“TIA—This is Africa”: Afropessimism in Twenty-First-CenturyNarrative Film

Martha EvansIan Glenn

Black Camera, Volume 2, Number 1, Winter 2010 (The New Series),pp. 14-35 (Article)

Published by Indiana University Press

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Martha Evans and Ian Glenn, “‘TIA—This is Africa’: Afropessimism in Twenty-First-Century Narrative Film,” Black Camera, An International Film Journal, Vol. 2 No. 1 (Winter 2010), 14–35.

“TIA—This is Africa”: Afropessimism in Twenty-First-Century Narrative Film

MARTHA EVANS AND IAN GLENN

AbstractThis paper considers new representations of postcolonial Africa via five big-budget narrative films, including Hotel Rwanda (2004), The Constant Gardener (2005), The Interpreter (2005), Blood Diamond (2006), and The Last King of Scotland (2006). Although these films appear to have transcended old colonial stereotypes, a new set of features and themes, all Afropessimist in nature, links them, suggesting the West’s negative influence on perceptions of the continent. Although the films show more commitment to realism and historical accuracy than previous cinematic treatments of Africa, they still struggle to represent the real challenges and com-plexities associated with the continent. The limitations of genre and the pressures of the industry result in several weaknesses, principally an inability to investigate the social and structural elements of African history, the overreliance on white focaliz-ers and narrators, and a tendency to generalize from particular cases to continental trends.

Numerous critics have attacked post–World War II films about Africa for giving a second life to old colonial (and often racist) stereotypes.1

Films as far apart in time as Trader Horn (1931) and Out of Africa (1985) draw on earlier images of “darkest” Africa to justify colonial adventure and romance, and the 1985 and 2004 remakes of King Solomon’s Mines (1950) testify to the lure of the exotic. Toward the end of the twentieth cen-tury, however, other trends developed. A strong current of antiapartheid films emerged and still continues (A Dry White Season [1989], Sarafina! [1992], and Catch a Fire [2006]), and the most recent films set in other Afri-can countries show significant changes.

The Africa in these films is much more brutal than in earlier representa-tions, but it is harder to attribute this to filmmakers’ ignorance or racism. The films have been better researched, especially in the attention paid to real-ist detail, resulting in a bleak, Afropessimist outlook. Simply put, Afropessi-mism is the consistently negative view that Africa is incapable of progressing,

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economically, socially, or politically.2 The discourse, inspired by photojour-nalism and television reporting, particularly from the time of the Ethiopian famine in 1984, has come to dominate representations of postcolonial Africa. It is evident in a number of the films’ themes, including the warped economic arrangements of the criminal state; the “resource curse” hypothesis;3 the phenomenon of the child soldier (with the monstrous child as the perfect embodiment of a doomed future); genocide; a new sympathy for white colo-nizers after independence; and kleptocracy and the “big man” syndrome. Other trends include an examination of the unethical interests of multina-tionals, the shortcomings of other world institutions, and the catastrophic effects of meddling foreign interests.

Rather than attempting a full account of every twenty-first-century film about Africa, this paper concentrates on a spate of big-budget, relatively suc-cessful movies: Hotel Rwanda (2004), The Constant Gardener (2005), The In-terpreter (2005), Blood Diamond (2006), and The Last King of Scotland (2006). These films move away from South Africa, are set in the postcolonial period, and center on the dilemmas of modern African states. The selected films have achieved relative success, both financially and critically. All of them share major features of Afropessimism, which demonstrate the emergent western view of postcolonial Africa. While we look at a variety of filmic con-cerns, including mise-en-scène, casting, and especially the interplay between historical accuracy and narrative, we also attempt to gauge reactions to the films, particularly from African politicians.

The paper argues that, although refreshing in their attempt to look at the continent from different perspectives, like the photojournalism com-ing out of third-world countries, these films effectively create an image of Africa as “other to the ‘economically developed,’ safe west”4 and equate the continent with famine, disease, violence, and political turmoil, even if this was never the journalists’—or filmmakers’—intention. The films are at times compromised by commercial imperatives as well as cinema’s highly intertextual nature, which links them to earlier stereotypes and draws on familiar genres and narratives. Numerous critics have noted the resulting limitations: the dependence on white protagonists5 that continues to situ-ate African characters on the periphery; the tendency to approach Africa with a totalizing gaze in order to generalize about regional or national problems; a propensity to dehistoricize (and thus eternalize) events; the re-course to western psychological and familial models and plots (particu-larly with upbeat endings involving escape from Africa); a fascination with the details of violence coupled with an inability to explain its causes; and an avoidance of socioeconomic realities and political complexity,6 which makes it difficult to realistically project positive images of the continent’s future.

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Africa and Aberration in Hotel Rwanda

The first mainstream attempt at a serious look at contemporary Africa came in 2004, ten years after the Rwandan genocide, with Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda. The Rwandan tragedy, perhaps the most widely covered event in African history since the Ethiopian famine, runs the risk of equat-ing all of Africa with genocide, a trend which Mamdani and others argue is already on the rise, as Rwanda turns into “a metaphor for post-colonial vi-olence.”7 Like most material focusing on the genocide, the film goes to great lengths to criticize the West for its delayed response. Under international law, groups targeted by genocidal crimes are entitled to international pro-tection, and the Clinton administration in the United States was accused of avoiding the word genocide to describe events in Rwanda in order to shirk its duty.8 In what might be seen as a gesture of apology for turning a blind eye at the time, western filmmakers have produced a slew of films on the topic in recent years, including One Hundred Days (2001), Sometimes in April (2005), the BBC’s Shooting Dogs (2005), Shake Hands with the Devil (2007), and Une Dimanche à Kigali / A Sunday in Kigali (2006).

Hotel Rwanda, the most commercially successful of these films, ex-plores events through the eyes of the real-life figure Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), the manager of the Hôtel des Mille Collines, who gave ref-uge to 1,268 Tutsis and Hutu moderates. Referred to as Africa’s Schindler’s List (and similarly criticized for focusing on heroism rather than history), the film highlights the disastrous effects of colonial social engineering as well as the consequences of “forgetting” the “forgotten continent.” Yet, like the other films under discussion, it both underplays and overstates Africa’s challenges.

Early in the film, the Tutsi–Hutu conflict is posited as a consequence of the colonial government’s divide-and-rule tactics, documented to have fa-vored Tutsis. The opening lines set the scene, as one of the genocidaires ex-plains the situation for western audiences via a radio broadcast: “When people ask me, good listeners, why do I hate all the Tutsi, I say, ‘Read our his-tory.’ The Tutsi were collaborators for the Belgian colonists; they stole our Hutu land; they whipped us. Now they have come back, these Tutsi rebels.”

