At the root of journalism is the desire to tell a powerful story. The trick is figuring out what story you are going to tell and how you’re going to tell it. As a child of the diaspora, French journalist and filmmaker Elisabeth "Liz" GOMIS always knew that her stories resided on the African continent.
Gomis was born in France but her family originates from Guinea-Bissau, a Portuguese-speaking country on West Africa’s Atlantic coast, just south of Senegal. She struggled with her identity growing up as the only Black child in her neighborhood and wanted to be more like her blonde haired, blue eyed counterparts. It was the 1995 hip hop boom in France that flipped the switch for Gomis when she was 15.
“You identify with those people who are making that music and they are Black, so you are really proud of this,” she explained. “And then after, you make another transition, which is more like, okay, they are Black, but they're from the US and I'm from Senegal. I have my family there. It was like a constant evolution of my identity.”
Since then, Gomis has sought to establish a connection between her African heritage and Western upbringing through the power of her pen and camera lens.
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Getting Her Start in the Journalism Industry
Her exploration started at Sorbonne University’s school of Communication and Journalism in Paris, where she studied cultural mediation and communication followed by audiovisual journalism at ISCPA. Originally, the plan was to be a television producer but she got her start at Radio Nova, the last independent radio station in France.
“It was the first radio station that played African music in France in 1981,” she recalled of those nascent days in her career. “So this station means a lot to me because they had a magazine, which was called Nova magazine. It was really cutting edge. They were always finding new artists in music, literature, and cinema.”
After a year spent living in Canada, Gomis moved to New York to work at Wax Poetics, a music magazine specializing in vintage and contemporary soul, jazz, hip-hop, blues, and R&B. She continued her travels through a scholarship from Libération, one of the biggest newspapers in France. The prize sent her to Brazil for six months where she worked on a project filming people from the contemporary art scene in São Paulo. After completing these stints, Gomis returned to Paris to work in television.
“I worked on TV for about 10 years, but that's how I learned to use a camera,” she said. “And after that, I decided to do my own thing with the camera and started to film documentaries.”
Initially, she started out making films about “random stuff in France” but when the opportunity presented itself to strike out on her own, Gomis decided that she wanted to focus on Africa. One of these projects was a documentary series called “Africa Riding,” featuring young people using activities including cycling, skateboarding, and roller skating to shift the mentalities in their neighbourhoods, cities, and sometimes even in their countries. One episode followed Abdul Karim Habyarimana, a young man who fled the violence in his country and found refuge in Rwanda where he introduced rollerblading and provided resources to the underprivileged. It has been viewed over 15 million times on YouTube to date. Another series, “Africa Tomorrow,” produced for France Télévisions, offers portraits of creative and inspiring African women. Gomis also had the opportunity to work with Saison Africa 2020, an event celebrating the continent through its geography, history and culture. Her role involves consulting on over 400 projects in arts, sports, and science but more importantly, it allowed her to save some money for her passion project.
“I didn't want to earn money and then just go on vacation and that's it. I wanted to create something to last,” she says.
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Creating a magazine during the pandemic
With the closure of clubs, cinemas, and the lack of live entertainment and sports during lockdown, some people turned to hobbies or picked up new pursuits like baking, crafting, and painting. Gomis started a magazine. OFF TO Magazine is a trip through Africa — one city at a time. The publication goes “beyond the postcard” to take a deeper dive into the cultural, social, political, and environmental issues affecting the continent.
And why did she choose to focus on cities? “It was because I was thinking of myself when I'm travelling, when I'm going back to Senegal or Guinea-Bissau, where I'm from,” she shares about her thought process. “What can I do? Who are the people I meet? What kind of places am I fond of? And for me, there was something really different between what I saw on TV and what I read in city guides. And I wanted to give an objective lecture on what those cities are.
”For the first city guide, Dakar, Senegal seemed like an obvious choice. Gomis’ mother lives there, as well as several friends. Then she settled on another favourite, the Ghanaian capital Accra. Gomis had never constructed a magazine from scratch before so she rounded up an all African team of women — some from France and some from the continent itself — to brainstorm. It took four months to produce the magazine while working around the constraints of lockdown, but by August the first issue was ready to launch. Among the glossy pages were interviews with Kuukuwa Manful, an architect and urban planner who discussed some of the challenges facing Accra; an exploration of the Jamestown settlement; and a piece on Nubuke, an art institution in the city’s East Legon neighbourhood.
“We made it bilingual to touch a much larger audience,” says Gomis. “So we did Accra and I didn't know if people would like it or not. So for me, it was a test. I was really proud of it, but I didn't have any expectations about it. And the thing is it worked actually. People really liked the idea. So I received a lot of messages from around the world; people from Australia, the US, of course from France, and all over Europe. Everywhere you have the Ghanaian diaspora I received some messages. But even people from other countries, because Ghana is a destination that is kind of trendy currently. So it went pretty well.”
The success of the first issue motivated Gomis to work on a second, this time highlighting Kinshasa, the capital and largest city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The COVID-19 restrictions forced her to work remotely and rely on a team on the ground in Kinshasa, but they were able to capture the essence and purpose of the city just as she envisioned.
“I wanted the two sides of the story. It's a struggle. It's an everyday struggle because you have a lot of traffic and when it's raining, it's insane. People are living in difficult conditions. This is one side. But the other side is the creativity, [it’s] insane.”
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The pandemic forced many people to reevaluate different facets of their life, with some committing to more purposeful living. Could that sentiment lead to vacationers bypassing the more superficial aspects of travel and really getting immersed in the local culture? Gomis is not so sure.
“I hope so, but to be really honest, when I'm looking at the internet, whether it's Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, people are looking for glamorous things,” she says. “They are looking for things that are Instagrammable or Tik-Tokable. I know that some people, of course, the people who are buying the magazine, are more into this, but the mass, even from the diaspora, just want to be optimistic. And people are more like this. Yeah, we have to talk about the continent in a beautiful way, of course we have to tell different stories, but we can't just be talking about the fact that there's a Coachella in Accra, Ghana. We can't. For me, it's like lying to ourselves.”
She added, “I know that the feeling is to sell a different image of African people outside of the continent, but it's not true because if we only sell that side of Africa, the people who are seduced by this idea, when they will come they of course will be disappointed because it's not only about that. So yes, my dream is to make people travel in a different way and to see those cities in a different way, but I'm telling you, the struggle is real.”
Gomis had a few tips on how to get around Africa for those looking for a meaningful experience. First, travellers need to rid themselves of preconceived images and judgments and come with an open mind, prepared to learn something new. Another key is being respectful of the culture and showing empathy for the locals. Learning a bit about the customs before landing will also go a long way towards building goodwill. Gomis has visited more than 20 countries by herself and touts solo travel as an effective way to adapt and assimilate while abroad.
“You have to be humble because otherwise it's going to be like a pain in the a** because you are by yourself,” she shares candidly. “So I think travelling alone is the best experience ever, because you learn all of those things really, really fast.”
In the meantime, Gomis will continue to produce OFF TO Magazine to not only provide a different perspective, but to help create parallels and spark conversations between members of the diaspora and people on the African continent. It’s a costly endeavour — Gomis pays out of pocket and distribution rates from Europe to Africa are not economical, while travel within the continent is also expensive making it impractical for many locals. OFF TO Magazine is their connection to each other.
“People are not travelling that much from one country to another, if it's not a country that you share a border with,” says Gomis of her mission. “So for me, it was important to create that link.”