Country: Mali
Director: Abderrahmane Sissako
Time: 1 hour and 55 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Amazon ($3.99 to rent)
What It Evokes: Debt politics, future visions amidst social fissures, and quotidian beauty
Imagine you’re a Senegalese nightclub singer working in Bamako, Mali. Your daughter is running a fever and your marriage has fractured to the point that you’re barely speaking with your husband. You’re thinking about abandoning Bamako and heading back home to Dakar. And just in case you didn’t already have enough on your plate, your frontyard is hosting public court proceedings in the case of African Society v. International Financial Institutions, which means that a corps of judges, international lawyers, witnesses, reporters, and viewers arrive every morning as you prepare to go to work. Needless to say, a lot is going on.
Abderrahmane Sissako’s imaginative Bamako tells the story of two conflicts: a public trial and Melé’s relationship with her husband. The trial (whose origins are never explained, but rather treated as a matter of course) features speeches by various Malian intellectuals and artists, each lamenting the social and economic costs brought about by IMF and World Bank policies, alongside prepared statements and cross-examinations from lawyers representing each side. By contrast, Melé has little interest in the court’s proceedings. Her concerns lie with her sick daughter and her plans to return to Senegal in the wake of her crumbling marriage. Her unemployed husband, Chaka, the film’s most heartbreaking character, has fallen into a depression and begun teaching himself Hebrew on the off chance that if Israel opens an embassy in Mali, he will be qualified to become its security guard. (The distant and fantastical nature of this ambition only highlights the pervasive lack of immediate opportunity.) Throughout the film, scenes from daily life, as well as an allegorical short film, contextualize Melé and Chaka’s relationship and accentuate the judicial proceedings. The result is both a sensitive group portrait of the city’s residents and a frontal protest against externally imposed economic interventions.
In particular, two Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, come in for explicit criticism in the film. To simplify quite a bit, the World Bank offers loans and advisory services to countries for specific development projects (historically geared towards infrastructure), while the IMF functions as an international lender of last resort, furnishing funds to states experiencing economic crises (acute balance of payment issues, unsustainable debt burdens) that lack the ability to tap sovereign debt markets for new financing. In a process known as “conditionality,” the IMF has historically made the disbursement of funds contingent on various domestic policy changes (termed “structural adjustment”), which encompass trade and market liberalization (such as the sale of state-owned assets and removal of tariffs protecting domestic industry), labor market reforms, and budgetary contraction. The Dakar-Niger Railway’s privatization constitutes the most prominent example of this type of policy in the film. (The line links landlocked Mali to Senegalese ports.) A Canadian company took over operations in 2003 after being granted a concession by the Senegalese and Malian governments, leading a trial witness to detail how the closure of unprofitable stops on the line has eliminated economic opportunities for locals, generating widespread migration and community disintegration.
The critiques and counter-critiques surrounding the role of international financial institutions in aiding or constraining “development,” alongside debates surrounding what the aims of “development” should be, remain heinously complex. The film outlines two opposing viewpoints: World Bank and IMF defenders tend to see longstanding domestic institutional failures and economic mismanagement (corruption, underinvestment in education, cronyism, poorly targeted policies) as the primary culprits of persistent poverty and low living standards. By contrast, critics of these organizations point out the ways in which intrusive interventions (planned and coordinated by institutions led by powerful states with their own geopolitical interests and limited working knowledge of local conditions) rend social fabrics by offering one-size-fits-all policy prescriptions that fail to stimulate widespread growth and entrench pernicious debt cycles that leave borrowers continually beholden to external creditors. This latter account—with which Bamako shares its sympathies—tends to see these institutions as merely the latest (neo-colonial) manifestations of an international economic system that has long facilitated exploitation by powerful states (cf. the international slave trade, colonialism), warping societies and narrowing political possibilities in the process.
The arguments showcased in African Society v. International Financial Institutions trace their antecedents to decolonization and its myriad visions of political, economic, social, and cultural independence, while reacting against Western policymakers’ abandonment of mixed economy models in the 1970s and 1980s—itself a component of what sometimes gets called “the neoliberal turn.” In a small glimmer of recent hope, under its former Managing Director Christine Lagarde (who headed the fund from 2011-2019), the IMF began moving away (at least rhetorically) from the most rigid forms of “structural adjustment” in favor of somewhat greater policy flexibility on behalf of borrowing states. Not coincidentally, this shift came after much criticism directed against the IMF for its role in a European state’s debt crisis (Greece). As a filmmaker, Sissako’s strengths lie less in introducing novel arguments into these thorny and longstanding debates. Instead, he renders viewers sensitive to the ways in which unfavorable historical confluences have generated forms of individual hopelessness and suffering (alongside great resilience and creativity) in order to underscore costs that can remain hidden to outsiders. As a protest film, Bamako does not aim at subtlety. Instead, it strives to give voice (through language and music) to those too often denied the opportunity to articulate their frustrations and aspirations in order to forge emotional affinities between its characters and viewers.
Since the film’s release, things have only grown more complex in Mali. In March 2012, the Salafist group Ansar Al-Dine (literally: “supporters of religion”) took over Timbuktu as part of a broader sweep into the country’s northeast, aligning themselves with the MNLA, a Tuareg (Berber) breakaway organization fighting Mali’s government. (Frustration with the government’s handling of the Tuareg insurgency led to a military-backed coup just prior to Timbuktu’s capture, the first of three coups the country has experienced over the past eleven years.) The swift loss of northern territory elicited a UN-backed African Union mission and, subsequently, direct French military intervention at the request of the central government, which expelled Ansar Al-Dine from Timbuktu. As a parting gift, the group made international headlines by burning a library filled with historic manuscripts and scrolls dating back to the thirteenth century when Timbuktu emerged a central axis in the trans-Saharan salt and gold trade and a regional center of Islamic thought. The last French troops left the country only in 2022. (Sissako’s 2014 film Timbuktu beautifully and subtly delves into these events.) In 2019, brewing conflict between agricultural and pastoral communities over land and water access resulted in massacres in villages in the central Malian state of Mopti. Last year, Human Rights Watch accused the Malian Army of summarily killing suspected Islamists. These events have only highlighted the extreme complexity of the country’s political and economic structures, undermining pat uni-causal narratives. In the end, cinema’s ability to limit violence has always remained dubious. Yet, amidst these challenges, Sissako’s films have worked to shorten distances between people by foregrounding our shared humanity and evincing solidarity, sympathy, and respect for the globe’s marginalized, taking seriously individual suffering while celebrating individual resilience. There’s no better place from which to start building a better world.
Go Down The Sissako Rabbit Hole With:
Abderrahmane Sissako — Timbuktu (2014)
Abderrahmane Sissako — Waiting For Happiness (2002)