Traditional African tales of monsters, genies and malevolent spirits have been reworked for a contemporary audience in a new Netflix series.
Film-makers from Tanzania, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Mauritania and Uganda have turned six traditional stories into dark fantasy dramas that cover topics including domestic violence, suicide and child marriage.
Most of the 30-minute films in the African Folktales, Reimagined series, produced in partnership between the streaming channel and the UN cultural body, Unesco, are female-centred.
Anyango and the Ogre, directed by Kenyan film-maker Voline Ogutu, explores the unfair societal expectations of marriage on women – marginalising those who are not married, while pressuring those who are to stay in unhealthy relationships.
It is based on folklore about a troll who, disguised as a handsome man, marries a woman with three children so he can fatten them up and eat them.
Ogutu’s futuristic drama depicts married women living in beautiful, hi-tech “blue zones”, while unmarried women are relegated to the “grey zone”, where they have to fight for basic necessities. The ogre represents an abusive husband and society, Ogutu said.
The film-maker said she did not want to shy away from difficult subjects that are intrinsic to the lived experiences of women on the continent. In her culture abuse against women is pervasive and encouraged, she said.
“We do need to embrace [darker themes],” said Ogutu. “In the stories I heard growing up, these monsters were a personification of human nature itself, so it’s like a mirror that we hold up against ourselves as a society. [These stories] highlight problems in society and the risk of those problems becoming a bigger issue if they are not tackled.”
The South African film-maker Gcobisa Yako reimagined MaMlambo, the avenging goddess of rivers in Zulu mythology, as a deity that watches over women with troubled lives who have tried to take their own lives in the river.
The film, which has only two characters and little dialogue, is shot in isiXhosa, one of South Africa’s most widely spoken languages, and focuses on the relationship between two women, MaMlambo, and Amandla, a woman grappling with feelings of isolation and despondency after facing violent abuse.
Yako said her childhood had been filled with such tales – narrated with dramatic flair by her grandfather, as she and her siblings sat around their sitting room with the television off and no distractions.
Yako believes the retelling these folktales in digital form is an important part of cultural preservation and evolution, as the continent’s oral traditions face extinction. Many stories disappeared during the colonial period, when written western literature was privileged and bans on vernacular languages, containing communities’ cultures and history, were enforced.
“There’s a lot we don’t know about ourselves,” said Yako, who believes many folk stories will die with her grandfather’s generation, if they are not archived. “All these platforms exist now and we need to utilise them to preserve these stories.”
Maimouna Jallow, a Gambian film-maker who has performed reimagined stories for modern audiences, said folktales were an “amazing tradition that we have been left with as Africans”.
“It’s not just about the content, but also about the sense of community that it creates … in how stories are told usually with a big gathering of people – it was a moment for families to come together. Often, the stories would reflect an issue that was happening in society, so it was a subtle communal way of dealing with those issues.”
But she said: “We have to be very careful that beneath the gloss of beautiful production, we are not still telling a single story about Africa, one that’s incredibly violent and brutalising – and when it’s not that, it’s exoticising.”
The other films tell the story of a young girl in futuristic Nigeria on a journey to reclaim her fate in a society taken over by artificial intelligence; an abandoned woman who seeks revenge on her abuser; a girl on a mission to end drought; and, from Mauritania, an ancient djinn, an invisible spirit, facing an old foe.
The six films were selected from more than 2,000 applicants from Africa who responded to a 2021 call for ideas from Netflix and Unesco, which were offering production grants of £55,000.
“There’s one thing that Unesco and Netflix have in common, and that is belief in the multiplicity of cultural expressions,” said Shola Sanni, Netflix’s director of public policy for sub-Saharan Africa. “We believe that great stories can come from anywhere and be loved everywhere.”
Ernesto Ottone, Unesco’s assistant director-general for culture, said: “If big platforms in the industry can help us to bring this content to audiences in a more contemporary way, it can completely change how we tell stories, to and for the next generation.”
• African Folktales, Reimagined is now available on Netflix
