Presence of the Colonial Past Afrika Auf Europas Büh N E N a Reader on the Focus of the Theaterformen Festival Braunschweig 2010
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presenCE of the colonial past afrika auf europas bÜh n e n a reader on the focus of the Theaterformen Festival Braunschweig 2010 supported by Content Editorial 04 I. ARCHIVE OF A POSSIBLE FUTURTE | Film series Archive of a possible future – notes on a film series | Nanna Heidenreich 06 Programme 08 II. Theatre productions Missie 10 Introduction 11 Ivo Kuyl interviews David van Reybrouck 12 Excerpt from Missie by David van Reybrouck 15 Exhibit A: Deutsch-Südwestafrika 16 Introduction 17 Performers’ quotes 18 The past that never ends Interview with Brett Bailey and Paul Grootboom | Frankfurter Rundschau 20 Influx Controls I: I wanna be wanna be Influx Controls II: On the 12th night of never I will not be held black 23 Introduction 24 Africa’s spirit was trampled down | Braunschweiger Zeitung 26 Performance Wonder | Kultiversum.de 26 Miss Soweto and the god of David Beckham | Nachtkritik.de 27 With all things Equal | excerpt from Influx Controls I: I wanna be wanna be 28 Pinkie’s Prayer | excerpt from Influx Controls II: On the 12th night of never I will not be held black 29 Pour en finir avec Bérénice 30 Introduction 31 The tragedy stays | Braunschweiger Zeitung 32 My Only True Country is my Body | David van Reybrouck about Faustin Linyekula 33 The Studios Kabako | Deutschlandfunksendung 36 III. THE PRESENCE OF THE ELSEWHERE IN THE NOW | thematic weekend Introduction 43 The complete programme of the thematic weekend 43 Decolonizing Germany | opening lecture by Kien Nghi Ha 47 Selected projects Baggage | Otobong Nkanga 57 Reconstructing Damon Albarn in Kinshasa | Jeanne Faust 59 Note d‘intention | Brigitta Kuster 60 Stagings Made in Namibia | Evelyn Annuß 63 02 Resonance Braunschweigs Heart of Darkness | Christine Regus 66 The Presence of the Elsewhere | Christel Weiler 68 On the landing | Annemarie Matzke und Studierende 71 There‘s no such thing as post-colonialism | Ann-Christine Simke 73 Journey to elsewhere | Tagesspiegel 74 Mission possible | Süddeutsche Zeitung 74 Goose pimples in the ice cellar | Theater Heute 74 „Africa“ focus at the Braunschweig „Theaterformen“ festival | Deutschlandradio 75 IV. Festival grant The scholarship programme of Festival Theaterformen 2010 77 Theater can say the unspeakable | Braunschweiger Zeitung 78 The participants: biographies and personal accounts Utopia or give me your hand! | Diogo Bo, Brazil 79 The Presence of the Colonial Past | Hlengiwe Lushaba Madlala, South Africa 80 A history, which I am a product of | Frank Mainoo, Australia 81 Looking for certain a kind of humanity in Germany | Papy Mbwiti, Democratic republic of the Congo 82 FUTUROO | Jean-Frederic Batassé, Togo 83 Dilek Altunas, Turkey 83 Elina Cerpa, Latvia 84 Edna Jaime, Mozambique 84 Harminder Judge, United Kingdom 85 Princess Zinzi Mhlongo, South Africa 85 Nurgül Öztürk, Turkey 86 Nasser Al-Sheik, Sudan 86 Glossary 87 Bibliography 91 Imprint 95 03 EDITORIAL An international festival always represents a certain way of Possible Future, four theatre productions, a thematic weekend Die seeing the world. This requires us to occasionally scrutinize our Gegenwart des Anderswo im Jetzt – The Present of the Elsewhere intentions and perspectives, as the way we look at things is ne- Now and finally this reader, have essentially explored this question ver neutral. The rather cumbersome bilingual title, Presence of the in the most divergent formats. Colonial Past – Afrika auf Europas Bühnen, which was given to the focus of the Theaterformen Festival 2010 in Braunschweig, The short duration of German colonial history for examp- reveals a certain lack of ease. The festival was not meant to simply le does not mean that it had no consequences in Germany: the have an ‘African’ focus. On the contrary, we wanted to put the spot- ways in which various fantasies of supremacy and mythical self- light on the European view of the African continent. Put bluntly, the aggrandisement can be historically mighty powers was clearly focus was primarily on white heads, not black bodies. However, in illustrated in Kien Nghi Ha’s lecture Decolonizing Germany, the an area where the fundamentals and vocabulary are lacking, it is opener for the thematic weekend Die Gegenwart des Anderswo difficult to phrase and communicate with precision. im Jetzt. The fact that racism is an ideological construct, based on pseudo-scientific research that is carried out specifically in the After all, what a minefield! The heading ‘Africa’ throws up mainly interests of exploitative colonial power politics – this insight was starry-eyed idealism or cynical indifference alongside abundant driven home with rare emotional force in Brett Bailey’s theatrical misconceptions, ignorance and prejudice. Academic insiders feel installation Exhibit A. And that we see what we expect to see, that that the postcolonial discourse has already ‘been done’ where- was pointed out by Faustin Linyekula when in his performance Le as the average German (myself including) cannot even list all the Cargo he says: “I am an African dancer! I have exotic stories to former German colonies in Africa. In television films or on stage sell! Which one do you want to hear today?