Fire, Form
and F(r)ictions
in Under the Hanging Tree
Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja
INTRODUCTION
Namibian contemporary artists are increasingly doing memory work that deals with Germany’s colonial genocide of Nama, Ovaherero, and San people during the period 1904-1908. The tensions and conflicts that had prevailed between Africans and white settler colonialists in German South-West Africa led to what in Namibian historiography is known as the early resistance war. Africans in central and southern Namibia rebelled against the German colonial administration following the forced occupation of their land as part of building the German colonial empire. Africans lost their land and cattle and were consequently driven into the Namib and Kalahari deserts to die of dehydration and starvation. Ovaherero, Nama, and San that survived this genocide were put in concentration camps — such as the one on Shark Island — and used as slave labor to support the colonial economy. By 1908, approximately 24,000 to 100,000 Ovaherero and 10,000 Nama people had been killed in what eventually became acknowledged as the first genocide of the 20th century.
In the current political moment, calls for reparations have placed this history front and center in Namibia’s memory culture. This is a result of selective memorialization propelled by Namibia’s post-apartheid government, which has prioritized a single narrative about the liberation struggle at the expense of another: the white minority apartheid rule. Part of the colonial and apartheid projects in Namibia was the land dispossession, which left indigenous Namibians landless. Today, most Black Namibians continue to be affected by this history and marginalized by the government’s neo-liberal policies.
Examining this turn to memory work in Namibian cultural production, we see that many contemporary artists here are challenging this simple narrative and experimenting with performance, form, and structure, transgressing conventions of cultural production by spoiling ‘neat images’ of realism and the linear story. Perivi Katjavivi’s third film, Under the Hanging Tree (2023,) is a celebrated and award-winning feature that displays these studiedly undisciplined tendencies in its script, cinematography, and performance. Katjavivi’s film relies on fiction to surface frictions of histories and futures of a post-colonial country that is still haunted by the land question.
Under the Hanging Tree is set in the Kalahari desert landscape in which a troubled police officer struggles to investigate a horrific murder that brings up the ghosts from a colonial past. The film places mythology, mysticism, and spirituality at the center of the undoing of colonialism and its legacies of land dispossession. This essay is a close reading of the film’s aesthetic and political choices, focusing on its script, cinematography, soundtrack, and performances. I argue that Under the Hanging Tree deploys a vocabulary of Archival F(r)ictions, a creative method that interfaces embodied, spatial, and institutional archives in ways that are generative and productive in memory work. The film gives the status of archive to the tree, the fire, the land, the landscape, continuously reminding us of the power of imagination in returning the land to itself.
UNDER THE HANGING TREE - THE STORY
Firstly, there is a ritual at night. We see a man, Cornelius Karunga (played by late veteran actor David Ndjavera), haloed by firelight. The feeling is meditative as he repeatedly plays the bow instrument known as Okambulumbumbwa. He is communing with the ancestors. Chanting, roaring, and orating a prayer in Otjiherero. Remembering the ancestral blood that was spilled on the land and their bodies that were hung on trees. In this ritual that opens the film, there is a search, a call for the spirit to return home and to rest in perfect peace. Karunga throws some herbs into the fire, a sign of ancestral offerings. He issues a warning for Gustav, the fictional white farm owner, ostensibly the great-grandson of the historical Eugen Fischer, the eugenicist in the then-German South West Africa. Towards the end, the sound of burning wood and the movement of the dry branches of an ancient tree are replaced by a ritualized rock guitar soundtrack.
The next scene introduces the protagonist Christina Mureti (played by Girley Jazama), who is seen in the glow of, not a fire, but a projection indoors. She is staring at graphic images projected on a wall that are familiar to me as a Namibian: they are archival images of skulls and other human remains from the first official genocide of the 20th century. She is a police officer investigating a murder that happened on a local farm that is directly linked to the colonial era.
We see Christina driving a police van to her aunt’s home in a reserve. When her aunt Ndjambi (played by Petrina Ndjavera) sees the police van parked in front of her house, she repeatedly calls for Christina, who is in the kitchen, seated with her eyes closed as if she is in meditation. She stands up, looks out the window, and sees Ndjambi outside hanging clothes. When Christina comes outside, she encounters a dead dove, which she proceeds to bury. Ndjambi asks her to help with hanging some sheets and bedding on the washing line, which irritates Christina, who complains about this domestic work. She is also irritated because she does not understand Otjiherero and, therefore, only responds to Ndjambi in Afrikaans. It is clear that Christina and Ndjambi, like most Namibian families, struggle with intergenerational dialogue and the concomitant question of cultural identity.
