In the current wave of success, Hollywood continues to look for best-selling movies on the stories that are otherwise shrugged off as yet another African tragedy.
The Last King of Scotland, starring Forrest Whitaker, was shot in Kampala and Western Uganda, and is reaping countless benefits as Whitaker continues to rake in accolades for his role as Idi Amin. The story is told through the eyes of a young Scottish doctor who happens to make it out alive to 'tell the world.'
Casino Royale features its bad guy, a dread locked Kony look-alike from West Africa who quipped a badly accented 'Apwoyo matek, latina.' (Thank you, my child). Acholi in James Bond! Even though Acholi has made it into the psyche of Hollywood, it is as the bad guy, the victim, from that place of unspeakable hell. What better premise than that when one searches for a story to tell?
Blood Diamonds, the story of a rare pink diamond, is told from the point of view of a South African mercenary played by Leonardo di Caprio. Djimoun Hounsou, the actual main character, is relegated to the background as the movie 'stars' di Caprio, and Jennifer Connelly, whose pretty eyes do more for the movie than her clichéd political lines.
Before that, there was Invisible Children, Uganda Rising and a plethora of other successful documentaries that have catapulted the names and careers of directors and writers in the West into stardom.
We were elated when Lisa Leung was featured on Oprah, talking about the night commuters. But that show was overshadowed by our handsome man, George Clooney, who 'risked his life' to tell the story of Darfur.
Remember Angelina Jolie's passion as she talked about Acholi (among other things), in the Anderson Cooper CNN interview — that showed her off to be more than just a pretty face? It helped a great deal that her eldest daughter was saved from a ravaged existence in Ethiopia.
According to MSN, our Canadian handsome man Ryan Gosling is “snubbing the Oscars to do the Angelina Jolie routine in Africa.” Gosling, who first strung our hearts with that kiss scene in The Note Book, is apparently in Uganda “scouting for a location” to shoot a movie he has written, is directing and will star in; tentatively titled ‘The Lord's Resistance Army.’ Good for him. We wish him all success. With his acting accolades, and nomination for an Oscar award, surely he is qualified to be an illuminator, to tell the story of the child soldier in Uganda. Really!
Never mind how long we have known this story. Never mind how many times we have written to our politicians and newspapers. Never mind the petitions, the Guluwalks, the fundraisers, the various calls for action that we have made over the years. Ryan Gosling is poised to tell it, as it ought to have been told. He will write, direct and star in it. Yes, he will. Apparently, “he's seemingly foregoing professional child actors in order to give the film a more realistic feel and likely because professional child actors are giant pains in the ass. . . And has personally chosen non-professional actors and actual child soldiers whom he wants to use to tell the story.” That should add to the authenticity of the story.
But then after that, what? Is Sierra Leone any better for having shown Blood Diamonds? Do we feel better for having celebrated when the Kony look alike met his death in James Bond? Are we relieved that Idi Amin was ousted? What is the role of the movie watcher? What is the role of the world citizen as to what happens beyond our borders?
Whether or not Kony is ‘dead’ does not change the horrific experiences that Acholi children remain exposed to. The Last King of Scotland was brilliant, but the caricature of Idi Amin as portrayed by Whitaker leaves him as just that. The movie watcher is not empowered to do anything. Watching movies is no political act. It is not an education. The buzz goes up as we all talk about the movie for a couple of days, and then another blockbuster comes up, and that’s that.
As Hollywood continues to ride the wave of our continuous heartbreak, we need to go further than be 'grateful' that ‘the world finally knows' or has witnessed our plight. Fact is, careers are being made on our blood. There is no longer need to reach into the psyche for a fictional account of human destruction and tragedy. Until the need for blood in the Western theatre is quenched, there will be no need for fiction as fantasy reaching for the universal truth. All that movie makers need to do is harvest our non fiction and very real tragedy, and sugar coat it with a sheer enough coat of fiction to ease the minds of the paying moviewatchers. Mind you there has to be enough basis on 'fact' to carry the docudrama-feel that movie watchers are currently geared to pay money for.
Our gratitude is lost in the plumes of the majestic Acholi dancers in The Last King of Scotland. We need more than that.
Africa's role in general, Acholi's position specifically, continues to be that place of “delightful mystery” that Joseph Conrad wrote about in The Heart of Darkness. His Marlowe recalls his imagination taking him to the place on the map where there was “a mighty big river... resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with it's head in the sea, it's body resting afar over a vast country, and it's tail lost in the depths of the land. It fascinated me as a snake would a bird—a silly bird... The snake charmed me." That was the map of Africa, the Congo River, where he would travel as a grown man to discover the ‘Heart of Darkness.’ Hollywood is back in the so-called ‘Heart of Darkness’ of the human psyche. This dark heart is epitomized repeatedly as the African dictator, rebel, child abductor and slaver, and so on.
That the devil is black, in juxtaposition to our blonde, blue-eyed Christ and savior, represented by Nicholas Carrigan (McAvoy) in The Last King of Scotland or Danny Archer (di Caprio) in Blood Diamonds, is not a new notion. But the obvious racial interpretation carries on into our daily existence when we talk about where we come from. Uganda? Oh, yes. Idi Amin, they respond. Now Joseph Kony. It is never that simple. There are beneficiaries to the arms trade that African wars depend on. There are beneficiaries to the oil explorations that are being done on the land of the internally displaced people. The blood diamonds are sold to lower income earners, for “only $299.99 at your local jewelers” while the rich can afford the artificially expensive blood-free diamonds mined in Canada’s North —with the backdrop of a Native population with an extremely high suicide rate—whose youth spend their time sniffing gasoline.
Who’s the silly bird now? Who’s the silly bird paying millionaires with our time and money to see how and what they do with our stories?
Those that are comfortable in their seats and in the knowledge that these atrocities happen in far away places, will do good to remember John Donne's No Man Is an Island. Hollywood's bell tolls for us all. It tells us that if we don’t own our stories, they will continue to same path of extraction from the continent. Our people, our land, our resources, our children and now the last thing we can truly call ours: our stories—and with that—the identity we should be able to choose to present to our children, the world, and ourselves.
One of our very own storytellers, Okot p’Bitek, still spins stories from beyond the grave. In my living room, there is a black and white picture of him hugging an unnamed Rwandan man. Imagine, two big men smiling, from the saddest places on earth; the two places where countless deaths and suffering took place under the watchful eyes of the rest of the world. Rwanda was re-named a place of genocide. Darfur's is genocide. Those who know the criteria for these things are still debating whether Acholi’s is genocide. Remember Clinton's apology in Kigali? Never again, was it?
Juliane Okot Bitek.
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