“ The colonial past is shows, an amnesic desire for the exotic is amply cultivated and still very much part of the present and obstructs our view. So: let‘s in the avant-garde sector, projects ‘involving Africa’ are certainly decolonize the white heads! en vogue. But the debate, if any takes place at all, is mostly senti- mental, generalized and cursory. Over 50 countries, in which up to The reader at hand is a collection of material: perhaps an im- a billion people live, are lumped together and outlined as a vague petus, possibly a start. We owe thanks to the artists, scientists and entity of something between adversity and exoticism. An aware- authors who have given us access to their work and thoughts; and ness of our long, mutual history is absent. Respect, precision and of course, the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (Federal Cultural Found- realism are missing. Sometimes simple admission to the fact that ation) whose sponsorship made the entire project possible in the we do not understand certain things is missing. No other conti- first place. nent is approached with the same ignorance as is Africa. But why? Why is that so? The focus of Presence of the Colonial Past, which embraces a series of films Archiv möglicher Zukunft – Archive of a Anja Dirks for the Festival Theaterformen 04 Film SERIES ARCHIVE of a posSiBle FUTurE 05 Archive of a possible future Notes on a FIlm series Nanna Heidenreich “Seeing is gluttonous. The things we see are not so much trophies of its triumphs but rather they mark the limits that are set its extension”. (Michel de Certeau, GlaubensSchwachheit) A series of film evenings curated by Nanna Heidenreich took Memories of one’s own colonial past and its resonance in the place on six Wednesday evenings in April and May 2010 at the present remain weak in modern Germany; its colonial past is consi- Universum cinema in Braunschweig. The feature films, documen- dered to be marginal or a footnote to a story that not only happened tary films and short films thematised the resonance of the colo- elsewhere, but whose significant parts were written by others. This nial past in the present and future from a variety of perspectives. contemporary myth of negligibility that is told above all as a story of On each of the evenings there was an introductory talk as well as “briefness” and “late arrival” is extended by the older myth of the Ger- a lecture and/or follow-up discussion. mans as “good” colonists in a perfect example of the Freudian “kettle” logic (a story that he weaves into The Interpretation of Dreams): a man is accused by his neighbour of giving back a borrowed kettle in a damaged condition. He contests this: first of all, he brought back the kettle undamaged and secondly, the kettle was already damaged and thirdly, he never borrowed the kettle in the first place. Therefore: We have never been there; when we were there, everything was in perfect order (this is the famous myth of the German as “best colo- niser and cultivator”, as Henry Simonsfeld put it in 1884) and finally, we have never had anything to do with the atrocities, the current pro- blems and the former constellations. This type of repression remains politically explosive even today, as it is instrumental in refusing to meet the Herero’s demands for reparation, which they have tried to claim since Namibia declared its independence in 1990. When, for instance, former SPD Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul admit- ted to “our historical, political, moral and ethnic responsibility, and the guilt that the German took upon themselves at the time” in 2004, 100 years after the genocide of the Herero by the German colonial pow- ers in Okakarara near the Waterberg, and even went on to say that the “former atrocities (…) (were) a genocide that would be brought to trial today”, she was heavily criticised. Her speech was condemned as an “expensive emotional outburst” that could mark a turning point “to Germany’s disadvantage” in the dispute over reparation demands. Even in 2003, the Green Party Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer dis- missed the question of why the German Federal Republic could not apologize for its colonial crimes by saying that he “could not make any statement relevant to compensation”. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida noted in his book Archi- ve Fever that repression is also a form of archiving. there is a historic coincidence between the genesis of the cinema and colonialism. This makes cinema an important site to activate the memory of colonial history and to investigate the colonial past along with the present and the virulence of colonial fantasies (as investigated by Susanne Zan- top).