Christina and fellow police detective Hosea (played by Dawie Engelbrecht) drive to a savanna landscape, where they follow footprints, cross fences, and later encounter what looks like organs hanging from one of the fences. At one point, Christina walks towards a tree. This walk is depicted in a wide shot with a sonic score of a swarm of bees. This shot lingers. As a viewer, I read that as an irritatingly long search. It is followed by a close-up shot of the tree’s trunk and several cow horns piled up it, an Otjiherero symbol of a grave or site of memorialization. The film suddenly cuts to a severed hoof of a cow on the ground. We see Christina and Hosea slowly following traces that establish that there is a search happening. The two police detectives are in the wild conducting an investigation about a sacrificial murder that relates to land dispossession and intergenerational trauma.
The next scene sets the stage for all the storylines to come together. We see a lady, Eva Fischer (played by Roya Diehl), at the Christian altar in her home in the evening. The sonic score is another soft psychedelic tune. The next shot is still in Eva’s home, whom we see sitting and knitting to the sound of burning wood. Her husband Gustav (played by Christian Stiebahl) walks into the room, and there is a brief conversation about someone else's children and fixing a mess. The next morning, we are presented with a carcass of a cow’s head in front of the farmhouse, and afterwards, Gustav is having a nightmare while his wife is seated next to his bed, staring at him. The last scene with the couple shows them seated at a candle-lit dinner table where Gustav chokes and literally falls while she watches him die. There are more unnerving scenes that incorporate cinematic choices (versus narrative ones)—for example, when Christina is at home in her thoughts, staring into the horizon, and there is a little girl seated and playing next to her, who fades away. We are unsure who the little girl is, and we find ourselves speculating.
Another lingering shot is introduced to signal that the search continues, the police vehicle is in a field, and in the distance we see the two cops walking. They approach an empty car with blood stains. There are more lingering shots of different parts of the landscape, with mountains, birds, and springboks visible from a distance. I read these lingering shots, which seem random, as breathing space that indicates that life goes on while the search continues. The percussive music that underscores these shots is followed by the sound of a moving tree branch. When Christina and Hosea approach this tree, they find Gustav hanging from it and next to him a head of a cow’s head.
The investigation continues when we see Christina questioning two construction workers and later interrogating Eva in her home. Eva’s interrogation is portrayed with minimal dialogue, with long stares and silence. Eva takes Christina and Hosea to the settlement where Cornelius lives, whom they find holding an axe. He attempts to throw it at them, but they manage to put him down and arrest him. In the back of the moving police van, a disturbed Cornelius laments about how the white man mistreated him and how he is fighting to get back the land.
Fast forward, we see Eva looking at herself in the mirror and, thereafter, Christina returning to Eva’s house. They meet at her candlelit table, where Christina further interrogates Eva who opens up about her family’s dark past. When Christina starts to confront Eva about the family’s colonial history, the stolen land, and the hanging tree, she immediately chokes on the drink that Eva served her. Eva looks on as Christina fights for her life on the floor and recites a short praise song, casting a spell that invokes some kind of deity for a good harvest. When Christina surrenders to the poisoning, Eva sings a German song about good harvest, with her hands raised over Christina’s passed-out body in a sacrificial manner.
In the next scene, Christina rises from the shallow grave where she was buried. This rising is met with Ndjambi speaking about the Omumborombonga tree, which she describes as the tree that holds Ovaherero together. This tree is perceived as motherly, a womb that gives life. Christina’s rising from the shallow grave evokes the exhibition concept They Tried To Bury Us by visual artist Isabel Katjavivi, who is Perivi’s sister. This installation work was on show at the National Art Gallery of Namibia in 2018 and the Academy of Arts in Berlin in 2019, emphasizing that the plan to exterminate Ovaherero did not succeed because the victims and survivors multiplied.
