Rungano Nyoni: ‘I wanted to show Zambian humour… | Little White Lies

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Rungano Nyoni: I want­ed to show Zam­bian humour and how we deal with trag­ic events’

19 Oct 2017

Words by Beth Webb

A stylised portrait of a person with dark, braided hair and a thoughtful expression, set against a background of swirling, abstract shapes.
A stylised portrait of a person with dark, braided hair and a thoughtful expression, set against a background of swirling, abstract shapes.
The Welsh-Zam­bian direc­tor dis­cuss­es her impres­sive debut fea­ture I Am Not a Witch.

I Am Not A Witch is the tri­umphant fea­ture debut from Welsh-Zam­bian writer/​director Rungano Nyoni, one which has been praised for its strik­ing use of imagery and bold sense of humour to present some­thing entire­ly new. Set in the Zam­bian coun­try­side, the film fol­lows eight-year-old Shu­la (Mag­gie Mulub­wa), who is exiled from her vil­lage and sent to a neigh­bour­ing witch camp. We caught up with Nyoni, a self-dep­re­cat­ing and won­der­ful­ly dry woman, to talk voodoo, Isabelle Hup­pert and how to get what you want.

LWLies: You were in your late teens when you decid­ed that you want­ed to make films, what was the dri­ving force behind that?

Nyoni: I bor­rowed The Piano Teacher from the world cin­e­ma sec­tion of the library because I liked the pic­ture on the front. Now it’s one of my favourite films. I want­ed to be just like Isabelle Hup­pert; her per­for­mance had a huge effect on me. I quick­ly realised that I couldn’t be like Isabelle Hup­pert because I’m not a very good actor, but I was still curi­ous about the direct­ing. That was a big turn­ing point for me, real­is­ing that if direct­ing is done very well it can have a real effect on people.

And you’d decid­ed that the only way to make this film was as a satire?

In the end, I’m not nec­es­sar­i­ly sure that satire was the best choice. Peo­ple don’t know the con­ti­nent of Africa that well, only through third hand ideas. I used Dr Strangelove as a point of ref­er­ence. I real­ly loved how Kubrick approached satire, but peo­ple don’t have a point of ref­er­ence for Africa, they can’t dis­tin­guish between satire and what it’s real­ly like. With Dr Strangelove, peo­ple laugh because they know that it’s absurd. In my case, even though every­thing is fic­tion­alised, I want­ed to show Zam­bian humour and how we deal with trag­ic events, which from the out­side may seem very inap­pro­pri­ate. But it’s the humour that I want­ed to put across with­out apol­o­gis­ing. I am quite an angry per­son so I have to rein it in and find a dif­fer­ent way of express­ing it.

The spools of white rib­bon used to teth­er the women, where did that come from?

In real life, when you’re accused of being a witch you’re giv­en these rules that you have to live by. The rules are dif­fer­ent depend­ing on where you’re sent to, and the per­son who’s run­ning the out­fit. The one that I vis­it­ed in Ghana, for exam­ple, had an invis­i­ble shrine, which could only be seen and con­trolled by a witch doc­tor, not the witch­es, fun­ni­ly enough. There are con­structs every­where; there are places in Ghana where they paint a line and tell you that you can’t go around it or else you’ll die. So I put these con­structs togeth­er and decid­ed that it had to be a rib­bon, which was frag­ile but the women still believe in its pow­er and allow it to con­trol their movements.

What was the sig­nif­i­cance of the West­ern influ­ences in the film?

I want­ed to show that this was the now, that the film is con­tem­po­rary. The belief part of witch­craft I don’t have a prob­lem with, you can believe in what­ev­er – pagan­ism, witch­craft, voodoo. But then there’s the bad stuff, like a rea­son to oppress women. They found a way to repress women through spir­i­tu­al belief, they found a way to con­trol them. It’s just that, it’s just con­trol­ling these women. It’s like female gen­i­tal muti­la­tion, peo­ple say­ing it’s just what they do in their cul­ture. It’s not, it’s con­trol­ling women and their move­ments and it’s painful and horrible.

You vis­it­ed a witch camp in Ghana and spent time with these accused witch­es. What were your first thoughts when you entered the camp?

It felt very safe, the women were help­ful, and it struck me how pret­ty this par­tic­u­lar camp was. I went there because it was the old­est and the most organ­ised witch camp. I thought I would see some resis­tance; there was a third gen­er­a­tion witch watch­er stand­ing over them like a shep­herd, and mak­ing sure that they went out to work. But it felt like an ordi­nary African vil­lage, just pop­u­lat­ed by women.

There are so many lay­ers to the film. How much did you tell Mag­gie Mulub­wa about what was going on around her?

I did the same with her as I did with the oth­er actors because I don’t tend to use a script. They knew rough­ly what the sto­ry was about, but we took it scene by scene. I would tell her the sce­nario and ask her how she would react. Some­times she would tell me, but when she got the hang of it she just went and did it. She fig­ured it out her­self. She was very smart. She is very smart.

What expe­ri­ence from this project will you take on to your next?

I’ve learned to go after what I want with­out being girly about it. My moth­er warned me not to be girly, don’t be apolo­getic or be polite. I realised that some­times you just have to say, This is what I need, how can I do this?’ rather than feel­ing guilty, or bad, or afraid, or think­ing that you look like a bitch. That was hard, it took me a long time, and I had to build that into my vocab­u­lary. It was a big, big thing.

I Am Not a Witch is released in cin­e­mas 20 October.

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