C. S. Nicholson
A family in West Africa recounts how their ancestor discovered European explorers—to a European film crew. We’re allowed to see how this encounter is still remembered ritually. But do all the claims about the historic event bear a closer look? And to which degree can we trust the filmmaker’s white gaze? This short documentary explores how pride and conscience can affect collective memory.
CREDITS
Featuring: Mitó Kpatènon Mijlèhounkpon Mènouéwa | Roger Soulé Kpatènon | Avocèvouyè Akéhintô Zounvi
Director/producer: C. S. Nicholson
Cinematographer/editor: Peder Bratterud
Composer/sound recordist: Stian Kjelstad Granmo
Location sound: Øyvind Stjern | Sindre Skollevoll
Sound design: Anna Nilsson
Grade: Jens Valberg
Poster design: Eirik Aven Sætre
Genre: Nonfiction short
Year: 2022
Running time: 25 mins.
Countries: Norway, Benin
Original languages: Fon | Xweda
AWARDS
DISHONORABLE MENTION | Norwegian Short Film Festival
SPECIAL JURY PRIZE | Apricot Tree International Documentary Film Festival
BEST SHORT DOCUMENTARY | Black Star International Film Festival
INTERNATIONAL SHORTS COMPETITION WINNER | OKO International Ethnographic Film Festival
BEST INTERNATIONAL SHORT DOCUMENTARY | Jakarta Independent Film Festival
BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT FILM | Bahia Independent Cinema Festival
BEST EUROPEAN SHORT | Cittador International Film Festival
LIMINA COMPETITION WINNER | Ribalta Experimental Film Festival
BEST DOCUMENTARY | Close:Up San Francisco Short Film Festival
MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA WINNER | ’24 GIFF.Docu
BEST SHORT DOCUMENTARY | Japan Indies Film Festival
BEST ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK | Palma Film Festival
SCREENINGS
2022
Fotografihuset (Norway)
The 2nd Mirage—Art of the Real Film Festival (Norway)
2023
The 35th Minimalen Short Film Festival (Norway)
The 27th Norwegian Documentary Film Festival (Norway)
The 46th Norwegian Short Film Festival (Norway)
The 26th Revelation Perth International Film Festival (Australia)
The 1st Experimental Brasil (Brazil)
The 5th Accra Indie Filmfest (Ghana)
The 9th Apricot Tree International Documentary Film Festival (Armenia)
The 30th Chicago Underground Film Festival (USA)
The 8th Black Star International Film Festival (Ghana)
The 11th Nordic/Docs (Norway)
The 21st Festival international Signes du nuit—Paris (France)
The 4th OKO International Ethnographic Film Festival (Ukraine/Bulgaria)
The 19th Festival Transterritorial de Cine Underground (Argentina)
The 5th Black History Month Norway (Norway)
The 18th Tacoma Film Festival (USA)
The 6th Screaming Ostrich International Film Festival (USA)
The 8th Festival de Cine Independiente de Salto (Uruguay)
The 12th Dharamshala International Film Festival (India)
The 4th Jakarta Independent Film Festival (Indonesia)
The 9th Bahia Independent Cinema Festival (Brazil)
The 20th Abuja International Film Festival (Nigeria)
The 3rd DjârFogo International Film Festival (Cape Verde)
The 4th Nettverk for kunstnerisk film (Norway)
The 7th Festival internazionale Segni della notte—Urbino (Italy)
The 5th Fotogenia—Festival Internacional de Cinepoesía y Narrativas Divergentes (Mexico)
The 5th Benin City Film Festival (Nigeria)
The 2nd Cittador International Film Festival (Austria)
2024
The 44th Brussels Independent Film Festival (Belgium)
The 5th Budapest Independent Film Festival (Hungary)
The 10th Festival de Largos y Cortos de Santiago (Chile)
The 4th Ribalta Experimental Film Festival (Italy)
The 5th Close:Up San Francisco Short Film Festival (USA)
The 1st CinéVesture International Film Festival (India)
The 1st Beach House African Short Film Festival (Nigeria)
The 4th Festival International des Films Identitaires et Solidaires (Benin)
The 4th Genesis International Film Festival (China/Greece/Russia/Reunion/Chile/Brazil/India/Turkey)
The 6th Les Rimbaud du Cinéma (France)
The 9th Boston Short Film Festival (USA)
The 2nd Under Berlin Film Festival (Germany)
The 7th Japan Indies Film Festival (Japan)
The 3rd Palma Film Festival (Spain)
REVIEWS
INTERVIEWS
SOUNDTRACK
'The Discoverer of the Discoverers' offers an immersive experience, its images bathed in music from start to finish. The soundtrack, so central to the experience, was engineered by Stian Kjelstad Granmo in a WWII bunker built by Polish POWs during the German occupation of Norway. Stian, a producer, multi-instrumentalist and member of post-rock duo Locult, tweaked sounds and played overdubs to embellish crude demo loops I’d constructed from various historic source materials.
