University of Cape Town – FAM3003S

Jacques De Villiers

19 November 2016

‘Homecoming King’:

The Overlapping Epochs of Haile Gerima’s Teza (2008)

“The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.”

– Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto (1848)

Anberber, the protagonist of Haile Gerima’s epic Teza (2008), is patently a man unstuck in time, just as his nation, Ethiopia, is pinioned to a present that partakes of both an ancient past and a (supposedly) utopian future. His home village is still, like so many African enclaves, seemingly trapped in the stereotypical timelessness of a ‘pre-coeval’ form of society – Anberber’s mother, the local orthodox church and the village elders all conform to a bevy of unchanging rituals and chores that define their marginal existence. But as well as this inanition of tradition, the place also exists under the heel of two separate versions of ‘the end of history’: first as a result of Mengistu’s Soviet-style military dictatorship and later amidst the civil war and chaos of early post-Communism. Anberber returns home from Germany twice to take part in both transitions and both times he finds himself distressed by the apparently unavoidable choice his people are torn apart by: stasis or terror.

His youthful idealism amongst the ex-patriate student left in the mid-70’s is maintained by the relative isolation of his radical clique and the air of revolutionary opportunity incited by the downfall of Emperor Haile Selassie’s feudal regime. His socialism is still self-evidently individual; it just goes naturally with his outsider’s temperament, radical chic look and sincere intellectualism.  But his experience on returning home of the vast gap in representation between the Party and the People (his people) stirs up a nostalgia one can well imagine Gerima himself shares – for the beauty of the theory before the horror of the practice. To speak up against the ‘chosen’ administrators of the Revolution once again proves to be far more dangerous than the initial rebellion itself ever was, and the myth of the ‘true unity’ of the Revolutionary masses inspires more anarchy than any admission of political difference. Cinematically, this all translates into what I can only call a ‘troubled’ shooting style. Just as Anberber constantly wakes up thrashing and screaming, believing he’s still in the past on the brink of death, the handheld camera whips around and cuts urgently from reaction to reaction, flashback to flashback, with a disconcerting uncertainty that bespeaks his, and implicitly Ethiopia’s, inextricable lack of peace.

The notion of Cinematic and Historical Time this method critiques is the messianic complex of the avant-garde. There is no stable present in the film – just an alternating pattern of flight and return seen from the standpoint of the latest temporary aftermath – and so the notion of a single forthcoming moment of climax, when Ethiopia’s struggles will be over for good and a new African cinema will be born to proclaim it, appears quite clearly naïve, but not reprehensible. This is a hard lesson coming from Gerima himself, considering his seminal position as an alumnus of the heroic ‘L.A. Rebellion’ of Black filmmakers in the early 70’s, but it undoubtedly stems from his own journeys home at the time. in parallel with Anberber. The projected ‘immediacy’ of the paradise of African socialism and rightful redistribution must be forced to reconcile with the banal, repetitious forms of village life if it is to undergird a stable society. Since this is a lesson seldom learned or taught, and redistribution itself encourages a self-perpetuating form of violence, it is no real surprise to see Ethiopian society as a continuing macrocosmic version of the scene in which past and present editions of an escaping boy are simultaneously shot down by a soldier. The identities of the boys and the soldier are both seemingly arbitrary, just as Tesfaye’s son, despite being the product of a loving interracial relationship, is forced to live through the same undying racism and alienation his father had to give his life struggling against.

Gerima, as you might expect, doesn’t offer any easy answers to this Sisyphean fate. What we merely realize is that the idea of the Ethiopian nation is something to embody and represent rather than continually scrabble over. The proletariat, in African terms, is the wretched of the earth, the most powerless among us, and thus the genuine fight against Power becomes a neverending process of redistributing pride and identity to the people who most need it. And here those people are the ones Gerima chooses to depict with greatest sympathy, caught in the crashes of history – Anberber and his fellow villagers.