1. Reflecting on Migration:
Man on Ground (2011)
-
a Nigerian film
on South Africa
Françoise Ugochukwu
DPP, Open University, 20/04/2016

2. Southern Nigeria, a heavily populated territory, has experienced emigration since the
colonial period. These migrations first took people to Britain or the United States for
historical reasons. The early Nollywood films, Nigeria-made in the 1990s, recorded
this trend, exploring widespread belief that Europe and America were better placed
to ensure the happiness and prosperity of Nigerians who could make it there.
The recession experienced by Nigeria in the early 1980s, and the gradual tightening of
immigration by Western countries within the last forty years, changed the landscape,
with more and more Nigerians exploring the rest of the African continent in search of
a new elusive Eldorado. This paper considers the film Man on Ground (2011)
produced and directed by the Nigeria-born South African Akin Omotoso, in the
context of the problems encountered by Nigerian migrants in South Africa and the
growing diplomatic malaise affecting bilateral relations between Nigeria and South
Africa, to study its reading of Nigerian immigration to South Africa.
Picture: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-warren/south-africa-immigration-apartheid_b_8068132.html

3. THE FILM
Man on Ground
South Africa 2011.
Directors: Akin Omotoso Akin Omotoso, Kazeem Kae-Kazim, Rosie Motene &
Fabian Adeoye
Producer: Akin Omotoso
Cast: Hakeem Kae-Kazim, Fabian Adeoye Lojede, Fana Mokoena, Buku
Mazibuko, Thishiwe Ziqubu & Makhaola Ndebele
Languages: English, Zulu, Sotho & Yoruba
Colour, Blu-ray Disc, in English, Yoruba, Sotho and Zulu with English subtitles.
80 mins.

4. SOURCE
The film is directly inspired from events which took place in the evening of
Sunday 11th May 2008, when a gang of youths from the black suburb of
Alexandra in Johannesburg invaded a house on London street and attacked its
foreign residents, murdering them in cold blood and taking their properties.
Within days, the violence spread to the townships of Diepsloot and East Rand,
where Ernesto Nhamuavhe, a Mozambican immigrant living in an informal
settlement outside Johannesburg, was burned alive as onlookers laughed.
Ernesto Nhamuavhe, a husband and father, who became known internationally
as ‘the man in fire’, inspired the film Man on Ground.

5. SYNOPSIS
Director Akin Omotoso structures this intensely personal narrative as a thriller. Ade
(Hakeem Kae-Kazim), a Nigerian banker living in London, desperately searches for his
missing brother to deliver a parcel sent by their Mum, amidst the xenophobic tensions
of South Africa's townships.
FOCUS
The focus here will be on the film treatment of Nigerian and African migration in
South Africa, on its interpretation of the current malaise between the two countries
and on its audiovisual presentation of intercultural communication or the lack of it.
The presentation ends with a consideration of the political and educational use of the
film and its impact, in the line of traditional Nollywood films. It equally aims to show
that in spite of its originality, this film closely follows the Nollywood ‘edutainment’
model, seeking, in this case, to warn would-be immigrants against dangers waiting for
them abroad.

6. From Lagos to Johannesburg
With some 2,4 million African immigrants coming from Nigeria but equally from
Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe, randomly accused of various evils, South Africa
has been experiencing xenophobia, discrimination and violence.
After years of difficult relationships marred by Nigeria’s hostility to the South African
apartheid regime, South Africa, considered as the “most modern, diversified and
performing” nation on the continent (Veron 2006), has now become Nigeria’s
valuable economic partner. Commercial exchanges between the two countries have
grown exponentially since 2002, reaching some three million euros in 2012. This,
unfortunately, neither improved relations between the two giants nor helped the
more than 250 000 Nigerian migrants settled in South Africa – with some 400 of them
currently incarcerated there.