The point is dramatized later when a Rwandan journalist explains that it was the Belgians who created the divisions: “They picked people, those with thinner noses. The Belgians used the Tutsis to run the country and then when they left they gave power to the Hutus and, of course, the Hutus took revenge.”

Many critics have dismissed these attempts at historicizing as “cursory,”9 and though the film at least attempts to clarify historical events, the explana-tions fail to come to grips with the complexities of the pre-existing settler

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and native identities located as a central source of the conflict.10 While Bel-gian colonists may have provided a modern state structure for the divisions (by, for instance, introducing identity documents that classify Rwandans ac-cording to their ethnicity), they did not invent them. In some ways, in fact, western modernity turned the traditional downtrodden (the Hutus) against the dominant minority. In that sense, one might have expected Americans to applaud the Hutus, but of course mass murder isn’t the Boston Tea Party or the American Revolution. So, to smooth out the contradiction, Hotel Rwanda finds it easier to blame the Belgians for inventing something they in fact found and built on, rather like the British using local chieftains.

The reason for this simplification lies not only in the limitations of cin-ema, but also, potentially, in the American tendency to view Africans merely as good savages ruined by colonizing Europeans. In its myth of its own origins as anticolonial and anti-European, the United States finds it difficult to assume any responsibility for current events in Africa, even though it was clearly the power that could have intervened most easily at the time. Though investigative journalists have focused on the Clinton ad-ministration’s indecision,11 the film doesn’t give a face to American guilt. Rusesabagina’s manicured Belgian bosses (to whom he is portrayed as overly subservient) are ensconced in their remote European offices, while the Americans in the film, Jack Daglish (a Scot named Jock Daglish in the original screenplay) and Colonel Oliver, played by Joachin Phoenix and Nick Nolte, are portrayed as active on the ground—risking their lives to record events for the media, protecting civilians, and trying to procure UN assistance. Though loosely based on Canadian Roméo Dallaire, there is only one reference to Colonel Oliver’s Canadian roots, and Nolte’s prior roles as American military characters (in, for instance, The Thin Red Line) muddy the identity. African history, in this case, is dehistoricized also be-cause of America’s pervasive anticolonial stance.

Yet this dehistoricization is not as troubling as it is in some of the other films under discussion, because it isn’t coupled with an overly fascinated por-trayal of seemingly senseless brutality. Unlike Blood Diamond and The Last King of Scotland, the film is surprisingly nonviolent. The horror of the geno-cide is filtered through the fear of victims seeking refuge at the hotel and via Rusesabagina’s brief journeys through the Interahamwe-controlled check-points in his search for supplies. For the most part, the genocide happens off-screen12—a technique common in films dealing with trauma13—and this allows audiences to identify with ordinary Rwandans instead of allowing them to consume the images voyeuristically (as is the case in the more har-rowing but ultimately alienating portrayal in A Sunday in Kigali).

In addition to the subtle approach, Hotel Rwanda, like Blood Diamond, has been criticized for its “sunny denouement,”14 particularly in light of

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subsequent clashes in Burundi as well as ongoing uncertainties about ap-plying the term genocide to Darfur. Because the film gives us one of the happier stories from the genocide, it is in danger of creating a skewed de-piction—especially since it appears to be a popular resource in African Studies university courses in the U.S. The criticism of the film’s upbeat ending highlights the difficulty in making mainstream films on African themes. To tell modern African stories, many filmmakers appear to avoid the question of Africa’s future altogether, falling back on upbeat endings and sympathetic black characters who are saved from the wreck (frequently through the sacrificial actions of white protagonists or through emigration to the developed world).

The most obvious merit of the film is that it invites identification with a black African character (albeit played by an American actor). Although, as a middle-class figure, Rusesabagina does not represent the majority of Rwandan victims, he is situated at the center of the drama, and it is re-freshing to see Hollywood stars playing second fiddle.

Yet this “Schindler” approach was not met with praise from the post-genocide regime in Rwanda; instead, their response indicates discomfort with Rusesabagina’s valiant figure, raising the question of who is entitled to speak on the country’s behalf. Since the film’s release, Rusesabagina, now living in Brussels, has become a celebrated political mascot, has been awarded medals, and is frequently invited to speak at public events in the U.S. and Europe. His critical comments about the current government at these events and in his autobiography, An Ordinary Man, have provoked the ire of the Paul Kagame regime, which sees the media attention given to Rusesabagina as inappropriate. To counter the publicity, Alfred Ndahiro, a public relations advisor to Kagame, and Privat Rutazibwa, a well-known Rwandan journalist, have coauthored a book, Hotel Rwanda or the Tutsi Genocide as Seen by Hollywood. Though the book focuses rather narrowly on the inaccuracies of the film in an attempt to deheroicize its central fig-ure, refreshingly, it gives some insight into the way in which the film has been received by those most affected by its topic. In an interview, Rutazi-bwa complains about the film’s reception, saying that Rusesabagina is “taking advantage of the fame he falsely gained from the movie to rebrand the very ideology that led to the genocide that he claims to be the hero of.”15 The debate between the Rwandan authorities and Rusesabagina is politi-cally complex, but the response indicates a deep frustration over the lack of control over global media images.

The film’s effacement of the causes of the genocide has more serious re-percussions than misplaced heroism. Deflecting attention onto the West’s delayed response and raising too few questions about the roots of the geno-cide leaves audiences to interpret it as an “apparently atavistic inter-ethnic

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conflict,”16 a reading that feeds into existing views of the event as an “anthro-pological oddity.”17 In addition, like many of the genocide narratives, Hotel Rwanda locates the genocide as an exceptional moment in time (suggested by such titles as 100 Days and Sometimes in April), which not only adds to the inexplicability of the violence, but also diverts focus away from current events and the possibility of reprisals.18 In the case of Rwanda, overlooking the roots of social violence could have dire consequences.

The Constancy of Corruption in The Constant Gardener

The next major film set in Africa was Fernando Mereilles’s 2005 adaptation of John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener. Like Hotel Rwanda, it points an ac-cusing finger at the West, in this case a pharmaceutical company that is test-ing dangerous tuberculosis (TB) drugs on Kenyans. Tessa Quayle (Rachel Weisz), the activist wife of Justin Quayle, a British diplomat (Ralph Fiennes), is murdered when she tries to expose the deadly effects of the drug, and the plot revolves around Justin Quayle’s search for his wife’s killer while piecing together the details of the scandal she has uncovered. This is the first main-stream film to look seriously at disease in Africa. The only way in which ear-lier films seemed able to apprehend the problem was allegorically (for instance, in Outbreak [1995], in which an unknown African disease gets to America through an illegally imported monkey), suggesting that Africa was seen as a mysterious threat to action set almost exclusively in the U.S. The Constant Gardener is more interested in the ways in which globalizing forces have led to the exploitation of the world’s poor. Le Carré was much inspired by journalistic research on the outsourcing of first-world drugs to third-world countries, and the much-publicized documentary exposé Dying for Drugs influenced Jeffrey Caine’s adaptation of the book.

