Edith Kaphuka - Crew Statement

NOTE:  This short piece was written for Glimpse Magazine, and so it was intended for a very particular audience - hence the hyperbole and context...  A new, more approprate, crew statement for this forum is on the way!  - JJP

 

When looking back at those twenty-four continuous hours of footage, I’m amazed – and, to be honest, very pleased - that Edith’s day comes across as so normal and ordinary.

 



We started filming at midnight.  My digital alarm beeped; I crawled out of our tent, and slowly felt my way through the compound to the Kapuka’s mud-brick, thatched-roof, four-room house.  Edith and Memory were fast asleep, curled up in a ball underneath a pair of grey blankets, the wooly mass moving up and down with their breath, silhouetted by a pair of kerosene lanterns we had lit, and set, several hours before.  I crawled quietly to the Canon HD video camera, which had been carefully mounted on a short tripod, a discreet distance outside their tiny bedroom, and gently pressed the red button.

 


With that, our Global Lives Project shoot had begun.  The goal of Global Lives is to record 24 hours in the lives of ten people that roughly represent the cultural diversity of the world’s population.  These ten lives will then come together in a traveling video installation, and also form the basis for of a collaborative online video encyclopedia of human life experiences. To date, four project shoots have been completed - in San Francisco with a cable car driver, in São Paulo, Brazil with a musician, in Tokyo, Japan with a disabled college student and, with the completion of our shoot, with a schoolgirl from the Zomba Plateau in Malawi.

 

My name is Jason Price, the producer and director of Global Lives Malawi.  Nine years ago I had served in Malawi as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching high school English for almost three years.  When I returned to Malawi in 2007 to do some anthropological research, I organized a small production team composed of some Malawian and American filmmakers to contribute to the Global Lives Project.

 

Choosing a participant proved to be easier than we had initially thought.  In order to meet the project’s demographic demands, we were searching for “a typical Malawian schoolgirl”.  We knew many, of course.  But to bring a film crew into your home and village to complete this kind of shoot is exhausting and stressful, and it requires a subject who is both strong and sensitive.

 

Lucky for us, Edith Kapuka, an energetic, but exceedingly mature, thirteen year-old girl from a small village outside of Zomba volunteered for the task, along with her family, friends, and community.

 

Edith is the third born of four children, all of whom live with their mother – Cecilia, a 36 year-old subsistence farmer, small business entrepreneur, and single mother. Three years ago she divorced Wells Kapuka, an itinerant construction worker because of issues related to alcohol abuse. Mr. Kapuka has since remarried and lives nearby.  He plays a peripheral role in the lives of his children, meeting them on the road from time to time, and helping out with school fees when he can. Other than Edith, there is Bright (15 years old), Memory (10), and Lynndiwe (4), along with Crispin (18), Edith’s orphaned cousin whom Cecilia took in years back.

 

All of the children attend school at Domasi Mission of the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP). Edith and her family are Presbyterian. They are Yao by tribe. The Yao are predominantly Muslim and historically inhabit areas around the southeastern lakeshore.

 

Edith and her family live in a small compound along with two of her aunts and three of her cousins - Vivian Libotzi and her son Gift, and Rophina Issa and her daughter Naomi and her son Slaj, who is deaf.  Like Cecilia, Vivian and Rophina are also single mothers – with one husband having fled for religious reasons and another for economic ones.

 

Their compound is located in Sub-Traditional Authority (TA) Ngwale, within TA Malumbe, in the District of Zomba; though it is usually referred to as Ngwale Village and is known mostly for its proximity to the mission.

 

All three families have red-brick houses with thatched-grass roofs. They have neither electricity, nor running water. They depend upon a small stream some 100 meters from the compound for their water. Edith and her family speak Chichewa, the national language, and Chiyao, their tribal tongue.

 

Edith’s daily life is typical of a Malawian schoolgirl. She gets up at dawn with the rooster, sweeps her compound with a small, hand-held broom, collects water from a borehole nearly a mile away, prepares tea for breakfast, washes pots and pans, bathes and dresses, walks to school, attends classes, plays netball, returns home, plays games with her friends (or harvests vegetables from the garden – depending on the time of year), prepares dinner, washes the pots and pans, does some schoolwork, and then goes to sleep on a mat in a small room with her sister Memory.

 

Though Edith is an intriguing subject because her biography intersects with some important social and historical issues - her schooling and religious affiliation indexes a rich history of colonial evangelism; the geography refers to a complex pre-colonial past (the old slave-trade route passes near her village); her Yao ethnicity sparks interesting questions about identity and its relationship to nationalism; and the lives of her mother and aunts bring up questions related to gender and power - I’m afraid, and perhaps a bit relieved, that they did not end up on screen in any direct or deliberate way.

 

At the end of the day (both literally and figuratively), our shoot faithfully records her everyday routine, as I assume all the Global Lives shoots have done, and will continue to do.  The most sublime moments are incredibly subtle, and not at all uncommon – a yawn in a classroom, a sigh while washing the dishes, deep breaths after a schoolyard game, for example. While these moments are particular  – the room is at Domasi Primary secondary school where the desks are dilapidated and the electricity has failed, and those dishes are washed in a cold stream that runs through Ngwale village, and the game of netball is played barefoot on a hard, dusty pitch – they are also radically universal.  In fact, our shoot may reveal more about the joys and tedium and innocence of late childhood, of life on the cusp of the adult’s world, rather than anything else.

 

This is ironic when I consider something Edith said in her life story interview.  At the end of two hours of questions and answers - after she explained about her family, and her village, and her school, and revealed that she had been no further than Blantyre (some 50 km away), but wanted to be a nurse in America like her aunt Beatrice, nonetheless – I asked Edith what she thought people would think of her life when they saw it on the screen.

 

She replied, “I don’t think they will think I lead a normal life.  Because when people look at the film, all they will see is a poor girl.”

 

I think and hope it will be the opposite, and I think that’s important.  With so many hopeless and depressing, explicit and exploitative, images coming out of Africa these days, I relish the chance to offer audiences a long, unobstructed view into the everyday experiences of a normal, everyday girl that we can all, in one way or another, identify with.  And, if I understand the mission of Global Lives, I think that is the point, after all.

 

-Jason Price, Director, Global Lives Malawi Shoot