TIA (This is Africa!): Colonial violence in Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond (2006)

Blood Diamond is one of the recent Hollywood films that avoids the exotic representations of Africa of the colonial melodramas and even critiques western stereotypes about Africa, but as Curtis Keim asserts, ‘Hollywood stereotyping of Africa has become veiled rather than growing less prevalent’ (2009: 24–25). The code TIA (This is Africa) in the film summarizes the film’s representational logic of violence which implies that in Africa, violence is the order of the day. The image of Africa as a death-trap invokes memories of dystopian colonial literary discourse about Sierra Leone as ‘the white man’s grave’ (Phillips 2002). In this article I examine the treatment of violence in Blood Diamond to establish its complex patterns and motifs, and the racialized frame of representing violent death. I examine the lucrative nature of neocolonial violence for mercenaries, their African nation clients, and rebels, and what it says about the complexity of neocolonial violence in Africa.