It never seems right that a person used to privilege is the one on whom it falls to document a poor country’s history—or a part of it. And yet, it often falls to such a person—or to an outsider—to provide such a document. How many impoverished persons with less than stellar education can bear the experience, and also document it?
And so, it falls on the director of the documentary No Simple Way Home, Akuol de Mabior, to tell a part of the story of South Sudan, the world’s youngest country. As part of the elite, she’s no victim, but being the daughter of her country’s freedom-fighting hero, she is close to the story. That hardly means she was privy to anything of political importance during the Second Sudanese Civil War, but John Garang, her father, was the leader of the faction that, after his death, formed a new country.
This means that the story predates Mabior in many ways. It probably predates everyone living since, as with many African countries, the problem began with British colonialization. The British created and left an uneven structure that gave the heavily Islamic North power over the South. The South’s displeasure led to the civil war, which ended in 1972. But in the 1980s, the fragile peace broke down and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) was formed. As its leader, Garang, who became vice-president of Sudan, wasn’t very interested in dividing the country. But after his death in 2005, which has its share of controversy but is presented by his daughter as an assassination, the country did get split, and in 2011, South Sudan was born.
Much of this history isn’t presented in No Simple Way Home, which as it goes on becomes focused on the present and the recent past. Some wartime footage is shown but the film is ultimately preoccupied with what happens after a thing sought by a people is gotten. It’s also interested in Rebecca Nyadeng Garang de Mabior, the statesman’s widow and the director’s mother, as she becomes a vice-president in the new country. She appears to have been given this position because of a tacit acknowledgement that the immediate family of a personality as important as Garang should have a representative in the new country. Mabior doesn’t quite see herself as a part of that situation, but she does see her elder sister taking up a role. Nonetheless, her mother admonishes her on the true implication of her filming and recording events.
“What you are doing here is politics.”
Her daughter queries the assertion.
Mum says, “Registering history is politics.”
“It’s political,” says the daughter.
“It’s political,” mum agrees, then adds, “When it comes out, its politics.”
Indeed. And one of the immediate politics of the documentary concerns the presentation of John Garang. Viewers will leave the film thinking highly of the man. He deserves that, to be sure, but as with many great men of national importance, he has his critics and some of them were from his own faction. Garang, according to his critics, favoured a brusque, authoritarian style of leadership, was accused of being driven by profit, and is said to have championed his Dinka ethnic group over others.
None of these make it into this documentary. Perhaps for filial reasons. But this is also a documentary that appears to have found its theme in the editing room. At first, it seems as though a history lesson will be provided, then it seems like the widowed mother’s rise to political office is what might be chronicled, and then the documentary seems to be an account of a flood that devastated a swathe of the country. It is none of these and it is all of these.
But getting a little bit of this and a little bite of that leads to a scene that brings a striking clarity to the elemental problem of countries that have a man of war as chief statesman: they leave many people dead in their wake, few of whom (or their families) are remembered by the country. In that scene, after a woman asks if she is being filmed and if the lady behind the camera (Mabior is credited as a cinematographer, along with Emma Nzioka) is indeed the daughter of John Garang, she recounts the devastation visited on families by a flood, reminding the director that a lot of the families affected are from soldiers who followed her father to war and got killed, leaving their wives husbandless and their children fatherless. Now, she says, the government isn’t doing as much as it could for those families. It’s easy to see that if this unnamed lady was the one telling this story of South Sudan, we’d see something vastly different from No Simple Way Home.
As it is, Mabior’s work might get pigeonholed as an “African documentary” and get into geographically themed sections at festivals and on streaming platforms. But a brave and smart distributor could potentially create more interest and views by emphasising the women in politics angle. It probably helps that Mrs. Garang has a soundbite ready for the purpose. While considering the conspicuous absence of economic prosperity in South Sudan, she says, “Yes, we have freedom—but can people eat freedom?”
Director: Akuol de Mabior
Producers: Sam Soko, Don Edkins, Tiny Mugwe
Cinematography: Emma Nzioka, Akuol de Mabior
Editing: Khalid Shamis, Angela Wamai
Music: Gary Thomas
Production Manager: Ivy Kiru, Samir Bol
Production Companies: LBx Africa (Nairobi, Kenya), APO (Juba, South Sudan), Steps (Kapstadt, South Africa)
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Panorama Dokumente)
In English, Dinka, Arabic
82 minutes
