The frogs went by minibus

In 1967 Moustapha Alassane said none of his six films was known to African audiences. His stories came from tales told aloud in Niger, and some of his films speak Hausa. So he built the road to his public himself, with homemade cameras, an open-air cinema and a minibus.

In 1967 Moustapha Alassane had made six films, and he told Le Monde that not one of them was known to African audiences. The companies that distributed films in Africa, he said, would not programme work like his. Yet his films, then and later, came from what people in Niger told aloud and lived: old tales, a wedding in a Zarma village, a young man home from abroad with a suitcase of strange clothes. Two of them exist today in Hausa as well as in French. The stories were there, and so were the people who would know them. What was missing was the way from one to the other.

He was used to building what he lacked. As a teenager with no film stock, he drew his moving pictures on transparent cigarette paper, Hyperallergic wrote in 2017. A mechanic by training, he built his own cameras, which earned him a nickname from the film historian Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, the African Méliès. In 1962, at twenty, he learned animation in Montreal with Norman McLaren, and he was already drawing the toads that would fill his films.

Much of what he filmed came from speech. Two of his first films, in 1962, drew on traditional tales. One of them, Aouré, which the Turin Film Festival calls Niger's first film, follows two young people through the preparations for their wedding in a Zarma village. La Mort de Gandji, from 1965, often described as the first animated film of sub-Saharan Africa, draws on a legend about a toad king and his courtiers, according to ASIFA's obituary of him. Another obituary, written for Africiné, counts him the second African animator, after Egypt's Aly Moheeb. Toula adapts a tale by Boubou Hama, and the Harvard Film Archive lists it in French and Hausa.

In Le Retour d'un aventurier, from 1966, a young man comes home to his village in Niger with a suitcase of boots, hats and revolvers, and his old friends turn into a gang of cowboys who call themselves Black Cooper, John Kelly, Billy Walter and Casse-Tout. A documentary filmed on the set describes the young men of the cast as a taxi driver, mechanics and bricklayers. Zalika Souley, nineteen, played the only woman among them. The film exists in two versions, one in French and one in Hausa.

By his own account, ASIFA wrote, the people of his country liked his films. He opened an open-air cinema of his own. With a minibus and a few projectors he toured Niger to share his love of cinema with the people there, as far as its most remote villages, showing his favourite films beside his own.

He kept building for the rest of his life. In Tahoua, 550 kilometres north-east of Niamey, he turned a few rooms of his hotel into studios for shooting and editing, and he learned computers to keep making films. At sixty-seven, according to the critic Olivier Barlet, he was still making puppets and working on software full of animals to help young people learn animation. His sons and his neighbours moved the puppets. He died in Ouagadougou in March 2015, at seventy-three.

The tales had always been there, told aloud in the languages of Niger. The people were there, in villages a minibus could reach. What had been missing was the channel between them, and he put one together from a minibus, a few projectors and cameras he made himself.

Today much of that channel runs through phones. Our languages are as complete and inventive as they ever were, and most of life in them is still spoken, yet much of what reaches those phones asks people to read and type, often in a language other than the one they speak at home. At Namu we build voice technology for the languages of the Sahel, made from the voices of the people who speak them and recorded with their agreement, so that a story told in Zarma or Hausa can reach the person it was meant for, through the phone already in their hand.