Kanraxel-The Confluence of Agnack, a documentary screened at Al Jazeera International Film Festival, conveys a whole new perspective on diversity and multilingualism in Africa.

By Umer Nangiana

It was unique because it portrayed linguistic and cultural diversity in a setting otherwise too often portrayed as tribal, isolated and underdeveloped.
Unaware perhaps of the increasingly globalised world, a small village in the West African country of Senegal has been celebrating and managing multilingualism and diversity.
The film Kanraxel-The Confluence of Agnack captures an unforgettable ceremony in a small village in Southern Senegal. Screened at the recently-concluded three-day Al Jazeera International Documentary Film Festival 2015, the documentary won applause from the audience.  
Directed by Remigiusz Sowa, the film is set in the beautiful and small village of Agnack Grand in Casamance, Senegal. Casamance, a region of meandering rivers and wetlands, also happens to possess an extraordinary richness of cultural and linguistic diversity.
Panning through the visual splendour of the landscape, the film captures the village of Agnack. It is a place where both rivers and people converge in the most stunning of ways, a place where it is considered perfectly normal to speak a minimum of six languages.
The film tells the story of the people of Agnack as they laboriously prepare for a once-in-a-lifetime event that gathers relatives from near and far for days of eating, drinking, dancing and sacrifice in celebration of the village’s late leader.
Kanraxel is unique because it focuses not on yet another ‘problem story’ from Africa, but on one of the region’s greatest resources. It discovers a wonderful and generally unknown aspect of many African societies.
Multilingualism and diversity are concepts generally associated with modern urbanisation and globalisation. Centuries-old ways of managing cultural and linguistic diversity in so-called traditional and rural societies, on the other hand, hardly touch the public mind.
This is especially true for African societies that are often depicted as backwards, underdeveloped, and uneducated, an incredibly ironic characterisation in the face of so-called uneducated villagers who often speaking four, five, or even six languages fluently.
This film therefore represents a unique cultural and creative resource, conveying aspects of diversity and multilingualism in Africa which do not generally figure in the mind of general audiences and researchers alike.
In a setting too often portrayed as homogeneous or tribal, this film shows that cultural and linguistic diversity can act as a valuable resource, rather than as a source of tension or conflict. The tolerance and diversity management shown in the film bears great relevance to a wider audience, especially in today’s era of globalisation.
By conveying this unique and stunning example, the film has great potential not only to entertain but to take these important topics to a wider audience, including the general public as a whole, but also minority community members, language endangerment researchers, teachers and policymakers specifically.
It can also provide inspiring models to language management and teaching elsewhere, and help people more generally rethink the way they view multiculturalism, including for example the way bilingual schoolchildren are perceived and dealt with.
From an anthropological perspective, the film will also be a priceless resource for preserving, documenting and providing insight into the richness of the rapidly changing Baïnounk culture.
The ceremony shown in the film and the rituals associated with it are surrounded by such guarded mystery that even many locals are excluded from seeing what goes on ‘behind the scenes’, with only a select trusted few from the community chosen to protect it.
It was the first time this type of event has been filmed, apart from the filming of a theatrical version performed in the 1980s for the ‘Day of Baïnounk Culture’ at a culture centre in the regional capital Ziguinchor.
The film not only is of great interest to viewers around the world, it is especially valuable to the Baïnounk people themselves, whose rich culture is in many ways more threatened now than at any point in its long history due to abrupt changes brought by globalisation, migration and conflict.
Remigiusz Sowa is an award-winning documentary filmmaker with directing, filming and producing experience in Africa, the Middle East and Europe. His film The Last Anchorite has won the Best Documentary Transmitter Award at the London Crystal Palace International Film Festival.
He is the director of a film production company Chouette Films where he makes films for a wide range of purposes, from education to development, environmental to humanitarian, and far beyond.