As 'The Discoverer of the Discoverers' in large part deals with history, its original motion picture soundtrack uses samples designed to instil in the audience a general feeling of distant past. Since wax cylinder and vintage gramophone recordings crackle and pop with a surface noise reminiscent of bygone eras, my hope was that samples of these would convey a sense of history.
Encounters between West Africa and Western Europe c. 1548 are inseparable from the so-called New World and the colonies that would soon grow from Europe’s twin obsessions of religious zealotry and desperate greed. Yet both cause and effect of the Atlantic slave trade—Europe and the Americas—are largely missing from 'The Discoverer of the Discoverers', the film having been shot entirely on location in Benin. So in scoring the short, to emphasise Europe I chose to draw from the wellspring of my cultural heritage. As other European filmmakers in Africa before me, my gaze too comes from a decidedly white vantage point. Instead of masking this, I set about deconstructing Western classical music, hoping to dislodge from its clichéd, self-satisfied notions of civilisation precisely what any notion of 'civilisation' tries so desperately, but always vainly, to escape: violent greed born of a fear of nature.
The notion of a first encounter between previously unfamiliar worlds brought to mind 2001: A Space Odyssey—specifically its use of György Ligeti’s otherworldly micropolyphony. But Ligeti composed those awe-inducing, ecstatically terrifying pieces more than 400 years after the first Portuguese are said to have landed at Kpatè’s feet. By that time, Europe’s colonial grip was rapidly loosening. So I turned to what I thought might be Ligeti’s most significant influence: Italian composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, musical darling of Renaissance Europe.
Not only a visionary artist whose polyphonic choral compositions encapsulate the intertwined and ever-changing flow of conflicting emotions, Palestrina was alive when Kpatè’s descendants say their ancestor first discovered Portuguese discoverers. So vintage recordings of three of his works show up in mangled, fragmented or looped form at various points in 'The Discoverer of the Discoverers'.
Palestrina was Italian. Although Italy gave the world what we might call the discoverers’ discoverer—Christopher Columbus—and many early investors in the Atlantic slave trade were Italian (particularly Venetian), a Portuguese composer would fit the bill even better. I could hardly believe my luck, then, when research led me to 'the Musician King': Not only did King John IV rule the Portuguese Empire from 1640 to 1656, he also wrote books (one of them in defence of Palestrina, who had gone out of style by then) and composed music. Listen intently and strains may perhaps be discerned, somewhere along 'The Discoverer of the Discoverers'’s 25 minutes, of 'Crux fidelis', a composition at times attributed to the king. (John IV’s manuscript seems to be lost, and the sheet music allegedly written by him has been judged by some experts to be an invented 'reconstruction' from the 1800s.)
In one scene in the film, a direct descendant of Kpatè—Mitó Kpatènon Mijlèhounkpon Mènouéwa—is enstooled as head of the Kpatènon and Ahombakla families. Dignitaries eat from china said to have been given to their ancestors by the Portuguese 469 years previously. For this sequence, a loop of Portuguese court music seemed to make sense. The stately, regal cembalo accompanying the ceremony comes courtesy of an archival recording of a composition written in the second half of the 1700s. Its composer—João de Sousa Carvalho—served as music teacher to the Portuguese royal family.
Africa was not only the obsession of kings, explorers, profiteers and other will-to-power types. Many European artists, as well, were fascinated by the discoverers’ new frontier. Which is why the film’s soundtrack samples recordings, from the early 1900s, of German composer Giacomo Meyerbeer’s final opera—specifically the scene that reenacts Vasco da Gama’s first sighting of the West African coast, somewhere along the Bight of Benin.
The soundtrack features various other samples of vintage recordings as well: A pope reciting the Hail Mary echoes the religious justification that underpinned Europe’s colonial project. Chinese court music—a genre dating as far back as 618, making it the oldest surviving court music in the world—provides the soundtrack to the sailors’ gifts of fine china depicting Far Eastearn motifs. And various recordings from what was once Portuguese possessions in South America bring 'the New World' into the mix: Field recordings of Gbè folk music carried over the Atlantic, a vintage studio rendition of Antônio Carlos Gomes’ Brazilian opera The Slave, and more.
