The documentary Zinder is a deeply uncomfortable watch for anyone living in the poorest countries in Africa—which is to say most countries in Africa. When it opens there’s a guy on a bike holding a flag with a swastika. Later, in response to a raid, another guy says he prays for the terrorist group Boko Haram to show up. In another scene, a phone shows a lynching; thankfully, it’s not quite clear. All of these happen barely ten minutes into Aicha Macky’s film.
The title is a place in Niger, a country in West Africa. It’s the place where the poor and leprous have been carried to—away from the center. Macky is also from Zinder, as she tells us in a note at the start of the film. What has made her own story different from theirs, she asks one of her film’s protagonists? There comes the reply, “education”. She moved away to the country’s capital Niamey.
Niger’s—and by extension all of Africa’s—problems have come in stages. Once there was colonialism. These days, there is terrible leadership at practically every level. As with colonialism, it is hardly one country’s problem. To take an example from Zinder, Nigeria’s decision to close its borders has lead to smuggling and its attendant dangers. Nigeria, of course, has its own intractable problems with Boko Haram. In both countries, it’s quite easy to see that the actions taken at the highest level of governance visit scars on the citizens. Some of these scars are literal, as Zinder shows.
One of Macky’s methods of telling the truth about a situation is to have the afflicted catalogue their own wounds. On a head, across arms, near a neck. On a man, on a woman. One man singles out a scar as being memorable, he says, because it came from a woman. He never says what exactly happened, but the implication is that they were lovers–until he corrects himself and says he was one of her clients. What emerges then is a place where there are no conventionally respectable jobs. Unemployment is the dominant condition, and most of what anyone does in the area is to sell their bodies—for sex or hard labor—or sell smuggled fuel.
Macky’s documentary belongs to a very dispiriting but ultimately based-on-fact genre of African documentaries: the Plight of the Impoverished African and The Country. It’s almost certainly the most common genre of internationally successful documentaries focused on Africa. And because everywhere you turn across the continent there’s a story of the sort to be told, filmmakers hardly need to know a place intimately to set up a camera and obtain these stories. Everybody is welcome.
And while there is nothing particularly bad about anyone telling these stories, there is something that is, or feels, different when you know that the story (or stories) told in Zinder are by someone with more than a passing acquaintance with the place and people she chronicles. Perhaps it’s in the way that, in one scene, Macky and her cinematographer Julien Bossé elect to show us a mostly repented thug talking to his kids. Or how she shows her main subject, Siniya Boy, converse with his pregnant partner. Or maybe it’s because, despite the deplorable living conditions afflicting everyone she speaks to, she has structured the story to end with hope—or something quite close to it.
In fact, considering how shapely the narrative arc is, Zinder ultimately has a filmmaker’s ending. You could even say it’s a Hollywood ending, which is ironic given that we are told at one point that the gangs of Zinder are inspired by movie violence. But set in a place of so much despair and neglect, it feels radical. It even contradicts one of its subjects who says that in Zinder, “there’s no second chance.”
It’s hard to argue with him. The smuggler doesn’t quite succeed. A young man gets a three year prison sentence. Money is hard to come by for everyone concerned. The education and its lack that makes the difference between the filmmaker and her subjects will continue into the succeeding generation. All of these are near certainties. But in hacking her narrative into a shape that slouches toward redemption, Macky has snatched some measure of hope for her people. Zinder, the documentary and the place, is a tragedy, yet its hope-filled ending makes you want to applaud the filmmaker’s choices.
Director: Aicha Macky
DOP: Julien Bossé
Sound: Abdoulaye Adamou Mato
Editing: Karen Benainous, Coline Leaute
Original score: Dominique Peter
Sound design: Andreas Hildebrandt, Mix Matthias Lempert
Producers: Clara Vuillermoz (Point du Jour-Les films du balibari), Ousmane Samassekou (Tabous production), Erik Winker (Corso Film)
Production Tabous production (Niger), Point du Jour-Les films du balibari (France), Corso Film (Germany)
International Sales: Andana Films
Duration: 82 min
