“If I drop dead now and I want to speak to you, I’ll probably appear in your Whatsapp”: Kwesi Owusu on his 1990s Afrofuturist film Ama

In the late 1980s and early 90s, The Africa Centre, originally located in Covent Garden, central London, was a vibrant creative hub. Plays, poetry, music and dance were programmed, but what was more significant was the way these different artforms often intermingled and produced a kind of multi-faceted expression that was hard to pigeonhole. African Dawn was emblematic in this respect. Equal parts writers group and band, it featured individuals who had a strong interest in the visual arts. 

Kwesi Owusu is one of its members, who wrote verse and subsequently branched out into film. His first full-length feature, Ama: An African Voyage of Discovery, co-directed with Nii Kwate Owoo, was released to critical acclaim in 1991, and remains a fascinating meditation on the complexity of different generations of Africans in Britain whose lives have considerable cultural and sociological complexity, if not contradiction. 

The eponymous protagonist Ama is the young daughter of a Ghanaian couple in London who becomes the recipient of a life-changing prophecy, all the while confronting the challenges of a contemporary world that has unenlightened attitudes to race. Furthermore, society is marching toward new technology that can trigger as much discord as harmony. The plot and characterisation spring from an embrace of magical realism, a pervasive force in literature, which duly fired Owusu’s imagination.  

Why did you make Ama?

I wanted to tell a unique African story (partly reflecting who I am and my interests). As I come from poetry, the visual narrative had to be pretty poetic, a seamless narrative which is very much in tune with Anansi stories (the trickster spider of African and Caribbean folklore). I had to use a magical realist format to tell that particular story. 

One film that really blew my mind in that respect was Yeelen (1987) by Souleymane Cisssé. The main protagonist gets into the nuances of culture and travels to the source of that culture. The terrain was the Sahara desert, but for us the terrain was going to be England. Then we had to devise a story that was in tune with the reality of England but nonetheless had this fantasy integrated into it, so that you have tradition playing out against the reality of an African family living in England. 

It’s the story of a family, but young Ama is the heart and soul of the narrative.

She carries the film. I thought it would be interesting to have a fresh voice, a female and a young person. The big question in the film is: are people going to believe her or not? Would you listen to your 12-year-old sister or daughter? The prophet is a younger rather than an elder. She had no previous experience of this, but it had a real impact on her. These are traditions that linger on and shape our lives irrespective of whether we know about them or not.

We had to recreate some kind of a deserted African encampment within this forest, Belwood, to make an ambiance that is unfamiliar to her. She enters this space where there are talismans. And she finds a computer disk in a talisman. The information on the disk is startling. It’s a prophecy. It tells that the father has to go back to Ghana and that her brother, who is a boxer, must not go ahead with his big fight, otherwise he’ll get knocked out. They have doubts over what she is saying. Throughout the film the prophecy has to be resolved.

It’s interesting that you made a computer disk a meaningful symbol in the story. Did you want to create a clash of tradition and modernity?

Yes, we had to sidestep the fact that ancestral tradition had been denigrated. People always talk about witchcraft. We also had to find a way to say African culture is contemporary, irrespective of how old it was. We had to find a medium that transmitted an old, ancient message to the present. And we used a computer disk. I remember when the film opened in Accra there was a big, big, big debate on whether our ancestors, if they wanted to speak to us, would do so through a computer. The father believes in ancestral visitation, but he thinks if my ancestors want to speak to me they won’t use a computer disk! 

Everybody thinks about traditional symbols, but I always said I’m living now. If I drop dead now and I want to speak to you I’ll probably appear in your DM or Whatsapp. The whole idea that our culture has to be frozen in time is something I was keen to transcend. Culture is living and evolving.

In keeping with that evolution is a ‘widescreen’ artistic vision.  

I was trying to capture new forms of storytelling. I was part of a poetry group, African Dawn, where young writers were trying to create magical realism around about the same time that Ben Okri wrote The Famished Road. We were friends, and we all used to perform at the Africa Centre. We were all part of this movement, magical realism, which was in literature, film and poetry. We were trying to create a fusion of artforms and find holistic ways of telling stories to reveal all the unseen nuances of our culture and fuse them with reality as we knew it. These days they’d call it Afrofuturism.

Channel 4 funded Ama. Would you say they were a force for good at the time? 

Channel 4 paid £1 million for it, and yes it was crucial to the development of independent Black cinema because they set up the workshops and I got trained as a filmmaker in one of them, Cinema Action. But in addition to that we had Black Audio Film Collective, Sankofa, Ceddo and a range of other initiatives. It was a very exciting time, because there was a group of us who just got on and did things. 

Ama: An African Voyage of Discovery screens in the African Odysseys strand at BFI Southbank on 16 September.