7. In 2013, reports of endemic discrimination led the Nigerian minister for foreign affairs to
deplore the negative attitude of the South African Government against Nigerian citizens in
that country. According to him, the main problem was the average South African’s
perception of Nigeria as a fraudsters’ haven and their xenophobic attitude towards
Nigerians, which had to be remedied through dialogue between the two countries. Related
subjects discussed included immigration procedures, police harassment and expulsion of
Nigerians.
This situation seems to be growing worse by the day. On April 19, 2015, the then Nigerian
Consul in South Africa, Ajulu Okeke, reported that his compatriots had lost more than 21
million rands through xenophobic attacks, while, on April 29, 2015, Reuters signalled the
calling back of the Nigerian Ambassador in SA after a new spate of violence in
Johannesburg. And in March 2016, for Damilola Oyedele, the visit by South African
President Jacob Zuma to Nigeria may be indicative of the warming diplomatic ties between
the two countries but not a reflection of the relations between citizens of both countries
(http://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2016/03/13/nigeria-south-africa-relations-beyond-the-rhetoric/

8. From Life to Screen
This is the difficult climate which inspired the Nigerian-born Akin Omotoso’s
second film. His first film, God is African (2003), equally inspired by intra-African
migrations, “a theme scarcely treated” (Crouillère 2010 : 190), “signals a shift to a
new kind if cinema made by African immigrants in South Africa”(Dovey 2009 : 143).
God is African takes us back to 1995, where a Nigerian student, Femi, sought to
mobilise his university to uphold the Nigerian poet Saro-Wiwa’s human rights via
the local radio. A few traditional Nigerian films (Coming to South Africa, 2005 ;
Akpegi Boyz 2009) have since attempted to attract people’s attention to the ugly
side of migration. South African films, on their part, “highlighted the filmmakers’
concern with the social realities of violence, and offer ways of conceptualising,
visualising and criticising violence” (Dovey 2009 : 6).

9. Man on Ground (2011) tells the story of two brothers, Ade and Femi, who left
Yorubaland. Ade is the perfect example of the successful migrant: he resettled in
London where he works as a banker; As for Femi, a political opponent in his
country, he chose to flee to South Africa where he survives taking small badly paid
jobs in a black Johannesburg ghetto. Ade takes advantage of a short visit to South
Africa to deliver a parcel from their Mum, discovers his brother has been missing
for a week. He then starts looking for him, using the very few clues he gathers on
the way, and slowly discovers what had been Femi’s daily life and difficulties. His
search brings him to the ghetto and the factory where his brother worked, and
where he meets Femi’s boss, Timothi; but neither Timothi nor his wife Lindiwe
show any willingness to answer his questions. While Ade and Timothi are together,
a xenophobic riot erupts among black South Africans and both men are forced to
spend the night together in Timothi's office. The long hours spent drinking, silently
facing each other, slowly lead Ade to understand how his brother tried to survive
in South Africa and to realise what happened to him.

10. Man on Ground belongs to what Haynes defined as the ‘new wave’ of Nigerian
cinema, “a movement which sets itself apart from the usual Nollywood productions”
(Jedlowski 2013 : 37). These films, sometimes tagged “docu-fictions” (Jedlowski
2012 : 244) to highlight the way the treat their sources, are produced and shot in
diaspora with big budgets for cinema house publics and reflect diasporic lifestyles.
Destruction is at the heart of the film built on symbolism, as evidenced by the match
being struck, with fire spreading and engulfing metal shacks representing black
workers’ insecurity, and cars seen as consumer goods out of the workers’ reach.
Man on Ground illustrates the tense relations between Nigerian immigrants and
their South African hosts. This is a subject familiar to the film director, who
experienced this first hand. His father Kole Omotoso, a well known Nigerian
academic and writer, moved to South Africa in 1991 with his family.

