9/8/2023 0 Comments Abduwali muse interviewThe thing is that the misrepresentations work well for others, especially governments and international donor agencies. Being from Lesotho adds another layer to the misrepresentation. Does that make you particularly keen to address issues of misrepresentation?īeing from Africa and being black, one is born misrepresented. Your parents are from Lesotho, a country that is often simplistically represented by outsiders in terms of poverty and AIDS. I also felt that since 9/11 people are labeled terrorists, Islamists, fundamentalists, pirates and many other things and we lose people behind those labels. For me, the story of Somalia is a story of how the powerful shape the reality for everyone. No one ever talks about the illegal foreign ships on the Somali coast. No one ever talks about why there are so many guns in Somalia and where they come from. The more I discovered about the Somali teenager, the more I knew his story had to be told. Commentators on the news were angry about the smile, but I wanted to find out about the person smiling in this situation and know why is was smiling. The pirate was a young boy handcuffed and chained, but he was smiling! I couldn’t understand who would be smiling in that position. All of a sudden, they showed the surviving pirate arriving in the U.S flanked by federal agents. I remember I was watching news on TV and there was some excitement about how Somali pirates who had captured an American ship had been shot dead and the surviving pirate was being brought to the U.S to face charges of piracy. I know it sounds cliché but I think there is truth to it. Matsumunyane: I think there must be something to the adage that we don’t choose stories, they choose us. Matusumunyane’s film, “The Smiling Pirate,” poses a direct challenge to the problematic representation of the Somali Pirates in the film Captain Phillips and aims to do something Hollywood has thus far been afraid to do: give a Muse and others in Somalia a genuine voice to tell their side of the story.Īfrica is a Country spoke to Kaizer Matsumunyane about his film and why when Hollywood producers say, “based on a true story”, they really mean, “based on grossly perverse and unabashedly biased interpretation of true events.” For in Captain Phillips, more than anything else, it is the truth that has been hijacked.Īs a filmmaker, why did you decide to make this film? Not content to allow the mainstream media to construct a lopsided perspective of piracy in Somalia, Matsumunyane set out to make a documentary film representing the Maersk Alabama hijacking and its aftermath from Muse’s perspective. Here’s the film’s trailer:Įnter Canada-based Mosotho filmmaker Kaizer Matsumunyane. Hollywood however, can’t be bothered by such narrative inconveniences and so Sony Pictures sailed full steam into the production of their film, “Captain Phillips”, transposing Muse from the box of his prison cell to the box of the movie screen. The complexity surrounding the social and economic drivers of piracy off the Horn of Africa was lost in the media-friendly version of the story as well as any detail about the personal backgrounds of Muse and the other hijackers. It mattered not that members of Phillips’ own crew contradicted the hero’s tale by sharing how the Captain’s ineptitude led to hijacking in the first place and far from selflessly giving himself up, he was actually captured by failing to secure the ship’s bridge. He was encouraged to publish a book about his experiences, A Captain’s Duty, which more recently has been transformed by Sony Pictures into a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks. Western media outlets looking for a hero framed Captain Phillips as an altruistic leader who had given himself up to save his crew from the marauding pirates. In a dramatic assault by the US Navy, Muse’s colleagues were all fatally shot, Captain Phillips was freed and Muse himself was taken into custody. The case was historic as it marked the first time in more than 100 years that someone had been charged with piracy by the US judicial system.ĭuring the 2009 hijacking, the captain of the vessel, Richard Phillips was taken captive by Muse and three other hijackers while his crew took refuge on the ship. Muse, a young man from Somalia, was sentenced in 2011 to nearly 34 years for his role in the hijacking of an American cargo ship, the Maersk Alabama. Abduwali Abdukhad Muse sits anxiously in a federal prison in Indiana, while his Hollywood-constructed doppelganger prepares to leap onto a silver screen near you this weekend.
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