AI’s purpose for re-telling unearthed historic stories untold unveiled.
Our experiences are as unique as our DNA, and yet they might often overlap with others and hence become a paradigm — a recognisable pattern that expands and leads to new deeper understanding.
Often, the nature of our stories remain hidden, either because we attach little value to their external interest or we purposefully restrain from sharing.
My mother, and I know from speaking to many friends abut their parents felt that the forces encountered travelling to the UK and setting up home were part and parcel of the journey. God’s will, you might say and hence best leave the unsaid unheard.
Anytime I asked my mother to recount her past, she found an excuse not to. It was her prerogative and I respected that. Then one day, at breakfast, in reflective mode she started to speak about the challenges she faced.
Ten or so minutes in I felt the urge to resist too strong. Woops! I pressed record on my Mac. It was a mind meld, deep, full of pathos. She was still evasive, but posited a de facto film script — her life.
Her dad John Kojo Badu Sarbah, a railwayman married her mother Margaret Palmer who’s German father was stationed in the Gold Coast. They had 11 children, ten of them girls who spoke local languages and by being sent to Convents, English. Their mother, German-speaking hardly knew any local languages. I can only imagine how they spoke to each other.
My mother would come to work to the UK as a nurse at the NHS. It’s a familiar and yet unique story. Unique too from the African experience. Then a campaign she mounted to right a deep injustice made her work as a nurse unsustainable. That campaign would attract a pioneering scientist and today is a legacy for many people. An African experience that is rarely retold.
I’m a cinema journalism , academic and filmmaker. I live for the literary and cinema value of a story that takes me on a journey, a journey so unfamiliar I don’t know where it’s going, but I know therein lies a dreamscape and a familiarity with others.
I’ve started to apply my craft skills to my father’s story ( you can see the 2min trailer here ) and now my mother’s using AI. AI is helping to, for want of a better word, remaster a story that lives as literally bits and pieces. I sense though this is much greater field akin to photography, but in time everyone will be doing it.
My mind then turns to other stories that provide purpose and context. Next year will be thirty years since South Africa’s historic first all-race election. Between 1992–94 I was a freelance foreign correspondent and this weekend had a cursory look at the number of radio reports that paint a vivid picture of South Africa.
Here too the application of AI will help uncover stories that are unheard — from my personal experience interviewing and shaking hands with Mr Mandela, to the broader stories of others. If this interest you at a community, academic, programme making level, do drop me a line.
More about Dr David Dunkley Gyimah here
