Hollywood’s Africa: Recycling the Myth of the “Dark
Continent” from 1950 to 2010
By
Okaka Opio Dokotum
Kyambogo University
Abstract
Hollywood’s engagement with Africa has changed shape and
style over the years but the “Dark Continent “ master text that
informed colonial novels still pervades contemporary EuroAmerican films about Africa. The more recent films , especially
Blood Diamond (2006), and Tears of the Sun (2003), are action
film’s as well as adventure tales with quest narratives and treasure
hunts of different kinds. They tackle serious themes about
contemporary Africa and in some cases even make metatextual
reading of western stereotypes about Africa. Even more interesting is
the film category of “Based on a True Story” that tries to invoke
historical validity mixed with humanitarian sentiments to tell
Africa’s story from a more journalistic perspective. Two films stand
out, Hotel Rwanda (2005) and Invictus (2010). This paper examines
the changing generic modes of Hollywood representation of Africa
over the years in order to establish how the “Dark Continent”
master text continues to inform contemporary Hollywood films about
Africa and why.
Key words:
Myth, Representation, Adaptation, Recycling, Colonialism,
The establishment shot of Africa
I consider Compton Bennett and Andrew Morton’s 1950 film
Adaptation Rider Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885) as
the establishment shot of Africa. Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines is
the first colonial novel set in Africa, and in it Rider Haggard
developed what can be called the original template for all colonial
novels set in the continent of Africa. King Solomon’s Mines can also
be considered the ideological and generic template for the film
adaptations as well as other “original” screenplays they have
inspired. The film adaptations develop further Haggard’s idea of
primitive Africa and far exceed the author in their racist
representations. The characters, themes and attitudes in the novel
incarnate in the film adaptations. Haggard scholar Lindy Stiebel says
it was Haggard who imagined and created the “perfect” picture of
Africa, not just for Victorian England but for the entire West for ages
to come, developing what she called the “Haggardesque ‘Africa’”
(53).
The relationship between the novel King Solomon’s Mines and its
1950 film adaptation is also a relationship between British
colonialism/imperialism and American neocolonial hegemony. The
film as an adaptation with all the related cinematic apparatus and the
safari-style movement of location-shooting in Africa becomes an
instrument of colonial incarnation. Peter Davis gives a great analogy
that the invention of the camera is synonymous with the beginning of
“the second conquest of Africa,” which was not just about images
but also “the way these images were presented.” He likens the
filmmakers to “freebooting imperialist” who plundered Africa’s
wealth. With the invention of film, “motion picture photographers
scurried all over the globe, frenetically gathering images—exotic,
arcane, bizarre, sensational, revelatory—which became the ‘reality’
about …[Africa] …for millions”(2). The movie camera was a major
instrument of colonial expansion in new guises and a tool for further
economic exploitation of Africa, especially since all colonized
countries were considered properties of the metropolitan colonial
authorities. Africa’s topography, wildlife, beauty, flora and fauna,
and cultural diversity were and are still exploited because they
provided the perfect background canvas for the outlandish and
exoticist fetishism of colonial representation. In her book Artificial
Africa’s (2002), Ruth Meyer
shows the colonial nostalgia in
Hollywood and the significance of Rider Haggard as a major source
when she says, “exotic cultures and colonial settings have always
been popular in Hollywood … countless versions of Haggard’s work
would in itself present an interesting reflection of the varying
colonialist imageries…” (34). The Hollywood movie camera
therefore perfected the distortion of the image of Africa that the
colonial novel begun. The 1950 Hollywood adaptation of Haggard’s
novel is also informed by what was happening in the movies in
America at the time. This was the last decade of the golden age in
American film history which stretched from 1920 to 1963; the age of
the big hero, big romance, technicolor, the big screen and big
audiences. While colonial nostalgia in the film is evident, Hollywood
employs new ways of treating the colonial themes. The film thus
treats the novel as a dummy, but the dummy is given new life
through the film’s formal codes and the American culture of the
film’s production. Haggard’s novel retains the English appropriation
of the “Dark Continent” while it voices the novel’s story with a postWorld War II vision of America expansionism championed by
Hollywood, creating new images of the “Dark Continent” for its
Euro-American and wider western audience.