Christina and Hosea return to Eva’s house, armed with guns, plotting an ambush. They manage to get into the basement lit with scores/hundreds of candles, in front of an altar furnished with photographs of different people, which the viewer assumes are her ancestors. Here, they find Eva dressed in a white ohorokova, the Ovaherero women’s dress. The camera rotates to provide a 360-degree perspective of the scene. Admitting her sins, Eva stabs herself in the stomach with a knife. She pours paraffin over herself and sets herself on fire. Christina sobs, disappointed in herself for not solving this murder mystery. After all, nothing makes sense to her, and perhaps we should question it, too, because, in the words of Christina, which ends the closing scene, “What if we are already dead?”
All these scenes described above are woven together as chapters with Otjiherero proverbs. They offer a deeper sense of Otjiherero mythology and signal indigenous wisdom. The various proverbs about trees and people, for example, emphasize relatedness between people and the natural environment that has been in Ovaherero communities before the genocide. They are evidence of the knowledge and wisdom that has survived the wars and displacement of people and their cultures. The proverbs that Katjavivi uses as headings for various scenes are a way of showing the viewer that there is more to Otjiherero history than the erasure and scattering of knowledge.
FIRE
The use of fire is central to the land question and to spirituality. In the making of this feature, Katjavivi drew on Otjiherero mythology and mysticism, which center fire and its use. The outdoor fireplace that we see Cornelius tending in the opening scene is known as Okuruuo, the holy fire that is central to the Otjiherero way of life. It is at this site where ancestors are remembered and consulted on a continuous basis. Most rites of passage are performed at the holy fire. This is partly why the film is predominantly made up of scenes that are set in the evening. Fire offers light, and it paves the way. In requiring tending, it summons spirits and requires an ethic of care. One specific use of fire in Under the Hanging Tree is in rituals in domestic sites in landscapes that are marked by dislocation. The characters performing sacrificial and ancestral rituals are constantly in search of guidance, answers, and power. This search keeps returning to the land question.
The use of fire is central to the land question and to spirituality. In the making of this feature, Katjavivi drew on Otjiherero mythology and mysticism, which center fire and its use. The outdoor fireplace that we see Cornelius tending in the opening scene is known as Okuruuo, the holy fire that is central to the Otjiherero way of life. It is at this site where ancestors are remembered and consulted on a continuous basis. Most rites of passage are performed at the holy fire. This is partly why the film is predominantly made up of scenes that are set in the evening. Fire offers light, and it paves the way. In requiring tending, it summons spirits and requires an ethic of care. One specific use of fire in Under the Hanging Tree is in rituals in domestic sites in landscapes that are marked by dislocation. The characters performing sacrificial and ancestral rituals are constantly in search of guidance, answers, and power. This search keeps returning to the land question.
Writing on African fire cultures, Andrew Sluyter and Chris Duvall (2015)1 remind us that “Fire regimes emerge partly from human activities that reflect cultural-ecological knowledge of the relationships among fire, vegetation, grazing, climate, and other variables, as well as social relations.” (Sluyter and Duvall, 2015: 294). Although most fires in Under the Hanging Tree are in and of the built environment, there is one scene in which Christina and Hosea rest one evening in the veld next to a fire. It is in this natural environment in which they continue to search for the murderer the next day. There is an emphasis placed on the dry and arid landscape of Namibia. We see a lot of fences and gates, as double markers of possession and displacement. Fencing marks the large hectares of farmland and the gates of the homes in the reserves where many Ovaherero, Nama, and other minority groups in central and Southern Namibia have been forcefully displaced, including the character of Cornelius. The entire country is marked by fences because of land dispossession, but this also means that the spirituality of Africans in Namibia is displaced. It is for this reason that indigenous Namibians who continue to suffer the consequences of land dispossession continue to rely on fire rituals as a way of resting and aligning ourselves with nature and the ancestral realms.
Another way in which Under the Hanging Tree uses fire hints towards sorcery. In the film’s acutely observant telling, colonialism and its afterlife are both witchcraft in practice. We see this in Eva's use of poison at her dinner table as well as witchy ill-will at her various alters of lit candles. To read colonialism as witchcraft is simply to say that its genocidal mission is also an extermination of a people’s cultural and spiritual ways which reflect in the material circumstances of land dispossession.
