Dakan

Dakan

Plot:

Manga and Sory are two young men in love with each other. Manga tells his widowed mother of the relationship, and Sory tells his father. Both parents forbid their sons to see each other again. Sory marries and has a child. Manga's mother turns to witchcraft to cure her son, and he unsuccessfully undergoes a lengthy form of aversion therapy. He meets and becomes engaged to a white woman called Oumou. Both men try to make their heterosexual relationships work but are ultimately drawn back to each other. Manga's mother eventually gives her blessing to the pair and the end of the film sees Sory and Manga driving off together towards an uncertain future.

Causing uproar in Guinea 29 years ago, Dakan has been hailed as the first West African film to tackle same-sex love. Yet its director would never make another movie, and its legacy has been a warning for other filmmakers.

Causing uproar in Guinea 29 years ago, Dakan has been hailed as the first West African film to tackle same-sex love. Yet its director would never make another feature film, and its legacy has been a warning for other filmmakers.

7 March 2022

By Chrystel Oloukoï

Dakan (1997) (With English Subtitles)

A high-angle camera zooms in on Manga and Sory, two high-school boys kissing passionately at night in a sulphurous red convertible car in Conakry, Guinea. The music is late Guinean singer Sory Kandia Kouyaté’s ‘Toutou Diarra’. This is the opening scene of Mohamed Camara’s Dakan (1997). It’s unforgettable in its heralding of night-time as a site of transgressive queer possibility, and for its bold pairing of a homoerotic encounter with a classic Mande song to the memory of great warriors of the region’s precolonial past.

Hailed as the first West African film to explore homosexuality, Dakan (‘destiny’ in Mandinka) premiered at Cannes in 1997, where it faced a mix of fiery rejection and fascination – both of which were to accompany the film for a long time to come. Camara often recalls how Djibril Diop Mambéty (Touki Bouki, 1973; Hyenas, 1992), a veteran of African cinema, walked out of the film’s press conference stating: “You can be sure that your career is over, but in a hundred years, people will still talk about you.”

The film had already barely come into being when its subversive theme led to the government withdrawing financial support. It made finding actors difficult. Camara’s own brother had to play Manga, while he himself acted as Sory’s father.

Poster for Dakan (1997)

Screenings were a risky business. Dakan was shown at the 1999 FESPACO, having lived a full life on European and North American festival circuits already. As Beti Ellerson notes, the film’s theme enabled it to find a public outside of the usual viewership of African cinema, in particular in a number of independent and LGBT-themed festivals in the era of New Queer Cinema.

The film starkly divided audiences. Black, queer, continental and diasporic audiences from Soweto to Washington DC were enthralled. But in the filmmaker’s home country, it became the object of a national controversy. In a 2019 interview for AfroQueer podcast, Camara recollects changing hotels every day and leaving before the end of screenings to avoid potential violence.

Yet, Dakan wasn’t Camara’s first brush with public hostility. The charged themes of his previous short films – incest in Denko (1993) and child suicide in Minka (1994) – revealed his keen interest in familial dramas and the tension between social expectations and individual desires. What could be mistaken for a taste for the sensational was a deep desire to humanise complex social issues.

Aside from fascination and vilification, Dakan also met with frustration. Detractors and fans alike wrongly assumed Camara to be gay. They asked questions about the hidden realities of queer life on the continent that the filmmaker couldn’t answer. In both post-screening discussions and reviews, question were raised as to whether the world the film portrayed was even possible. It was, of course. Yet, Camara responded to these queries by speaking out against the realist imperative African filmmakers found themselves confined within. He spoke more in favour of creative individuality. His was a work of art, not a testament of existence nor an anthropological document.

The rhetoric had limitations, but it resonated in the context of a Black cinema often corralled into documentation by former colonial powers and newly independent governments alike. Camara belonged to a generation of Guinean filmmakers who were disenchanted with the overly didactic cinema of Syli-Cinema, Guinea’s Ministry of Information film unit under Sékou Touré’s Marxist and Pan-Africanist regime.

Mambéty aside, few could have predicted that Camara’s filmmaking career would end so abruptly. Since Denko won several prestigious prizes, Camara had embarked on his first feature, Dakan, as a director full of promise. But, 29 years later, he hasn’t been able to make another feature film.