Anthropological documentary filmmaking in Niger: Mariama Hima Yankori and 'Baabu Banza' (1984)

Against the colonialist view that French anthropologist Jean Rouch (1917-2004) is the ‘father’ of Nigerien film-making runs the tradition that began to be established after Nigerien independence from France in 1960, when Oumaru Ganda (1935-1981) and Moustapha Alassane (1942-2015) took the cinema of Niger in distinct new directions. Rouch’s continuing presence in Niger after independence helped create an infrastructure for film production and technical training in its capital city Niamey in the 1960s and 1970s, and Mariama Hima (b.1951), who had studied ethnolinguistics at Paris’s highly selective École pratique des hautes études in the 1970s, became the first Nigerien woman filmmaker with her series of five documentaries, Baabu Banza/Nothing is Thrown Away (1984), Falaw/Aluminium (1985), Toukou/Barrels (1986), Katako/Boards (1987) and Hadiza and Kalia (1994). Hima’s documentaries observe the skilled artisanal work carried out on certain objects and materials (used tyres, aluminium, barrels and boards), and their French-language commentaries, narrated by Hima herself, detail the processes employed by the artisans, who also describe and explain their work in their own language(s). Her first film Baabu Banza/Nothing is Thrown Away formed part of the PhD in anthropology Hima gained at the University of Paris X in 1989. Hima’s small but expert set of documentaries constitute a vital piece of national heritage only known outside Niger via occasional copies deposited in archives, even if they have regularly been broadcast on Nigerien TV, and although she is routinely mentioned in anthologies of articles on African cinema and finds a place in dictionaries of women’s filmmaking, little or no consideration seems to have been given to the films themselves, which merit comparison with Rouch’s extensive work in anthropological documentary. By offering an account of Baabu Banza/Nothing is Thrown Away that compares it with certain of Rouch’s films and (re)evaluates it against them, this essay will seek to remedy the oblivion into which the work of pioneering African women filmmakers such as Hima threatens to fall.