The chosen film, “Sentinelle di Bronzo” (Bronze Sentries), from 1937, was a last-minute addition to the program, but it is more appropriate than the organizers could have imagined. Much of the reason that Somalia collapsed and the refugees are here at all has its roots in the eighty-year-old monochrome drama on the screen. “Sentinelle di Bronzo” was an Italian propaganda film shot on location in part of the Somali desert called the The Ogaden at a time when the lines drawn in the sand by the colonial powers of Italy, Ethiopia, and Britain were beginning to harden into real borders, populated by sentries and watchtowers. Salman Rushdie called the Somali “a common people divided by maps,” and “Maps” is the title of the Somali author Nuruddin Farah’s novel about a later war between Somalia and Ethiopia, over the same issue, in 1977. In the film, the hot-headed crown prince of the Ogadeen clan fails to appreciate the looming danger from the Christian Ethiopians that have designs on his land, only to find sanctuary with the Italians, who covet the same thing. It is the beginning of the 1934 Italo-Ethiopian war, captured for English speakers in Evelyn Waugh’s “Waugh in Abyssinia,” from 1936, when the nomads were running out of desert.

The ambivalent look in the eyes of the Italian Captain Negri in the closing scene is perhaps a forewarning of the coming disaster for the Somali people. When the great powers shuffled the cards after the Second World War, the Ogaden was dealt to Ethiopia, the southern grazing lands remained in Kenya’s Northern Frontier District, and the rump of Somalia became a trust of the United Nations, pending independence in 1960. A third of the famously proud and independent Somali people were ruled by governments they viewed as illegitimate: Ethiopia and the British colony of Kenya. The residents of Kenya’s Northern Frontier District, where the refugee camps now sit, voted to join the newly independent republic, but their wish was sidelined in the horse-trading over Kenyan independence. The colonial cartographer’s pen was stupid and cruel, and, as with Palestine and Pakistan, it had bloody consequences.

The film depicts a paradise of shady palm groves, warriors on horseback, herds of fat camels, and naked maidens washing in a wide, slow river. The sumptuous editing suggests that the filmmakers knew it was the end of an era. In the decades since, Somalis in Ethiopia and Kenya waged war against their new colonial masters while trying to unite with Somalia proper. They were, and are still, tired of years of martial law, marginalization, and being treated like second-class citizens. They failed. Meanwhile, the independent Somali republic collapsed under the weight of expectations (and politicking) of all the Somali clans who had ended up outside of its borders: in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya. The twenty years of war has displaced millions.

A whole generation has grown up in the camps with only stories of that lush, lost, past. I wonder what they would have made of what for me were explosive images of their free and happy forbears. Alas, the refugees did not watch “Sentinelle di Bronzo,” nor did they watch most of the other films in the festival, which, it turns out, is not for the refugees at all but, rather, for the aid workers in their fortified compound. Film Aid says that it has not found a way of cutting out the scene of naked women, which, they fear, would offend the conservative mullahs that exert disproportionate influence over cultural activities in the camp. Plus, for security reasons, Film Aid won’t do evening screenings in the camp—necessary for the open-air projection. The sum total of the festival in the refugee camp itself was a morning of short documentaries made by refugees and shown on large TVs in tents guarded by armed police. The audience was entirely made up of children who sat quietly on mats for a short while but who showed far more excitement at the traditional dances that followed.

The audience of Kenyan aid workers in the compound—the modern-day arbiters of the lives of the refugees—has been harder to please. Previous screenings during the week were booed until more popular Hollywood offerings were shown. Tonight, the movie is competing with the British soccer premier league that is showing on a TV locked in a welded-steel cage hanging from the converted shipping container that serves as the bar behind the audience. The rare colonial gem of “Sentinelle di Bronzo,” with its powerful historical resonances, has little relevance for the non-Somali Kenyans guzzling beers and turning their heads from the soccer to the movie and back again. The man sitting next to me gets up before the end. “This is boring,” he says, “I like films that touch me, like ‘G.I. Joe.’ ”

This week, the festival moved on to Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. “Sentinelle di Bronzo” was not on the program. And the refugees were not in the audience.

Photograph: UNHCR Dadaab & Alinjugur.

Source: The New Yorker