Hollywood's Africa after 1994

1: The Cited and the United

15 o n e The Cited and the Uncited toward an Emancipatory reading of representations of Africa harry garuba and natasha himmelman Orientalism is . . . a system for citing texts and authors. —Edward said in TheLastKingof Scotland (Kevin Macdonald, 2007), a newly qualified scottish medical doctor sits in front of a map of the world pondering where he should go to escape from the stifling world of his boring, conventional bourgeois family. the map, a little globe, sits on his table like a plaything. And playfully, with a child’s glee, he spins it round like a toy. when it comes to a halt in front of him, the country he sees is Canada. no, not exotic enough, he thinks; and then he spins the globe again. when it stops once more, he places his finger on the point right in front of him. this time it is Uganda, in the eastern heart of Africa. And it is to Uganda that he and the film go. this sequence, of course, echoes the famous scene in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness1 where the narrator, Marlow, speaks of his childhood fascination with maps and his longing to visit the blank, unexplored spaces on the maps of the world. by the time he grows up, Marlow tells us, those blank spaces will have become places of darkness. Here is how Marlow describes it in Conrad’s classic tale: “now when i was a little chap i had a passion for maps. . . . At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when i saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) i would put my finger on it and say, when i grow up i will go there. . . . i have been in some of them . . . well, we won’t talk about that. but there was one yet—the biggest, the most blank, so to speak—that i had a hankering after. 16  H A r r y g A r u b A A n d n A t A s H A H i M M e l M A n “true, by this time it was not a blank space any more. it had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. it had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. it had become a place of darkness.” (2006, 7–8) by reiterating and foregrounding the Marlow-and-maps scene from Heart of Darkness, The Last King of Scotland suggests right from the beginning that by the time our young doctor “grows up,” Uganda will also have become a place of darkness. And by the time our young—now “grown-up”—doctor leaves the country at the end of the film, Amin’s rule has transformed Uganda into “a place of darkness.”2 we will return to these images later. if, as Edward said claims in his classic study of representations of the Orient in western texts, “Orientalism is . . . a system for citing texts and authors ” (1979, 23), Hollywood’s Africa is also discursively anchored on a similar system of citations. in this sense, representations of Africa in Hollywood or Hollywood-influenced films are massively cited. representations of Africa in these films work on a referencing system of citations in which the present image builds on a previous, always already known image of Africa (see Mayer 2002 and Ebron 2002), sometimes of maps and exploration and conquest , or of adventure or safaris, but more often of savagery and sexuality, cannibalism and concupiscence, drumming and dancing, and so on; in short, depictions that show an excess of physicality and primitive passion. Cited from text to film or from film to film, these tropes define an Africa inscribed as both discursively known but also inscrutable to reason (see, for instance, Hickey and wylie 1993). they constitute an archive that v. y. Mudimbe famously referred to as the “colonial library” in his study of the invention of Africa in European discourse (see Mudimbe 1988). the colonial library is a library of citations, a readily available archive in which all the significant information worth knowing about Africa is stored. One way to critically read films that depend on this archive of images is to focus on retrieving the “citations” that enable and give authority to each frame, image, or sequence of the film. such a reading is certainly of great benefit in...