Moolaadé and The Man In My Basement

What I read and watch seem to pick themselves: Two works - a film and a book - in two months on the same themes of freedom and the imprisonment of a society:

(i) Moolaadé, the 2004 film by the esteemed "Old Man" African director Ousmane Sembene: an African village's overcoming of the ritual of female circumcision;

(ii) Walter Mosley's "The Man In My Basement": a novel-fable which prescribes the means for a black man's achievement of freedom, namely, by the white man locked in his basement. If this sounds vague, it is meant to be - Mosley's book is easy to read but difficult to deconstruct, and his conclusions remain highly controversial.

The two works present a similar yet diverse deliverance: knowledge is the only key for a society locked in the chains of ignorance, hierarchy, fear and tradition. In Moolaadé, this comes from the modern world outside the little African village, transmitted crucially through media: this was clear from the radios which the women carried that played the music they danced to, and most importantly, imparted what little education they had - it is not a coincidence that Collé Ardo, the main inciter against the ritual, is also the character portrayed to most cherish her radio. When the men, angered at their women's resistance to "purification", confiscated their radios, piling them up into a bonfire, the message is clear. So is the message of the final two shots, in the style of Kubrick's famous cut in 2001 - a shot of an ostrich egg atop the mosque, the egg having apparently been there for eons, replaced by one of a television antenna. Modernisation is therefore that which will advance civilization - it will do away with a barbaric past and bring forward freedom, rights and justice.

In "Man In My Basement", summarily put, knowledge comes about only from the white man who locks himself voluntarily in the basement of the black man and confesses his heinous crimes against the world - the money he has stolen, the people he has killed, the children he has slaughtered etc. This is knowledge of another kind, one not gained, but only given - the knowledge of forgiveness. Only with that can we even begin to start on understanding a free world.

Yet... is anything so easy in such a hideously difficult world? Mosley's proposition is almost glib: Anniston Bennet appears one fine day on Charles Blakey's doorstep and pays the latter to lock him up in his basement so that he can absolve himself. To me, therefore, Sembene's work is the wiser but at the same time the less hopeful of the two: Collé Ardo's resistance worked because she invoked Moolaadé, a power of protection probably as ancient as female circumcision, signified by a string of colourful yarn which she ropes across her doorstep - no one may cross that rope, or she will be killed by moolaadé. The saladina draw back, afraid. The men, equally powerless, end up beating Collé Ardo to make her undo the moolaadé, to equally no avail. The only forms of life which/who paid no heed to the signification of the yarn were the livestock, and a small toddler who simply crawled underneath it when he found it too difficult to cross it. Freedom may be simpler than we think, though at the same time infinitely more difficult.