Category: Africa

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Mbuti Film Study: subsistence activities and the elima female initiation ceremony (1954) footage – Francis S. Chapman and Colin Turnbull *

108 mins., col., sound

Source : NAFC, catalogue number AF-91.13.3

[Notes based on NAFC catalogue]

Footage shot among the Mbuti ‘pygmies’ of the Ituri Forest, still then part of the Belgian Congo
 (later to become Zaïre, and more recently the Democratic Republic of Congo). It focuses strongly on the relations between Ndaka (Bantu) villagers and the nomadic, forest-dwelling Mbuti. Subsistence activities shown 
include: an Mbuti forest camp, the construction of domed leaf houses, 
barkcloth manufacture, hunting forest deer with nets, the collection 
of honey. There is also a sequence of boys playing on a tree swing.

Ritual sequences show: a  camp on the banks of the Epulu River for
 the month-long seclusion of pubescent Mbuti girls prior to their initiation during the elima ceremony, the elima ceremony itself, and an Ndaka village wedding ceremony.
 The bride is shown being anointed with palm oil (a sign of wealth) and carried on a palanquin into 
the village, where she is regaled by dancers.

This footage was shot by a Canadian Broadcast Corporation cameraman, Francis S. Chapman, based on the field research of anthropologist Colin Turnbull. The HSFA also hold a shorter set of black and white rushes (AF 91.13.6, 35 mins.) accompanied by a recording of Turnbull commenting on them. These rushes show life in a forest camp, and nkumbi male initiation ceremonies at Ngawana village of Musafu and the Bira village of Eboyo.

Chapman and Turnbull also produced an edited colour film about the nkumbi initiation ceremony (Mbuti Film Study, AF-91.13.4)

They also collaborated on making audio recordings of Mbuti music, released in 1992 in the Smithsonian Folkways series. For details, see here

Texts : Turnbull (1962), Turnbull (1965), Grinker (2000)

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Mbuti Film Study: forest camp, Bira and Ngwana villages, and the Station de Chasse, footage (1954) – Francis S. Chapman and Colin Turnbull *

35 mins., b&w, silent

Source : NAFC, catalogue number AF-91.13.6

This is rather random footage of the Mbuti ‘pygmies’ of the Ituri Forest, then in the Belgian Congo (later Zaïre and now the Democratic Republic of Congo). It includes sequences of Mbuti camp life near an Ndaka (Bantu) village; nkumbi male initiation ceremonies in the Ngwana village of Musafu and the Bira village of Eboyo; and at the colonial Station de Chasse on
 the Epulu River organized for capturing elephants and okapis for export.

This footage was based on the field research of anthropologist Colin Turnbull, who comments on the material in the NAFC version, and was shot by his cousin, Francis S. Chapman, a Canadian Broadcast Corporation cameraman. The NAFC also hold a longer set of rushes in colour (AF 91.13.3, 108 mins.), also accompanied by a recording of Turnbull commenting on them. These rushes cover a wide range of topics, including subsistence activities and the female elima initiation ceremony.

Chapman and Turnbull also made an edited colour film about the nkumbi ceremony (AF-91.13.4). Further details here.

They also collaborated in making audio recordings of Mbuti music, released in 1992 in the Smithsonian Folkways series. See here for further details

Texts : Turnbull (1962),  Turnbull (1965), Grinker (2000)

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Mbuti Film Study: nkumbi male initiation ceremony (1954) – dir. Francis S. Chapman and Colin Turnbull *

70 mins., col., silent.

Source : NAFC, catalogue no. AF 91.13.4

[Notes based on NAFC catalogue entry]

This film concerns the nomadic hunting and gathering Mbuti ‘pygmies’ of the Ituri Forest, then still in the Eastern Province of the Belgian
 Congo (later to become Zaïre, and more recently the Democratic Republic of Congo), and their sedentary Ndaka (Bantu) village neighbours, with whom they 
maintain important economic and ritual relations, and with whom they even cohabit for certain periods. The film focuses
 primarily on the various different phases of the nkumbi male initiation ceremony which involves both Mbuti and Ndaka Bantu boys. Nkumbi means “to share the blood” and the ceremony reflects one aspect of the close ties between Mbuti and
 Ndaka villagers.

