King Ampaw: Traveling by Lorry

Abstract

King Ampaw. Kukurantumi: The Road to Accra. 1983. Ghana. English. ArtMattan Productions. 95 min. $295.00. King Ampaw. No Time to Die. 2006. Ghana and West Germany. English. ArtMattan Productions. 95 min. $245.00. Set in aftermath of 31st December Revolution in Ghana in 1981, King Ampaw's Kukurantumi: The Road to Accra (1983) deserves much more critical attention than it has received. In African film scholarship, Kukurantumi seems to have been overshadowed by Kwah Ansah's Heritage Africa (1986), internationally perhaps most widely recognized Ghanaian film to appear before emergence of Ghana's video industry. In 1980s Ampaw and Ansah, both working outside state-owned Ghana Film Industry Corporation, attempted to make serious politicized African films that would resonate with global and local audiences. Ansah cobbled together funding from various private sources to produce Heritage, while Ampaw collaborated with Reinery Film Production and NDR Television of Germany to make Kukurantumi. And while Ansah looks back at colonialism in his film, Ampaw engages immediate political context in a daring and honest portrayal of mixed outcomes of Ghana's 1981 People's The 31st December Revolution was a military coup orchestrated by flight lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings and Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC). An ambitious campaign against fraud, illicit accumulation, and social injustice, Rawlings revolution, according to historian Maxwell Owusu, was nothing less than a crusade against destruction of moral fibre of Ghana as a nation (1996:318). Its major objectives were an end to decades of corruption and government mismanagement and return of power to ordinary Ghanaians in order to bring about a more equitable distribution of nation's resources and wealth. Historians agree that initially it garnered a wide base of popular support, although optimism that surrounded early days of PNDC regime quickly gave way to cynicism as economy stagnated and revolutionary enthusiasm degenerated into extreme acts of violence against market women and others perceived as enemies of revolution. Paul Nugent notes that efforts to root out corruption and build a more integrated national economy failed because PNDC neglected to address immediate realities of situation, which where collapse of basic economic infrastructure, a crippling shortage of foreign exchange and acute fiscal crisis of state (1995:90). During PNDC's first year, manufacturing output declined and endemic shortages of spare parts and raw materials were ongoing. Trying to ward off inflation, government withdrew fifty cedi note from circulation, an event to which Kukurantumi refers directly; Mary, a character in film, remembers that on day note was invalidated the sea was full of because many disgruntled Ghanaians who had been unaware of impending demonetization or unable to change their money before it went into effect tossed their suddenly worthless bills into sea. Ampaw's film eclipses physical acts of violence carried out in name of revolutionary discipline and concentrates instead on persistence of economic decline and corruption under PNDC. In this way, film situates hardships of one family within larger national context of scarcity, and though it chronicles losses of love and friendship, Kukurantumi remains steadfastly political, never giving way to trite sentimentality. The film's protagonist is Addey, a lorry driver who transports passengers between capital city, Accra, and village of Kukurantumi, where he lives with his wife, Seewaa, and daughter, Abena. The film undoes colonial teleology that naturalizes time as a spatial relation in which village represents African tradition while city signals Western modernity. In Kukurantumi village is no more or less modern than Accra, but it is a place where people are impoverished and where economic opportunities are few. …