Written by Robin Hitchcock.
My name is Robin and I am a white person living in Africa. Cape Town, South Africa, to be specific, although Hollywood wouldn’t be, because Hollywood’s Africa takes the continent’s 30.2 million square kilometers of land, 57 countries, and population of over 1 billion, and reduces it to a whole lot of this:
Hollywood’s Africa has three types of people: poor kids you can sponsor for the price of a cup of coffee a day, antiquated tribes living in huts, and most importantly: white people. And Hollywood thinks white people in Africa are definitely the most interesting.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I think my life is super dupes interesting. I mean, this morning I dropped a container of yogurt and it exploded! Real stuff. But if you wanted to make a movie set in Africa, why would you zero in on a white immigrant? I’m really not the person to tell the story of an entire continent (obviously NO ONE IS, but that wouldn’t stop Hollywood from trying).
1985 Best Picture winner Out of Africa typifies this fixation with white people in Africa. Based on her memoir, it follows Danish Baroness Karen Blixby (Meryl Streep) as she settles in Kenya with her husband of convenience, Bror. He wants her money, she wants his title, and they both want escape, so while they discuss going anywhere in the world (“Well maybe not Australia”) they choose British East Africa for reasons the film isn’t bothered to sort out. Cut to one of the many scenic vistas that make up roughly a third of Out of Africa‘s two hour 40 minute runtime (because long = “epic” = Oscar).
Bror turns out to be a fool (planting coffee where it can’t grow) and a philanderer (with bonus syphilis!), so his marriage to Karen does not last. Fortunately Karen can move on to Robert Redford’s super hunky big game hunter Denys. Karen and Denys’s affair is the heart of the film, and the reason for most of its (now faded) acclaim: Streep and Redford have strong chemistry and I found myself smiling and sighing and getting weepy at all the key moments. But it’s not particularly different from any other Hollywood romance, aside from the close encounters with lions. Is Karen and Denys’s love somehow more romantic because of the “epic” “sweeping” backdrop of Africa? A Best Picture Oscar suggests this is the case.
In Out of Africa, Black people are just part of that “backdrop.” The only non-white character with any sort of a role is Karen’s right-hand man Farah, but he seems to exist to facilitate her life and is not fleshed out as a person at all. The Kikuyu people who live on “Karen’s” land are essentially scenery, despite the famous scene where Karen drops to her knees to beg on their behalf to the Governor. Meryl’s motivation to win an Oscar completely eclipses Karen’s motivations, because the rest of the movie is her having interpersonal drama with other white colonialists (well, that and all those scenic vistas).
Out of Africa is 30 years old, but Hollywood hasn’t tired of making movies about white people in Africa. See last year’s Adam-Sandler-and-Drew-Barrymore-on-safari romcom Blended (wait, no matter what you do, DON’T see that). Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz in The Constant Gardener. Leonardo DiCpario and Jennifer Connelly in Blood Diamond. From my childhood, I remember little Reese Witherspoon and Ethan Embry escaping poachers in A Far Off Place; and The Power of One, which illustrates prejudice in Apartheid-era South Africa by telling the story of a white boy bullied because he is English and not Afrikaans. Really. When I was 8 years old I thought that movie was very powerful. Now I think making a movie about Apartheid starring white people is really gross. (Even when the story is just a metaphor for Apartheid, Mr. Blomkamp!).
Africa is beautiful, but it isn’t just pretty scenery to put behind white people. Its political and economic problems (which were all largely caused by white people!) aren’t there to create dramatic stakes for your white characters. There are so many African stories to tell that are about Africans. Hollywood, please show us some more of those.
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town and this is the last time she gets to use that byline because she is headed out of Africa (geddit, that’s why I reviewed this movie now *wink*).