In 1890 the Zulus filed their teeth, chucked spears at the screen and boiled their guests in an iron pot with a couple of large onions. In 1937 Hollywood pushed most of these al-fresco cooks down King Solomon’s Mines. In 1964 Michael Caine skewered at least 4,000 hysterical warriors on the end of his bayonet. And, since 1977, various unlikely Brits including Richard Burton and Mark “Flashman” Thatcher have plotted to take over the continent disguised as Wild Geese or helicopter ambulance pilots. But Africa has resisted most of these coups with a great deal of comical ease.
Hollywood’s foreign policy towards Africa has been more or less standard issue since King Kong had his way with the natives. Precious few Western films have actually engaged with the country, and the precious few that have are invariably low budget independents. Kevin Macdonald’s latest film, The Last King of Scotland, is one of these rare pearls. It opens The Times bfi London Film Festival on October 18, and slips a sharp needle into the life of Idi Amin to extract a most unpalatable truth: notably that he was a loyal, if deranged, addict of Western excess. He parked the heads of his opponents in the fridge, and played the bagpipes while his country burned and crashed. He was an avid fan of Scotland, and a tempestuous child in power.
Macdonald’s film is based on Giles Foden’s award-winning novel and it stars Forest Whitaker as the tyrannical Amin, and James McAvoy as an infatuated young doctor who becomes horribly entangled with the President’s grisly legacy. “Amin is somebody who embodies all of Hollywood and media’s wildest fears about the continent,” Macdonald says. “He is the archetypal image of what scares us about Africa in every way. But because both characters turn a blind eye to reality, the film is ambivalent about the moral corruption. Amin does unspeakable things. But McAvoy’s character is like Faust in Africa, blinded by the trust and intimacy of Amin.
“What surprised me about filming in Uganda is the widespread perception of Amin as a hero. He is the most famous African alongside Nelson Mandela. Despite his brutal dictatorship, people are proud that he stood up to giants like Nixon. Making this was an eye-opener. Forest Whitaker told me he was respected among American blacks in a badass sort of way.”
But there’s a long way to go before films like this can tap the mainstream. Dr Jack Shaheen has spent 30 years researching Hollywood attitudes to Arabs and Africa. He’s a cranky authority on the subject. He wrote his first book, Reel Bad Arabs, to address the issue, and he’s delighted that I’ve tracked him down in South Carolina.
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“First and foremost, it’s the image of the savage that spooks Hollywood,” Shaheen drawls. “It’s fear of the other. Africa is a hostile environment. It’s the jungle with signposts: ‘Beware the dark complexioned other’. Africans and Arabs are incapable of civilisation without a white man and a light sabre to save them from themselves.”
We both agree that the most ghastly package to date is Tears of the Sun (2003) in which a weepy soldier (Bruce Willis) plunges into the forest to save a virgin aid worker (Monica Bellucci), and then decides to get even with the African natives the American Way. “Because the enemy are African Muslims,” Shaheen muses, “their deeds are far worse than any Arab. I doubt there’s a better advert for Christian fundamentalism.”
“God has left Africa,” Willis growls through pristine teeth as he surveys the carnage from his five-star hotel helicopter. God never actually arrived. Hardly a deep surprise. The whole film was shot on location in Hawaii.
“The prevailing reality is that most Americans don’t care how much they are hated abroad,” says Shaheen. “It has only happened in the past few years of my life. On the plus side there are films such as Syriana in which the villains are primarily white corporations. To me that’s new.”
The chronic failure of Hollywood to gamble on an African responsibility doesn’t surprise an old hand like Simon Channing-Williams, who was the the first assistant director on Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), a Hollywood spectacular directed by Hugh Hudson.
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“Hugh Hudson and I had a major falling-out about chopping down a 100ft mahogany tree to get one particular shot. It was amazing because they transported pygmies down to the set. The handlers got all the money and the pygmies got drugs.”
Williams subsequently produced one of the most astute films about Africa, The Constant Gardener, starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz. It not only got under the skin of John Le Carre’s savage attack on corporate exploitation in Kenya, but it managed to do so without touching a single awkward cliché. Such films are rare.
The cynicism runs deep. Nicolas Cage told me recently that he couldn’t persuade a single major studio to invest a cent in Andrew Niccol’s gun-running satire, Lord of War. Phone calls were not returned. Doors were closed in his face. He was totally bemused. It’s not the greatest film ever made by a long stretch, but Cage puts in a seriously good performance as a genial arms dealer to some of the most unsavoury despots in Africa.
Cage believes that it’s the most important work he’s yet done. He was genuinely flabbergasted by the stone-wall reaction of American producers he has worked with for years, but man enough to reach into his own pocket to ensure the project was made.
In the treacherous world of box-office zillions, Lord of War was always doomed to fail in terms of marketing muscle, despite lavish critical praise, although it has now found an audience on DVD.
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“Because Africa seems unfinished, and so different from the rest of the world, it attracts mythomaniacs,” noted Paul Theroux in the pages of The New York Times in December. He was referring, obliquely, to celebrity missionaries such as Jay-Z, Gwyneth Paltrow, Lucy Liu, and Lindsay Lohan who wear charity as tastefully as Benetton jumpers.
Yet Theroux’s acid insight — he worked in the Africa Peace Corps in the 1960s — is equally applicable to the studios that bankrolled these expensive careers. It’s a moral we should all take to heart.
UNDER AFRICAN SKIES: SCREEN STEREOTYPES
The Birth of a Nation (1915)
D. W. Griffith’s film perpetuated a view that blacks were ape-like, oversexed, corrupt and lazy and spurred the black independent- feature movement.
Sanders of the River (1935)
The clichés of witch doctors v noble African king (Paul Robeson) mars this tepid anti-slavery epic. An angry Robeson stormed out of the premiere.
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King Solomon’s Mines (1950)
Hollywood was still showing the indigenous population of Africans as mostly savages, cannibals or beasts of burden.
The Wild Geese (1978)
Racial stereotypes abound as white mercenaries rescue a liberal leader from a dreadful African regime.
The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980)
A “quirky” comedy that painted Bushmen as heirs to a blessed existence untroubled by the woes of modern life.