Ananse Entertainment present Ajetey Annan (Akatork), Peter Richeie (Razak), Ama K. Abebrese (Joan), Asana Alhassan (Aminah), Akofa Edjeani Aseidu (Rukaya), Mohamed Hafiz (Seidu), Ibrahim Alhassan (Baba Dauda) Ramatu Mohamed (Fatima), Tony Francis (Esther). Cinematographer, William Kojo Agbeti; Director, Kwabena Gyansah; Screenwriters, Kwabena Gyansah, Gwendelene Quartey; Producers, Sarah Dwommoh, Mansford Asante, Kwabena Gyansah. © 2018
Azali is not a glib production statement, as you would think. It tells a down-to-earth story that you would believe; has its genesis in Oluture and other human and sex trafficking films. But this has a surprising twist that would hit you side of your head. Bam! It has a pastoral setting in Northern Ghana’s boondocks, in a far-away, savanna community, where one counts trees and neighbors. Then the story stretches into Accra’s capital and then comes back and ends where it all started in the village.
Aminah (Asanah Alhassan) could not marry the man who asks her hand in marriage. He is four times older than her, and she’s only fourteen. Despite the goats, he keeps bringing to woe the young girl and her grandmother’s heart. A single mother’s daughter. Everyone in the village knows Aminah is old enough to marry, well, to their standard, fourteen years old is a woman.
Her mother, Rukaya (Akofa Edjeani Aseidu), doesn’t agree to the proposal of a seventy or so Oldman marrying her daughter. And her brother, Akatork (Adjety Anang), an incessantly lazy man, couldn’t help her in this dilemma. She instead wagers her daughter’s fortune and happiness on a mysterious woman, called Aunty, who appears in the village one day and wants to take Amina to the city. To Aminah’s mother, anything is better than her daughter becoming a fourth wife, especially to a septuagenarian.
You should see the face of Aminah, her grandmother, and mother, Rukaya, as she departs from them to the world at large. When she walks to the van, she turned once more and waves to both mother and grandmother. Rukaya, in tears, puts away the crumpled Cedis she received from Aunty for taking her daughter away into the sex trade. Poverty! Akatork couldn’t even do anything to help her out of the situation.
Aminah runs into another captive at the social services center named Seidu (Mohamed Hafiz). They bonded on the way to nowhere. Seidu is a street kid and knows what’s up, so he plans an escape from Aunty with one other girl and Aminah, and all three take flight in the middle of the night, at the back of a produce truck to Accra. Things got crazier once they hit Accra, Aminah, sheepishly walking in tow with Seidu. They soon got lost from each other in the vistas of Accra market wilderness. Aminah has to find and fend for herself all alone to survive.
In atonement with God, Aminah prays daily. Adiza harbors many prostitutes in her compound and is ready to take in any tramp as she did Aminah. But none of the prostitutes stays in her abode without paying her fifteen Cedis per day for board. Aminah criss-cross roads with Seidu, who has gotten deep into the Accra street hustle along the way and even have a visit from him one day.
Aminah isn’t still pleased with herself. She wants to go back to her mother in the village. One day, when she had made some money, she decides to leave for the town; she passed by Seidu’s place and got raped by Seidu’s boss, Razak (Peter Richeie). Aminah got pregnant. Adiza has no room for a “bastard child” in her compound, she needed the fifteen cedis daily rent, so friends urge her to abort, but she couldn’t go through with it.
Meanwhile, back in the village, Rukaya and her mother put pressure on Akatork to go to the city searching for Aminah. In Accra, he has to do menial jobs until he runs into an old acquaintance, Joan (Ama K. Abrebese), who runs a chop shop, where he volunteers to help. In turn, she follows Akatork to go on the street and search for Aminah. One day, Aminah witnesses Seidu, beaten and bloodied and doused with petrol and set on fire by a throng of angry men while Razak looks on. Obviously caught stealing.
As she leaves the scene, while Razak follows her, she meets with her uncle Akatork. Akatork turns round and sets his eyes on Razak. “Razak! Aminah. That is your father.” And Aminah falls, fainting to the ground, in disappointment and shame. Small world!
In most dramatic efforts, readers or viewers are notified of the importance of essential figures in a story. Razak is an important figure here. He unknowingly rapes and impregnates his own daughter. The grandmother complains that Rukaya refuses to marry a man, only to end with the young Razak. Razak ran away to the city after impregnating Rukaya with Aminah.
Akatork must have been an incessant lazy fellow “who sleeps the whole day and does nothing,” as his mother would cry. He impresses his mother and sister at last by going to Accra in search of the one and only child of his sister. And then, too, he lets us meet the father of Aminah.
Even if I passed this entertainment endeavor as an excellent piece, some areas need to be commented on. The relationship between the woman, Joan, Akatork teamed up with at Accra to look for Aminah is implied. It is not in a name, nor in the relationship with Akatork. Are they old dates? Ama made her entrance into the Nollywood mainstream in a documentary, where she plays herself, in Jimmy Goes to Nollywood ((2015). She has taken series of strides in making inroads into entertainment art. Besides being ‘Mother’ in Beasts of No Nation (2015), she produced and narrated (voiceover) The Burial of Kojo (2018), a brilliant art film from the woods of Ghally, to date.
The idea of having sex with one’s daughter isn’t uncommon in literary or dramatic or Greek fables and mythologies. Myrrha committed incest with her father, Theias, and bore Adonis. Some legends indicate that Demeter’s father impregnated her and begat Dionysus. My beef here is, we were never forewarned about Razak’s character. Guess the surprises or shocks on our faces when we learn that the pregnancy, through rape, Aminah carries is for her father, Razak:
“This child will never be accepted by tradition, so in our hearts, we buried a secret that only heaven knows.” Azali.