“I Am Muna moto”

If, before the colonial onslaught, the dowry was at best a symbolic marker of unity—between two lovers, and between the couple and their families and communities—colonialism corrupted it, as with other African cultural practices, making the bride-price subject to bidding, and turning the female body into something to be purchased. Muna moto is thus an indictment of the corruption of African spiritual values by the materialist ones imposed on the continent by European colonialism. Simultaneously, it issues a radical and precise critique of patriarchy within African cultural formations: its legislating of the roles of women; the ways in which they may love; whom and in what conditions they may marry; what constitutes value in relation to them, whether commercial (the dowry) or biological (virginity and the ability to procreate). The film deconstructs the ways in which patriarchy situates women as recipients of male violence, by having their sexuality violated, their will contradicted, and their speech censored. It analyzes the status of the family within patriarchy and advocates for the spirituality of love and resistance while underscoring the challenges of revolutionary change. Muna moto begins with a dedication to the director’s mother and his wife, two women who have borne the brunt of the patriarchal order in their lives. In homage to them, he invented the character of Ndomé, who embodies their hopes as well as their tribulations. The women in Mbongo’s household are presented primarily as victims of a system from which they cannot subtract themselves. Polygamy is one component of their oppression. But small and sweet moments of rebellion exist, as when Ndomé fails a virginity test and one of the wives is jubilant.

Although he originally wrote Muna moto in France in 1966, Dikongué-Pipa was not able to get funding to direct it until 1974. The film was shot over nine months, using a small sum from the French Ministry of Cooperation and a loan from the Consortium Audiovisuel International (CAI), an organization set up by the French state to support African filmmaking. After receiving permission to shoot the Ngondo ceremony from the community elders in the village of Mboussa Sengué, Dikongué-Pipa moved his entire production there. During filming, he at times resorted to fishing and hunting in order to feed his cast and crew, most of whom worked without pay.

Drums and chanting open the film, inaugurating Ngondo, the famous ceremony at the center of the coastal Duala people’s yearly water festival, and anchoring us firmly within Dikongué-Pipa’s philosophy of an African cinematic language. He structures Muna moto in flashbacks from the present day of the festival, emblematic of the fact that cinema, to him, is a matter of memory, a bulwark against the cultural amnesia enforced by colonizers. Dikongué-Pipa might extend the Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha’s dictum—according to which, to make a film, one needs an idea in the head and a camera in the hand—in the following terms: to make a film, one requires first a profound and critical immersion in, knowledge of, and understanding of one’s culture, and only then should one pick up a camera and attempt to film the real, or even the imaginary.

Chronologically speaking, Muna moto begins at the end, when Ngando, during the ceremony, in an act of ultimate and desperate defiance, attempts to kidnap his own child from the hands of Ndomé, who has become his uncle’s wife. Ngando is arrested by the police, judged/misjudged, and sentenced to jail. Here, Dikongué-Pipa takes seriously Jean-Luc Godard’s injunction that even though a film needs a beginning, a middle, and an end, it need not be ordered in that way, and he jumbles the sequence in which the story events happen, as well as alternating between memory and the imaginary and inserting the fictional into the nonfictional, among other strategies. A mastery of the principle of montage is at the heart of the director’s narrative approach: the orchestration of gazes, the use of offscreen space as cinematic space in which to play. All these techniques result in a film that is very reflexive about its own representational processes and whose form serves not to situate us but to unsituate us, to make us wonder.

If the director does not go so far as to reveal the camera, this narrative structure, through the principled aesthetics of interruption, keeps the spectator at a certain distance, even while the absolute beauty of the film’s images and its stately pacing keep us in a state of absorption. The film’s resonances, its assonances, its poeticism and oneirism, and the insubordination of its images to linear regimes are as important to the experience of Muna moto as the events of its story. Dikongué-Pipa takes pleasure in frustrating our narrative expectations, for at stake is a truly complex cultural world and a system of visions whose spiritual charge could only be impoverished by linear narrativity. In one scene, as Ngando frantically searches for Ndomé in the crowd attending the Ngondo, he reaches for a woman who looks like Ndomé but turns out to be someone else. In this case, Dikongué-Pipa fully exploits the potential of montage to deceive—its quasi-demiurgic powers of the false—thereby indirectly pointing to the notion that we invest belief and expectations in moving images at our own peril. They make meaning only by virtue of the ways in which we organize them in relation to one another.

