Chance meeting, film bring poor farmer unlikely global fame

When Musya Kisilu welcomed two Norwegian university students at his Ndatani village home in Kitui County in April 2011, he did not imagine his kind gesture would make him a sensation in the global climate change stage.

The 50-year-old peasant farmer who was struggling to overcome the adverse effects of global warming offered the two foreign students pawpaw fruits harvested from his less than an acre farm.

He narrated his struggles and the pain of watching his crops wither every season to the two students who were part of a three-month exchange programme between Kenya and Norway.

ENTHUSIASM

Julia Dahr and Julie Lillesaeter — both aged only 23 — were awestruck with his eloquence and enthusiasm in building resilience against climate change — the global phenomenon responsible for extreme weather conditions.

What began with a lunch hour meeting culminated in “Thank you for the rains”, an award winning film, which has catapulted the peasant farmer onto the global stage and fame, five years later.

According to Ms Julia, they had interviewed many farmers in rural Mutomo, but when they got to Mr Kisilu — a father of nine school going children, they promptly settled on him because his story was authentic and he never falsified anything to impress them.

The 2011 visit happened in the backdrop of a prolonged drought in Ukambani but while most people had given up to the vagaries of dry weather, Mr Kisilu stood out for his determination to overcome the challenge.

Julia and her friend Julie decided to document his experiences as part of their research in Kenya which they would share with their contemporaries back in Norway, triggering conversations in Europe which have expanded across the world.

BRAVE

“Mr Kisilu is extremely brave and generous. He truly gives his audience everything to make sure they feel and understand his fighting spirit and the psychological challenges that he and his community are going through because of climate change,” she says.

A visionary, charismatic smallholder farmer and an informal community leader, Mr Kisilu’s figure has the power of a mythological hero, sending a universal message that goes far beyond the issue of the climate change itself, reminding the world that it takes only one to make a difference.

At the same time, the global politics of climate action were getting as complex as the phenomenon itself, with countries racing to adopt strong policies under the auspices of United Nations Environment Assembly.

However, back in the remote and gully filled Ndatani village, Mr Kisilu had no closer examples to emulate in his conservation efforts, neither did he have a magic solution, but he kept hopes that his voice must be heard.

Through the film, “Thank you for the Rain”, which he stars as the main character, Mr Kisilu has succeeded in creating a strong movement that seeks to change global attitudes and transform millions of indefinite climate anxieties into adaptation solutions.

CLIMATE CHANGE

The documentary is an account of Mr Kisilu, as he soars against various odds in his battle against climate change first in his backyard — a remote village where there was no running water or electricity — and later on the global scene.

For the poor farmer in Kenya whose prominence on the world stage rivals that of Greta Thunberg — the Swedish teenage climate activist — and Ms Julia, his co-producer in the film from Norway, their worlds collided on the front line of climate change.

After narrating their research findings back home, Mr Kisilu’s story translated into a film idea and the two decided to return to Kenya the following month, where they camped at his home for another three months.

Ms Julia says in Norway, there was this perception that people in Kenya just sit and do nothing and are always looking for handouts, so she wanted to show that it was not like that.

For five years, the two would follow Mr Kisilu as he embarked on his daily life — from fetching water in the nearby seasonal stream, to ploughing his shamba, to his community engagements in local churches and storytelling sessions in the evening with his wife and children.

FIVE YEARS

“We followed Mr Kisilu for five years filming different seasons and how his farm crops performed. It was a tedious project, because we literally walked his journey of trying to overcome the frustrations of erratic weather patterns in Kitui County,” Ms Julia said.

The filming captured Kisilu’s life in the most natural way possible where nothing was made up. The two Norwegians would occasionally help his wife Christine Wayua in preparing the family dinner.

“At the beginning, I was to follow Kisilu for only one rainy season. It was all dry and, on my last week before we left, there was this storm which blew away Kisilu’s roof as we watched,” Julia explained in a telephone interview from Oslo, her town in Norway.

The film begins with an episode of long suffering of the Kisilu household following the prolonged drought where his children would occasionally drop out of school for lack of school fees and his struggles to put food on the table.

The worst happened when a violent storm damaged his mud house by blowing away the roof — a sad phenomenon that was captured on camera, shining further focus on how climate change had exposed Mr Kisilu’s family to more suffering.

RELIEF

The rains that would have brought some relief to the region turned out to be another painful disaster for the poor household as the storm also damaged their crops.

This jolted the farmer into action and with only basic climate smart skills which he had learnt at a one-day farmers’ field training school, he began to mobilise his community into planting trees, digging terraces and planting drought resistant crops like millet, sorghum and cowpeas.

“The other season we were crying no rain, no rain, no rain. Now we are talking of floods. Everything is being contradicted,” Mr Kisilu muses in the 90-minute film which has bagged 17 global awards including the Best Film on Sustainable Development Award during the 2018 Objectif D’argent film festival in Paris.

