A Bambara proverb reminds us, "Everyone is in the hands of his mother." Ta Dona has been hailed as Africa's first environmental feature film because it outlines an authentically African development path - nurtured by tradition not abandoning it, cultivating the land and its people not plundering them.

In Ta Dona, director Adama Drabo deliberately mixes traditional and modern African modes of seeing - supernatural myth and naturalistic narrative. Like Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen, Ta Dona is the story of a quest for secret knowledge by a young hero, Sidy, a modern agronomist working for the Ministry of Rivers and Forests. It revisits a perennial African theme also at the center of Yeelen: the responsibility to use expert knowledge (traditional and now scientific) for the communal good not personal power.

Sidy, while living in a remote village, undertakes the search for a secret Bambara herbal remedy, the seventh canari, which has been forgotten except by an aged, childless mid-wife living in the Dogon country. Sidy's quest for the past represents a new kind of anthropology, not documenting an irretrievably alien culture, but rediscovering, reinvigorating and then developing one's own heritage.

Sidy exemplifies how the educated African elite can contribute to rural development in contrast to the corrupt class of African kleptocrats (ruler-thieves) who exploit rather than nurture their countries. The latter are exemplified by the local MP and father of Sidy's girlfriend, Samou Traore, (a thinly veiled reference to Malian dictator Moussa Traore.)

The film's title and central metaphor, fire, suggest that only revolutionary change can purify Malian society. In fact a month after the film's premiere in February 1991, a coup, brought about by protests in which more than 100 students were killed, overturned the 23 year dictatorship of Moussa Traore, leading to free elections.




Politics and Government
Tradition and Modernity

"Incorporating dashes of local color into a contemporary tale of ancient mysticism and modern corruption, Ta Dona strikes an appealing balance between old and new."
-- Variety

"This exciting film is composed like a painting, one stroke after another. Images and scenes reveal a very precise portrait of the geographic, social and intellectual environment of present-day Mali."
-- Le Monde

Director: Adama Drabo
Mali, 1991
In Bambara with English subtitles
100 minutes

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