”In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.”
– From ”Out of Africa,” Isak Dinesen`s memoir
Was Africa where Isak Dinesen should have been? Yes, indeed, according to Hollywood.
For more than 70 years, filmmakers have been fascinated by the stark beauty of the world`s second-largest continent. But from ”Tarzan” and the Oscar-winning ”Out of Africa” to ”Gorillas in the Mist” and ”Mountains of the Moon,” which opens in Chicago next month, the story has been the same:
White men or women pit themselves against the land and often against the black people who live there, and they come up the winners.
Even in movies in which the struggle is against South Africa`s system of apartheid, the heroes are usually white people, not the blacks who suffer under the repressive white government.
Make no mistake, the history of black-white relationships in Africa is far more complicated and less attractive than the Hollywood filmmakers would have us believe.
There are 350 million people in Africa, and most of them are black. So why are the heroes of these movies white?
”Mountains of the Moon,” a visually lavish film about the efforts of 19th Century explorers Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke to discover the source of the Nile, is a project that director Bob Rafelson had in mind for almost 25 years. Rafelson, who made ”Five Easy Pieces” and ”Black Widow,” has traveled to some of the remotest parts of the globe and has been to Africa numerous times since his first trip in 1971. While researching ”Mountains,” he traveled the same arduous route that Burton and Speke took up the Nile. Nine years ago, he wrote the script and launched his battle to get the movie made.
Rafelson chalks up the distance between conception and execution of his film to the middling financial success of most Africa-set films and to a certain timidity on the part of the film community. He thinks his passion for the land and for his subject were important to his film: ”My experience in Africa is quite different from most movie makers` because I`ve been there before and I go there for pleasure. I feel very relaxed and responsive there. I like sleeping in tents and walking great distances and would do it regardless of whether or not I was shooting a film on Burton and Speke.”
There`s no doubt that ”Mountains” was an intensely personal and heartfelt project for Rafelson. He admits that Burton, who led the expedition, is ”a fantasy hero” of his and his enthusiasm is evident onscreen.
But, says Delroy Lindo, the black actor who plays Mabruki, a runaway slave and shaman (medicine man) whom Burton rescues and protects, Rafelson didn`t avoid the racial pitfalls that other filmmakers have stumbled into when dealing with Africa. He says, a bit hesitantly, ”I think Bob made the best effort he could under the circumstances. But as far as I`m concerned one of the weaknesses of the film is that the African characters don`t have as much dimension as I would have liked. We were all pretty much subordinate to the white characters. I felt that very keenly.”
When told of Lindo`s concerns, Rafelson says, ”I`m quite surprised to hear this. There have been screenings for a number of anthropologists and ethnographers and they have all felt it was quite good. I try to make a movie as best I can. I don`t separate the blacks from the whites. This film is about a man (Burton) who has a real regard for ancient culture and that sets him apart from the other people in the movie.”
Lindo`s problem with ”Mountains” is not a new one-or an unjustified one. Whether he intended it or not, by focusing on two white heroes, Rafelson`s film falls in line with the one-sided history of Hollywood films about Africa. Though history indicates that Burton was slightly less racist than many of his contemporaries, he was a citizen of England at an intensely imperialist time. The colonial period in Africa (and in other Third World nations as well) has been romanticized for years, much as our own Western period has been romanticized.
This passion is evident not only in films but in the larger culture. Witness Ralph Lauren`s new Safari collection, a line of products that features clothing, perfume and furnishings. According to a Lauren publicist, the collection is ”a fantasy of what colonial life might have been like, as interpreted by modern times.”
What the publicist fails to mention is that colonial life was considerably less glamorous for those under its rule than it was for the Europeans reaping its benefits. The battles for independence waged by most Third World nations for much of the late 20th Century attest loudly to that.