Dikongué-Pipa’s use of sound is one of the most important dimensions of Muna moto, and of particular note is his proposition to translate the language of drums into cinema. In one scene, subtitles explain that the Ngondo is the umbilical cord of the Duala people, and that its theme this year will be youth perceived to be in perdition. Contrary to what one may first think, these subtitles are translating neither a voice-over nor a voice from within the film nor even an intertitle but rather the speech of the drums themselves. In other words, the director suggests that the nonverbal but rich signification of the drum, which humans have codified and abstracted into other kinds of sounds, can be part of the language of film. His deployment of sound beyond its naturalistic possibilities is central to his aesthetic project, as we hear, for instance, when Ngando is shown felling trees in his attempt to raise money. The sound of his axe against the wood is expressionistic; it is sound as felt and experienced rather than realistic sound recording.

Despite the structural obstacles it depicts, Muna moto is a celebration of love and its possibilities. The ways in which the lovers run after each other, touch each other, roll over and lie on top of each other, exchange looks, provoke, taunt, spend time with, and are committed to each other make this one of the most beautiful love stories in African cinema. “I will give you many children,” Ndomé tells Ngando. “I will wait for you forever.” Here, the commitment to love becomes the commitment to resist, and therefore metaphoric of a larger commitment to transform a social reality that would stand in the way of love. And the film is an affirmation of the possibility not just for two bodies to come into contact but also for two souls to commune. It is the sacredness of love that is celebrated here, its pure and absolute freedom, its ability to transcend earthly confinement.

With their love, Ndomé and Ngando partake of the possibilities of a new Africa that the forces of repression deny, whose emergence those forces seek to prevent by perverting and misusing culture. The film is a dialectic between the old and the new, figuring historical change in Africa and also the ways in which aristocratic and neobourgeois forms of culture have confiscated more modern and potentially more open forms in order to alienate the most vulnerable of their participants, capture their capacity for transformational agency, and confine them to cultural, economic, and literal prisons. Muna moto also recognizes the challenges of attempting to avoid doing away with all aspects of a culture in one’s efforts to bring about change. Ndomé and Ngando do not elect to try to escape their village until the very end, after which they are caught and brought back by force. The lovers are respectful of the needs and demands of the culture, and they do their utmost to comply with its exigencies, which in fact is the source of their doom.

The neocolonial division of labor between African countries and their former colonizers meant that African films shot on that continent were postproduced in France or elsewhere in Europe, and African filmmakers were often unable to even see their rushes before the editing stage. In the case of Muna moto, it took Dikongué-Pipa several months to realize that the 16 mm camera loaned to him by the Douala French Cultural Center was defective, rendering important parts of the footage unusable. He couldn’t afford reshoots, and thus the restored film we see today is still truncated from its originally intended form. Muna moto was edited in conjunction with Andrée Daventure, renowned for her work editing African films as part of Atria, an agency set up by the French Ministry of Cooperation to assist African filmmakers with the production and completion of their films.

Dikongué-Pipa’s post–Muna moto feature filmography includes Le prix de la liberté (1978), Music and Music: Super Concert (1981), Histoires drôles, drôles de gens (1983), La cicatrice (1983–85), Courte maladie (1987), and Badiaga (1987). At age eighty-two, Dikongué-Pipa today says he still has screenplays he wishes to turn into films. The one dearest to his heart is entitled Sur les chemins de Boumnyebel, which he envisages as an homage to the great anticolonial, pro-independence, and unionist Cameroonian leader Ruben Um Nyobè, who was inspired by the Viet Minh and the Algerian National Liberation Front (both movements that chose armed struggle against their common French colonizer) and was assassinated by French troops in 1958, as part of their efforts to derail Cameroon’s impending independence.

Muna moto was one of the first films selected for restoration by the African Film Heritage Project (AFHP), a partnership among the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI), The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, UNESCO, and the Cineteca di Bologna, and the premiere of the restoration was planned for the fiftieth anniversary of FESPACO, in 2019. Unbeknownst to the AFHP, a grassroots effort was also being undertaken in Cameroon to honor Dikongué-Pipa at the same edition of the festival, by inaugurating a statue of him in Ouagadougou’s Colonne des cinéastes. Thus, two independent efforts joined to offer one of the most memorable celebrations of the master filmmaker in several decades. At the screening, the director said, “You have not restored my film. You have restored me.” And indeed, this restoration and release participate in reinserting Dikongué-Pipa’s masterwork into the historical consciousness of Cameroonian, African, and world cinema. We can hope that they will help to substantiate, for African filmmakers and for filmmakers and audiences around the world, the following statement by Dikongué-Pipa: “African cinema has a very bright future, if it could be allowed to blossom. Despite it all, African cinema keeps improving, and it will astonish the Western world.”