Ni chaines, ni maitres – A Must-See Film
28.09.2024
There is a beautifully made film showing right now in the cinemas of Mauritius about the runaway slave settlement at Le Morne. It is being launched simultaneously in Mauritius and France, and also in other countries. The film can proudly join important works world-wide on slavery.
The film Ni chaines, ni maitres sensitively directed by Simon Moutaïrou, born in France to parents from Benin. He also wrote the script. The film is a must-see. The actors in it are Thiandoum Anna Diakhere as the enslaved young woman Mati who escapes and runs away, Ibrahima M’Baye as her father Massamba in his quest to find her, and Camille Cottin as the notorious runaway slave capturer Mme La Victoire, Mauritius’ first woman to be granted divorce – a character that actually existed in Mauritius. All three actors have a commanding presence in the film.
The narrative takes up the orally transmitted myth of Le Morne, first noted perhaps in 1773 by Bernardin de St. Pierre in his Voyage a L’Ile de France.
While the film is historically reliable and well-researched, set in the reality of 1759 during the French period, right in the middle of Mauritius’ slavery history, it also portrays, with uncanny emotional depth, the inner spiritual life of the characters living under the draconian conditions of slavery. The film shows the different ways that slaves, nurtured by their own humanity, in turn maintained their humanity – both as individual human beings and collectively – gleaning tiny spaces where they could, and did, challenge even the most extreme repression they were forced to endure, in lives of forced labour, labour extracted from them by the owners of private companies that made and sold commodities the slaves produced to the imperial capitalists. This aspect of the film shows us, as we watch it, that today, we too, we who work under conditions of wage-slavery, can glean ways to come together to escape our present-day domination. As we watch this film today, we think of the Palestinians in Gaza and how they have shown us that they, too, can and do. We, like the self-emancipated slaves, may be a small minority, and we, like the people of Gaza may be out-gunned by an Israeli army and air force, but we, too, can do it.
The film, at another level, clearly exposes how the process of enslaving humans for private profit was made possible by the totality of organs of the State at the time, including the French monarchy, the laws of the land in France and its colonies, while all the horrors are meanwhile justified as god-ordained, justified ideologically by the Catholic Church, as well as by “the family” as an institution – the “we have to make our living” argument. At another level and in a subtle way, the film reminds us how, today, the slaughter of Palestinian women, children and men is possible because of the constant actions of the totality of organs of the Israeli and American States, with daily justification by much of the media and even with pretentions to the military occupation and the killing being god-ordained. The film helps us pose the question of how we can manage to oppose this domination, even today.
It is a fine film in all these ways – and it also shows the beauty of the people, the beauty of the South Eastern rivulets in Mauritius, and the pride and stark stance of Le Morne mountain against the whole of the colonial empires that invaded Mauritius – the Dutch, then the French, then the British. And how it becomes the country of the people who live in it, love in it, and make it humane.
This film is so good it can join the best of the films on slavery that I have seen. It can sit alongside The Last Supper (La Ultima Sena directed by Tomas Gutteriez Alea) about a runaway slave and a slave rebellion in Haiti and set at the very same time in history – the 1750s. This film begins with the decision of religious plantation owner to include 12 slaves for Good Friday eve dinner as Jesus had on the eve of his crucifixion. Then the second film worth watching “La controverse de Valladolid” directed by Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe filmed in 1990, with Jean-Pierre Marielle, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Jean Carmet, about a debate in the Catholic church in 1550 as to whether Native Americans were to be considered “human” and, while the verdict was yes, there was the hideous corollary that Africans, by contrast, were not. The third film worth mentioning is Queimada (1969) later marketed under the title “Burn!” directed by Gillo Pontecorvo and starring Marlon Brando, a more mainstream film which highlights not just a slave rebellion but also the interests of the capitalist class in fomenting the rebellion against the reactionary feudal classes that were a barrier to their potential profits.
And these films join with the brilliant classic of history, written in literary prose, The Black Jacobins by Trinidadian activist-writer C.L.R. James about the Haitian revolution of 1791-1804, in parallel with the French revolution.
The film Ni chaines, ni maitres in the Mauritian context, will join works as different as Alexandre Dumas’ novel Georges published in 1843 about a slave revolt in Mauritius, the Rajni Lallah 2011 composition sung by Joelle Hoseiny called“Ana” in memory of the slave rebel Ana de Bengal who led an uprising for which she was hanged by the Dutch colonizers, Roger Moss’s prose poem Le Morne/Lemorn published by LPT as a booklet in 2000 and produced in play-reading form by with Ashish Beesoondial, Pascal Nadal and Stephanie Theodore at Ledikasyon pu Travayer in 2009, and even join works like the statue in Cape Town to the memory of Louis van Mauritius, the Mauritian-born slave who led the big slave rebellion in the Cape in 1808. For the record, Louis, who worked as a slave in tailoring and also wine-selling in Cape Town and was thus well educated about world events in general, met two Irishmen James Hooper and Michael Kelly, who confirmed that slavery had been outlawed in Europe and the Americas. Louis and the two Irishmen, joined by four slaves Jeptha of Batavia, Cupido of Java, Abraham van der Kaap and Adonis, an unnamed Indian slave and two unnamed Khoikhoi men, led 350 slaves in an uprising. Five of the leaders were executed. (South African History on Line -- just google “Louis van Mauritius”.)
All this to say, don’t miss the film.
Lindsey Collen, for LALIT