Last, but certainly not least, there’s the song sung by Kpatènon family griot, Mr Avocèvouyè Akéhintô Zounvi, on location for the film’s shoot. But that song merits its own page.
- C. S. Nicholson
THE SOUNDTRACK E.P. IS AVAILABLE HERE
RESEARCH FOR THE FILM
The story goes something like this: One day in 1548, in the Kingdom of Whydah, on the coast where the Atlantic Ocean bends to the West African landmass, the hunter Kpatè and his brother (some say friend) Zingbô go to the beach to catch crabs. Out on the horizon something entirely new is discovered: A boat carrying something ruddy and human-like, looking back on the beach through a camera, or perhaps binoculars. This boat-being on the ocean is clearly an incarnation of Zo, god of fire. At least according to Zingbô, who immediately takes flight in a slapstick of cowardice.
Kpatè, meanwhile, being made of braver stuff, decides to stay and draw the ship’s attention. This author of a destiny yet unknown makes a bonfire for Zingbô’s 'fire god'. To really make sure he catches the ship’s attention, Kpatè then removes the raffia covering his waist, grabs a long stick, and fashions a flag. Then he starts waving it across waves that, for the longest time, separated continents.
This, then, is how Europeans are discovered by a citizen of Whydah: drawn in by the long pole of a naked man, standing right there on the beach, fearlessly waiting for what will soon turn out not to be gods at all, but rather sunburnt seamen from a far-away kingdom called Portugal. These explorers, or maybe merchants, are the vanguard of other 'zojɛ̀àgě'. (Lit. 'Zo coming ashore', the first noun for such pinkish people.) First the French, then the Dutch, the British, and so on. And with them Whydah, and subsequently Dahomey, then finally the Republic of Benin shall all be graced with trade, wealth and civilisation. All thanks to one fearless man: Kpatè, hunter of gods burnt by the sun, like so many Icaruses.
Or something like that. Although certain details have changed with time, the central elements of this account have been passed down through successive generations of Kpatè’s descendants, the Kpatènons*, in the coastal town of Ouidah. The short film 'The Discoverer of the Discoverers' doesn’t try to get to the bottom of what actually happened during this historic (by some accounts first) encounter between West Africans and Europeans. Instead, it focuses on how the event is remembered today. 'The Discoverer of the Discoverers' is not a factual documentary, but rather a collective dream about history. Like the end credits state, somewhat unhelpfully: 'Some of the claims made in this film are not supported by the historical record or contemporary evidence.'
The story, as presented in the film, is drawn from oral tradition. To unravel what we can and cannot say about 'what really occurred' with any measure of conviction, it might be useful to turn to historical literature dealing with West Africa’s connections with Europe.
The Known Knowns
In 1755, on the morning of All Saints’ Day, Lisbon suffered a 7.7 magnitude earthquake. Ribeira Palace, the residence of Portuguese kings since the early 1500s, also housed the Portuguese Guinea Company. This corporation by royal charter managed the empire’s commerce with West Africa. The palace’s 70,000-volume library was wiped out by the earthquake, fires and ensuing tsunami. Perhaps the Portuguese Guinea Company’s archives were likewise lost to waves, flames and fresh abyss? Whatever the case, no log book or written account of any Portuguese sailors’ first encounter with the people of Whydah seems to have survived.
We do know that the first Europeans to explore the Bight of Benin were the Portuguese, beginning in 1472. A decade later, they erected a trade fort on the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). By the second half of the 1500s, the Portuguese were trading regularly at Hulagan, the kingdom of 'the Popos'. (Currently known as Grand-Popo.) (Law, p. 29) Hulagan is less than 50 kms from Kpatè’s hometown, Ouidah. Indeed, in an account of the family tradition published in 1959, an elder descended from Kpatè told local historian Casimir Agbo that his ancestor already knew about the European presence in Hulagan before making contact with the Portuguese ship:
Aja**, the Whydahs’ point of origin, had long maintained relations with the various countries of the Popos, where the Whydahs had already made contact with Europeans. ... One day Kpatè, accompanied by a comrade called Zingbô, was chasing land crabs in the vicinity of Ouidah beach. ... Suddenly, on the ocean, they saw a ship passing quietly. Zingbô had never seen one, as for Kpatè, he was already aware of both ships and Europeans, as he once frequented the countries of the Popos prior to the emigration of his tribe. (Agbo, p. 17, translated)
So the current tradition recorded in 'The Discoverer of the Discoverers'—that Kpatè was the first sub-Saharan to ever encounter Europeans on the African continent—seems to be a fairly recent embellishment of the oral history. But a detail that hasn’t changed since Agbo first published the Kpatènon family’s oral history 64 years ago, is the supposed year of Kpatè’s discovery of Portuguese discoverers: 1548.