The film also won the prestigious 2019 Wright Film Prize, which recognises films that take advantage of the evocative faculty of film as a means of furthering a concern for humanity and communicating that concern to others.

Using his miniature camera, he would document his farm work and engagement with the community on how they should adopt climate mitigation techniques such as agroforestry, mixed farming, and the use of terraces to prevent soil erosion and harvest rain water.

MOBILISER

In an interview with Lifestyle at his farm, Mr Kisilu narrated his journey from peasantry to being a community mobiliser and later an unlikely voice on the global stage on matters climate change.

"I had never met a filmmaker before I met Julia and never even seen a full film as I live in a remote village with no electricity. It was very interesting to see Julia’s way of working and how she thought my community’s story was so important to the world,” the farmer says.

When the film team asked if they could stay with him and his family for a month to film, Mr Kisilu accepted without any hesitation, and he is now proud that together they managed to tell a story of hope from the front line of climate change.

A compelling human portrait, Mr Kisilu provokes serious questions through the film about what the future holds in face of climate change and how influential political leaders across the world choose to do nothing.

"Now we are looking forward to bringing this film to communities around the world and strengthen the global climate justice movement. I’ve started using the film in my own community, screening it in schools and churches to engage and share knowledge on how we can build climate resilient communities,” he says.

SMALLHOLDER FARMERS

Even before the film which took five years to produce was finally released in 2017, Mr Kisilu had already attracted world attention when he was invited to speak on behalf of smallholder farmers at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference dubbed COP 21 in Paris, France.

The Kenyan delegation to the Paris meeting, which was led by then Environment Cabinet secretary Prof Judi Wakhungu, was surprised to see a “poorly dressed” peasant farmer who wasn’t part of their team of senior government officials addressing the global event.

According to Ms Julia, Mr Kisilu attended the UN Conference of Parties (COP 21) at the invitation of Spire, a Norwegian youth organisation, which facilitated his travel and accreditation to the high level global event.

“I had a golden chance to address world leaders at Paris and share my story as representative of the millions of people on the front line and bearing the heaviest burden to climate change,” Mr Kisilu said.

From the Paris COP 21 conference which had brought together 195 countries, Mr Kisilu came back home more energised to continue with his advocacy and conservation work in Mutomo, where he took his campaigns in public meetings addressed by government officials.

GLOBAL EVENTS

When the film was released in 2017, it became an instant hit in Europe prompting Mr Kisilu to land another prestigious invite to speak at the COP 23 which was convened in Bonn Germany in November 2017, and several other subsequent global events.

The peasant farmer from Kitui is scheduled to address the European parliament in Brussels, Belgium, in June this year, to share his experiences on what farmers in rural parts of Africa are going through in mitigating against climate change.

The film has been screened in cinemas and festivals in more 20 countries, won international awards, and been selected for festivals such as HotDocs, CHP: DOX and Sheffield. In just one year after release, it had already premiered in more than 7 European and 49 countries across Sub Saharan Africa.

“This film powerfully shows the impact of climate change. In contrast to statistics and reports, it is well suited to bring forward an emotional connection to the issue. It also examines the psychological aspects of living at the front line of climate change,” writes Jan Egeland in a review.

Mr Egeland was UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, 2003-06, and was also co-chair of the UN High Level Panel for Global Climate Services, 2009-10.

Ms Emily Wanja, a television producer from Docubox, a firm which is promoting the film, said there was an overbooking when the film screened in Nairobi for the first time last year and they have since screened in churches, towns and schools across five arid and semi-arid counties in the country.

SENSATION

“Mr Kisilu’s story turns out to be an instant sensation everywhere we go. The screenings provide forums to talk about climate change. This shows the power of film as a tool for building climate-resilient communities,” she says. Through the film, several partners have joined hands to help the Kyatune community improve their livelihoods through climate smart agriculture and build resilience and adaptation mechanisms.

Through several screenings overseas, the film has helped to raise funds some of which has gone into building Kyambusya earth dam, some 5 kilometres from Mr Kisilu’s farm and installing irrigation systems on at least 6 acres around the dam for the local community.

The dam was built by Sasol Foundation, a Kitui based non-governmental organisation that has partnered with Differ Media and DocuBox to provide the technical aspect of the project.

The project dubbed Kyavonda model village project has attracted, among others, South Eastern Kenya University, which has been studying ways in which farmers and pastoralist communities in Ukambani region can sustainably tap on resources at their disposal to build alternative sources of livelihoods.

Dr Charles Ndung'u, a climate change adaptation specialist with the university, who is in charge of the Kyavonda model village, says the institution is working with farmers in the area to identify alternative sources of income in the project dubbed A Sustainable Approach to Livelihood Improvement (ASALI).