LargeUp Interview: Director Karen Marks Mafundikwa on “The Price of Memory”

Words by Michellee Nelson

When Jamaican-born filmmaker Karen Marks Mafundikwa took on the task of filming the documentary, The Price of Memory, she couldn’t have predicted the state of turmoil America would be in concerning race relations and racism at present. Once again, we here in the US are up in arms about yet another string of incidents of brutal use of force against a person of color at the hands of police. The subject of the value of black lives and black bodies is not a new topic in the least and, and with her film, Mafundikwa broaches the discussion in her own way with the controversial matter of reparations in Jamaica.

Told from her point of view, The Price of Memory is a unique look at just how much the slave-owning class of British benefited from slave labor, and at what cost that was to the black and brown population of slaves and former slaves. It delves into Jamaica’s colonial past and neo-colonial present to tell a well-researched story of the scope of debt owed to modern-day Jamaicans as a result. Despite lacking some in the footage department, the movie manages to make a very compelling and moving case for reparations.

Mafundikwa’s first film as director (she previously produced, and co-wrote the feature documentary, Shungu: The Resilience of a People), The Price of Memory is a bold look at the fight for reparations in Jamaica through the past 50 years. The film centers around Queen Elizabeth II’s 2002 visit to Jamaica as part of her Golden Jubilee celebrations and follows the Rastafari who petition her for reparations. Rastafari continue to be at the helm of the struggle to secure payment for the debt owed to the descendants of slaves in Jamaica, and have pushed other notable academics, and lawmakers to join the cause.

At a time when a country like Brazil has been waging its own war on discrimination in policing practices that makes headlines daily, this film takes the discussion yet another step further. Although it may not have been her intention, with the The Price of Memory, Mafundikwa is adding her own “two cents” to the the debate over the value of Black lives and Black bodies following centuries of slavery, oppression, and white privilege.

The Price of Memory premieres in NYC on December 7th 2pm, at Cowin Center, Teachers College at Columbia University, and plays again on December 10th, 7:20pm, at Quad Cinema. Click the link for more information on the screenings.

Read the interview to hear what Mafundikwa had to say about the film, Ferguson, and keeping hope in the struggle for reparations.

LargeUp: What was it about the fight for reparations in Jamaica that drew you to devote 10 years of your life to documenting it?

Karen Marks Mafundikwa: My hometown of Montego Bay, and Jamaica in general, has monuments and ruins left over from slavery. While growing up, I used to walk through my town square very frequently. It was a place where 500 slaves were hanged for rebelling. I learned this as a child, and passing through there used to creep me out after that. In 2002, at an official ceremony for the Queen, I met a group of Rastafari who had come to petition the Queen for reparations. The British monarchy has a long history of enrichment from slavery. I thought this was a clash of the past and present of epic proportions, and as a filmmaker, I wanted to capture what was happening. It was natural for me to explore a history I had lived with my whole life.

When I started the film in 2002, the UN convened the Durban World Conference Against Racism in South Africa, to discuss reparations. The conference was very contentious and widely covered in the press. This is the background to the start of the film, which I saw as recording the history and the movement and the people engaged in it for posterity. However, I was interested in focusing on Jamaica, since it was my own history and it was from a perspective which had not been explored in a film.

The people I began to follow in the film were very active in the reparations movement. For me, this was history unfolding before my very eyes. I had never seen anyone explore the Rastafarian pursuit of reparations and repatriation. It also led me to question what was the legacy of slavery in Britain, which had benefited from slavery.  It was important to capture it on film, because that’s the creative medium I work in, and because I felt it was a way to reach many people. I didn’t know it would have taken 11 years to complete when I started! I did other work in between, but I stuck with it because I felt a huge responsibility to finish it.

LU: How had the fight for reparations evolved from the beginning of the filming in 2002, to some ten years later when you wrapped?

KMM: When I started, the Jamaican government had recently sent a delegation to Durban World Conference in 2001 and advocates were calling on the government to have the delegation submit a report to Parliament and to “do something” about reparations. Reparations had been largely a Rasta call, from what I saw growing up. But about that time, there were intellectuals and other activists becoming publicly vocal in calling for it. Also, there was a vocal movement in the US that was in the news a lot. But in Jamaica, Rastafari were the most vocal. At that time in Jamaica when the average person heard the word reparations, people always connected it to repatriation, which is returning to Africa. This is because Rastafari have called for reparations and repatriation for decades. The Jamaica Reparations Movement, a national organization, had just formed and started to lobby government and raise public awareness.

All these actions,  led to the government debating reparations in Parliament by 2007. Finally around 2009, a National Commission on Reparations was formed to research and advise on what the government should do about the issue. Now governments across the Caribbean are organizing to pursue reparations. It is no longer perceived as something [just] Rastas talk about.

Photo: Saki Mafundikwa

LU: What work had you been doing up until 2002 that made you see this film as necessary to make?