The Year of the Donkey
1548 isn’t the only proposed date for the first European landing at Ouidah. In the 1910s, the town’s French colonial administrator, Marcel Gavoy, proposed that Kpatè would’ve welcomed the Portuguese in 1580. According to historian Robin Law, however, Gavoy’s guesstimate appears to have been based on a mathematical error. (Law, pp. 24-25) To further complicate matters, the local ruler to whom Kpatè is said to have led the Portuguese—King Kpassè—is thought to have reigned from around 1620 to about 1640. To make pinpointing a date even more befuddling, in 1625 a Portuguese ship was captured by Dutch pirates, probably off Ouidah. Which would suggest that Kpatè’s discovery had already taken place. (Law, p. 30) The facts, then, cannot quite confirm nor deny any of the proposed dates.
What the facts do make clear is that not all particulars of the various versions of Kpatènon family lore can hold true all at once. If the year was 1548, the king couldn’t have been Kpassè, etc. etc.
Tradition further states that Kpatè discovered Europeans twice. The second story is practically identical to the first, except this time the whites are French. One anecdote recounts a tiff between the Europeans when the Portuguese return, only to find they’ve been superseded by a mötley crüe of Frenchmen:
Annoyed to see himself preceded and supplanted by French traffickers, the Portuguese commander demanded the right of priority in Ouidah. To this end he showed the French the land formerly granted to him by the king of the Whydahs; as proof, he had soil dug from which he took out the stone on which were engraved the date of his first landing and that of the granting of land. (Agbo, p. 20, translated)
Indeed, Portuguese explorers were in the habit of erecting padrões—stone pillars—to mark (or claim) new territory. Perhaps the date 1548 stems from just such a padrão? To the best of my knowledge, however, no stone pillar matching that description has survived in Ouidah.
As for the Kingdom of Whydah, a European trading post was only established there in 1671—a good 123 years after Kpatè is said to have welcomed the first Europeans.
A Hero’s Cult
There seems little reason, however, to doubt the Kpatènon family’s basic claim that it was their ancestor who first welcomed Europeans in the Kingdom of Whydah. In 1864, British soldier (and infamous orientalist-in-disguise with a penchant for measuring penises) Sir Richard Francis Burton published an account of his time in Dahomey. This kingdom had occupied Ouidah since 1727, and Burton makes mention of the locally venerated deity 'Kpate, the first Whydah man who, sighting a ship from his plantation, brought it to anchor by waving a cloth tied to a long pole, and led the captain into the town. Like Triptolemus, he is worshipped as a benefactor to mankind.' (Burton, p. 146)
Here, Burton is referring to a prince from ancient Greece who was said to be among the first priests of the cult of Demeter, goddess of harvest, and Persephone, queen of the Underworld. Prince Triptolemus became deified in Greek mythology as the inventor of agriculture. And indeed, Kpatè has long assumed an elevated place in Ouidah’s pantheon, due to his association with Europe. Law, citing French anthropologist Christian Merlo, writes that the main focus of the veneration of Kpatè shifted in the 1930s. Whereas earlier he had been associated with material gains from the Atlantic slave trade, under French colonial rule Kpatè was celebrated as 'the hero of the importation of European civilization'. (Law, p. 14)
Writing about a rare and major ceremonial event in 1948, Casimir Agbo observed that only four cults were allowed to hold processions in Ouidah—and only after the memory of 'the patriarch Kpatè' had been celebrated with a sacrifice of pigs and goats at a feast in his honour. No Voodoo celebration in Ouidah was considered complete without brandy, and so 'tradition requires that Kpatè be honoured ... because it was through his mediation that European importers and civilisers gained access to the land of Whydah and, therefore, to Dahomey.' (Agbo, p. 132, translated)
In 1871, seven years after the soldier Burton published his proto-anthropological travelogue comparing West African religion to Greek mythology—that most Western of navels in which to gaze—the king of Dahomey held an English entomologist hostage. On a whim. For eight months. J. Alfred Skertchly, who found his time as King Glèlè’s forced friend rather pleasant, later published a book on his experiences in Dahomey. In it, he briefly mentions 'Kpate, a canonised Whydah man, who first enticed Europeans to the town. His emblem is a tree stump with a white rag tied round it.' (Skertchly, p. 473)
Souvenirs of Sunburnt Whites
Which brings us to the matter of the relics kept by the ancestral cult of Kpatè. In 'The Discoverer of the Discoverers', various objects are taken out of Ghana Must Go bags (or 'IKEA bags', as they’re known to Westerners). These objects are said to be gifts, brought by returning Portuguese for the man who’d beckoned them to make landfall at Ouidah in the first place. Once the Iberians were told that Kpatè had passed away, the merchant seamen gifted the presents to his family who, or so the story goes, has kept them ever since. They include oil lamps, cutlery and crockery, and are used during ceremonial occasions, such as when a new successor to Kpatè is enstooled.