But, as both film19 and book20 reviews have noted, the conventions of the thriller genre prevent the narrative from fully engaging with the com-plexity of the issue, both over- and underemphasizing Africa’s problems with Big Pharma. While the negative side effects of drug trials are an issue, greater problems include the ethical challenges associated with “informed consent”21 and the fact that the developing world rarely enjoys the benefits of medical research, either because the drugs are too expensive or because they are irrelevant to their health needs. In its attempt to inhabit the thriller genre, the movie creates the impression that Tessa Quayle’s damning re-port contains such revealing information that those with pharmaceutical shareholders’ interests at heart will kill to prevent its release. Sonia Shah, author of The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World’s Poorest Pa-tients, points out that “in real life, bad drugs and unethical research prac-

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tices often continue unhindered despite mountains of data and reports detailing their defects.”22 Getting the West to care is not as easy (or as dan-gerous) as the film implies.

The film also dehistoricizes Kenya’s past. Le Carré’s novel situates events within the highly corrupt Moi regime in Kenya, and the representa-tion of corrupt government officials led to its ban there. While the Kibaki government unbanned the book and permitted the film to be made in the country, they did so perhaps with the expectation of a more historical ap-proach to events, as a statement from Raphael Tuju, Minister of Informa-tion and Communications indicates:

The Constant Gardener is very critical of Kenya, and it was unprecedented that this ministry would support it and license it. But I went ahead and made sure that we did so, because if we didn’t support it being filmed here it was still going to be filmed somewhere else, and it would still be critical of Kenya in the past, with respect to issues like corruption.23

Nonetheless, the film fails to distinguish clearly between past and present, and neither mentions Moi nor dates the events depicted. Instead, the approach undermines the filmmakers’ intention to make the film thor-oughly Kenyan. At the time of filming, Kenya had distinguished itself as the first African country to vote out a leader through democratic elections. Though political events have since turned sour, no awareness of a different era is shown in the film. In the DVD extras on the filming process, much was made of the decision to film in the country (instead of in South Africa with its superior film infrastructure), suggesting a kind of obsession with authenticity. But, like many of the other mainstream films on Africa, the film privileges visual realism over historical accuracy.

The scene of the horseback raid in southern Sudan is a case in point. Though the scene is actually filmed in Kenya, the remoteness of the loca-tion made the filming process hugely complex; yet the actual scene involves little explanation of the Sudanese situation and operates instead as a visu-ally evocative setting. As Justin gets closer to finding his treasure (in this case Tessa’s damning report on the ThreeBees trials), so the suspense is heightened through his and Dr. Marcus Lorbeer’s near death at the hands of Sudanese tribesmen. Lorbeer provides scanty explanation for the audi-ence—“Tribesmen. Nasty. They steal cattle, food, children”—before he and Quayle are whisked away by plane.

The question of African violence is also elided in the film. It is never made clear why the black Belgian Dr. Arnold Bluhm (Hubert Koundé) is murdered separately and quite so brutally. While the delayed discovery of his body keeps Justin wondering about Tessa’s fidelity and the possibility

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that her murder was a crime of passion, no rationale is offered for the par-ticularly vicious nature of Bluhm’s elimination. (Though the film doesn’t show us the horror, we are given a detailed description of how Bluhm’s hit men deemed it necessary to cut out his tongue and chop off his genitalia and stuff them in his mouth before crucifying him alive.) While mutila-tion practices, particularly female circumcision, have been recorded in Kenya, the filmmakers offer no solid explanation for Bluhm’s fate and, as with Hotel Rwanda, seem to expect that audiences will simply accept the gratuitousness of black-on-black violence.

Unlike Hotel Rwanda, however, Africa is filtered through the eyes of white protagonists, a trend with which film reviewers appear to be losing pa-tience even though it may be argued that it is a box-office necessity to make the films acceptable for western audiences.24 Many of the white protagonists in the new films on Africa are shown sacrificing their lives for postcolonial countries, and a new sympathy attends white colonizers (the South African Lorbeer, for example, is portrayed as a do-gooder caught up in a destructive machine). The film’s conclusion features Justin waiting to be gunned down alongside Lake Turkana. Like Blood Diamond, the implication is that the he-ro’s death will procure significant benefits for Africa. Not all reviewers were satisfied with this trajectory, referring to it as a “white man’s burden movie”25 that “largely denies its victims a role in their own saving.”26

On one level, the filmmakers appear to anticipate the limitations of film’s refracted view of Africa, as indicated by the fuss made over Brazilian Fernando Meirelles’s supposed third-world perspective.27 Yet, the film’s vi-sual innovations (oversaturated film stocks, jarring angles, and mirage-like focal planes) and real-life footage of the slum of Kiberia do not make up for the absence of a central African character.

African Typicality in The Interpreter

The lack of a fully developed black African character was also a major com-plaint about The Interpreter (2005), Sydney Pollack’s final film, which marks, explicitly and persistently, a revaluation of attitudes toward African libera-tion.28 The film expresses despairing Afropessimism through visual ele-ments, plot, character, symbolism, and casting.

In the opening sequence, we encounter the dystopia of the fictional country of Matobo,29 a cross between Rwanda, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. The imagery is of broken infrastructure and rusted slogans of indepen-dence. Three men, two white and one black, travel to a football stadium to uncover evidence of a massacre. The black man and one white man go into the dilapidated stadium, discover a changing room full of rotting corpses

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(recalling media images of the Rwandan genocide), but on emerging are shot by two child-soldier hit men.

Matobo is run by Zuwanie, “The Teacher,” a former liberation leader who has become president. His name recalls that of Julius Nyerere, whose nickname was Mwalimu or teacher, and he also draws on elements of other more frightening figures: President-for-Life of Malawi, Dr. Hastings Banda, and of course Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.