KMM: If you mean was I working on reparations before, no. I had read a lot about it because I am interested in the world around me, and particularly in issues of African people. I had also lived in the US and seen how its legacy plays out there. I had read a lot of African and African diaspora history. Jamaica was a slave colony. The visible ruins of the almost 400 years of slavery are scattered all over the island with plantation houses, slave prisons, names of places like Runaway Bay, Lovers Leap, where enslaved people who were in love leaped to their death rather be separated. The vast majority of people are descendants of enslaved Africans. We were enslaved in the Americas for much longer than we have been “free.” For anyone living in Jamaica who is vaguely aware, it is hard to miss how much of the legacy of slavery affects our interactions and the society in general. So having grown up and reached adulthood there, and being an artist and a storyteller, and having been exposed to all I had, it was natural for me to make this film. Seeing people coming to petition Queen Elizabeth in front of me, at her own celebration — it was like a spark went off to tell that story.

LU: Are you trying to send a message with the film, or simply show the progression of the struggle for reparations in the Caribbean? If you are trying to send a message, what message do you hope to get across to viewers?

KMM: As a filmmaker, my first job is to tell a compelling story, not to preach, just to let the story speak for itself.  Just our knowing our own story is important. So just telling the story is an end in itself. There is power in knowing your story. I wanted to record the history and our actions for reparations for posterity, and for ourselves. Anyone who watches can see the clear case for reparations.

LU: In the film, The Rastafari involvement is central….

KMM: Calls for reparations started in Jamaica soon after slavery. However, given the colonial climate, that transitioned into the trade union movement. Rastafari have been pursuing reparations for decades, when very few other people were talking about it. The Rastamen in the film who pursued reparations in the 1960s were young men then. Today they are in their 80s. Filmore Alvaranga just passed away at 91.

To understand why Rasta is at the center of the movement, you would have to understand the impact Rasta has had on Jamaica. Rastafari is centered around African consciousness and also justice. It has brought to Jamaica a sense of identity when previously, Jamaicans, the majority of whom are of African descent, were taught that everything African was inferior. The Rastafari movement’s focus on Africa as a promised land to which one should return when others claimed it was a “dark continent” has infused a sense of value on African identity which was lacking before the Rastafari movement emerged in Jamaica in the 1930s, and became popular in the 1960s. The movement has enabled many Jamaicans to claim Africa and their African identity, as it should since over 90-percent of Jamaicans are of African descent. The first thing you need in building anything is a sense of your own value.

Intellectuals, artists and other people have since embraced reparations, but Rastafari were at the core, pushing it for decades. Hence Rastafari remains central to the movement in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean.

LU: What has been the response to the film?

KMM: It has been overwhelmingly positive. I have been showing it mostly at film festivals and I had a few community and university screenings in Jamaica. At my Jamaican premiere, a diverse audience of about 300 people from all classes, races, ages and walks of life stayed for almost an hour to ask me questions afterwards. That was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. Some teenagers in Jamaica told me they did not know the Jamaican or British history, or about the Rastafari missions to Africa in the 1960s. When I see it touch young people, I know I have accomplished something. My nine and eleven year old nieces watched the whole thing and loved it. As well as Simba, the young Rasta boy who we see grow up in the film. That was a pleasant surprise because I had thought it might be too heavy for someone so young. Some people like watching the life of Ras Lion and other people in the film unfold.

Two young Scottish women invited the film to Africa in Motion Film Festival in Glasgow, Scotland, on seeing it in Los Angeles at its world premiere at Pan African Film Festival. They were very passionate about it. They said they had never learned any of this history in school!  The best thing for me is when the film starts dialogue, and it has. Its been shown in Trinidad and Antigua and now I have invites from all over the Caribbean, US, UK, Brazil. So early next year, I will do a US and a UK tour and we are organizing to show it across the Caribbean and Brazil. I just finished the Spanish version, which will premiere at Havana Film Festival this weekend.

LU: What sort of dialogue has the film provoked?

KMM: I have heard people talking again about: How could reparations work, the logistics of it. It has started debate about whether Caribbean governments should be pursuing it. It has also spurred people to discuss Jamaica dropping Queen Elizabeth II as symbolic head of state. I have personally experienced Jamaican people telling me they now understand the Rastafari call for repatriation.

LU: What do you say to others who are also fighting for reparations but are losing hope?

KMM: If you look at what has happened in the US, with youths organizing around Ferguson and in Brazil with their movements for equality, reparations is alive. It’s just not being called reparations. This generation is ready to create change. Everywhere you look where slavery lasted for hundreds of years, African diaspora populations living with its legacy are moving to create change. I think the increased attention in the US from films like Slavery By Another Name, and others as well as scholarship and popular writing, shows that the idea of reparations is not going away. It reappears in cycles because it is embedded in the psyche. The struggle continues.