We also witness this in the fire rituals that are cinematically/editorially juxtaposed in Under the Hanging Tree to make this point about witchcraft. For example, the indigenous cleansing and warning ritual opening the film and the final scene which is sacrificial, cultic, and tragic—in which the antagonist Eva Fischer burns to death in the house fire. The cleansing ritual becomes the response to the witch-hunt historically orchestrated by Eva and her family. After all, she is a descendent of Eugen Fischer, the notorious German professor of eugenics who collected Africans’ human remains for the purpose of his pseudo-scientific experiments during the genocide. As a Namibian viewer, I read this familial connection to Fischer and the associated fire rituals as some kind of historic cult established in the colonial legacy of oppression. Under the Hanging Tree, therefore, depicts rituals of death, revenge, and cleansing, primarily relying on fire to enable these rites. All these rituals are facilitated by lit candles, holy fire, fire for warmth, and the fire in the hearts of the characters.
FRICTIONS
The writing of Under the Hanging Tree began with archival research. Katjavivi conducted extensive research looking at various collections of colonial photography in Namibian and European libraries. This includes images of human skulls and other human remains from the National Archives of Namibia. While the film shows these gruesome images of Namibia’s traumatic histories, Katjavivi also worked with other archival sources that are not necessarily colonial, national, or institutional: the archive of the land and its memories.
He understood and treated orature, trees, landscapes, fire, embodiments, and the above-discussed rituals as archival sites, which he interfaced with the conventional archives to produce a ground-breaking cinematic work. Under the Hanging Tree brings beautifully together sonic and somatic aspects, emphasizing their archival nature. The Otjiherero proverbs, for example, which are orally transferred from one generation to the other, are examples of somatic or embodied archives that we read on the screen while listening to classical German songs. The memory work about Namibia's colonial past is embedded in the traumatized living bodies, ancestral remains, as well as Omumborombonga. Both Katjavivi and I read and consider all of these aspects as archives for the reason that they hold memories and have the ability to remember and unearth historical events. The songs and the proverbs also evoke situated cultural and national memory. These are all living archives that are audible and visually marked in Under the Hanging Tree.
The sound design in Under the Hanging Tree is deeply haunting. It reminds us of the traumatic memories that Namibia’s national memory work has not addressed. The combination of deep breaths, crickets, birds, bees, silence, noise and the natural landscape bring to the ear that which continues to haunt the collective. These parts of the sound design are irritatingly haunting as the wide and close-up shots of the natural landscape, animal carcasses, dry grass, and old trees. In multiple ways, we hear our intergenerational trauma in the edgy score and in the difficult and fragmented intergenerational dialogue between Christina and her aunt, Njambi. Christina speaks to her aunt in Afrikaans, while Ndjambi sticks to Otjiherero, their ancient language. Evidenced through language, their intergenerational struggle is about inheritances, belonging, and different ways of being in the world, which reflects Namibian post-colonial conditions in which the old and new generations clash.
The intergenerational clashes, as well as dialogues between archives and languages, produce frictions of memory work. In Under the Hanging Tree, the frictions are a result of the cinematic acknowledgment that the sounds and imagery of the bodies, the trees, the built environment, and the land have all borne witness to Namibia’s dark colonial history. It is the rubbing together of these elements that generates a work that breaks dominant film-making conventions in Namibia’s cinematic landscape.