The link did not go unnoticed in Zimbabwe, where the movie was not only banned but also provoked critical commentary from official govern-ment sources. The government-controlled Herald dismissed the film as anti-Zimbabwean and CIA-supported,30 with Tafataona Mahoso, chair-man of the Zimbabwe Media and Information Commission, calling it “cheap American and Rhodesian propaganda . . . typical of the tactics used during the civil war.”31 While this reaction has been described as “para-noid”32 by Zimbabwean opposition parties and the U.K. media, this dis-missal risks overlooking the relative popularity of anti-West rhetoric among ordinary Zimbabweans, a rhetoric that appears to have provided Zanu-PF with an effective means of maintaining support. In this case, the West’s negative reaction to political events in Africa has been used as a means of drumming up support, and the scarcity of African reviews of The Interpreter (as well as the other films) leaves a gaping hole in the commen-tary on such portrayals.

Central African characters are also glaringly absent from the film’s narrative. The sister of the murdered white “martyr” is played by Nicole Kidman, the interpreter of the title. She is working at the UN and is also the former lover of the murdered black man, the leader of an opposition party. The Kidman figure creates a new sense of the complexities of Africa and white–black relationships, suggesting, like the Lorbeer character, that whites have in some ways been victims of independence, not simply cal-lous exploiters. According to scriptwriter Charles Randolph, the casting had less to do with box-office revenue than some critics assumed. Ran-dolph’s script pointedly deals with a white translator:

I chose a white African because I felt that’s a story that really hasn’t been told . . . I think we’ve historically dismissed white Africans as racists, and I wanted to portray someone who loved her country, felt an intimate connec-tion to it, but didn’t happen to be black.33

How is the world to understand white (South? Southern?) Africans after independence and the disillusionment with African governments? While The Constant Gardener and Blood Diamond make use of morally ambiva-lent characters, The Interpreter sets up a dichotomy: the bad white African

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is played by the villainous more-or-less Afrikaner head of Zuwanie’s secu-rity service (Jesper Christensen); the good white African (English, with British mother) by Kidman. White English-speaking Africans have merged, it seems, into the Australian column with the same kind of access rights to the U.S. In addition, on one level the title also bestows a kind of legitimacy upon white colonists, who are in a position, it is suggested, to interpret for the West.

When Sean Penn, who plays the Secret Service agent, is brought in after Kidman reports she has heard of a planned assassination against Zu-wanie, he suspects her and asks what she felt about Zuwanie. “Disappoint-ment,” she answers. “It’s a lover’s word,” he retorts. This seems a central claim from Pollack and liberal westerners generally. Kidman’s character, on behalf of Pollack and a liberal audience, one must assume, accuses Zu-wanie of not living up to his own revolutionary-humanist claims. When she eventually confronts him, she forces him to read aloud a passage from his autobiography to make him face his betrayal of his (and her) own ide-als. The accusation against Zuwanie is that he has proved the bigots and racists right. Liberals, logically, are more betrayed by the failures of black Africa than conservatives or racists are.

In spite of Randolph’s attempt to dramatize this, the centrality of the white character was also the movie’s most criticized flaw. “That a white woman,” one reviewer noted, “no matter how conflicted and compelling, bears the visible burden of this violent history obscures the high costs for black Africans.”34

Interestingly, reviewers have been less critical of the film’s indulgence in decontextualized images of African mayhem. In addition to its fictional status, Matobo is afflicted with just about every African horror: Zuwanie is the typical ex-revolutionary hero who has become corrupted with power (recalling many states, including Zimbabwe), his would-be assassin has AIDS (a disease strongly associated with its African origin),35 Silvia’s brother and former lover are shot by child soldiers (recalling Sierra Leone and Liberia), the protestors outside the UN buildings call for the end to genocide (recalling Rwanda), and we also learn that landmines killed the heroine’s parents (recalling Angola).

Matobo’s fictional history can be seen as an attempt at what Georg Lukács called “typicality”—a narrative tool enabling filmmakers to har-ness a larger political significance for their films.36 Typicality is defined by Lukács as

the convergence and intersections of all . . . the most important social, political, moral and spiritual contradictions of our time . . . Through the creation of a type

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and the discovery of typical characters and typical situations, the most signifi-cant directions of social development obtain adequate artistic expression.37

Pollack appears to critique the failures of African states generally. By typi-fying location in addition to character, however, the film tends to impede rather than enhance the power of the message. Reviewers referred to Ma-tobo as a “smokescreen”38 and noted, “You can’t help but feeling a bunch of white people are making up a lot of stuff about Africa.”39 The film’s concat-enation of western anxieties about the continent is such that Silvia’s deci-sion to return to Matobo at the end of the film hardly seems plausible; too dismal a view of Africa’s future is entrenched in the viewer’s mind.

Aligning the film more closely with the circumstances of a particular country at a particular time (by, for instance, removing the child soldiers and landmine elements) may have circumvented some of the complaints about the film’s indiscriminate cut-and-paste approach. Matobo, even if fictional, cannot stand in for a continent of some forty-six countries. This points to another weakness of Afropessimism: in its wish for a total expla-nation of the continent it generalizes about its problems.

White Sacrifice in Blood Diamond

Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond (2006), the most commercially successful of the films, makes more of an effort to deal with the specifics of Sierra Leone and has been praised for its depiction of child soldiers. The leading figure, Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), is a former South African mer-cenary of Rhodesian descent. Now a diamond smuggler, he seems heartless and racist, though the film redeems him consistently and he ends up as the sacrificial westerner. Had one imagined, twenty or even ten years ago, that a major Hollywood star would play a white racist mercenary in Africa as a sympathetic figure—and get an Academy Award nomination for it—one would surely have attracted ridicule, and DiCaprio’s character is testimony to the changed reactions to Africa.

Set during Sierra Leone’s civil war, the film takes its inspiration from the “resource curse” hypothesis, and Zwick worked with Sierra Leonean documentary filmmaker Sorious Samura, whose own take on the situation fed directly into the film. In the documentary Blood on the Stone (2007) when Samura is asked whether diamonds are a curse to Sierra Leone, he replies that “diamonds, which should have made Sierra Leone a country fit to compete with other western countries, has us all killing, raping and maiming each other.” In the film, the point is clarified for the audience when an elderly man in a ravaged village tells Vandy that he dreads what

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would happen if oil were discovered in Sierra Leone. The narrative goes on to explore the situation in two ways. Internally, the politics of the country are reduced to a naked struggle for power and control of diamond mining, while externally, first-world consumerism (what Archer calls “bling bling”) is linked to African civil war (“bling blang”). In singling out diamond company Van der Kaap (understood by most audiences as De Beers) as the major enemy, the film again exemplifies suspicion, typical of Hollywood and liberal Afropessimism, of multinational corporations. This wish to blame what is still seen as a white South African corporation leads to one of the major historical distortions of the film. In its eagerness to implicate the West, it fails to even mention the actions of Liberia’s Charles Taylor, arguably the most brutal and disruptive force in the war.