11. Within the last ten years, Nollywood has gained in popularity across the whole
Southern Africa (Becker : 180). Yet, at first glance, Man on Ground seems very
different from those Nigerian films, both in its subject and its treatment of reality.
First, the film appears rather austere. The decor is reduced to its barest minimum:
a deserted street, a wasteland, a staircase, an empty room. There are no colours
either, a striking departure from the traditional Nollywood and its brightly
coloured costumes and lively crowds. This minimalist approach is enhanced by
the timing of the story, more than half of which is set at dusk or at night, and by
its choice of venues: lunar, foggy landscapes, rail junctions, open warehouses and
machinery, long empty corridors – which all powerfully echo the characters’
feelings. The total absence of spatial markers facilitates viewers’ empathy with a
story they could easily appropriate, and with the enforced message that what
matters is the sharing of human experience.
A Different approach

12. The film is built on close-ups focusing on facial expressions which serve
as clues to the characters’ unspoken feelings and reactions, a choice
enhanced by the frequent use of slow motion, flash-backs and voice off
to piece the story together.
Man on Ground is the story of isolated individuals : Ade, Femi’s fiancee,
the factory’s boss. Timothi suffers from extreme loneliness and hated by
his workers, is carrying heavy secrets and does not even know that one
of them killed Femi ; his wife herself is totally silent. In this environment,
migrants do not have any support, be it from family or friends – Femi and
Ade’s mum, in her faraway Nigerian village, is only briefly mentioned
once, and represented by the tiny parcel meant for Femi, which will only
be opened by his young widow in the last scene.

13. These rootless migrants, in transit through alien surroundings, live under
threat. Immersed in the wordless violence of a black community fighting for
the betterment of its living standards, they remain strangers there, as they
neither share the local language nor its culture, as proven by the struggle for
communication between Ade and Femi’s boss, with both only able to share
monosyllables.
In the absence of words to express their feelings, and of the trust necessary to
share their thoughts, silence ends up defining relationships in the film, with
facial expressions as the only clue to people’s emotions: fear, anguish, doubt,
contempt and love. A moving illustration of this is the night Ade and Timothi
spend facing each other, getting drunk from the same bottle without uttering a
word – hoping perhaps to break that invisible barrier.

14. The scenario tries to unpack a tangle of fragmented information and retrieve the
missing links on the way. Questions are being asked, which do not get any answer:
where did Femi live? Where did he work? Why did he choose to stay in that
country and settle in this dangerous area of town? What happened to him? Then,
why was he killed? Is Ade now in danger as well? We hear the word ‘foreigner’ a
few times – a reminder that Femi could never have managed to integrate the
black community he had joined.
The post apartheid South Africa is presented here as an African country
viscerally hostile to foreigners, accused of despising locals and stealing the little
they are entitled to. The style and the staging of the film successfully
communicate the depth of migrants’ isolation and their problematic situation.
While Ade managed to carve a space for himself in Britain, Femi’s future in South
Africa remains an aborted dream, and his life a failure, poorly compensated by his
fiancée's unborn baby. This is a rather sombre reflection on South-South
migration.

15. A Teaching Tool
In the first part of her published thesis, Dovey, herself a South African, considers
the cinematographic production of her country and suggests that cinema remains
the best means of reaching her illiterate compatriots – 75% of the population. She
enumerates the producers’ difficulties, faced with past white violence and
brutality, yet desirous to contribute to national reconciliation and unity, and turns
her book, African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen, into a
denunciation of xenophobia while pleading for a positive multiculturalism.
Omotoso’s reflection as expressed in Man on Ground is to be seen in that context:
just like several other film directors, he “attempted to represent violence
realistically for educational reasons” (Dovey 2009 : 32), and denounced “abuse,
rejection, fear and intolerance, triggering his public’s reflection and generating an
openness to a greater wisdom and humaneness” (Crouillère 2010 : 190).

16. Man on Ground is the fruit of three months of in-depth research by the
production team under Omotoso’s direction, supported by the main cast -
Fabian Lojede and Hakeem Kae-Kazim, joined by the female producer Rosie
Motene in early 2011. The storyboard is inspired by an analysis of the riots and
the reading of books, interviews and commentaries on the situation. For
Omotoso,
It was important to get all sides of the story and the research was crucial. It
gave us insight into what was happening on the ground, it provided us with our
tagline "tell them we are from here". One of the victims was asked what he
would tell his attackers if he could talk to them and he say, "tell them we are
from here". Here, being planet earth.[…] The script took three years to write.
We went through the research, investigating different narrative options till we
settled on the version that became the shooting script.
http://www.spling.co.za/movie-news/interview-akin-omotoso-on-his-film-man-on-ground

