Uriel Orlow

Imbizo Ka Mafavuke

Mafavuke, an indigenous healer from South Africa who in 1940 stood trial for mixing European ingredients in his formulations, travels through time into our present to take on the pharmaceutical industry’s appropriation of indigenous knowledge. Imbizo Ka Mafavuke (Mafavuke’s Tribunal) is an experimental documentary set at the edge of a nature reserve in Johannesburg. A kind of Brechtian ‘Lehrstück’, the film shows the preparations for a people’s tribunal where traditional healers, activists and lawyers come together to ask who benefits when plants become pharmaceuticals, given multiple claims to ownership, priority, locality and appropriation. And of course, ghosts of colonial explorers need to be reckoned with at the same time in order to imagine future scenarios and frameworks.