Before the film was released, the conflict between the filmmakers and the diamond industry hit the news, when De Beers and the World Dia-mond Industry allegedly requested that the filmmakers add a disclaimer stating that events in the film are fictional and belong to the past.40 When the filmmakers refused, the industry embarked upon a damage control campaign to counter the anticipated negative press. The furor was height-ened when the Kalahari Bushmen of Botswana entered the fray, publishing a full-page advertisement in Variety, addressed to DiCaprio: “Friends have told us that you are in a film Blood Diamond, which shows how badly dia-monds can hurt. We know this. When we were chased off our land, offi-cials told us it was because of the diamonds. Please help us, Sir.”41

The link between celebrity and commentary on Africa is particularly relevant to film; it is often through celebrity action and filmic releases that events on the continent become newsworthy. Julie Hollar points out that after the opening of Blood Diamond, Sierra Leone was mentioned eleven times on the news inserts of the major news networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC), whereas the role of diamonds in the conflict was mentioned a scant twenty-six times during the entire duration of the civil war.42 Numerous critics went on to say that after viewing the film they “will never look at a diamond in the same way.” To the filmmakers, such responses no doubt served as a measure of Blood Diamond’s success.

But another reaction, which must have taken the wind out of their sails, came from an unlikely source: former South African president Nel-son Mandela, who, as part of the De Beers campaign, wrote to Zwick him-self, expressing concern over the film’s potential effect on the diamond industry (and Africa) as a whole:

It would be deeply regrettable if the making of the film inadvertently ob-scured the truth, and, as a result, led the world to believe that an appropriate response might be to cease buying mined diamonds from Africa . . . We hope

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that the desire to tell a gripping and important real-life historical story will not result in the destabilisation of African diamond-producing countries, and ultimately their peoples.43

Mandela’s reaction points to the precariousness of Africa’s dependent posi-tion in the economic sphere. The tussle for global representation character-ized much of the debate preceding the 2010 Soccer World Cup in South Africa, for instance, and critics have for many years suggested that negative reporting, especially on the threat of terrorism and crime, impacts hugely on tourist industries,44 exchange rates, and economic growth across the continent. Narrative film is an extremely powerful force in this respect.

Mandela’s prediction was accurate: like the other films, Blood Dia-mond does obscure historical truths, decontextualizing events in its en-deavor to bring the Sierra Leonean civil war to audiences. The concluding credits, which do acknowledge that the conflicted diamond situation has improved and that Sierra Leone is at peace, go on to state that there are still 200,000 child soldiers in Africa. This conflates past and present events in a way that leaves viewers with an impression of Sierra Leone and indeed Af-rica, not as a region whose problems can be solved through more carefully monitored economic arrangements, but as a place of little hope.

In addition, Archer’s figure becomes a way for Americans to articulate and hear his cynical TIA (“This is Africa”) view that the continent is be-yond good and evil, beyond aid, beyond repair and, probably, to feel some sympathy for those caught in it. In a pithy exchange, he sums up the pre-vailing view of Africa:

Danny Archer: Peace Corps types only stay around long enough to realize they’re not helping anyone. The government only wants to stay in power until they’ve stolen enough to go into exile somewhere else. And the reb-els . . . they’re not sure they want to take over, otherwise they’d have to govern this mess, but TIA, right M’ed?M’ed: TIA.Maddy Bowen: What’s TIA?Danny Archer: This is Africa.

The Afropessimist TIA mantra—a sardonic response to African apathy and brutality—rings especially true with audiences, and the abbreviation has become part of popular discourse in blogs and Web sites dealing with African issues. The problem, as with the Matobo fictionalization, is that once again Africa’s problems are not seen discretely, as challenges with particular causes, even if Blood Diamond invokes actual history and attempts to steer away from totalizing by locating the country on a map of Africa in the opening sequence.

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Indeed, events are not invented in any way: the brutality conveyed in the film was well recorded by journalists, and, though much of the film was shot on location in South Africa and Maputo rather than in Sierra Leone, the filmmakers appear to be more concerned with realism than earlier directors. There were child soldiers (an estimated 23,000) with horrifying names like Captain Cut Hand;45 “the future is in your hands” was indeed the govern-ment election slogan, cruelly subverted by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in its campaign of amputation; the “short- or long-sleeve” query prior to amputation, as wild as it may seem, is based on fact; and even minor de-tails, such as the RUF’s donning of wigs, are accurate.

And yet, something about Blood Diamond still seems off-kilter. It is mainly the sense that too much effort is put into portraying authenticity (a kind of morbid interest in how things happened), and not enough screen time is devoted to explaining why they may have happened. The effect of this approach, as with The Constant Gardener, is to eternalize Africa’s problems; with no explanation as to why they exist, it is difficult for audi-ences to imagine their resolution.

The lack of context is nowhere more obvious than in the famous Siege of Freetown scene, to which much attention was paid during filmmaking, with witnesses being called in to help recreate authenticating details in a supposed homage to victims. In the DVD interview, Zwick claimed he wanted to include the siege because he didn’t want the film to focus only on Archer and Vandy; it is an attempt, then, to portray the larger picture of the suffering of Sierra Leonean people. But like the horseback raid scene in The Constant Gardener, the lack of context compromises this intention. Maddy’s “this place is about to explode,” coupled with radio reports an-nouncing the approaching RUF, are all we get by way of contextualization, with no mention of Johnny Koroma’s removal from power.46 In spite of Zwick’s objective, the scene serves only to create a hostile urban jungle in which Archer can display his bravado, thereby winning Vandy over. Nu-merous reviewers note this failure, seeing not just African history but also Vandy as plot devices in “another white man’s redemption.”47

Blood Diamond is probably strongest in its portrayal of the brutalization of child soldiers, and critics have congratulated it for the scenes in which Dia is indoctrinated into the RUF as these attempt to explain the processes that lead to what would otherwise appear as senseless violence.48 Still, even here, it misses the point. As Kapuściński’s writing on the phenomenon shows, al-though abduction as a means of recruitment is undoubtedly a problem, more frequently, orphaned children, or vulnerable children displaced by civil war, poverty, and migrant labor are easily drawn in. “Weapons,” he points out, “are not only for waging war, but are a means of survival.”49 Similarly, the African minister in Robert Kaplan’s famous 1994 essay, The Coming Anar-

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chy, interprets Sierra Leonean brutality as the “revenge of the poor,” pointing to a corrugated-iron shack and stating, “The boys who took power in Sierra Leone come from houses like this.” In the film, the images of poverty and squalor, though abundant, are limited to unknown subjects, whose discom-fort we witness only in highly aestheticized shots, which do not capture the real hardships, and boredom, of impoverishment.

