Clando

Jean Marie Teno, Cameroon, 1996,  95 mins, English subtitles.  

Clando wrestles with a dilemma facing more and more educated Africans: whether to work to change the autocratic regimes at home or seek their fortunes abroad.

Clando is a call to action from one African to his fellow Africans - a heart-felt conversation we are privileged to overhear. Teno writes: "A majority of Africans are waiting, waiting for change to happen, a passivity inherited from 400 years of oppression, where things can only go from bad to worse."

Clando begins in medias res: a chaotic, disorienting, urban present where people are so busy surviving they don't have the time to confront the underlying causes of their desperation. The central character, Sobgui, a former computer programmer, has, for reasons not yet clear, been reduced to driving a "clando" or gypsy cab through Douala's anarchic streets. He is clandestine, not just because his cab is unlicensed, but because he is hiding from his own past. When a radical political group involves him in the revenge slaying of an informer, Sobgui knows it is definitely time to get out of Douala. A wealthy elder from his village provides the chance when he asks Sobgui to go to Germany to buy more cars - and to try to locate his long-lost, prodigal son, Rigoberto. 

In a series of flashbacks after he arrives in Germany, we discover that Sobgui allowed a group of pro-democracy students to use his office to duplicate an anti-government flyer. He had, however, been under surveillance and is immediately abducted by the political police and brutally tortured. Sobgui is dumped in a civil jail, which a fellow prisoner sardonically observes must be "heaven" - since the nation beyond its wall is a prison and a hell. One day, without explanation, the political police whisk a terrified Sobgui away, drop him on a busy street corner and tell him not to move until they return. As the hours pass, he realizes that they aren't coming back but that he remains thier prisoner - only now his cell is all of Cameroon.

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