Recycling the “Dark Continent Myth”
Fifty six years after Morton and Bennett’s King Solomon’s Mines hit
the theatres, Edward Zwick came up with Blood Diamond (2006),
one of the recent Hollywood films that try to move away from the
old exotic representations of Africa found in earlier jungle
melodramas and adventures films. It is also a complex generic
cocktail of action, adventure, and social problem film that attempts to
tackle serious themes about contemporary Africa. The film explores
the negative impact of American popular culture in Africa and
condemns the plunder of Sierra Leone’s natural resources by
multinational corporations that feed western consumerism. In spite of
its humanitarian crusade, the fascination with Africa for negative
press is very evident in Blood Diamond and racist clichés abound in
the film. These racial attitudes are not as overt like in the oldies and
the stereotypes are even contested in the character of Solomon
Vandy, and more especially in the character of Maddy Bowen the
journalist. The critical edge of the film reflects changing times, but
there is still evident colonial nostalgia in the film in its portrayal of
Africa and Africans. This can be seen in the generalisation with
which the word Africa is used synonymously with Sierra Leone
casting the whole continent in the shadow of the Sierra Leone Civil
War and the causes of the violence. The code TIA (This is Africa) is
used repeatedly to explain extreme violence, poverty, and everything
negative in the film as just a way of life in Africa. Africans are
represented as weak, helpless and disposable, and in need of western
intervention since even God has left the continent. Colonial nostalgia
in the film is evidenced through themes, motifs, clichés, historical
invocation, Hollywood trademarks, and colonial self-reflexivity.
In spite of its moral force, therefore, Blood Diamond is first and
foremost a piece of entertainment, and its first allegiance is to the
wider western audience who socially condition Hollywood
production and provide the money that sustains the movie industry.
Siegfried Kracaeur observes that “Hollywood’s fiction films are
commercial products designed for mass consumption at home and, if
possible, abroad” (55). This means Hollywood has to tread carefully
by giving its consumers what they want which in most cases means
compromising objectivity in exchange for entertainment value. There
is therefore a constant tension between objectivity and subjectivity;
between providing new knowledge and understanding, or upholding
established cultural myths and perceptions about other people. The
ratio of objectivity to subjectivity also depends on the degree of
closeness to American culture or significance to the American
people. Kracauer breaks the images into two; “in-groups” related or
common or brotherly cultures and “out-groups,” those cultures that
are considered distant and are not taken seriously (70). The portrayal
of Africans who represent the extreme “out-group” from America on
the cultural scale (or to use more familiar term, the absolute “other”)
will mostly be negative. There might seem to be more objectivity and
greater knowledge generated, but deep down, it’s just a change of
form. As Annie Coombes observes, “Representations of the African”
is not cast in stone but keeps changing “depending on the political
exigencies of any specific historical conjecture” and because of that,
“they tell us more about the nexus of European interests in African
affairs and about the colonizer, than they do about Africa and the
African over this period” (Coombes 3). American Historian Curtis
Keim asserts that “Dark Continent” portrayals of Africa in its crudest
form collapsed with advances in anthropology and the demise of
settler colonialism, and that the increasing casting of Africans in
contemporary Hollywood film has greatly reduced the overtly racist
statements that the colonial oldies carried. But that does not mean
Hollywood representation of Africa is now positive or has improved.
He contends that, “Hollywood stereotyping of Africa has become
veiled rather than growing less prevalent” (24-25). Colonial nostalgia
is evident in Blood Diamond through themes, motifs, clichés,
historical invocation, Hollywood trademarks, and colonial selfreflexivity.
Militainment and white salvation
Antoine Fuqua’s tears of the Sun (2003) shares with Hotel
Rwanda the “based on a True story” code, but it excels in its pityparty about Africa. Why the title Tears of the Sun? Fuqua says,
“When people think of Africa they think of the Serengeti, the heat
and the sun [tropical paradise?]. I see it more like it’s rainy and
cloudy and wet; sort of like the tears of God…that’s why the title
fits so well for me.” The statement shows that the director’s
Africa is an imagined Africa which shows his ignorance of
geographical Africa. This is a simplistic casting of Africa into one
climatic mold. From Cape Town to Cairo, east to west, Africa’s
climate is very diverse. But even if Africa were wet and cloudy,
what has it got to do with Tears of the Sun? The relationship
between the tears of God and tears of the sun is not clear in the
film, but there are certainly lots of tears of desperate Africans.
