French and Francophone Studies professor Cherif Keita has spent more than a decade of his life researching the life of John Dube (1871-1946), the first president of South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC). “When I visited South Africa for the first time in January 1999,” Keita said,“I realized the extent to which Apartheid, as the most violent form of European colonialism, had robbed Africans of their sense of pride and self-worth.” For this reason, Keita said, he turned to film-making “to dig into the past and bring to Africans of today the models of positive leadership that, as a people, we are sorely lacking right now on the continent.”
In 2005, Keita presented his research to the public by directing and producing a feature-length award-winning documentary about Dube’s life and his education in the US called Oberlin-Inanda: The Life and Times of John L. Dube. Keita followed his first film with Cemetery Stories: A Rebel Missionary in South Africa (2009), another documentary about Dube. In this film, Keita traced the connection between the politician and William and Ida Wilcox, Christian missionaries from Northfield, MN who were deported, penniless, from South Africa in 1918 for speaking out against injustice there, and who have been posthumously honored by the South African government in 2009 for their 38 years of activism.
Most recently, Keita has been working on Remembering Nokutela, a third documentary film focused on the woman who became John Dube’s first wife, Nokutela Mdima (1873-1917), a brilliant educator, seamstress, singer and music composer. Nokutela’s most notable contribution was the Zulu Song Book she co-authored with John Dube in 1911 for the Ohlange Institute, a trailblazing industrial education school founded by the Dubes in 1900. Through this song book and their school choir, Nokutela was responsible for popularizing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfika, the song that became the ANC’s anthem and a popular hymn that was as meaningful for the anti-Apartheid movement as “We Shall Overcome” was to the American civil rights movement. Despite her work for the people of South Africa, Nokutela’s legacy has been largely forgotten until Keita decided to uncover it. Remembering Nokutela will premier at Carleton on February 17, 2013.