About forty minutes into Tug Of War (Vuta N ‘Kuvute), Officer Matata — while speaking to Mwajuma, the charismatic friend of Yasmin — says of the communists, “They don’t believe in God, the law and they don’t want peace.” That sentence frames much of the over one hour film that follows Dende (Gudrun Columbus Mwanyika), a strong-headed young Mswahili revolutionary fighting for the freedom of Zanzibar; and Yasmin (Ikhlas Gafur Vora), an Indian-Zanzibari woman escaping a forced marriage, who forge a romance against the backdrop of the fight for freedom from British colonial rule.
In the aforementioned line of dialogue, Officer Matata, a police officer working for the British, portrays god, the law and peace through the lens of colonial oppression that Dende and his friends fight throughout the film. God is the religion by which they are subjugated, the law exists to maintain the power imbalance and peace is a facade of the British at the top and the indigenous people beneath them.
Tug of War debuted at the Toronto Film Festival and is based on the Swahili novel by Shafi Adam Shafi. It narrows the often too broad narrative of African independence from colonial rule to Zanzibar, the spice islands of Tanzania. Under the expert hand of Amil Shivji, the film dives into the many divisions that plagued colonial-era Zanzibar. Yasmin’s mother rejecting her because she is staying in the black part of the town after fleeing a forced marriage portrays the divide between the Indians and the indigenous Black people, Dende’s impatience and frustration with the political party on the mainland shows the divide in the methods they use to fight oppression, and the British sovereignty that is being fought uses these divisions as a tool for maintaining their clutch.
Told in Swahili, the film strikes the balance between a forbidden love story and political drama while painting a vivid portrait of Zanzibar with elegant frames of the islands and winding streets that make the place a character in its setting. It takes us on a journey that sees Yasmin and Denge undergo remarkable transformations. Yasmin metamorphosing into a force in their struggle and Denge facing trials of his body and mind but coming out even more determined to fight.
In a film that is not scared of silence, the musical direction (led by an original score by Amélie Legrand and Amine Bouhafa) is potent when it is deployed. With different genres and forms grounding the characters in their heritage and locations, the music serves pivotal moments of tension and emotional release. For example, in early scenes where the loud music is effectively yanked away when the dancehall is attacked creating a jarring effect, or when Mwajuma (Siti Amina) sings — her voice a sonorous protest — after they decide to break Denge out of prison.
Tug of War weaves a tapestry of questions, answers and observations; interrogating a range of issues with simple scenes: a glance, dialogue or the lack of it. It makes you wonder about the undocumented role — that is sometimes thrust upon them — of women in revolutions when Denge hides his pamphlets in Mwajuma’s home and questions the anti-Blackness the indigenous Zanzibarians faced from the Indians that reflects a part of minority relations today. One might wonder why there is little focus on the growth of Denge and Yasmin’s love, but maybe in a revolution, love is not going to grow in ways we expect.
Scenes exist that evoke a type of biblical imagery. One where Denge is carried by the prisoners from solitary confinement, the light striking his body and conferring on him a godlike status and another where Yasmin’s scarlet scarf is a kind of marker reminiscent of Rahab’s scarlet cord in the bible.
There are few interactions between the freedom fighters and the British save one where after Denge’s imprisonment he is taken to a church to meet Inspector Wright who reinforces the twisted notion that colonialism is a favour to the people of Zanzibar.
The peculiarities of liberation from colonial rule exists between African countries and even between communities within those countries and in the end, Tug of War, packed with terse acting performances and rich cinematography captures the unique history of a significant time and place. It tells many stories woven within themselves: love as a motivation for freedom, the violence indigenous people face from oppressors on their own land, the inadequacy of non-violence as a response to violence and a reminder that revolution is a hopeful struggle for freedom and that struggle will have a different story for different places.