The film is one big pity-project. Fuqua says he was inspired to
make the film and put it out there to get the “Trustees of Africa”
to try to get involved. “Maybe by putting it out there… I might be
able to save [Africa] if people get involved and try to help.” But
where does the resilient pity for Africa come from? It is part of
that transcendent colonial narrative which makes the westerner
feel sorry for the African by default. Adichie calls it, “a kind of
patronizing, well-meaning, pity” born of “a single story of
catastrophe” in which there is no possibility of the African being
similar to the westerner; “No possibility of a connection as
human equals.” Fuqua takes this lofty patronizing responsibility
of trying to “save” Africa, what has been coded, “The Whiteman’s
burden” now made even more justifiable since its picked up by
an African American. This kind of discourse is sustained by what
Boggs and Pollard call America’s “long-held myth of Manifest
destiny—a sense of imperial entitlement…” as well as “messianic
nationalism” (Boggs & Pollard 7). In the film, that salvation
comes in the form of Lt. A.K. Walters and his men. The “real”
African refugee characters in the movie are ideologically
constructed to invoke pity at every level.
Tears of the Sun is also one of those war films that were made
with Pentagon collaboration, a product of the US military
industrial complex termed “militainment.” The term was coined
in the 90’s to describe the increasing corporation between
Hollywood and the Pentagon in the entertainment industry. The
term military-industrial-complex was first coined by President
Dwight Eisenhower who with prophetic precision warned of a
dangerous merger between the military and other corporations
to wield propagandistic power against the population (Stahl 11).
Roger Stahl traces the official application of the word
militainment in his book, Militainment Inc. (2010), saying the
word “militainment” “entered the public lexicon” in 2003 and
was first defined by Princeton’s Online Dictionary WordNet as,
“entertainment with military themes in which the department of
Defense is celebrated” and Stahl considers it a predominantly
American experience (Stahl 6). The result is manipulation and
distortion of what passes for historical and “true story” films.
Some Hollywood producers go overboard to please the Pentagon
and “turn villains into heroes, remove central characters, change
politically sensitive settings, or add military rescues to movies
that require none” (Fleischer par. 1).This is the kind of concocted
rescue mission we find in Tears of the Sun where the US military
come out as the good guys while Nigerian troops are all turned
into villains, entrenching the “Dark Continent” theme.
Fuqua himself says, in order for him to get the nuclear carrier
and the aircrafts which came at the end of the shoot, the military
“always had this carrot and stick that they could wield.” Fuqua
was “forced to adopt only one political view which was…right
wing.” As a consolation, he argues that “the navy seals seemed to
share the same viewpoint,” so, he didn’t mind, even though he
had wanted to explore other viewpoints. Fuqua reveals his own
indoctrination or self deception when he says, being limited
politically in what he could say “made the movie in some way
more truthful.”
Based on a “True Story”?
Another strand of contemporary Hollywood films about Africa is the
“Based on a “True Story” genre best exemplified by Terry George’s
film Hotel Rwanda (2004) which claims to accurately reconstruct the
history of the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda through the story of Paul
Rusesabagina, the then manager of Hotel Mille Collines.
In an
earlier paper I have asked the question, “is Hotel Rwanda based on a
true story? Even if we were to say, yes, what exactly does it mean for
it to be “based” on a “true story”? (Dokotum 8)” Thomas Leitch
argues that it does not mean “the film is an accurate record of
historical events” since the claim is “always strategic or generic
rather than historical or existential” (Leitch 2009, p. 282), the idea of
“true story” being further complicated by the ambiguity of the verb
“based” on. As Leitch further observes, it implies that “even before
the film was made, a story was circulating that was not just about
actual events but was a true story account of them, as if extracting a
story from actual events or imposing a story on them was not
unproblematic [My emphases] (2009, p. 282). Whichever way you
look at it, the film Hotel Rwanda is to a large degree removed from
the reality of what happened at de Mille Collines. Hyden White
explains that historical facts in themselves cannot constitute a story,
but provide “story elements” at best. For it to become a “story” it has
to be made by “the suppression or subordination of certain…
[elements] and the highlighting of others, by characterization, motific
repetition, variation of tone, and point of view… (White, 1985, p.
84). While some aspects of historical actuality about the Rwandan
genocide are invoked in Hotel Rwanda, other aspects are concealed.
In any case, how reliable is the memory of Paul Rusesabagina? How
faithful are the screenplay writers to Rusesabagina’s testimony, and
to Rwandan history, and how are these deployed in the film text?
