Kalanda - The Knowledge of the Bush

If you want to learn more about the regional ecological and political context of the area of West Africa where the film was shot and read in more detail on how the hunters are adapting to change and transformation, you might want to check this article out. The director of our documentary published a piece on the Journal of Contemporary African Studies with the title The dankun network: the donso hunters of Burkina Faso between ecological change and new associations. From the abstract:

In this text I look at processes of transformation involving an initiatory society of hunters known in parts of West Africa as donsoya. In countries like Mali, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso restrictive environmental policies drew donso hunters into state-recognised associations, a phenomenon that has massively transformed donsoya in the past 25 years. Ecological change implied the disappearance of the big animals that gave master hunters their prestige and role of meat providers. I take the example of western Burkina Faso to look at the complex interactions between ecology, the internal structures ofdonsoya and the diffusion of a cult imported from neighbouring countries. Through a reflexive account of my own initiation to donsoya I show how hunters, in parallel with the emergence of associations, adopted ritual forms that emphasise relationships with other hunters, and argue how these changes show the interrelatedness of ecology, ritual and politics in today’s donsoya.

Anthropologist and filmmaker Steven Feld has written a review of our film for the visual anthropology journal VAR. The access is by subscription, but here is an excerpt from his conclusions: 

We will screen in France, during the festival Mondes en Images in Cucuron, south-eastern France. Kalanda will screen on April the 1st in the cinema Cigalon, together with two more films from the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, starting at 10am. 

The Royal Anthropological Institute is bringing the films from its 2015 Ethnographic Film Festival to the USA, thanks to a partnership with USC. Kalanda will screen in a section dedicated to Africa in the Los Angeles campus, in room Seeley G. Mudd Hall 124 at 3:50pm, on Saturday the 5th of March. If you are around, don’t miss one of the few opportunities to watch the film projected in the USA. 

On Tuesday the 26th of January 2015 we will be part of Picks of the Festival, a series of screenings of award-winning documentaries from last year’s RAI Festival of Ethnographic Film. The screening will take place at the Royal Anthropological Institute, 50 Fitzroy Street, London W1T 5BT. 

The director Lorenzo Ferrarini will be present for a Q&A after the projection. Kalanda received the Richard Werbner Award for Visual Ethnography and a commendation in the RAI Film Prize category.

We’re having a giveaway of 3 digital copies of the documentary. If you win you’ll be able to download the file or stream in HD, DRM-free.

More news from Estonia, we are going to screen at the 29th Pärnu International Documentary and Anthropology Film Festival. 

Kalanda has won the Richard Werbner award for Visual Ethnography at the 14th RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film! We also got a commendation for the main prize. 

We are pleased to screen the documentary at the 14th International Festival of Ethnographic Film organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute, one of the most prestigious for the genre. The screening will take place in the Watershed cinema in Bristol, on 18 June 2015. 

Some of the protagonists of the documentary.

When on fieldwork in Burkina Faso, working on donso hunters and their knowledge of the bush, I found myself to need a shotgun in order to join the hunters in their outings. In Bobo Dioulasso I came across Boubacar Traoré, who comes from a Jula family of blacksmiths. He sold me a locally made 12-gauge shotgun, a copy of a French Simplex model. I learnt from him that the shotgun was handmade, and he told me about his family's workshop in the neighbourhood of Koko, not far from the Great Mosque in Dioulassoba. In particular his father Bafetigué was a renown gunsmith and his extended family had blacksmithing workshops all next to each other in the area.

In Mande Africa blacksmiths (numuw) form an endogamous group that is sometimes referred to as a caste - although the term is inaccurate. They traditionally have the monopoly on the production of metal and often wooden objects, but used to live and have their workshops at the margins of the village. They also took up the roles of healers, sorcerers and ritual specialists (most notably performing circumcisions). To know more, the classic reference on the topic is Patrick McNaughton's 1988 book The Mande Blacksmiths. Knowledge, Power and Art in West Africa.

Endogamy is still practiced and makes sure that most blacksmiths in Koko are related to each other. Yet family relationships don't mean that everything runs smoothly, and it filtered through some of Boubacar's comments how money would set the blacksmiths one against the other. But the traditional role of numuya in Mande societies and the kinship relations between the blacksmiths make of their profession more than a simple trade, rather a family heritage - even though not all those of numu ancestry end up working at the forge.