17. Created in reaction against the 2008 South African xenophobic explosion, Man on
Ground, a high quality film produced in partnership with the South African National
Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) and the International Organisation for Migration
(IOM) after a funding campaign open to the entire population, is considered as “a
timely exploration of the plight of refugees” (Dov. Kormits, 30/04/2012,
(https://www.facebook.com/ManOnGround accessed 29/01/2016).
Its specificity is inscribed in its production history: from conception to release, it is a
political film, at the crossroad of its director’s personal experience and of the
country’s recent history. It is unique in that, based on its history and qualities, it was
chosen as a reconciliation tool. Each of its screenings can be seen as a step towards
the progress of the campaign launched throughout the country and beyond to fight
a xenophobia considered as an offshoot of poverty.
A Film for Reconciliation

18. Premiered at the Toronto Film festival in 2011, Man on Ground has been
touring South Africa, with screenings in four of the country’s regions: in Musina,
Malelane, Durban and Cape Town during the information campaign ‘Tell Them
We Are From Here’. This campaign sought to inform the population on the
difficulties faced by immigrants, facilitate the dialogue between migrants and
local communities and support diversity, tolerance and peace. Sponsored by the
International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the Goethe Institut and the Open
Society Initiative of Southern Africa (OSISA), and led by the film director, this
campaign followed another one launched in 2012,
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqe4E-0F1AQ, accessed 18/04/16), titled ’I
Am a Migrant Too’ and equally organised by the IOM to promote peace through
helping the various communities in the country to realise that the migration
experience affects everybody and should be celebrated.

19. The support offered by the International Organisation for (IOM) is in line
with the organisation’s strategy , which aims to inform on the migrants’
situation, facilitate an understanding of migration issues, promote the
protection of migrant workers and their families, and promote, facilitate and
support discussion and dialogue on migration. This support enshrines the
official recognition of the match between the mission undertaken by
Omotoso’s film and that of the IOM, and credibly demonstrates how much
the cinematographic tool can contribute to popular education. The film
screenings are followed by recorded interviews intended to offer audiences
the opportunity to share their experience and to air their opinion on
xenophobia, identity, integration, social cohesion ad exclusion.

20. In conclusion
The importance of Man on Ground, an icon of the contemporary Nigerian experience
on South-South migration and alterity, places it at the crossroad between two worlds.
Blacks, Africans and yet foreigners in South Africa, Nigerians represent here an entire
continent searching for stability, in a film offering a sober reflection on the difficulty of
resettling outside one’s birthplace. The number of official nominations of Man on
Ground, in Toronto, Lagos and Dubaï in 2011, in Berlin and Durban in 2012, and the
awards received since then, amply prove the impact of its powerful message. Yet the
director’s desire was to reach out to ordinary people and local communities. Omotoso
explained:
I wanted to make a bold yet visceral film, that wasn’t afraid to give the viewer space to
meditate. Secondly, I wanted a film that would stimulate dialogue within communities
affected by xenophobic violence as well as the world at large. […] I hope that this film
will begin to change the mindset of people who are obsessed with persecuting fellow
human beings because either they don’t look like ‘us’, they don’t sound like ‘us’.
http://www.flavourmag.co.uk/review-man-on-ground/ accessed 18/04/16

21. Man on Ground, directed by a Nigerian immigrant in South Africa, could be
considered as far removed from traditional Nollywood productions immersed in
Nigerian settings, with their colourful crowds, verbal art and exuberance. Yet its
sharp criticism of societal evils and its didactic nature prove that it really
belongs there. On a continent still plagued by a dearth of public libraries and
poor reading habits, Omotoso’s film is definitely part of those productions
which “have become a means to communicate the diasporic experience,
including the hardship, which may be part of it, to those who stay
behind”(Krings & Okome 2013 : 7). A multilingual film at the crossroads of
various cultures and offering a mix of English, Zulu, Sotho and Yoruba, Man on
Ground joins other films carrying a message of peace in the context of current
campaigns against violence in South Africa and beyond.

22. http://www.flavourmag.co.uk/review-man-on-ground/ accessed 18/04/16