I Like Ship Metaphors
An Interview With Boima Tucker
Boima Tucker has spent the last few years making a film about extraction, energy, colonialism and the slightly uncomfortable question of what happens when the people who need development most are also the people expected to pay for it. After Oil moves between South Africa, Kenya and Western Sahara, following communities negotiating very different versions of the same global system.
bios: You're not necessarily trying to be a spokesperson for these individuals, but you're also making a film about much larger systems —– extraction, capitalism, colonialism, energy. How much did that influence the way you approached the filmmaking?
Boima Tucker: The project was never really intended to be objective. It was about taking a stance, or presenting a perspective that we felt was missing from mainstream discourse and even from some activist discourse.
I had gone to a socialism conference in the US, and I was seeing this disconnect between the Global North's discussion about clean-energy transition and what that actually means for the Global South. The question became: how do you extend this transition democratically across the world?
Also, we ask the question: What does development actually look like?
You look at South Africa from 1994 onwards, Kenya from independence onwards, Latin America —– all of these different development trajectories —– and you have to ask what extraction means within those contexts. Western Sahara was particularly important because of the question of decolonial struggle and self-determination.
bios: When I first saw the poster, I thought, “Oh, this is going to be an activist film.” And that actually made me resist watching it. Do you think audiences resist that kind of decolonial or activist language?
Boima Tucker: The target audience was activists, but I wanted the film itself to be subtle. I didn't want it to be dogmatic or pedantic. That's why Gwede Mantashe becomes this kind of fall person, but at the same time, his voice is prominent. But you're also drawn into the film through the stories and through the visual language, and this is where documentary film excels in relating ideas over other mediums.
Lastly, we turned the camera on Africa Is a Country itself. We featured our South Africa-based editor and our East African regional editor, and that became part of the process of deconstructing the fourth wall.
bios: I mean, I basically went, “Fuck, Mantashe,” when I watched it. But what I liked was that the film didn't lecture me.
Boima Tucker: The film starts with energy because that's a way to draw people in. But then you start revealing the colonial structures that exist domestically, internationally and within cities. Nairobi was a particularly important example for that because you have this very Western-oriented middle class existing alongside communities without water, electricity or sanitation.
bios: You've got the East African editor walking through the neighbourhood, and you're hearing language that you normally hear at conferences about development. Then you've got the old woman who's afraid she'll get an electric shock from the television, and the guy growing trees. It sets your mind puzzling.
Boima Tucker: The purpose isn't to demonise, or create an enemy. The globe is so intertwined, and we're living in this AI-driven attention economy. Changing the direction of the ship requires work, coordination, breaking social and political borders, and solidarity.
I like ship metaphors because everyone has a job on a ship. I think about House of the Dragon, where you've got the ship and all the oarspeople. Everyone has a job. The captain understands the geography, but everyone is working together to move the ship.
bios: And the Western Sahara section actually made me lose track of the energy question completely, because I got caught up in the history and the occupation. I was in Tangiers in 2015, and you can see Spain from there. I said to someone, “You could swim to Spain.” And he said, “You could walk to Spain.” I didn't understand what he meant. It was only when I watched After Oil that I understood: Ceuta. And suddenly the film became about this much larger colonial project. It made me think about how you actually deal with something that is so enormous that you can become overwhelmed by it.
Boima Tucker: I'm American and Sierra Leonean, and there's a privilege in being able to leave Freetown, or leave Sierra Leone, that isn't available to everyone. Borders make those material differences very visible.
bios: Where do you get your visual inspiration from?
Boima Tucker: I like vérité stuff. I studied film about 20 years ago at university, mostly from a theoretical perspective. But I've worked with film throughout my career, off and on, in media.
Visually, my aesthetic direction was informed by Latin American leftist cinema in the 1970s, Cuban cinema. There's a Bolivian film from the '60s or '70s, I believe, called La Sangre del Condor that resonated in particular. But these kinds of films, where you take rural or marginalised communities and give them the tools to tell their own story, have inspired me.
bios: Do you consider yourself a filmmaker or an activist?
Boima Tucker: I don't see myself as an activist or a filmmaker per se. I was a musician for many years. I love film. I love photography. But in filming I depend greatly on the talents of other people as well.
On this project I started as producer and actually worked collaboratively with three different location directors. It was Ebony Bailey, who's an Afro-Mexican American director. She directed on our first visit to Amadiba, and Tsogo Kupa was her DP; Onesmus Karanja in Kenya; and Raouf Meraga in Algeria.
