Like Mother, Like Daughter: Professor Chérif Keïta on connecting past to present in filmmaking
Keïta discusses his filmmaking work in South Africa and a recent connection he made related to it.
Last weekend, I learned through a network of African filmmakers that the film selected by South Africa for the 2025 Academy Awards is Old Righteous Blues, and its director is a young woman named Muneera Sallies. The news got me very excited, because I had the honor of meeting her late mother, Zulfah Otto-Sallies, in 1999 in Cape Town, South Africa. I decided to find Muneera’s contact to tell her that not only did I know her mother, but that she held a special place in my heart for the great inspiration she gave me 25 years ago.
In January 1999, I traveled to South Africa for the first time as the co-leader of an off-campus studies program — Poetry, Performance, and the Politics of Identity in South Africa — with 17 students from Carleton and St. Olaf. It was an opportunity for us to listen to stories about the lives of diverse communities under Apartheid and after Apartheid; in short, to learn about the ways in which diverse identities were redeploying themselves on the landscape of a democratic and multiracial society. We wanted to understand also the role of the arts (traditional and modern music, as well as literature and film) in the long walk to freedom.
It is in that context that we met and listened to several artists of different genres and visited many places of memory across South Africa for a month. One of the artists with whom we spent time was Zulfah, a young and dynamic poet, playwright, and filmmaker from the Cape Malay community. This meeting was a turning point in my personal journey, because she turned me onto filmmaking. Hearing her speak about her commitment to give a voice to her “colored community” and its multiracial and multi-faith identities, I understood the important role that cinema could play both as a vehicle for social activism and for documenting history.
This dynamic woman did not limit her conversation with us to a lecture room; she also took our group to meet her community in Bo-Kaap (Cape Town Heights), an area reserved exclusively for the “colored” and Muslim community during Apartheid. During our exchanges with members of her family, we learned a lot about the epic legal battles waged by the owners of the cute little houses of Bo-Kaap against rich, white land developers who wanted to dislodge them from their historical roots.
Zulfah’s example inspired me to consider filmmaking as a possible outlet for my own passion for history and storytelling. What I was far from suspecting at that time, however, was that through Zulfah, South Africa — this land I was just beginning to discover — was asking me to devote 25 years of my professional career to it.
For the following 15 years after that visit in 1999, I made a trilogy of films about the country’s little-known history, the first of which, Oberlin-Inanda: The Life and Times of John L. Dube (2005, Special Mention from Association Ecrans, Fespaco), was to be included in the South Africa line-up of the 2006 Brasilia International Film Festival, alongside films like Tsotsi (Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film) and Beat the Drum (2005 Fespaco award-winning film about the AIDS crisis in South Africa). My film, the production of which required a deep engagement with communities in Inanda, KwaZulu-Natal, and other parts of South Africa and Swaziland, dealt with the then-little-known story of Reverend John Langalibalele Dube (1871–1946), the Booker T. Washington-inspired educationalist who founded the African National Congress (ANC) in 1912 and served as its first President General for one term, before Nelson Mandela was born.
Having managed to get Muneera’s phone contact, I surprised her with a call. I introduced myself and explained to her my profound gratitude to her late mother. I also congratulated her for her success on the path that her mother inspired me in 1999. It goes without saying that she was deeply moved.
I wish the best of luck to Muneera and her film on their road to the 2025 Oscars.
—Chérif Keïta, William H. Laird Professor of French and the Liberal Arts
- 2022 Jury Prize for Diaspora Documentary at the Premières Rencontres Cinématographiques de SYA (Burkina Faso) for Namballa Keïta: A Soldier and His Village (2020, medialabafrica.com)
- Author of Outcast to Ambassador: The Musical Odyssey of Salif Keïta and Massa Makan Diabaté: un griot mandingue à la rencontre de l’écriture