The scenes also present us with an Americanized version of Africa: the nuclear monogamous family replaces the extended African family; Dia’s in-doctrination is played out as a kind of Oedipal rebellion (emphasized through the RUF’s consistent connection with gangster rap, the music associated with misguided American youth); and the idealized image of a transplanted small American town takes the place of an African dynamic.

Dia’s post-traumatic stress syndrome is also effortlessly resolved through his reintegration into the nuclear family. The family values that foster his individual salvation and the family’s apparent emigration to London also skirt the issue of community reintegration, one of the most difficult aspects facing former child soldiers as indicated in the interview with a former child soldier in the 2007 Samura special features interview that accompanies the DVD.

In this way, the narrative dénouement downplays the harsh African re-ality that the rest of the film spends so much time setting up—for example, in the depiction of the streaming mass of refugees. Taking an African fisher-man out of the chaos, reuniting him with every single member of his family, limbs intact, and ushering him onto the global stage where his comments help to bring about the Kimberley Accord underplays the hardships facing a society divided and brutalized by civil war. Furthermore, having an Ameri-canized African play the part suggests that while Archer might have died and had his blood blend with the African soil, the black hero and his son will find their future out of Africa. As with The Interpreter, the film’s projection of the continent’s future is too bleak for audiences to contemplate his return. In the end, the film imagines the West doing two things: pressuring multina-tionals or offering a lifeboat (via immigration) to a select few. It remains un-able to imagine or investigate a happy thriving African community, or go into the post-traumatic recovery of a society in chaos.

Diluting Social Judgement in The Last King of Scotland

Another film at pains to implicate the West in Africa’s failures is Kevin Macdonald’s adaptation of Giles Foden’s novel The Last King of Scotland. In his director’s comment on the film, Macdonald points out that the Brit-ish satirical magazine Private Eye had published a spoof column purport-

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edly by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. He could have added that Punch had done the same and that Alan Coren, the author of the columns, in fact pro-duced two collections of them. Macdonald went on to say that he wanted the film to avoid the condescending prejudice of pidgin English and the racist portrayals of the tabloid press of the 1970s. The Last King of Scotland thus raises the question of what differences emerge between the original reactions to Amin and the fictional version some thirty years on, providing an interesting example of how twenty-first-century film reappraises and tries to understand the travails of the African state.

The first point about the film is that unlike earlier filmic representa-tions such as The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin (1981) it does not depict the Brit-ish (English or Scots) as heroic figures. Macdonald’s objective—to portray Amin as something of a “Frankenstein’s monster,”50 the West’s disastrous creation—even won the filmmakers the support of Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni.51 Dr. Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), the central white focalizer in the film, is a shallow hedonist who blunders into events, puts himself and Amin’s wife Kay (Kerry Washington) in danger, and is saved only by the selflessness of one of the few good figures in the film: the Ugandan doctor, Junju (David Oyelowo). Amin’s words to Garrigan at the end of the film ring true and are all the more chilling because they come from Amin:

Did you think this was all a game? “I will go to Africa, and I will play the white man with the natives!” Is that what you thought? We are not a game, Nicholas. We are real. This room, here; it is real. I think your death will be the first real thing that has happened to you.

Nigel Stone (Simon McBurney), the local British official representative, also illustrates the mistaken perception of Africa as a “game.” He moves from seeing Amin as a solid local strongman to use against the left-leaning Obote to wanting to assassinate him. But the central figures representing Euro-pean morality and intelligence are the British couple, Dr. and Mrs. Merrit, who selflessly run a mission hospital, and, against Garrigan’s hedonism and Stone’s meddling, again set up the dichotomy between good and bad colonizers. Garrigan tries to seduce the wife, but she remains loyal to her husband and acts as a moral center.

What then of Amin? What is important here is that the film moves precisely to give Forest Whitaker enough room to define his character without either damning commentary or directorial judgement from out-side. What we have, in other words, is the psychologizing of Amin; he can when it suits him present himself as the poor boy made good, the anti-apartheid crusader, the jovial joker, or one of the people. The film hesitates,

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until the very end, to give any kind of judgement that would alienate the audience. When Nigel Stone presents Garrigan with evidence of Amin’s brutality, there is no mention of the claims that Amin carried out many of the assassinations personally. In addition, the attack on Amin’s life serves to justify some of his paranoia about his position.

The film, rather like Alan Coren’s Punch columns, omits some of the more sinister elements of Amin to build him up as figure of energetic, posi-tive, anticolonial energy. Coren stopped doing the columns when the real-ity of the massacres became clear, but the film has to find another way of letting Amin go on defining himself. The way it does this is astute. Garri-gan, by now fully aware of Amin’s murderous power and that he is likely to be a target, given his affair with Kay, suggests that Amin hold a press con-ference for critical western journalists. The conference gives Amin the chance to charm, bully, and cajole the assembled journalists, returning him to his earlier status as a comic or rogue figure, but the film omits any of the shibboleths: the praise for Hitler or Stalin or jokes about human flesh tasting too salty.

There are traces of Robert Mugabe in this scene. Amin ridiculously suggests that Britain misrepresents him because they hate him and are jealous of him, recalling Mugabe’s frequent anti-Blair rants. The similarity is no accident; Macdonald singles out Mugabe as a modern African leader with links to Amin.

Both started out as admired leaders . . . Both were seen as “freedom fighters.” Both then started to use racial politics as a populist tool. Both have almost wil-fully destroyed their county’s economies. Both have used violence indiscrimi-nately to achieve their political goals. Both have suffered from paranoia.52

In the press conference scene, Macdonald hints at the current impatience with African leaders’ invocation of the West’s agenda on the continent as an explanation for Afropessimism and bad press.

What the film eventually does, then, is to make space for Whitaker to perform, to allow us to admire an actor moving out of type, working on Amin as psychological study, but one that also comments on the present. What the film doesn’t do is show us how Amin stayed in power: the strong tribal basis for the reaction to Obote, the use of informers, what Amin’s long army service had taught him. We don’t even really look at why he made the decision to expel the Asians and what that meant for the country. We see a lot of hard-eyed soldiers and ready rifles, fearful ministers stand-ing around, and the jealousy of court life, but that is all.

The scene in which Amin’s brutality is finally revealed is strangely contradictory, on the one hand illuminating the West’s mistaken percep-

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tion of Africa and on the other regressing into a stereotype of atavistic bru-tality. After delivering his surprisingly apt analysis of Garrigan’s (and by implication the West’s) antics in Africa, Amin explains his punishment tactics in tribal terms: “In my village, when you steal the wife of a dead man, they take you to a tree and they hang you by your skin. Each time you scream, the evil comes out of you. Sometimes it can take three days for your evil to come out.”

