Journal of African Cinemas - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2014

The Rwandan genocide (1994) was a catastrophic mass killing in which nearly one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus perished at the hands of Hutu extremists. Several critical works have explored the Rwandan genocide in film but none reaches the multiple levels of conceptual analysis that reflects the many levels of discursive violence involved in depicting the tragedy through film. The aim of this article is to depict the levels of conceptualizing the Rwandan genocide through the tropological figure of the ‘dog’ in the film Shooting Dogs (1995). On a literal level, Shooting Dogs is viewed as representing, first, the actual failed attempt at shooting and killing the dogs (animals) that were feeding on the corpses of the dead Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Second, as a metaphor, Shooting Dogs (1995) uncannily reflects the debased and stereotypic reference to Tutsis and moderate Hutus as ‘dogs’ who ‘deserved’ to be gunned down as dogs because they are depicted as dastardly cowards. Third, Shooting Dogs is taken to mean the cinematographic action of ‘shooting’ images of dogs to represent the dogs who feasted on corpses during the genocide. Fourth, the film Shooting Dogs is viewed as a cultural mission to represent, through the camera’s ‘eye’, the insensitivity and cruelty of Hutu extremists and of the international community whose lack of respect for human life allowed the genocide to happen. It is argued that the symbolic violence manifested in Shooting Dogs constitutes a spectacle of excessive signification that attempts to inhibit imagining other, pro-life depictions, but fails dramatically because not all the Tutsis were killed in the genocide. The fact is that the Tutsis who survived the genocide are equally worthy of representation with their differentiated range of emotions and responses, and this could have been depicted in the film without minimizing the horror of the genocide. Such an argument forces us to realize that the ways in which art significantly translates known realities into telling stories can be a violent process that distorts human truths.

The first cinema-release South African made film to be banned since the fall of apartheid was Of Good Report (2013). This article discusses the broader context of the banning, its unbanning, and the debates that occurred. These are linked to broader issues of freedom of media and democracy, of who gets to decide, and the nature of increasingly repressive state–civil society relations. Issues of censorship, regulation of images and audience agency are examined.

This article examines four war-themed mainstream films about Africa – I Dreamed of Africa (Hugh Hudson, 2000), The Constant Gardener (Fernando Meirelles, 2005), Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, 2001) and Blood Diamond (Edward Zwick, 2006). The films were chosen because they present seemingly different representations of the African characters through their narrative strategies. The discussion will examine the representation of Western and African characters and how they function and interact with each other within a particular narrative context. The films remain centred on events that have occurred in Africa yet display typical features and characteristics of Hollywood film: the central characters are predominantly colonizers from the West who have entered Africa and interact from a hierarchical point of view with the land, the animals and the people. Drawing on Ndebele’s discussion on whether states in Africa can ever be represented as ‘ordinary’, this article will interrogate how the representation of both characters from Africa and the African setting contribute to the perceived notion that Africa can never be ‘ordinary’ and it will always be represented in extreme terms.

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.

Hillary Ng’weno’s documentary series The Making of a Nation is a reconstruction of significant events in the development of Kenya from colonialism to post-independence. The authorial vision underlines the role of violence in the formation of the colonial and postcolonial Kenyan State. This is cinematically presented through techniques that distance the viewer from the pathos of the images’ violence, such as political assassinations, mass demonstrations, incarcerations and attempted coups. The thesis of the article is that Ng’weno’s work is framed within the oral narrative tradition. This can be related to the observation of Tomaselli and Eke (1995: 115) that Third Cinema involves African themes and forms of oral story-telling. Significantly, the voice-over rendition in Ng’weno’s documentaries employs the oral narrative technique of mediating the horror of violence in an aesthetically and emotionally acceptable manner. As such, the visual images coupled with the omniscient voice of the narrator distance the viewer from the spectacle while also projecting the recurrent cycle of violence in the making of the nation. Drawing from Fanon’s (2004) concept of violence and Foucault’s (1980) analysis of power as both coercive and emancipative, we therefore argue that Ng’weno’s work presents the paradox of violence as both a means of dismantling and constructing the fabric of a nation.

Most socio-political films in Kenya in the last decade manifest manifold shades of violence. By juxtaposing two films (Wale Watu and Pieces for Peace) that reflect the scenario in Kenya following the bungled elections of 27 December 2007 – films that exhibit obvious physical violence – against two more (Benta and Nairobi Half Life), that explore everyday violence in metropolises characterized by social inequalities. This article aims to evolve a practical framework for the evaluation of how dramatic craftsmanship on the theme of violence in these films operates to interpret the Kenyan social, cultural, economic and political experiences. A framework of this nature will provide us with grounds upon which we can make objective deductions and substantive statements about Kenyan films in this regard. The article examines the external and internal processes operating upon the characters in the film texts and the strategies the film-makers employ to bring out these processes. Such an analysis is crucial in the evaluation of the relationship between an aspect of form – character – and content in the Kenyan film. Characters in the four selected films are considered from a socio-political perspective. Guided by the belief that any committed art is inseparable from political and social realities in its function, the article looks at the film-makers as committed artists, and examines their use of film as a vehicle for evaluating society and enunciating their visions for their societies.

This article explores the expression of violence through verbal and visual representations of HIV and AIDS in the film ‘Musinsimuke’ which literary means ‘change’ (Markham, 2001). The epistemological understanding of violence embraces two important strands: the symbolic and the physical. These two facets are intertwined and feed into each other. The manifestations of violence are played out onto the body which is a contestable terrain that reflects possibilities for both hope and social abjectivity. Violence destabilizes the normal: it is the politics of representation in which people infected can be viewed as hopeless and useless, and destined for death. In its psychological dimension, violence is the unstable condition in which infected people may begin to undermine themselves instead of living positively with the disease by leading a healthy life. This article will argue that extreme cinematic representations of diseased bodies gloss over the realities and methods of preventing HIV and AIDS. We will also conceptualize the violence of representation as metaphorically depicting Zimbabwe as a contaminated nation, undergoing challenging times and in need of serious attention. Most donor-funded films have a tendency to hit out at the government by proffering macabre images of diseased bodies, creating stereotypes and reinforcing damaging myths about African sexuality. Such myths need to be challenged and deconstructed through visual images working as counter-cultures.

Traditionally, the war film has been a primarily masculine genre. To some extent, the absence of women in the war story merely reflected the way wars had been fought throughout history, but by the end of the twentieth-century, the nature of war around the globe was changing substantially, and recent engagements have largely been civil conflicts. While the majority of combatants in Africa’s ethnic wars have been men, women are increasingly implicated in the violence. Despite her obvious involvement in hostilities, however, woman’s voice is rarely represented in the negotiations for peace at the end of hostilities, a process inevitably dominated by men, generally military leaders. In her film, La Nuit de la vérité/The Night of Truth (2004), Fanta Régina Nacro describes the reconciliation process in the wake of civil conflict in an imaginary African country. Peace talks are clearly controlled by the men in the film, but Nacro’s representation of women demonstrates how their role in war has changed and ultimately suggests that they have a role to play in the success of peace. This article explores narrative and cinematographic devices through which Nacro’s film makes a place for women in the last chapter of the war story, ultimately situating the film-maker’s work in the context of recent scholarship by social scientists who have studied Africa’s new wars and their reconciliation processes from the perspective of gender.