A portrait of a “beautiful, painful” experience studying in America
Partway through Brief Tender Light, a documentary about four African undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the students, Fidelis, turns the camera on the film’s director and producer, Arthur Musah.
Why, he wants to know, is Musah working on this project?
Blinking into the lens, the filmmaker stammers an answer about wanting to make a “modern African story,” a more complex look at the continent. When Musah and I spoke recently, he told me that he had been wrestling with many of the film’s themes — of belonging, identity, and expectations — since he was a 19-year-old from Ghana, also headed to MIT.
Many passengers on his flight to the United States were other African students going to top American colleges. They were united by the assumption, “spoken and unspoken,” that they would go abroad, get the best education, and bring their knowledge back home, he said.
But over time, Musah, who came to the United States two decades ago, “realized that there was a more interesting, a more complicated story going on than the scripts we had been given.”
Africa, with its large youth population, has increasingly been on the radar of American colleges looking to diversify their international recruitment. The enrollment of students from sub-Saharan Africa in the United States increased 18 percent last year, more than any other world region.
The documentary, which airs next Monday, January 15, at 9:30 p.m. ET on the PBS program POV, follows the students through their four years of college, as they wrestle with ambitions, their own and others’. “Those three letters, MIT, they mean a lot to people. People expect things from you,” says Billy, who plans to help with post-genocide reconstruction in his native Rwanda.
Fidelis wants to “milk” America to “amass” skills, knowledge, and leadership to bring back to Zimbabwe. Philip’s father died when he was 10, leaving him as a surrogate parent to his younger siblings, and he feels enormous pressure to make a better life for his family in Nigeria. Sante, from Tanzania and the only woman among the four, worries about losing her African-ness while studying abroad.
“When you’re in a new environment, your body and your way of thinking adapts to it so much that if you don’t watch out, it can swallow you alive,” she says, “and you can forget where you actually come from.”
Musah, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and computer science before turning to filmmaking, initially planned to focus on students in their first year only. But shadowing the students from orientation to graduation proved to be more compelling, he said, allowing audiences to see how college and culture shaped and affected them.
“Adjusting to a new environment is exciting but also tests your confidence and tests your belief in yourself,” Musah said. “I think that’s kind of a beautiful thing, although it’s a painful thing.”
Philip, who dropped out of primary school to work before winning a scholarship, feels out of step with wealthier classmates. Sante tearfully admits that she is retaking a physics class after failing it in her first semester, doubting that she has what it takes to be an engineer. The students combat misperceptions about Africa — classmates ask them if there are lions and elephants in the streets — but also deal with their own culture shock. Fidelis in particular struggles to come to terms with more liberal American attitudes toward religion and sexual orientation, but when he returns to Zimbabwe after his second year, he no longer feels fully at home there.
The film also documents the students’ grappling with what it means to be Black in America. Sante joins Black Lives Matter protests. Philip recounts an incident in which non-Black students wouldn’t let him into a campus building when he lost his college identification, even though his arms were full of schoolbooks. “It just made me wonder about how they perceived me, you know?” he said, questioning whether he can ever truly be accepted in the United States.
Musah said the students were savvier than he had been in their understanding of race and racism in this country, in part because of exposure through social media. But like them, he had to adjust to being seen through a “racist lens” by Americans. At the same time, Musah cannot live openly as a gay man in Africa, where many countries outlaw homosexuality.
At one point in the film, Musah comes out to Fidelis, who has expressed religious objections to homosexuality. Later the student says that in the United States he has come to understand that gay people are not much different from him. “I can’t reject my friends because they are homosexual,” he tells Musah. “Friendship is more than that.”
Musah said he had not set out to make himself part of the film. But after anti-LGBTQ legislation was introduced in the Ghanaian Parliament, he realized that it was important to speak out about queer Africans and that his story complemented the narrative he was telling about the students. He reworked the documentary to include his own reflections.
While the film focuses on the pressures facing its subjects, it also has lighthearted moments. It captures the students’ glee at their first snowfall, and an epic snowball fight. The students poke fun at how Americans dance. Billy is elected student-body vice president.
In addition to the television broadcast, Brief Tender Light will be shown at theaters in New York and Washington, D.C., and Musah hopes it will also be screened at colleges. His dream scenario is that such screenings could facilitate dialogue between groups represented in the documentary, such as international and African students, students of color, and gay and lesbian students.
“The film,” he said, “is maybe an argument for creating more belonging for everyone.”