We worked together, and I guess my job as the director was to stitch together these three different visual perspectives. Then Tsogo Kupa was our DP in South Africa. So it was about stitching together these different visions.
bios: But if one of your filmmakers is based in Mexico, and you're in Peru —– why was there no South American material in there? Was that a deliberate choice?
Boima Tucker: We did a lot of research on different struggles throughout the continent. And actually, at first we did want to focus on Latin America as kind of a model for Africa, particularly Colombia, which had just elected a leftist president, Gustavo Petro, and his vice president Francia Márquez was an Afro-Colombian environmental activist.
But I think as it developed, we realised that a continental focus would be stronger, and Latin America has its own complications and contradictions. It was a very slow process. We started in 2020 with the concept and in 2021 with the filming. We did several shoots in the same locations over time, which allowed us to move slowly and gradually direct as we developed the story through the footage we got. The first thing we got was the court case, the week of the court case. We went back a couple of times to Amadiba. I went the last time to help show the film and discuss it with the community, and we were able to respond with changes after that.
Nairobi was obviously different because we were embedded there. Our staff was there, and the director became part of our staff. Now he's working on other projects for us, so he was fully integrated into Africa Is a Country.
For Western Sahara, we were invited by Progressive International, which had been invited by the ambassador to the EU, who wanted to hold an invitational workshop with different activist groups to build solidarity and awareness around the world. We were initially going to focus on Morocco, but then the opportunity came to go to Western Sahara.
I would get footage back. I'd watch it. I'd give feedback. I'd say, “Can we go do this? Can we grab that?” People had a lot of autonomy in terms of filming. Then I chose the images based on what came back and gave direction: “Okay, we need to cover this.”
One of the last shoots we did, which wasn't in the initial screenings, was in eMalahleni, the coal-mining community. That was something where we realised we really needed the perspective of people who were working in the energy and old fossil-fuel industry as labour —– not just corporate and government development people.
bios: When you see the Amadiba stuff at the start of the film, my immediate feeling was: oh god, this again. I know this form of activism, I know how necessary it is, but we've seen it so much in South Africa, and we've seen it fail so often, that whenever I see that kind of thing on screen I flinch a little.
But then there's this question of privilege. We're able to make films and communicate across continents through WhatsApp, while there are people living in communities where the only solution they can see might literally be planting trees.
Boima Tucker: South Africa is this unique situation, right? The Constitution is so young. I grew up in the US education system, and we venerate the Constitution. Obviously, the cliché now is that the US Constitution is this document that can't be changed and blah blah, and it's so perfect. It's a piece of shit.
The South African and Brazilian constitutions are much more progressive constitutions and much more indicative of the modern world that we live in. The US Constitution was made when transatlantic slavery was at its peak, right? When they actively engaged in eradicating indigenous peoples at their borders. So it can't be —– there are good ideas in it about democracy and organising society, but it's not addressing our modern world.
The Brazilian Constitution since the '80s and the South African Constitution since the '90s are much more equipped to do that. Now the question is: how do you enforce the document? In Brazil, which I know more intimately, there are many ways to circumvent it. It's difficult to live up to the ideals of a document in everyday life. And then there's the question of how do you apply that to other contexts?
The ability for South African activists to win is important because Amadiba won. As we just found out in August, they won the court case in the Constitutional Court, and so not every country has the pathways to contest in this way. So that was why the comparative thing is important. It's not just about one place and one struggle. It's about looking at the different ways that communities have to contest to live a life —– to live, period.
The activism and the courts are one way, and it's beautiful that South Africa has that because many places don't. Many places are forced to do it through armed struggle, or through other ways, or don't have the ability. They're jailed. Journalists are jailed. Activists are jailed. People disappear. People are murdered. South Africa is very lucky to have such a beautiful democratic process through which to contest.
The judgment is beautiful because it recognises the past while also recognising that we're dealing with this future, that climate change is real. So I understand the tiredness of it, but also recognise the importance of it. It's beautiful that it exists, I guess you could say.
bios: So what happens next with that judgment? They've essentially outplayed and outlasted Shell. What's Shell going to do next? Is that something you think you'd want to go back and cover?
Boima Tucker: With these things, you just have to monitor it. We might not be the ones who have the ability. The hope is that it will inspire the next activist to take this on, or the next organisation to take it on.
And I think something that comes up in the film —– Nonhle says it, and it's in the judgment —– is that this judgment could be an example for the rest of the world. Nonhle comes back to her community and says that the work they've been doing has many cases like this pending, and this can be a reference. That's part of how the judicial system works.
So it's just always kind of being a fish and reacting to the currents. Or a ship, and learning how to steer —– learning how to re-steer in turbulent conditions.
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