A Centripetal Media Production, K. Roc Pictures present Kangwa Chileshe (Kennedy), Ruth Jule (Chama), Thabo Kaamba (Young Joseph), Kondwani Elliot Zulu (Martin) Director, Kenny Mumba; Writers, Andrew Thompson, Lawrence Thompson; Producer, Yasmin Dodia; Executive Producer, Lawrence Thompson; Cinematographer, Rick Joaquin; © 2022.
Talk about Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre-like character and story. Our character here shares the struggle, abuse, racism, cruelty, isolation, and transformation of Jane. A couple, Kennedy (Kangwa Chileshe) and Chama (Ruth Jule), destitute, have a child in a remote African village, and Chama puts to bed a boy child. Wait for this: Kennedy comes out of the delivery room, enraged, shouting above his voice, and pointing away, “Whatever that thing is, is not my child!” The child, he had named before birth, in memory of his late Baba, ‘Joseph,’ turns out to be an albino. Kennedy refuses to accept such a weird child and drives Chama and her albino out of his house, and life. Imagine that.
Thus starts the lifelong struggle of Joseph (Thabo Kaamba); a life full of rejects. It even starts with his biological dad, and then his grandmother who couldn’t hold baby Joseph in her arms. “Don’t call me, Mama (to Joseph’s mother), I always knew there was something evil about you. I don’t want you in my house anymore.” If charity begins at home, malevolence begins at the home where Joseph is born. Boy, this movie will make you well up some tears. If you can only bear with the writers for just a little, my friend. This is what a melodrama does to you: press emotional buttons on you here and, later release it there. In the end, you and I, and Joseph traversing this universe, will come out on the other side, smiling and maybe crying, a cry of joy.
Joseph was born in a traditional African community as an albino. No one automatically takes this weird child for granted. Amidst crying and begging, Chama held on to Kennedy’s pants, still begging. Kennedy still throws her portmanteau out the door and onto the street and orders her taxi to go anywhere but not in their home. By the goodness of the taxi driver, Martin (Kondwani Elliot Zulu), Joseph, and his mother found a new home. Joseph couldn’t go out and play with his peers. They run away from him whenever they see him. They assume he is evil. Now Joseph had to stay in his room and peer outside the window at his peers playing outside. He couldn’t join them even if he wanted, they would run away from him.
In Martin’s household, Joseph grows up, but Chama, his mother won’t let the boy go out and mingle. She feels her son being an albino wouldn’t be accepted, and therefore keeps him indoors. Rightly so, but the new stepfather, Martin doesn’t think so. He wants the boy exposed, and he brings home a toy motor, for Joseph. The day Joseph takes his toy outside to play, the neighborhood kids call him “Mwabi”, a term equal to ‘evil’ or a ‘devil.’ And they all run away from him.
The first day Joseph showed up in school, the majority of the kids couldn’t share a seat with him. But Sharon, a girl his age, offers him a seat next to her and stays with him as the only friend and a playmate, a friendship that stays forever. Joseph befriends a village outcast who teaches him to play guitar, even as his mother is bitterly fearful of and against her boy’s friendship with a man the entire village looks upon as the ‘Madman,’ and an outcast. Then village kidnappers waylaid Joseph, one day coming home from school together with Sharon. It was only by the grace of Sharon who ran into town and called for help. The kidnappers already started to harvest his body for sale.
Not long after, Joseph becomes an orphan sharing Jane Eyre’s heritage. He had hardly recovered from the attempt on his life, still on crutches, his aunt Brenda pulled him out of class and reported to him about the death of his parents. His voice was a hair-raising and melodious song at their funeral. Now one would be wondering about the life of the orphan after the death of his parents. Which home could he go to; that would come in handy with a warm welcome like once after school, his mother greets him, “My prince, welcome.”
His biological father is brought back into his life, but not for long though. Kennedy had not told his wife about a Mwabi child he had had with another woman, and therefore wouldn’t accept him in her house. Here is Joseph denied a home by Jenifer the wife of Kennedy. Joseph ends up in a boarding school where he again runs into Sharon, now grown into a beautiful teenager. In his new school, Joseph continued his singing and guitar lessons, and his talent was discovered and he became famous. On the eve of his debut performance in a crowded show, his father, Kennedy entered his dressing room, and in the moment of truth tells him how his father disappointed him, but found a place in his heart to forgive him.
For character analysis, we consider the precarious circumstances Joseph survives as a child growing up in the traditional African community which considers him a mwabi, an outcast. Knowing early his self-awareness, smart as he could be, and the self-survival instinct in all men, he has to sneak out of the house and join the group of his peers playing outside even as they gang on him and bleed his elbow when they push him to the ground. The same survival instinct later got him to return to them and retrieve his toy motor even as he ran from the scene. That is his first bout and victory among humanity and against society.
When the boys run him off, he falls into the arms of the village outcast––Madman. He gets the true story whispered in the community that the man had a well where he put children and locked them away from their parents. “so, they lied about you because they don’t know, and because of that they treat you differently.” Joseph clears his understanding of the Madman. “You are a wise boy.” When Joseph is bullied in school, the Madman gives him his mantra: “Repeat after me, “I’m powerful, I’m strong, I’m worthy, I belong.” This tree of life, guards Joseph all through the life of the story. He introduced Joseph to singing and guitar, which later became his surviving grace.
The most hair-raising scene is when Joseph stands at the podium sandwiched by coffins of his mother and Martin. And he shyly let go of those melodies: “Death comes to take away our loved ones. Death does not delay/ To get the ones we love/ My prayer is that we shall meet each other again.” By now droplets of tears stand on his pink rosy cheeks. This scene plays the trick on me. Tender-hearted as I am, I burst out loud, like the funeral crowd, crying with everyone. Joseph is left in this world with no mother, no father, and no one to look up to. Then I sat in solitude and thought to myself how God could thrust this vulnerable kid, Joseph, onto the throng of varmins in this world, where one could cut one’s head off for supper and won’t care a heck. No Joseph, they can’t see you!
Can You See Us? is inspired by John Chiti, the albino Zambian musician and a police commissioner. Joseph’s life may not have followed Chiti’s but certain elements of the police commissioner’s life must have taken a similar pattern.