FORM
The frictions that I refer to above bring together fiction and documentary to produce something that is intensely charged and emotive. It is this rubbing together of the imagined and lived experience that creates what Katjavivi refers to as “a story of awakening.”2 Under the Hanging Tree belongs to the return-to-the-source trajectory in African filmmaking. This return-to-the-source approach to filmmaking is largely concerned with re-imaginations of Africa before and beyond the colonial encounter by exploring Africa’s rich heritage of indigenous storytelling3
. Rachael Diang′a writes, “Unlike in the Western films, which use a single meta-narrator to tell the story, African films tend to advance storylines using a variety of different characters.”4
This perspective aligns with Mbye B. Cham’s (2011) critical survey of African films produced between 1970 and 2002, which are steeped in political and intellectual thought that interrogates the continent’s memory work and history. Cham observes that,
“The approaches and styles encountered in these films are also diverse, ranging from linear realist approaches to ones that are non-linear, symbolic and, sometimes, experimental. While their interrogation and reconstruction of history draw partially and in critically transgressive ways from sources such as official documents and narratives as well as traditional Euro-centric scholarly accounts, their foundation is the African heritage of oral traditions and memory.”5
While Katjavivi’s film is fairly more recent than the films surveyed by Cham, it is by no means strange to this trajectory of a Pan-Africanist thought, which Cham insists forges an African agency and subjectivity. Katjavivi is attentive to his own subjectivity when it comes to doing memory work about the 1904-1908 genocide while still refusing to center both narrative and his own artistry. Reflecting on Under the Hanging Tree, Katjavivi says, “…it is my story. I think as a Herero, as someone whose family went through this — my great-aunt was shot in the war and then went on to raise my father — these stories have been in my family and community for over a hundred years. But I do, at the same time, have some distance, through time and place, and this unique vantage, perhaps, helps. You want to be close but not too close.”6
Katjavivi’s films engage with subjects of cultural identity and the ways in which coloniality manifests in Namibia today. This theme of cultural identity is evident in his previous works such as The Unseen (2015), 100 Bucks (2012), and Eembwiti (2011). It is in his practice-oriented scholarly work that he also unpacks how Namibian post-colonial cinematic cultures contribute to national identity7.
The cinematic form at play is largely distinguishable by certain features that are deployed in order to produce a cinema that is aesthetically complex and politically charged. Under the Hanging Tree is an example of transcendental and dreamy cinema with stylized reality, lingering shots, and pregnant pauses. The film is characterized by purposeful slant shots that put the viewer in a landscape with noticeable color-grading, such as the washed-out cinematic image of the Namibian desert under the harsh sun. These kinds of images are not very common in Namibian cinematography, which places a lot of emphasis on technically sophisticated and aesthetically pleasing shots that disappear the effort of the film-making apparatus and make the story transparently available to the viewer.
There is also a deep commitment to ‘trans-languaging’ to create the frictions that I discuss above. This is important for Katjavivi, as a Namibian filmmaker who insists that the predominant use of English in Namibian films does not work as it does not reflect the realities of Namibia’s post-coloniality. This is why in Under The Hanging Tree, we hear Otjiherero, Khoekhoegowab, Afrikaans, German, and English. These frictions of languages, art forms, archives, performances, and histories can be read as what I have theorized elsewhere as “embodiments of love”8
because they make visible other modes of memory work that are excluded in national cultural memory.
But what is being spoiled in Under the Hanging Tree?
The filmmaking plays with form, in other words, spoiling the structure of realism by de-centering aesthetic pleasure and rubbing fiction and non-fiction together. I consider this to be a way of spoiling and transgressing the boundaries of established and neat cinematic forms, particularly in Namibian filmmaking. Under the Hanging Tree does not aim to always be aesthetically pleasing. At times, it is deliberately disturbing. When we see the lingering images of darkness, the lone figure, the fire, the head of a cow, a window, the minimal dialogue, people in deep thought, the imagery wants us to question some of the aesthetic and political choices. The spoiling is also made obvious through the juxtaposition in the edit sequences, at times poor lighting, and the dragging the storyline. I recall how, after the Windhoek premier, one audience member told me about her irritation at having to wait for the storyline to progress. This did not mean that she did not appreciate the film, it is, rather, to point out this unusual cinematic choice. The spoiling of the view challenges hegemonic forms in Namibian cinematic cultures, which predominantly play within the conventions of realism and dramatic acting. Under The Hanging Tree is a spoiler because it falls outside the disciplinary conventions of dominant cinematic and performance disciplines.
Fire, f(r)iction, and form are the three ways in which Under the Hanging Tree can be read as a spoiler. This is because it invites us to recognize the critical usefulness of fire and land in memory work, while rubbing together history and the imagination. An experimentation of this nature has an effect on the form of the production.
Bibliography:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja is a cultural worker, educator and writer at Owela Live Arts Collective Trust. His practice and research interests are in African performance archives and public cultures of social movements. He obtained a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of Cape Town and was previously trained at University of Witwatersrand and the University of Namibia. Mushaandja musical and performance art work has been performed widely at festivals, museums, theatres and archives in India, Germany, Switzerland, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Cameroon, Senegal, United States of America, and Namibia. He is a Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Namibia where he trains theatre makers and teaches courses in voice, performance, writing and applied theatre practices.
Editors: Neha Choksi, Matt Polzin