I Am Not a Witch director Rungano Nyoni: We find humour in bleak things

The filmmaker speaks to Rosamund Urwin about tackling dark themes on her debut feature
A bewitching watch: Rungano Nyoni's new film tackles misogyny and witchcraft in modern Zambia
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures L
Rosamund Urwin12 October 2017

The director Rungano Nyoni is telling me how women she met ended up in a Ghanaian camp for witches. “A woman had been fetching water and dropped the pail after walking miles; when she got home, she accused another woman of causing it by witchcraft,” she says. “Others were accused because of someone’s dream; another after a kid got sick.”

Nyoni, 35, lived in this camp for a month as research for her film, I Am Not a Witch, which is screened as part of the London Film Festival’s First Feature competition this week. What surprised her about the women — all older than 60 — was how “ordinary” they seemed: “I thought they might have a mental illness. Instead, they were super-independent.

"Some think they were accused because they started a business and someone said ‘you’ve got this fortune because of witchcraft’. And Ghana is patriarchal — you can’t even own land without a man. So as soon as you become a widow, you are open to someone — even family — accusing you to take your house.”

When she arrived at the camp, Nyoni had been prepared to “pack it in and find a hotel” if necessary. But she found it was like “an ordinary African village — it even had toilets” except the huts (donated by an NGO) were metal, so became ovens in the Ghanaian sun.

Her initial inspiration for the film — which tells the story of nine-year-old Shula, who is exiled to a similar camp in Zambia — came from a fascination with “the rules imposed on other humans, and how we collude in them, even though they’re absurd”. It’s a family trait to question customs. Nyoni’s grandmother lived under British colonial rule in Northern Rhodesia (before Zambian independence), where mixed-race relationships were banned, yet Nyoni’s grandfather is Spanish. He was deported when the relationship was discovered, and her grandmother then took a Dutch lover. She also used to fix trucks and was arrested for wearing trousers while working: “I thought how brave she was, and how easily most of us conform to societal rules.”

Nyoni is Zambian-born but her family moved to Cardiff when she was eight. She went to Hockerill boarding school, with her mother — then a cleaner — paying just £15 a month for her place.

After school, Nyoni wanted to act, studying at Central Saint Martins, before realising she was too shy for the screen: “Directors would complain that I’d move away from the camera,” she laughs. So she taught herself to edit and began making shorts. Her name, appropriately, means “story-teller”.

The research trip to Ghana was paid for by the BFI Network with the National Lottery — a welcome surprise: “I didn’t think I could get funding from Britain to make this film, because it’s not very British.” She feels it was a brave film for them to fund: “African films that you see internationally tend to be a certain type because the people picking them are European, so you have to have a sense of what they like. I got rejected from other funding because ‘it isn’t very African’.”

While making it, her biggest struggle was finding a girl to play Shula. Nyoni’s husband was the location manager (“I know it sounds awful, but he was the only one we could afford”) and had taken stills in northern Zambia that happened to feature a girl, Maggie Mulubwa, playing. “She looked startling.”

Although she auditioned another 1,000 girls, Nyoni kept thinking of this girl. Two weeks before shooting started, they launched a search for her, calling in a local tribal chief who’d been in the Zambian air force. His advice was to “ask everyone, even the drunk on the street”. Eventually, Mulubwa was found and brought to the set.

“She was very shy, but she told me later it was because she was scared,” Nyoni recalls. “Villagers had told her not to come because we would kill her — cut her up and use her for witchcraft. She still came because she hoped we would send her to school. She didn’t know it was a film.”

​Mulubwa couldn’t read and had never attended school, but the BFI will now fund her education. “Now she’s cheeky. She doesn’t shut up.” Mulubwa was flown in for the Cannes screening, having never before stepped on a plane. “She was such a village girl — even for a Zambian. No one knew when she was born, so she had to pick a birthday for her passport.”

One of the themes explored in the film is the tension between the modern and the mystic. “Zambia is a hotpot. There are a lot of witch accusations in Lusaka — and the police deal with them. They bring people in and interrogate them.”

The film seems ambivalent about witchcraft, neither mocking it, nor condoning it. “I don’t know where the truth lies — maybe people can practise black magic to cause harm. The only fact I know is that it is misogynistic, exploitative.”

Still from I Am Not a Witch

She thinks the obsession with witches stems from a fear of female power. “Men are threatened by women. It’s the idea of being threatened by something and wanting to destroy it.”

So these women — often vulnerable women such as widows — become scapegoats for society’s ills. “What places [with witch camps] had in common is that they all experienced drought badly. It’s the same in winter in Europe [in the past] — when food was scarce, witch accusations occurred.”

On screen, you see the “witches” being treated like zoo animals. Tourists take photos, while a guide makes up stories, claiming that the women would fly away and kill, were it not for ribbons tying them down. “I was interested in exploring the idea of oppression, and the way we collude in it,” Nyoni explains. “That’s why it’s a ribbon, not a chain. The woman can escape any time; they just have to cut it. And everyone else colludes — no one’s blameless.”

She includes herself here. “The tourist scene is also a judgment on me. In one of the camps, I asked women if I could take a picture, and they said ‘everyone takes pictures, and they just leave’. I’m that. I was there to write a script and leave, while these women’s lives continue.”

Despite the subject, the film is funny. Nyoni says it is injected with Zambian humour, which can seem cruel to outsiders. “In Zambia, it’s impossible to punch down — you punch across. We find humour in bleak things. At a Zambian funeral, people joke. They say: ‘Is this corpse bloated? He looks fat’. It’s our way of dealing with tragedy. When the HIV epidemic was huge, I’d go to a funeral in the summer holidays once every two weeks.”

Nyoni says audiences have struggled with whether they should laugh. After one screening, black audience members expressed disquiet on Twitter that white people were laughing. “I thought maybe I should segregate my screenings!”

She pauses, contemplatively. “I wanted to communicate Zambian humour. I didn’t want it to be laughing at beliefs, but the problem with images of Africa is that immediately the reaction goes to pity. It’s trying to break that — I chose humour to do it.”

I Am Not a Witch is screened as part of the London Film Festival tonight (October 12), Saturday and Sunday, and is on general release from October 19

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in