As far as I know, these relics have never been examined by an expert, so their age and origin don’t appear to have been verified. The oil lamps certainly look very old. As for the china, it is conceivable that Portuguese sailors might have brought plates from the Far East in, say, 1548. Vasco da Gama had established direct trade with Asia when he reached India in 1498. In 1513, Jorge Álvares had made first contact on Chinese soil.
In 'The Discoverer of the Discoverers', several of the cups and dinner plates are shown to have the backstamp, in green, of 'Thuringia'. The oldest porcelain factory in the German state of Thuringia wasn’t established until 1762. As for backstamping, that only 'began with the introduction of porcelain in Europe around 1720.' And these were not green: 'Until around 1820 the stamps were made by hand in blue.' Even the larger dishes with Chinese motifs are painted in a style artistically distinguishable from the earliest china brought to Portugal that are found on display at the Museum of the Orient in Lisbon.
This is not to say that merchant Portuguese sailors never gave Kpatè’s family gifts of lamps, china and cutlery. That some of these items may have been lost, or broken, or stolen, or sold in the past 400 or 500 years hardly requires a suspension of disbelief. Rather than proving the story untrue, perhaps this only helps us understand the nature of time and memory? Our imaginings about the past are intangible. They have no objects. There’s no way of verifying those thoughts, feelings and experiences, even when dates, names or artefacts are on our side. They’re their own fleeting fancy. They could just as well be true as they could be false. Certainly, scientifically dated physical objects from our distant past may serve as props in the stories we make of history. But can they displace the impressions passed down from generation to generation? Are not the academic truths about the distant past powerless in the face of the generalised, accumulated experiences of a community?
History is a science, but the vast majority of people aren’t scientists. Evidence rarely makes entire communities or cultures utterly redefine the myths that undergird their identites. Yet lurking in the uncertainties, in the doubtful claims and negligible inaccuracies, are emotional truths. Things that may not be literally or entirely true, but that point to experiences that were very real nonetheless. The role of collective memory is not to establish the facts, but to maintain what always eluded dates, statistics and objects that you can reach out and touch, even to this day.
* Kpatènon, the surname of Kpatè’s descendants, literally means 'mother (or owner) of Kpatè'. The Kpatènons make up one branch of a wider family called Ahombakla.
** Here, Agbo may be thinking of Aja Tado, a town in present-day Togo that’s considered the ancestral home of the Ajas, forebears of all Gbè-speaking peoples. (E.g. Whydahs, Fons, Gens, Guns, Ewes, et al.) The Kingdom of Tado was an important polity until the late 1400s. In 'The Discoverer of the Discoverers', Kpatènon elder Avocèvouyè Akéhintô Zounvi sings a song that alludes to Dahomey’s invasion and subsequent occupation of Whydah in 1727 until France’s colonial takeover in 1894. In the song, Mr Zounvi sings, 'Dahomeans are children who / waged war, razing Mother's house / They are our grandchildren, / bringing bullets for our destruction.' This is most likely a reference to the Fons of Dahomey attacking the Whydahs, both of whom trace their heritage to the Ajas of Tado.
Bibliography
Agbo, Casimir: Histoire de Ouidah du XVIe au XXe siècle (1959)
Araujo, Ana Lucia: Public Memory of Slavery—Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic (2010)
Burton, Richard F.: Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome. With Notices of the So Called "Amazons," the Grand Customs, the Yearly Customs, the Human Sacrifices, the Present State of the Slave Trade, and the Negro’s Place in Nature, vol. II (London, 1864)
Law, Robin: Ouidah—The Social History of a West African Slaving 'Port' 1727-1892 (Oxford, 2004)
Skertchly, J. A.: Dahomey as It Is | Being a Narrative of Eight Months’ Residence in that Country, with a Full Account of the Notorious Annual Customs, and the Social and Religious Institutions of the Ffons; also an Appendix on Ashantee, and a Glossary of Dahoman Words and Titles (London, 1874)