25th Anniversary of Vues d’Afrique and its Pan-Africa
International Film Festival

Montreal, Friday, April 17, 2009

It gives me great pleasure to be here in Montreal and to be the patron of a 25-year festival—not to mention a struggle, a happy and reckless adventure, “Vues d’Afrique is all these—that brings me back to my deepest roots and reminds me of so many friends and unforgettable moments.

As the great Aimé Césaire said just before he died, festivals like these show us an Africa that has been forgotten, deformed and scorned, and then given a superficial exoticism.

These words echo the mission Vues d’Afrique gave itself when it was created, a mission it continues today with passion, daring and conviction: to introduce others to the richness and diversity of African and Creole cultures.

On the island of my birth, Haiti, I grew up in the Creole culture, speaking Creole, so I understood how people in that culture live in the world and their realities.

As for African sensibilities, I discovered them through film and literature. And Vues d’Afrique also became an essential destination for me.

As a journalist, I made every effort to scrutinize and dissect the political, social and economic realities of African countries during the years I hosted Horizons Francophones on TV5 and Radio-Canada television.

All that was left was to follow the common thread of memory. An instinctive and blood memory. A memory sometimes came up because of a simple hand gesture or a pulsating rhythm.

Because I had never been to the continent of my ancestors, the place where they were torn from their lives, stripped of themselves, of their history, their culture, their language, their name, and deported as slaves to far-away lands.

That is, until destiny brought me to Africa on a State visit—my first as Governor General of Canada—and I travelled to Algeria, Mali, Ghana and South Africa.

And Africa coursed through my veins. On that trip, I discovered an Africa full of promise, one very different from the pessimistic vision we are too often shown.

Although Africa still faces enormous challenges—poverty, the AIDS pandemic, security, respect for the integrity of women and children—that visit was a journey of hope for me.

On that trip, I discovered an Africa full of promise, one very different from the pessimistic vision we are too often shown.

I met women and men who were determined to find their own solutions to the enormous challenges of the day, people working towards stability, security, prosperity and freedom.

I returned to Africa on March 8 of this year.

This time, I went to Monrovia, Liberia, at the invitation of the country’s President, Her Excellency Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first woman on the African continent to be elected as head of State.

I was there to take part in an international colloquium on women’s empowerment, leadership development, international peace and security.

A number of us answered the call—Heads of State and representatives from international and multi-lateral organizations, the UN and civil society—all of us convinced that the future of the world depends on women, that they will be the ones responsible for sustainable social change. It is up to all those women who—as they say in Africa—carry their communities on their shoulders and their children on their backs and against their chests.

You know, although it is true that the world we live in is experiencing unprecedented openness, it is also essential to cultivate and increase our access to the diversity of its cultures and information about how they express themselves.

Without festivals like this one—which open our eyes to other realities—we would have only the most simplistic, even biased, vision of the world.

Vues d’Afrique has created here, in this cosmopolitan city, a place where people come together to hold discussions, where all the diversity of African and Creole cultures is displayed for our collective enrichment.

Art has the power to transcend borders and tonight it is uniting our hearts in celebration.

Thank you, and long live Vues d’Afrique!