‘I wanted to show the world an Africa as I see it’
AMMA Asante and David Oyelowo have been friends ever since they worked together on the BBC2 series, Brothers and Sisters, in the late 1990s.
It was his first acting job after drama school and she was one of the writers.
He was the one who told her about Susan Williams’s book, Colour Bar. “He called me up and described some of the story to me. He said: ‘I think now is the time to make it. You’re the right director,’” Asante remembers.
A former child actress who had moved into screenwriting and directing, Asante had just successfully launched her period drama, Belle (2013).
Though in the throes of moving home and country, Asante read the book at Oyelowo’s insistence: “She (Williams) was really able to explain the inexplicable and pull together the complexity of the story, the politics and the path of their love.
“It gave me a good understanding for Ruth as a character, and for Seretse. That was my touchstone,” she said in a telephone interview.
Born in Britain to Ghanaian parents, Asante says she was embarrassed that she didn’t know their story at all, but doesn’t think knowing about Ruth Williams and Seretse Khama as a teenager would have changed how she saw Great Britain or interpreted history: “While I was frustrated by much of it, and I would use the word ‘shocked’, if I really analyse it, it’s more disappointment because I’d heard other stories of how the Empire worked.”
She describes her father as a Pan-Africanist whose mantra of ‘united we stand, divided we fall’ made a lasting impression on her: “He was always very clear about explaining the ways of the Empire and you see that (in the film) in the story of the nephew and the uncle.”
They ended up shooting quite a bit of the film in Bostwana with a very mixed crew from all over the world. She was glad to be working with her friend again, but knew that telling this story was important because of the way it showed a man of colour as the hero of his own story.
“We presented him in a way that everyone would fall in love with him in the same way we see other heroes, often white.”
On the face of it, all three of Asante’s films seem to be about race, but if you delve a bit deeper, there is more to them.
A Way of Life (2004) starts with a racist murder and then goes back six weeks and the unfolding story shows how the children are treated as an underclass: “They’ve been excluded by society, and society thinks it’s okay. When you exclude people, society suffers. Everyone thought they were going to see a story about race, but what they eventually saw was a story about class and exclusion.
“Belle was me exploring my intersection, my being a woman. So it was as much about gender as race.”
With A United Kingdom she wanted to explore the two places which shaped her. “I wanted to be able to show the world an Africa as I see and understand it. If you are only used to seeing an Africa in images that are always about starving children with flies on their faces, then that’s your reality, that’s what you believe.
“I’ve been accused of showing an idealistic Africa in terms of the shots of the beauty of the landscape. But, as a person with African parents, I can say it, because this is an Africa that I know.
“That’s why diversity is so important.”