A Time There Was/En ceTemps-là (review)

The subtitle of this film is “Stories from the Last Days of Kenya Colony.” Donald McWilliams’s own story and voice-over narration provide the connective tissue for these. As a young National Service conscript, the future filmmaker served in Kenya in 1954–56 during the Emergency. He knew nothing of the country and accepted prevailing views of Mau Mau savagery and the righteousness of his country’s mission. He describes how his own consciousness was subsequently raised by a chance encounter in Dar es-Salaam with a journalist who had experienced apartheid in South Africa. After being demobilized McWilliams immigrated to Canada, where he has lived ever since.

In 1999 he returned to Kenya for a soberer reexamination of the colony’s “last days,” an attempt, as he says, to go deeper into what happened when he was there. When he tried to find the site of his unit’s most important skirmish with Mau Mau, it had disappeared entirely, gouged out to extract diatomite, a mineral used to stabilize dynamite—and to make kitty litter. Nevertheless, he relives the horror of the event in every gruesome detail, now much more critical of British policy and sensitized to the richness of Kenyan—primarily Kikuyu—culture.

The other stories are those of three Kenyans: Mwaria Njumu, a veteran of the Kikuyu Land Army; Achrroo Kapila, an Indian-born lawyer who defended Kenyatta and many others accused of participation in Mau Mau; and John Nottingham, a district officer from 1952 to 1962 who became more and more critical of British policies. Each of them looks back on the period, describing his role and reflecting on it. It is unfortunate that Njumu is the least reflective of the three, defending the actions of the fighters and their goal of, as he proclaims, creating one nation. Kapila, on the other hand, ponders the problem of violence for an adherent of Gandhi. Do the means justify the ends, he asks. But he has no doubt that it was important to see that justice was done and the accused “Mau Mau” given a fair trial. Ironically, he himself was imprisoned in the 1980s on what he says were trumped up charges and found old friends avoiding him. In the end, Nottingham resigned from the Colonial Service and cast his lot with independent Kenya. He became a citizen, married a Kenyan woman, and has been engaged ever since in publishing African writers.

Inevitably one compares A Time There Was with the classic trilogy The Black Man’s Land, released in 1973 and a staple ever since on settler colonialism in Africa. One must say at the outset that A Time There Was is beautifully filmed, with misty shots of Mount Kenya and the Highlands. The effect, however, is to romanticize Kenya itself and its precolonial past. More seriously, because the focus is literally on the “last days” of the colony, a viewer coming blind to the film would have only the most superficial understanding of what preceded the independence struggle (an impression not helped by its rather jumpy structure)—and even of the complexities of that struggle itself. For that one still must turn to the earlier trilogy, which, to be sure, has much more time to go into the historical background and does this very well, drawing on textual sources and interviews as well as images. Interestingly, John Nottingham is an effective presence in this film, too, and a knowledgeable one since, with Carl Rosberg, he published the first serious study of Mau Mau in 1966, a study that effectively demolished the myth. Otherwise virtually all the figures in The Black Man’s Land are no longer alive. It is perhaps indicative of the differing points of departure of the two films that A Time There Was opens with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II as ruler of an empire that still covered a huge swath of the world, while Black Man’s Land...