Film historian Donald Bogle, author of ”Blacks in American Film and Television,” thinks the romance of the European experience is what keeps this sort of Africa-set film recurring every few years. ”These films have a kind of romantic appeal,” he says. ”In some ways that`s what`s really dangerous about them. You get sucked in by the romance and you don`t see the distortions that are there as well. These movies come from a very definite point of view and they very much neutralize justified suspicion or cynicism on the part of the African natives.”
Charles Hobson, executive producer of the 1986 PBS series ”The Africans” and now director of market planning at WNET in New York, agrees with Bogle`s point and adds, ”No one would deny a filmmaker`s right to make
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`Out of Africa` or whatever vision he has, but there are other stories to be told.”
One obvious reason that African stories are often told from the perspective of white characters is simply that the film industry is run almost entirely by white men. Films like ”Out of Africa” and ”Gorillas in the Mist” are assumed to be easier for a white audience to identify with and therefore more likely to succeed.
Euzhan Palcy, the black woman who directed last year`s South African drama ”A Dry White Season,” confirmed this when she told Essence magazine,
”I wanted to make a black story about South Africa. Unfortunately, no producer in the United States would put one penny into a black story.”
Bogle thinks there`s something more than market forces at work in the decision to focus on white characters over and over. He cites Richard Attenborough`s ”Cry Freedom,” the 1987 South African drama about black activist Stephen Biko that ended up focusing on white newspaper editor Donald Woods, as an example.
”Often it`s said that in a movie like `Cry Freedom` that these white characters are put there in these important roles so that the mass white audience has someone it can identify with, but I think the filmmakers themselves often feel that way,” he says.
Whether this identification is intensely personal, as with Rafelson and Richard Burton, or comes out of a more abstract desire to do good, as was the case with ”Cry Freedom,” the result is the same: Stories set in a black nation are told by and about white people who are only visitors there.
If movies that romanticize the colonial past have resulted in a skewed vision of Africa, movies about the South African present have often been completely topsy-turvy. Films like ”Cry Freedom,” ”A World Apart” and ”A Dry White Season” all investigate apartheid-but to greater or lesser degrees they all do it through the eyes of white characters. Awfully ironic when you consider that the nation`s 26 million blacks are completely under the domination of South Africa`s 5 million whites.
In light of the release of political prisoner Nelson Mandela after 27 1/2 years in prison, it seems likely that South Africa will be the focus of more films in the future, something that some film scholars view with mixed feelings.
Michelle Wallace, sometime film critic and author of ”Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman,” says, ”I think it`s better for a film to deal with race than to not deal with it, but you can`t make a silk purse out of a sow`s ear, which is what you`d have to do to make an anti-racist film in Hollywood.”
Bogle thinks that the reasons for the interracial relationships that are prevalent in anti-apartheid movies are complex, but the reality is more complex still. He says, ”This whole theme is more acceptable and less threatening if there are good white people and if white and black can still live together. (The films) say, `There are some bad white people who exploit the continent, but there are some good ones and they have a right to be there.`
”I`d love to see a film that said (to whites), `You must get out. You have taken, you have robbed, you have debased and now you must go.` ”
WNET`s Hobson spent about a year traveling throughout Africa when he was working on ”The Africans.” He notes, ”It is historically accurate that there were whites in Africa, but in Hollywood, they constantly go for those stories when in fact the colonials were just a tiny part of the culture.”
He adds, ”Having filmed and traveled throughout Africa there are four things that stick with me: The beauty of the people, the richness of the culture, the physical beauty of the place and the rich tradition of stories there.”
Hobson, like Bogle and other film scholars, feels that those are the stories that need to be told. Bogle believes that there will be some changes as African-Americans move into positions of power as directors and within studios.
Bob Rafelson notes, ”As black historians and scholars are always pointing out, history has been written by the white man.”
So it has been with Hollywood films. But thoughtful filmmakers, black and white, have it in their power to show us the other half of the story. All they have to do, says Euzhan Palcy, is take a chance. She`s optimistic: ”I believe that the American audience is not so dumb that they wouldn`t be interested in a black story.”