Educational Media Reviews Online

Filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno's Chef! was originally intended as a personal journey to examine cultural roots in his ancestral village, Bandjoun, in the Ghomala-speaking region of Western Cameroon, but it took on a life of its own. He was forced to ponder about the dichotomy endemic to his country: The leaders - the chiefs plunder the wealth of the country as if it were a national sport while at the same time a boy is almost lynched for stealing a chicken and four chicks. Flagrant abuse of power as a mode of government is transposed to a single acceptable discourse on all levels of society.

Teno's powerful look at the many faces of power comes back to the very notion of the concept of "chief". He refers to Cameroon as a country of chiefs, and by that very definition, a country of inequity. Political power has its roots in the villages and at the very source of this power is patriarchy. The country's civil code is based on the French Civil Code from 1804 and although there have been changes that allow women to work and open bank accounts, culturally the perception of women remains the same as it was two hundred years ago. As a wedding is filmed, we are made aware of the basics of "chief" culture. The man is the chief, or head of the family, he is compared to a ship captain. Therefore, half the 14 million population of Cameroon is comprised of chiefs while the other half are thought to be slaves. The civil code decrees that it is the husband alone who decides where the couple will live.

The film progresses to show the inexorable link between women's rights and human rights and to point out that it is this lack of awareness that handicaps so many women. Similarly, the various people interviewed clearly indicate that the greatest injustice is to inflict ignorance and that an educated people would not have accepted the current government.

The filmmaker is able to interview a number of individuals whose articulate perspectives form a picture of a political culture based on irresponsibility. He speaks with author and bookseller Mongo Beti and outlines the arrest and imprisonment of Pius Njawé, editor of an opposition news weekly, Le Messager, simply for asking if the President had left a soccer match because of ill health.

The film effortlessly fluctuates from the personal and individual to the global as it reflects on the human rights challenges in Cameroon. Highly recommended for Women's Studies, Political Science, African History, and Colonial and Post-Colonial Studies

The second film on the tape, La tête dans les nuages, was made 8 years earlier and has a similar personal style. It is a reflection on the plight of millions of educated people in Africa whose lives have not been improved by education. This European-style education, reiforced by Christianity, came with colonization and brought modernization without concern for the prevailing culture. University graduates in 1991, thus, end up directing their feelings of contempt against themselves.

The film follows two main people in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, a city of 1 million inhabitants. A man who is a recent law school graduate looks for a job but ends up taking money from his mother to open a shoe store, and a woman who works for the Ministry of Education must sell doughnuts on the street and grow her own vegetables to make ends meet.

The criticism of the inefficiently managed governmental bureaucracy is clear in every image of the crumbling city with its heaps of trash sprawling like mountain ranges. The government controlled formal sector, like its colonial predecessor, is basically parasitical. Violence is shown to have become more pervasive yet the informal and entrepreneurial business economy of the streets, keeps going and its ensuing spiritual crisis spurs artists to make sculptures from the heaps of trash. Recommended for Women's Studies, Colonial and Post-Colonial Studies, African Politics and Government.