consuming colonial debris
17 May 2009
The white liberal continues to be the Madonna of African conscience.
The Africans live in the shadows of these ghosts and monuments, reading pretty texts on ‘reconciliation’ which the context negates in every visible way.
Written texts designed to obliterate the African time-space also constitute the obstacles and debris which the African must learn to sweep into their place before his cinema can become a true means of releasing a new communicative power.
Following political independence, the Africans in the southern region have reoccupied their territories, but they have yet to reclaim them as bases for the African psyche to unfold.
- Tafataona Mahoso Unwinding the African dream on African ground
2 Comments
leave one →
Powerful words that cut to the truth of reclaiming/establishing as a project(s) of ‘our’ postcolonial identity.
I struggle with some of the identity forms that are portrayed on SABC, especially the ones that portray black folks/poc in terms that are white.
For example, there is an ad for a beer company (I forger which) where a black man (20-something) is walking drinking a cold beer in an arid area and as he talks about the beer other folks appear.
One of the phrases he uses to bring these other folks into the frame references his “chinas” …
When did black folk start to use this offensive term? Is it black folks or white sensibilites/values being directed?
So is ‘blackness’ manipulated to validate whiteness and at the same time invalidate the ‘coming out’ that is pressed by your quote here?
I think that perhaps the notions of freedom/equality in the terms captured by the quote suggest that neither is possible.
SABC is littered with images of what I call “nuwe boere” … or what Fanon termed the masking of blacks by white values and priorities.
Even as I write here there is a background subtext that also wants me to say that there are universal features to our humanity, even out racialized humanity.
But I worry about those universal features that are ‘forced’ onto our being in the act(s) of declaring our postcolonial ‘equality’, as in commercialized popular culture, for example.
In these terms I am coming to appreciate, thanks to your posts here, the struggle for authentic African cinema.
Peace
Ridwan
i recall the ad you mean. it’s selling a vicious kind of be the (new) leader of the pack (of wolves) aspirational message – substituting a black man where there was white before, changing nothing.
and speaking of… i find the string of windhoek ads especially hectic. the two i’ve seen have the same pay-off line “and remember, i’m watching (you).” What it says about masculinity (misogyny), money and power and the kind of big-brother patrolling not just public space but our very thoughts (conjuring Orwell’s thought police) is crazy. it’s where i think the “met eish” ad tried to do something else… anyway, an interesting visual/sociological project for someone.
unmasking our colonial past and reclaiming space (visually speaking) can only happen (if at all) in very very small strides on public tv. I’m beginning to think it’s trapped by the very thing that it is. as long as the model is one where space (and the ‘audience’) is sold to commercial interests (advertisers), content can never be free. of course good stuff gets through, but too rarely. i guess we can only become more conscious of how we read the content and control its presence? because beyond content, there’s “the box” itself.
but anyway, it’s where i think ‘film’ is different and can make interventions on the level that progressive art can. I say film, meaning the medium of moving image that is not made-for-tv. But to talk of an African cinema – means a tradition of access to resources to make and see African films (production, distribution, screening) and for the content of those films, its production and peoples engagement with the films to challenge and flip the dominant messaging and paradigm. I think we’re a long way off from that kind of cinema. There are more people working with cameras and making films who are trying to do this independently, or differently. But it’s very, very hard. The playing fields are too uneven. Maybe we’re seeing the beginnings of an alternative “body of cinematic work” that is more authentic or real, to an experience here in SA.. I don’t know. If so, then it’s happening on the margins of “the industry.”