There’s a misunderstanding at the start of Jide Tom Akinleminu’s documentary When A Farm Goes Aflame. The director sits before Baba, an elderly man who can communicate with the gods. He wants to know something about his family, but it appears the older man, who speaks only Yoruba, has been talking about something else. He has been talking about how the divination system of Ifa came to be, which suggests he has perhaps received many researchers seeking to understand one of the major traditional religions in southwestern Nigeria. This time though, it’s history of a different sort that is being sought.
Fortunately, through an interpreter, the director gets what he wants across. A few things have bothered him about his family’s history, which he has been working on—presumably to produce a documentary like the one we are seeing. Akinleminu has come to ask the oracle if it can explain to him why his father hid a secret from his mother, and why his mother never asked for an explanation. About what? Well, we are not told explicitly at first. But as Baba begins consulting the goddess Olokun the story unspools, starting from a letter written in 1975. This letter is from the director’s European mother, giving an account of her time with her Nigerian husband.
The framing of the first few moments of When A Farm Goes Aflame suggests there is something to be unraveled both for the director, who is clearly on a quest, and for the viewer. This narrative gap is soon bridged, however, and it doesn’t take too long to understand that the story is a personal one, one in which the director seeks to understand the breakup of his family. Thus, When A Farm Goes Aflame is an autobiography told through other people. Chiefly it’s told through the wonderful, if a tad melancholy, letters the director’s mother wrote over the years of her marriage and in some other ways. In one memorable scene, Akinleminu’s mother and a group of women sit around, laughing and having a meal. One lady explains how African men had come to Europe and met their wives, but couldn’t find jobs. Unable to earn a living, many went back to their home countries and “then things happen”. These many years later, those things that happened are still “things that can be painful for Danish women.”
It’s an important distinction she makes for Danish women, as it admits that it may not necessarily be so for women from other cultures, given that not every tradition thinks of polygamy in the same way. Even among the women speaking in that apartment in Denmark, there are some differences in thinking.
Asked about her partner’s polygamy, one lady, who remained with her polygamous husband, says it was never hidden from her. Nonetheless, “there were a few camels to swallow along the road,” she says, adding that she was probably in denial and then she adds the kicker: that is what you do when you are young and hopeful. It’s a remarkable framing of love and romance across cultures, even when she admits that she was close to leaving on a number of occasions. But then she and her husband “talked about things and worked it out.”
Including her perspective in a documentary could easily have been edited into a stick to beat people who have a different view, but here it broadens the film’s appeal and provides another angle to view the mystery of intimacy between lovers. Yet even the idea of talking things over is complicated when Akinleminu’s mother says it’s possible to be so understanding that “you kill a part of yourself.”
The cultural differences extend to the existence of this documentary. While the European part of the family is willing to talk, the Nigerian part—the father and a half-brother—urge the director to forget about the past. If it was up to them, there would be no film.
Despite its primary concern with the director’s family, this is a political project. When a document mentions hardship in 1991, economic historians will understand that as a reference to the IMF and World Bank-supported Structural Adjustment Program, a policy that pretty much decimated the Nigerian middle class. But there is a significant level of warmth overall, which has to be an achievement given that, hovering over the material, alongside the pain felt by members of Akinleminu’s family, is the eternally contentious matter of international migration—be it for work, for school, or for that most perplexing of reasons, love.
Director, screenwriter, cinematographer: Jide Tom Akinleminu
Producers: Florian Schewe, Yan Schoenefeld
Editing: Maja Tennstedt with Naaman Bishara
Production company; Film Five (Germany)
World Sales: Syndicado Film Sales (Toronto)
In Danish, Yoruba, English
Duration: 112 minutes