Garrigan refuses Amin’s wish to punish and purge him of his sin as a father would punish a wayward child, reversing the father-to-son dynamic and stating, “You’re a child; that’s what makes you so fucking scary.” The script moves into a deeply symbolic mode at this point and the loaded words signify Garrigan’s refusal to scream out his guilt as well as the West’s mistaken Afro-optimism in viewing Africa as capable of self-rule.

Garrigan’s escape from Uganda reverses the dynamic of Blood Dia-mond; the black Dr. Junju dies sacrificially so that Garrigan can tell the world “the truth about Amin.” “They will believe you,” he tells Garrigan, “you are a white man.” As Garrigan escapes with the non-Israeli hostages at Entebbe, he is comforted and cradled by an older blonde woman, who recalls Sarah, the doctor’s blonde wife he tried to seduce. Nicholas is re-turning to the good mother and, like Blood Diamond and The Interpreter, the film surely suggests that Africa is no place for whites—or Asians.

Whitaker’s role, one then feels, with its heavy Method School empha-sis, runs the risk of refusing to consider any social judgement of events. Sarah, perhaps in an echo of the opening of Julius Caesar, warns Nicholas that the crowd had sung for Obote just as they do for Amin, and through-out the film, most of the Ugandans are presented as approving of Amin. Only the two highly educated doctors—one white and one black—serve as moral opposition.

The final credits move us from the world of the thriller to brute historical reality, explaining that Amin killed over 300,000 Ugandans. For some crit-ics, the move comes too late in the film, as viewers with no prior knowledge of Ugandan history “will struggle to reconcile the death toll with what the film has shown.”53 The credits also point out (inaccurately) that all the Israeli hostages but one would be liberated forty-eight hours later and that world opinion was going to turn against Amin definitively. But even here there is nothing about Amin’s political flirtation with Palestinian nationalism or his support for the hijackers. Then the film shows some historic footage of Amin, framing and enclosing the fictional portrayal with a brief mention of Amin’s overthrow, exile in Saudi Arabia, and death.

In its stress on the military as a means of domination, on the white fo-calizer who has to tell the story of Africa, the “big man” syndrome, and on the growth of an exclusive black nationalism, the film fits many of the ste-

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reotypes of Afropessimism and shows the ways in which new filmic por-trayals try to differ from older forms of European racism. We can note again, though, the film’s failure to analyze social power and circumstances which led to and maintained Amin’s rule as well as the reduction of Garri-gan’s interaction with Amin to a form of familial relationship—something in which the film differs sharply from the novel.

Conclusion

The first crop of twenty-first-century films about Africa displays a fresh earnestness in their approach to the continent and tries hard (though not always successfully) to transcend the stereotypes of earlier films. This is particularly evident in the attention paid to realist detail, which in turn influenced the growth of the mass media. What transpires is a new set of stereotypes and commonalities—the emblematic child soldier, the corrupt official, the meddling multinational, and the sacrificial white do-gooder—which are intriguing in showing the tension in western thinking about contemporary Africa. These include seemingly contradictory elements: the appreciation of the West’s complicity in Africa’s problems is, for instance, coupled with impatience over the continued failures of the independent African state, particularly kleptocracy and corruption; the approach to Af-rican violence and poverty is visually and realistically detailed but lacks explanatory power; and critiques of the lingering effects of colonialism are tempered by a more sympathetic approach to the white colonizer.

In film, the attempts to grapple with Africa also suffer from the limita-tions of genre and the pressures of the industry, resulting in an Afropessi-mistic outlook that at the same time fails to portray the real challenges facing the continent. Here, we can note several weaknesses: an inability to investigate the social and structural elements of African history, which ends up eternalizing problems; the overreliance on white focalizers and narrators; the need for optimistic or upbeat endings (often located out of Africa); a tendency to generalize from particular cases to continental trends; and the bending of solutions into western individualistic and fa-milial modes. Yet, all of these can be seen as downplaying rather than ex-aggerating the real difficulties that African societies face, suggesting that narrative film still has some way to go before the quality of its commentary on Africa matches its power.

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Notes

1. Peter Davis, In Darkest Hollywood: Exploring the Jungles of Cinema’s South Af-rica (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996); K.M. Cameron, Africa on Film: Beyond Black and White (New York: Continuum, 1994); Melissa Thackway, Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Film (Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press, 2003). 2. Adebayo Olukoshi, “State, Conflict, and Democracy in Africa: The Complex Process of Renewal,” in State, Conflict, and Democracy in Africa, ed. Richard Joseph (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 451. 3. The “resource curse hypothesis” refers to the theory that instead of benefiting economically from minerals resource-rich countries experience slower economic growth and increased political instability because of a constant struggle to access min-eral rights and gain control of the state. 4. Thackway, Africa Shoots Back, 36. 5. “The Continent’s Celluloid Moment: Africa on Film,” Economist 382, no. 8514 (February 3, 2007): 50; Dave Calhoun, “African Cinema: White Guides, Black Pain,” Sight and Sound 17, no. 2 (February 2007): 32–35. 6. Ibid., 35 7. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (London: James Currey, 2001), xi. 8. Rory Carroll, “US Chose To Ignore Rwandan Genocide,” The Guardian, March 31, 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/mar/31/usa.rwanda (accessed June 2, 2008). 9. Mohamed Adhikari, “Hotel Rwanda: Too Much Heroism, Too Little History—Or Horror?” in Black and White in Colour: African History on Screen, ed. Vivien Bick-ford-Smith and Richard Mendelsohn (Oxford: James Currey, 2007), 280. 10. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers; Ryszard Kapuściński, The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life (London: Penguin Books, 2002). 11. See Carroll, “US Chose To Ignore Rwandan Genocide.” 12. Michael Dorland, “PG—Parental Guidance Or Portrayal of Genocide: The Comparative Depiction of Mass Murder in Contemporary Cinema,” in The Media and the Rwandan Genocide, ed. Allan Thompson (London: Pluto Press, 2007), 427. 13. Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 14. Adhikari, “Hotel Rwanda: Too Much Heroism, Too Little History—Or Hor-ror?” 290. 15. Cited in James Cowan, “Movie Sparks Public Feud,” National Post, April 25, 2008, http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=472493 (accessed June 6, 2008). 16. Vivien Bickford-Smith, “Rosenstone on Film, Rosenstone on History: An Af-rican Perspective,” Rethinking History 11, no. 4 (December 2007): 539; see also Luke Fletcher “Hotel Rwanda’s Moral Compass,” Screen Education 39 (2005): 21. 17. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, xii. 18. Kenneth Harrow, “‘Un Train Peut En Cacher un Autre’: Narrating the Rwan-dan genocide and Hotel Rwanda,” Research in African Literatures 36, no. 4 (2005): 223–232.

