1957 was the year the first African state won independence from colonial rule. To place that in context, my father was born then. In the 65 years he has been alive, three generations – including mine – have come into existence, yet post-independence Africa reads from an unchanged script.
It goes like this: election year rolls around; struggle veterans and members of politically connected families descend from their enclaves to canvass votes in the city, village and township, on behalf of the liberation party. Goodwill campaigns flourish as food parcels are distributed, load-shedding is suspended, and roads are tarred en route to the polls.
Such are the promises made by Honourable-Honourable (HH): the long-mouthed politician of Public Toilet Africa. The highly stylised, satirical film is set in the eldest democracy on the continent: Ghana, but instead of a sophisticated campaign befitting a well-established socio-political order, we are greeted by HH’s farcical promise of a solar toilet on every corner to “convert the waste to electricity for everyone”.
In addition to his exploitation of the limited education available to the masses, HH extorts votes from their hungry stomachs by parcelling out cassava, rice and eggs, while attributing their starvation to the policies of the incumbent he seeks to replace.
Every four or five years this game is played with different characters but similar outcomes: the decades marked by famine ushering in new generations to believe in the same empty promises. Such is a possible critique of the democratic process as it is satirised in Kofi Ofosu-Yeboah’s film.
Public Toilet Africa is more than a political statement. It is also a revenge story about an indistinct original sin. Ama, the character who opens and closes the film, returns to her hometown of Accra seeking compensation for an unpaid modelling job. While she is in town, she drops in to intimidate the art collector to whom she was gifted as a domestic servant when she was a girl. It is unclear whether she cripples him or not, for he is on crutches when we see him, but she does threaten to “f*** him up” should he alert anyone to what she has done.
Upon enrolling her sidekick and love interest Sadiq on her mission, she tells him, “They took everything from me. I want to take something from them.” The viewer is free to infer who “they” are, for the only thing Ama takes back are the negatives and equipment of the photographer who owes her. Read symbolically, she repossesses the means through which representations of herself have been made. Metatextually, Ofosu-Yeboah takes back the way African stories are told by the way he tells the story of his film.
In an in-depth interview with okayafrica’s Nadia Neophytou, the writer-director-editor delves into his production process: “We could have shot at all the beautiful places in Ghana to show, ‘Oh, this is how it’s done…This is how we are measuring up. We can finally be streamed on Netflix…because [the film] has the formula.’ But then I said, I don’t remember us…Let me put this document together so that at least they will know that we were here if we disappear.”
Ofosu-Yeboah’s rejection of the Western gaze is vehement, especially as it is encountered in film school. He refers to the pedagogy that has been designed for the Global South as one that reproduces “cookie-cutter NGO films”. Public Toilet Africa was never going to peddle in the self-rejection imbibed with Western storytelling techniques. And it is for this reason that the film does not subscribe to a strict narrative chronology.
Jeanine T. Abraham criticises the film’s unusual trajectory in her SXSW 2022 Review: “I’m still not clear on why the title is Public Toilet Africa. Storytelling shouldn’t be this hard to follow.” Her conclusion is, “The cinematography and characters are compelling, but…Public Toilet Africa doesn’t do a good job of telling a clear story.”
There is a dreamlike quality to the sequence of events resulting from Ofosu-Yeboah’s abandonment of the screenplay. “I remember when I first threw the script away…Well, the script is only a guide…I’d internalised mine,” he admits. His preference was to work closely with a cinematographer who understood his vision, rather than faithfully reproduce the outcomes of a Word document.
Shooting the film was more akin to jazz improvisation as opposed to an orchestral symphony, and Ofosu-Yeboah felt no obligation to provide reliable narration. As a precedent, he references the oral tradition of African storytelling: “the griots were not reading from a script…Each time the story is told there is some nuance to it…The same story, the same spirit, but with different variations.”
Ofoju-Yeboah has no qualms if viewers of Public Toilet Africa do not unanimously arrive at the same neat conclusion, for his intention is not to contribute to the cinema of “one plus one equals two, the cookie-cutter films that are meant to sell popcorn and Coke”. If, for instance, you do not immediately know what to make of Kwaku and Atta – the drunks who wander Accra aimlessly – perhaps a second or third viewing of the film will resolve the cycle for you.
It is up to the viewer to decide whether Sadiq succumbs to strangulation, or is rescued in the nick of time by Ama in the conclusion. This open-endedness plays into the filmmaker’s hands, turning his plot into the tale of the griot, which changes slightly with each retelling.
Perhaps the only point that Public Toilet Africa does not obfuscate is that the cooperation of the authorities, whether they are village elders, police officers or politicians, is always for sale to the highest bidder in Ghana, Africa, and maybe even beyond.
This story is produced in the context of an editorial residency supported by Pro Helvetia Johannesburg, the Swiss Arts Council.