Job Jabiro, a de Mille Collins survivor appreciates the film but scorns
the idea of its historical veracity saying he is “glad the movie was not
nominated for the best true storyline. It would have lost miserably”
(2008, p. 21). Ndahiro and Rutazibwa acknowledge the inevitable
dramatic license needed in the reconstruction of historical films but
maintain that the makers of Hotel Rwanda are guilty of
misrepresenting the genocide and promoting genocide negationism
by creating a false hero out of someone who aligns himself openly
with the genocidaires (2008, p. 39). The authors pose a few
questions: “Did the film’s producer intentionally distort reality? Or is
the lie only the doing of his technical consultant?” In any case, if
Rusesabagina lied, was he seeking “fame and glory” or was he
merely an opportunist trying to survive? (40). However controversial
these claims might be, the “true story” tag of Hotel Rwanda is highly
problematic for genocide memory at large although Rusesabagina
has gone on to amass great wealth and endless accolades from the
west as the Schindler of Africa. Even more problematic is the
political impact of Hotel Rwanda on Rwanda since Rusesabagina has
used the fame and stature the film has given him to present himself
as a critique and alternative leader to Paul Kagame.
Heroic self transcendence
The most positive film ever made about an African is Clint
Eastwood’s Invictus (2010) which celebrates Mandela’s contribution
to South Africa’s 1995 Rugby World cup victory. It is one of several
heritage productions of Mandela’s image that capitalizes on his postcolonial celebrity status to redefine the image of South Africa as a
post-apartheid nation. The flurry of productions of Mandela’s biopic
and the mythic reconstructions associated with his image and life
story led South African reporter Maureen Isaacson to write in
February 2010 that “Nelson Mandela is in danger of being
swallowed by Morgan Freeman and Hollywood. Without any doubt,
Nelson Mandela is one of the greatest icons of our time and his moral
resume and extraordinary courage and tenacity is beyond question.
But Mandela is also a man of his times, shaped in the furnace of the
political, cultural and social history of his world. It is impossible to
celebrate Mandela outside the context of the popular struggle against
oppression and injustice in South Africa and around the world.
Hollywood’s Mandela is in a sense uprooted from this reality and
planted onto the platform of hero-worship while giving minimal
treatment to the circumstances that shaped him. We never get to
know why Mandela was in Roben Island. The montage sequences of
Mandela in Roben Island does not show a suffering man but a tough
hero who his “master of his own fate” unbowed, unmoved. The
intense suffering he went through, the frustrations and even more, the
evils of the system that kept him there is not treated. It is as if prison
was just another
heroic feat or extreme sport. But Mandela’s
account in Long Walk to Freedom shows that prison was not as
stylized as it looks in Invictus. He was crushed by among other
things, being treated like an animal by the guards (404-410; 2010,
202), brutal separation from his wife (477), the death of his mother
(528-529), and of his son (530-531) and the fact that he wasn’t
permitted to bury them. Although in the film he does allude to the
vagaries of prison life, it is not allowed to interrupt the “feel-good,”
“nice-old-man” mood of the film. While Playing the Enemy
organizes South African history around Mandela’s biography,
Invictus deflates history and inflates Mandela’s image instead. The
problem with the internationalization of Mandela’s story and its
internationally collaborative screen productions is that South African
history is short changed on the screen and other anti-apartheid
activists, contemporaries of Mandela are forgotten leading to the
total Mandelisation of South Africa’s antiapartheid history.
Conclusion
I can hardly say the selected films are representative of
Hollywood’s filmic representation of Africa form 1950 to present,
but the selected films straddle what I consider the four major
waves of Euro-American filmic representation of Africa. These
include the colonial panoramic vista,
the colonial nostalgia
school that repackages British colonial experiences of Africa into
cinematic containers mostly made in America even as they try to
read against the very enactment of colonial power structures
that it portrays but for the most part consolidate the negative
imaging of Africa. The third strand is unique in its preemptive act
of intervening in an African civil war to save the lives of
expatriates and Africans and it glorifies the US military for their
recruitment agenda. The last category is unique in that Mandela,
the African “Prometheus” is over-praised and worshipped at the
expense of the anti-apartheid history of struggle that birthed and
shaped his character leading to historical distortion. On the
whole, while there is some improvement in the imaging of Africa
since King Solomon’s Mines, the “Dark Continent” master text
remains resilient in Euro-American representations of Africa to
date.
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