2023-05-14 03:18:17
The author, director and Peace Prize winner Tsitsi Dangarembga, who comes from the African state of Zimbabwe, wants to increasingly change the image of Africa in the West with a feminist view of the “Global South”. The image of her homeland Zimbabwe and the continent as a whole is still shaped in the “West” by “colonial narratives” and the influence of the patriarchy, she said on Saturday evening during a conversation as part of the Innsbruck Journalism Festival.
Her task as an author and filmmaker is therefore to “critically question these images” and “bring about change,” said Dangarembga, who also teaches internationally, runs a film festival in Africa and is director of the “Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa ” is. For these questions, it is crucial that she still feels like an “existential refugee,” she added.
“It means I’m still and always looking for ways to live as a normal person in a normal country,” she said, referring to the situation in Zimbabwe. It was there that she was acquitted a few days ago by a court of second instance after she had to face a grueling trial following a demonstration to free journalists.
According to Dangarembga, the fight for a “new image” of Zimbabwa and Africa must also be waged in our own country, which, as a former British colony, has to deal with the issues of racism, white supremacy and gender injustice. “Patriarchy is deeply rooted and female voices are not heard enough,” she analyzed the current situation.
This is mainly because as a black woman you are “doubly oppressed” and have to stand up against racist prejudices as well as against the devaluation of being a woman. It is precisely these that need to be “strengthened” and brought to the front of the curtain in and with films, she emphasized. Her film festival gives women a lot of space: “Female protagonists play a central role there.”
With her work as a writer, director and film festival director, she wants to express one thing above all as a “woman for women”: “You have the right to decide for yourself.” Women in Africa should “not put themselves in a box” and “be made dependent on men”, stressed Dangarembga. She has to support this emancipation process because she is “privileged to a certain extent” and was able to study film in Berlin, for example. “Not everyone was able to develop like me under these circumstances,” said the campaigner for women’s rights.
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