Written by Nick Smelser and Jordan Bailey
Africa is often shown in a negative light. The war, genocide and disease are all that people usually see when they are shown videos of Africa. Though these are issues, and they are true, they do not define Africa. Africa is a beautiful place, and this summer four college students are taking video cameras to Mozambique to show Africa in a new light, through the eyes of the Yao, a group of people united by ethnicity and common language who live in Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania.
Harding students Tyler Jones, Nick Michael and Kelsey Sherrod will be leaving in early June with Samford University student Maribeth Browning to head to northern Mozambique, an area that has been victim to 30 years of war.
“We’ve become numb to a lot of the images that have come out of Africa,” Jones said, “And unfortunately the people holding the camera have been white, western journalists.”
The group will be meeting up with current visiting missionaries Kyle and Ginger Holton. Kyle and Ginger and their children Asher, Eli and Eden will return at the end of May to live in Mozambique and continue their work with the Yao in Nomba Village.
The Holtons run a non-profit organization and resource center called Malo Ga Kujilana, which means “place of reconciliation” in the local language, Chiyao. Rusty and Anne Caldwell founded Malo Ga Kujilana with the Holtons, and both families will host the film group.
Jones, Michael, Sherrod and Browning call their effort the Kujilana Project. The project seeks change by putting the cameras in the hands of the Africans and letting them tell their story.
“You’ve heard of participatory journalism, you know, integrating into a culture to give your journalism context,” Michael said. “The twist here is that Africans will be participating in our journalism. We’ll be handing them our cameras and saying ‘Take it. You tell your own story. We are not qualified to tell it for you.'”
Jones said the team hopes that through the film they will offer Africans a unique way to tie themselves back to the way things once were. They want to empower Africans through the ownership of their image.
The team said they plan to spend a week getting to know the Yao once they get to Mozambique, give four or five people cameras, journey into the bush and find some elders who have lived through the wars. They are then going to let Africans film the stories of elders who remember the early times of Mozambique and take these stories back to the villages to show to the tribes.
According to Michael, the stories will serve as the start-up in a video library, which will archive village events and oral history.
“It’s time that Africa is allowed to speak for herself,” Jones said. “This project isn’t about us. We just want to offer a microphone. Because film serves as a natural bridge for oral cultures to preserve their meaning as globalization spreads.”
Each member of the team raised money to get to Africa through the Global Outreach Internship at Harding, so all of them are Harding interns. They are now in the process of appealing to churches and individual donors to raise $10,000 so they can make, produce and advertise the film.
The team has developed a multimedia approach to fundraising: they have a blog, Web site, Twitter page, Facebook group and Flickr album online, as well as a PayPal account. Links to other media like the trailer they filmed and brochures they designed to advertise the project are also available through the Web site, Kujilana.com.
Something people will notice when they look at the team is a change from many mission teams: none of them are Bible majors. Jones is a political science major, Michael and Sherrod are English majors and Browning is a journalism major.
Michael said they want to show that every profession can do mission work. The team seeks to use their talents to fill a specific need of the people of Africa in a holistic way.
“This says we care about more than filling your belly or planting your fields,” Michael said. “Those are important, but so is your imagination. Creativity is a commodity, too. When people can film their own stories, they can create their own meaning. And that’s something to get excited about.”