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19. Morris Dickstein, “The Politics of the Thriller: On Munich and Moral Ambiguity,”Dissent 53, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 89–92. 20. “The Continent’s Celluloid Moment; Africa on Film.” 21. The film does hint at this when Justin queries whether the Kenyans even know that they are testing new drugs. 22. Sonia Shah, “The Constant Gardener: What the Movie Missed,” The Nation, August 30, 2005, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050912/shah (accessed July 6, 2008). 23. Focus Features production notes, 2005, http://www.buzzer.nl/content/im-ages/PathePAC /persmap.pdf (accessed July 15, 2008); my italics. 24. See Ed Leibowitz, “The Genocide and the Box Office,” New York Times, April 10, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/movies/10leib.html?_r=1&oref=slogin (accessed May29, 2008). 25. John Lyttle, “Victorian Virtues: Black-and-White Morality Takes on an Unex-pected Colour: The Constant Gardener,” New Statesmen, November 14, 2005, 46. 26. Ty Burr, “‘Gardener’ Settles for Familiar Ground,” The Boston Globe, August 31, 2005, http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movie&id=7872 (accessed July 1, 2008). 27. See the Focus Features press kit (2005) and David Jays, “Fernando Meirelles: The Reluctant Globe-Trotter,” Sight and Sound 15, no. 12 (2005): 10. 28. Ian Glenn, “Sex, Race and Casting in South African Cinema” in Marginal Lives and Painful Pasts: South African Cinema After Apartheid, ed. Martin Botha (Cape Town: Genugtig Publishers, 2007). 29. The use of fictional locations in Africa, South America, and Asia was particu-larly popular in the 1970s and 1980s and has a long filmic and literary history. (Evelyn Waugh’s Azania in Black Mischief is probably the best-known example.) Zembala in The Wild Geese (1978) and Zangaro in the film version of Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War (1980) are obvious filmic examples. The trend appears to be enjoying a revival with the introduction of Nambutu in Casino Royale (2006) and the film version of the popular TV series 24, Redemption (2008), which features the fictional African country of Sangala. 30. David Blair, “Harare Loses the Plot over Kidman Film,” The Telegraph, Sep-tember 6, 2005, http://www.smh.com.au/news/film/harare-loses-the-plot-over-kid-man-film/2005/09/05/1125772458990.html (accessed June 1, 2008). 31. Cited in Caesar Zvayi, “US Takes Anti-Zim Drive to Hollywood,” The Herald, September 3, 2005, http://www.zwnews.com/print.cfm?ArticleID=12693 (accessed June 3, 2008). 32. David Blair, “Harare Loses the Plot over Kidman Film.” 33. Cited in Steve Daly, “Out of Africa: The Director of The Interpreter Talks about the Troubles Getting the Film Made and Shooting at the UN,” Entertainment Weekly, no. 816 (April 22, 2005), http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1049664_4,00.html (ac-cessed June 4, 2008). 34. Cynthia Fuchs, “Not Telling: Review of The Interpreter,” PopMatters, April 22, 2005, http://www.popmatters.com/film/reviews/i/interpreter-2005.shtml (accessed June 4, 2008). 35. This may also be a kind of homage to the novel which inspired the film. Su-zanne Glass’s plot revolves not around the assassination of an African despot, but around the hushed-up discovery and delayed release of an HIV vaccine.

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36. Ian Buchanan and Adrian Parr, Deleuze and the Contemporary World (Edin-burgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 187. 37. Cited in Mike Wayne, Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema (London: Pluto Press, 2001). 38. Dave Calhoun, “African Cinema: White Guides, Black Pain,” 33. 39. Don Thompson, “Film and Fiction Fusion: Review of The Interpreter,” Solpix Reviews (2005), http://www.webdelsol.com/SolPix/sp-reviews47.htm (accessed June 4, 2008). 40. Elizabeth Snead, “Blood Diamond’s PR War: The Gem Trade, Fearing Sales Won’t Sparkle, Campaigns Against the Film,” The Envelope, Los Angeles Times, October 10, 2006, http://theenvelope.latimes.com/movies/env-et-diamonds10oct10,0,1785785 (ac-cessed June 5, 2008). 41. Ibid. 42. Julie Hollar, “Bono, I Presume? Covering Africa through Celebrities,” Extra! (May/June 2007). 43. Cited in Matthew Hennessey, “Diamond Movie Unearths Rock-Hard Ethical Dilemmas,” Policy Innovations, Carnegie Council, December 15, 2006, http://www .policyinnovations.org/ideas/briefings/data/blood_diamond (accessed June 4, 2008). 44. For example, in 2003, when several western countries warned their citizens not to travel to Kenya because of potential terrorist attacks, tourism officials estimated that the country lost at least $1 million a day. See Stefan Lovgren, “Tourism Taking Toll on Kenya’s Tourism Industry,” National Geographic News, June 17, 2003, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/06/0617_030617_kenyatourism.html (ac-cessed July 25, 2008). 45. Jacques Pauw, Dances with Devils: A Journalist’s Search for Truth (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2006), 199. 46. The famous Siege of Freetown began when the RUF-supported Johnny Paul Koroma, who had taken power from Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, was toppled by the Sierra Leone Army, assisted by Nigerian-led Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) troops. Almost a year after Kabbah was returned to office, the RUF attacked the city, but was forced to retreat after several weeks. 47. Peter Travers, “Review of Blood Diamond,” Rolling Stone, December 8, 2006, http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/movie/10681570/review/12770387/1016_blood_diamond (accessed June 5, 2008); see also Joe Queenan, “A Whiter Shade of Guile,” The Guardian, January 5, 2007, 3. 48. Bickford-Smith, “Rosenstone on Film, Rosenstone on History,” 539. 49. Kapuściński, The Shadow of the Sun, 148. 50. Cited in Christina Hamlett, “Through a Lens Darkly: From ‘Real’ to ‘Reel’ with The Last King of Scotland,” Writers’ Journal, May/June 2007, 10. 51. C. Timberg, “In Uganda, Last King of Scotland Generates Blend of Pride and Pain: Crowds Flock to Oscar-Honored Film about Idi Amin,” Washington Post Foreign Service, February 27, 2007, 1. 52. Cited in Hamlett, “Through a Lens Darkly,” 10. 53. Eryan Gilbey, “A String of Mangled Opportunities: Review of The Last King of Scotland,” New Statesmen, January 15, 2007, 43.