Here two related films about the hardships and fortitude of young African women play together.
“When you educate a girl you educate a whole nation.” – Africa’s Daughters
Africa’s Daughters
Director: Natalie Halpern
In Uganda, only 16 of out of every 100 children attend secondary school, 7 of those are girls, and only 3 of those graduate. In a country whose culture does not encourage the education of women, this is the spellbinding story of two tenacious teenage girls, Hoctavia and Ruth, beating the odds. Watching these girls so desperate and eager to learn, filling themselves with every drop of knowledge they can, and cherishing each knew thing learned, it almost breaks your heart. One girl’s favorite book is King Lear. One girl sits curled around her advanced level physical chemistry book, enraptured, dreaming of becoming a neurosurgeon, her country’s first female neurosurgeon. One girl’s mother works her fingers to the bone to try and fail to save up the two and a half months worth of salary it takes to send her daughter to school- $300. To see this and think of our American teens, so many taking their free and top notch education for granted, living only for the moments they can text each other or run home and play video games, makes one a little sick and makes one want all of our American teens to see this.
Director: David Eberts, Helen Cotton
The theme of the importance of female education in the plights facing Africa is continued in this film where women in Zambia are taught filmmaking as a way to tell the stories of their lives. Their film tells the moving, true story of Penelop. Her story is similar to many AIDS orphans in this country where 1 of 6 adults is HIV positive and life expectancy is under 40. The father cheats, contracts AIDS, brings it back to his faithful wife who was probably forced to marry him as a young girl, he dies, then she dies, then thanks to a wonderfully cruel cultural tradition the father’s family comes and takes everything he owned, thus leaving the children to fend for themselves often having to chose between starving and prostitution. Young Penelop survived all of these hardships to go on to graduate from school and her story was used to instruct and inspire others and to allow women to talk in a culture they are not encouraged to and about a subject that, though killing them, is considered taboo. This film was sponsored by The Campaign for Female Education.
One thing you definitely get from both of these films is how eager the women of Africa are to break their traditional cultural bonds if given the chance. They want education, they want to start their own business, and they want to pull their families out of poverty. And the heart breaking thing is that it takes so little- for the price of a uniform or in some cases even just a notebook or a pack of pencils needed before you can attend school, these girls are missing out on their chance at an education.
Studies show that when you educate the women of a culture it has a domino effect on that whole society because they bring that education back to their families and their children. Increased female education helps prevent overall poverty and disease, lowers infant mortality rates, increases family health, etc. And again, it takes so little. By the end of these movies everyone in the audience’s one question was where do we go to find out how we can help. In case you are wondering the same thing, check out both of these films when you can, until then check out the websites below.
www.aud.org
Lucy Cruell