The film shows how the boys are first secluded  in the nkumbi forest camp, where they are subjected to ritual whipping, and training in dancing wearing keefa (raffia skirts)  The liminal
 status of the initiates at this point is signalled by their daily covering with 
white pempa clay, symbolizing their social death. After they have been initiated by a village “doctor”,  the nkumbi camp is burnt, the initiates are enclosed in a  banana leaf “womb” from which they are then “reborn”. The new public status of the initiates is then recognized as
 they dance through the Ndaka village of Epulu, led by a 
ritual “doctor” in a leopard mask. They are also marked with
 bengafi scars around chest and ribs which identify them are adult males who have “shared the blood.” Their final reincorporation into social life  is achieved by washing in the river, being covered  with palm oil (a Ndaka symbol of wealth), and going in procession
 to the centre of the village.  Here they dance on stools to
 signal their status as sexually active adults.

This film was based on the field research of anthropologist Colin Turnbull and was shot by his cousin, Francis S. Chapman, a Canadian Broadcast Corporation cameraman. The NAFC also hold a longer set of colour rushes (AF 91.13.3, 108 mins.), from which this film appears to have been extracted, as well as a recording of Turnbull commenting on them. These rushes cover a wide range of topics, including subsistence activities and the female elima initiation ceremony.

Chapman and Turnbull also produced some black and white rushes including sequences in an Mbuti forest camp, nkumbi male initiation ceremonies at Bira and Ngwana 
villages, and the capturing of elephants and okapi at the colonial Station de Chasse. Further details here.

They also collaborated in making audio recordings of Mbuti music, released in 1992 in the Smithsonian Folkways series. For further details see here.

 Texts :  Turnbull (1962), Turnbull (1965), Grinker (2000)

 

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Ik Film Study (1965-67) – dir. Colin Turnbull and Joseph A. Towles *

58 mins., col., sound – voice-over commentary, extra-diegetic music.

Production : Avery Research Center for African History and Culture, College of Charleston, South Carolina.

Source : NAFC catalogue number AF 91.13.2.

Background – The NAFC also holds the rushes from which this film was apparently cut (AF 91.13.1). Although this film appears to have been primarily the work of Colin Turnbull, it is also credited in the NAFC catalogue to Joseph A. Towles, who was Turnbull’s partner in life as well as colleague in the field.   It is not clear who shot the material, nor who edited it since there are no credits. The NAFC catalogue dates the film to 1964, but in fact Turnbull and Towles did not carry out their fieldwork until the period 1965-67.

This film serves, in effect, as a complement to Turnbull’s highly controversial book, The Mountain People (1972) in which he claimed that the Ik people of north-eastern Uganda, though traditionally hunter-gathers, had been obliged to become sedentary, and not being accustomed to this mode of being, their society and culture had broken down completely.

Film Content – The film is a very strange work, opening with a juxtapositioning of images of a seemingly harsh African landscape, with corny extracts from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on the soundtrack, along with a constant voice-over commentary by Turnbull  in which he makes some scarcely credible assertions as to the breakdown of sociality among the Ik; for example, that mothers only look after their children until they are three, whereafter they are left to fend for themselves. Most Ik are said to be dead by 30, though we  see images of older people. There is a recurrent return to a montage of shots showing Ik people in extremis.

Later on, the images become a little more intimate as they show a group of women working in what seems a perfectly sociable manner. They are very tall, like their neighbours the Turkana, and they live in Turkana-like villages. But a tall physique is very atypical of hunter-gatherers in Africa – casting doubt on whether we are indeed observing devolved hunter-gatherers in this film. They appear to be agriculturalists, and later in the film, one sees plenty of cattle. They certainly do no appear to be destitute.

This contradiction between the assertions of the voice-over and the content of the images continues for the rest of the film. Men are shown working industriously and conversing pleasantly with one another. The village itself seems highly ordered. Yet the commentary would have us believe that in this society, not only do parents abandon their children, but children abandon their parents. This proposition is directly contradicted by an image of a young man carrying a seemingly invalid older man.

A field study carried out by an anthropological linguist, Bernd Heine, almost 20 years later, suggested that Turnbull’s command of the Ik language was very poor and that he appears to have formed a highly erroneous view of Ik social life.

Texts : Turnbull (1972), Heine (1985), Grinker (2000)

 

 

© 2018 Paul Henley