Hollywood's Africa after 1994

5: Again, the Darkness: Shake Hands with the Devil

83 f i v e Again, the Darkness Shake Hands with the Devil kenneth w. harrow As the genocide raged, dallaire was condemned to peer into the heart of darkness, to witness the failure of humanity, to shake hands with the devil. —Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire to prepare for a recent talk on human rights films, i decided to view two documentaries on rwanda, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire (Peter raymont, 2004) and Ghosts of Rwanda (greg barker, 2004, Frontline-Pbs), and one popular feature film, Hotel Rwanda (terry george, 2004). My decision to create a series of roundtables titled “what’s wrong with Human rights Films” for the 2007 African studies Association and 2008 African literature Association was made in reaction to a screening of Michael Caton-Jones’s Shooting Dogs (2005), for which i had been asked to be a respondent on my campus. that film centered on a self-sacrificing british priest who saves “his” tutsis but is ultimately killed. As the film is deeply flawed, especially in its celebration of the Catholic priesthood, whose actual behavior in this massacre was generally the contrary to that presented in the film, i thought it would be important to ask whether the flaws in Shooting Dogs were merely random or something intrinsic to the whole enterprise of making human rights films. For these purposes, i just as easily could have chosen Hotel Rwanda, another film that reduces the historical event to a Hollywood Manichean binary of good and evil. this was partly the subject of my earlier essay, “Un train Peut en Cacher un Autre” (2005), in which i address the ideological effects of the genocide narrative in its occlusion of historical evidence that muddies the purity of the binary. to be specific, 84  K e n n e t H w . H A r r o w the focus on the genocide of the tutsis occludes the range of human rights abuses directed against the Hutus, and especially directs us away from the role of the rwandan government and its tutsi militias in wreaking havoc in the democratic republic of Congo (drC) after 1998, and in sharing a large part of the responsibility for the eventual deaths of more than five million people. (disclosure: i also worked on the creation of Forsaken Cries, the first Amnesty international film on the rwandan genocide made in 1997 by Kathy Austin [institute of Policy studies]. in that film our narrative never addressed claims of abuses suffered by Hutus at the hands of the rwandan Patriotic Front [rPF].) in films about the genocide we find the following typology: —A teleological history in which the events are presented in the form of an African historical determinism. the framing inevitably explains African history as entailing endless “tribal warfare”; this is what we might call the western newspaper headline version of Africa , dating back to colonial times. —the centering of a western protagonist through whose eyes the horror is duly registered (as in The Constant Gardener [Fernando Meirelles 2005])—typically, a white man or woman through whose eyes the dominant perspective of the film is purveyed. this is not entirely the case in Hotel Rwanda, although the figure of Paul rusesabagina , through whom the focalization is directed, is seen as somehow succeeding in remaining above the fray, unlike the others trapped in the killings. He is like a European, because of his link to the European hotel, and is still presented as a victim because of his tutsi wife. secondarily, the figure of the nick nolte character, the Un colonel, reinforces this perspective. Paul’s relationship to those threatening him is inevitably represented in black-and-white terms.1 —A code of characters and issues cast in familiar binary terms, an inevitable feature of human rights discourse. As an Amnesty international country specialist, i know all too well how it becomes necessary in mobilizing support for a cause not to muddy the appeal by suggesting that the ones on whose behalf an appeal is made are anything but pure victims of those who are to be seen as perpetrators. From such ratiocination is inevitably built the binary logic that JanMohamed would define as a “Manichaean aesthetic,” characteristic Again, the darkness: Shake Hands with the Devil  85 of colonial ideology, and, in lock step with its logic, that of a modernist...