suddenly became irrelevant and a new set of values filled my head. These values were not entirely new: they were things I had been peripherally aware of. Some were things I had savoured fleetingly and some were ones I had sought but never found.
Having spent so many years in search of a place where I could belong, I discovered the futility of that goal. If I felt like a perpetual outsider, it wasn’t because I was in the wrong place, it was because I had cherished being different, and overrated myself to the point of withholding my spirit wherever I went. I looked at, felt for, observed and wrote about places and people all over the world, but I had never actually let myself go. Being in Mossuril released me from my self-imposed bonds.
On the long nights from early dusk until the moon rose after 10pm, smothered in darkness, I sat on the dunes with the Indian Ocean breeze flittering around me, and savoured direct contact with life. For once, I didn’t assess my thoughts or analyse my feelings (or lack of them), nor did I press memories to fill gaps, nor fantasize to fill time. And all the people I had pretended to be and all the lives I had pretended to live opened up enough for me to finally be myself.
It was a great relief not to need to try and excel in all things. In the past, although I had put myself down for certain failures, I never attributed much intrinsic worth to the things I lacked. If I lacked a certain quality, I persuaded myself that the missing link was not of much value and not having it was almost a merit. In all other fields I had, from my earliest childhood, felt obliged to excel. When I moved to Africa, it was exciting to accept myself with all my failings and move on to a much bigger world than I had known before. Enchanted by such new dimensions, I felt that from then on every second and every minute would count. Whatever was left of my life (and I hope that will be many decades more) would be lived out in this remote part of Africa among people wed to the land and the sea for richer or for poorer.
And money, ‘that wonderful tester of human sentiments’ without which ‘we should perhaps never know how undear we are to our dear ones’, would never rule my life again. Of course, I would need it to help give the villages a leg-up. But I could live so cheaply in the bush that I would need very little for myself and whatever I could raise would be in direct donations. I was not brought up in a typically English way, and when it comes to money, I realize I am more rural African at heart than London British. I want to share what I have and I want others to help. My big mistake for several years was thinking that a charity had to have an enormous cash kitty in order to get things done in Africa and in trying to raise the relevant mega funds. In fact, what are needed are enormous energy, enormous patience, good will and good helpers, and a very close relationship with the people being helped. Then, and maybe only then (with a very good plan and some money), things can happen.
Back in late 2003, I was still unaware that a shoestring budget could change the lives of thousands of people in a lasting way. So once the film work was done, my plan was to stay out in Mozambique for a week or two and see what could be done to tackle the poverty problems of Mossuril by seeking help from inside Mozambique. After only a few days in Maputo, the answer was quickly evident: all the vast budgets available to this or that government or foundation were allocated elsewhere. Mossuril wasn’t on the current development maps and they were not scheduled to be pencilled in anywhere in the near future. It was as though the Cabaceiras didn’t exist.
X
Home-made Tools and a Giant Learning Curve
AS L.P. HARTLEY OBSERVED, ‘The past is a foreign country’. It seems now that my past is another world. I sort over it, sifting memories and translating them into this Mozambican harmony. ‘Out there’ in the big world that fills the villagers with such puzzlement and fear, my thoughts were scattered and my feelings diluted. Sometimes it feels as though I am being shown a glimpse of the essence of life. It is as though I have the chance to understand something without knowing what. I am a novice, an apprentice: I live on the edge of the earth ab
sorbing age-old African rhythms, learning to actively channel the past into each new day.
While I feel my way in this foreign country, I spend much of my time as the amateur guide to ninety local men and women and their families, leading them into uncharted territory on that enormous map called sustainable development. ‘Out there’ are thousands of professional guides, many of whom still look on us as a bunch of losers. Morripa is my local guide. Together with his home front he has seen a way forward. Sometimes it is the blind leading the blind, but we always know where we are heading even though we don’t always take the best path there.
For this particular journey, we have set ourselves a time limit of three years (from September 2005). After that, the results of our experiment must be visible to even the most hardened sustainable developer. If I had stuck to our original plan for the college, we would have gradually restored it over twelve to eighteen months and then opened it in September 2005. Work began in late June 2004 with a team of forty local builders headed by Morripa. There were ficus trees growing through the walls and gutters, tearing out door frames and buckling floors. The 55-metre veranda had a 30-metre-long hole in it and was missing nearly half its monumental pillars. Whole sections of the roof were missing. There were no doors or windows, no light or plumbing. Every wall was covered in green and black slime where the coral rock had sponged in the annual rains. Most of the ceilings had caved in and the gardens were a shambles of overgrown trees embedded in rubble. Yet within three weeks, what had seemed like a mission impossible was starting to find back its former graceful shape.
When I first saw the building, draped with purple bougainvillea, I imagined it restored, and I felt sure that most of the restoration it required was cosmetic, with only minor structural work. I wandered around it a couple of times in between and was struck more by its inherent grace than its decay. Because it used to be a college, it had most of the infrastructure a college needs in the way of rows of loos and showers, kitchens and classrooms. I had bought and overseen the restoration of several old buildings in Europe and by casting my amateur eye over the palaceu, I persuaded myself, like Basil Fawlty’s cowboy builder, that all it really needed was ‘a lick o’paint’.
Mozambique Mysteries Page 10