Teza

“Teza,” Haile Gerima’s award winning film, is the kind of cinema that is a beginning. It will summon the viewer to want to know more, but most of all, to understand the story’s larger historical questions. You will witness early on that Gerima is speaking to the African Diaspora in “Teza” because the issues in “Teza” are of that world.

“Through ‘Teza,’” Gerima wrote recently, “I have the opportunity to tell a story about Africans who find their lives, and subsequently their psyches, dislocated by a series of complicated and unforeseen historical circumstances.” Like in Gerima’s 1993 classic, “Sankofa,” the first film to approach the issue of African slavery in the west with honesty, the forces at the heart of “Teza” transcend the personal drama of the film and ponder history. 

“Teza” finds Anberber, a middle aged native Ethiopian returning home from Europe (Germany) to his village in Ethiopia after being away for years. He is scarred emotionally and physically, and as Gerima notes is seeking to “reconcile with a past…that he can’t easily forget…” The film is smothered in the culture and history of Gerima’s Ethiopia throughout and this provides an intense juxtaposition for Anberber’s anguish revealed religiously through flashback.

Anberber, a beloved figure in his village, experienced torment, humiliation, and personal loss at the hands of the government when he was in Ethiopia trying to serve the rural poor as a doctor before he departed. But then in Germany, the exile nation, Anberber also faces violence (racial violence) and he is thereafter seemingly in no man’s land: there is no solace abroad, and his own country is locked in an incomprehensible struggle. His life is disruption, but he is a man seeking to put his life back together, and to a certain degree, to put Ethiopia back together slowly, along with everyone else despite the impossibility of the task.

Beneath this thickly woven tale; however, is the real story, or more appropriately, Gerima’s vision: “independent cinema” that explores themes of “identity, liberation, and remembrance…” Thus, “Teza” is universal but also overtly African in what it seems to reveal: the struggle against western imperialism, the importance of tradition, and the intersection of these forces.

The film becomes like Ali Mazrui’s “The Africans,” fusing religion, culture and history, and the impact of the west upon Africa (in this case, one country) into one solid statement. Like “The Africans,” “Teza” is ongoing tragedy. The world and Ethiopians largely misunderstand the damage done to the country across the diaspora as a result of their own mistakes and choices and the various battles with the west that are not yet concluded.

It is engaging to view and experience a film that explores these areas considering they are seldom considered, especially so in America, amongst individuals of African descent. As Gerima notes of his vision: “The history, culture, and socio-economic well being of all peoples of African descent is my primary concern, but above all the preservation of their humanity is what motivates me as a filmmaker.”

Gerima has delivered a film that accomplishes his goal but also tells an anguishing personal tale of a man who simply wants to be a man.