A Somali woman is baking bread in a clay oven, outside in the yard her husband puts the finishing touches on their daughter’s hula hoop; the camera slowly zooms out and a headline informs us we are in Eastleigh, Nairobi. As we gain perspective, we see we are in a township of sorts: 4X4 pickups with mounted machine guns manned by turbaned and warlike looking men rumble through the streets. In the distance we see the skyscrapers of a city; anyone who is even vaguely familiar with the Nairobi skyline can instantly see this is not the capital of Kenya. Or Kenya for that matter.
In the wake of the Hollywood whitewashing furore, or to be more precise concomitantly to the Hollywood whitewashing furore, Asian American actors like Aziz Ansari are standing up and demanding that they be counted. John Oliver has discussed the subject of whitewashing on his cutting edge program Last Week Tonight and the simple fact that a film like Gods of Egypt has stars with names like Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Denmark) and Gerard Butler (Scotland), clearly demonstrates how deep the problem runs.
The flip side of the whitewashing coin is the ongoing depiction of Africa with the broad strokes of a large dark tar brush. A brush that refuses to acknowledge the reality on the ground in favour of a paternalistic narrative that denies Africa or Africans agency in the films that define them and tell their stories. The Africa rising narrative has been around for a while: economies are growing, middle classes flourishing, tech havens bubbling up. We’ve read the script, we know that change is not just something written about in the press, it’s around us, it’s real. Or maybe not. Turns out that not everyone wants to pay attention and in the same way that Hollywood keeps to unnecessarily casting white people in “ethnic” roles, it continues to depict Africa as a hopeless continent that cannot survive without the intervention of the benevolent and paternalistic “developed” North.
There are exceptions of course: fictional films depict South Africa as urban and edgy; it is the perfect setting for dystopian sci-fi movies. There are also notable films have been shot in Kenya that create a more nuanced portrayal of the country and its citizens. Think of the 2005 film The Constant Gardener - based on the homonymous novel by John le Carre’ - and Lost in Africa (2010) by the Danish director Vibeke Muasya, which both worked hard to write more multifaceted roles for the Kenyan parts. More recently, the widely acclaimed Netflix show Sense8 has strived to depict the life of a young matatu driver, so it cannot be said that it is beautiful sunsets and romantic Maasai warriors that are the only defining the narrative of Kenya today. For the rest though, West Africa is in a state of constant war (Blood Diamond, Beasts of No Nation), Central Africa rarely gets discussed and the Horn, with obvious exceptions, is too complicated a place to even consider trying to come up with a convincing storyline.
The 2016 release Eye in the Sky is a film directed by South African Gavin Hood (Tsotsi) starring Helen Mirren, which moves swiftly between military bases in Britain and the US and a residential area of “Eastleigh”. The plot device is to use the threat of Al Shabaab suicide bombers in a crowded space, to build up a convincing scenario in which drones are the only option to prevent a massacre. In a nutshell, Eye in the Sky is a beautiful depiction of the immediate and pressing emotions of the people who hold the power to take someone out with a drone. It is poignant and drives home the point that when people are making a decision from so far away, there are moral implications that cannot be overlooked. Yet while Eye in the Sky gives so much agency to the people making decisions from their offices and the two drone operators somewhere in Nevada who are tasked with pulling the trigger, it entirely disregards the Kenyan police/security forces who are on the ground and given no more than a cameo appearance in a film about their own destiny. Throughout the film, the narrative stubbornly insist on depicting Kenya as some kind of a failed state in which armed militias freely roam the streets and the police hide out in bunkers.
Kenya makes it very expensive for international film crews to come and film, financial reasons and the fact that the director is South African, made South Africa the obvious location of choice. The problem, however, arises when filmmakers purporting to make a current affairs thriller, make absolutely no attempt to portray the place in question in a realistic way. Imagine a thriller about life on the projects in Harlem, shot entirely in Houston with people talking in deep southern accents. In this case we are talking about Eastleigh, which sits a couple kilometres away from the Nairobi town centre and is not, as the film seems to imply, a lawless backwater situated on the very edge of the city. Nairobi, the capital of Kenya and the economic powerhouse of East Africa, is reduced to little more than a war torn African country in which warlords patrol the streets with machine guns and the rule of law hardy exists. By virtue of it being such a failed state, American and British armed forces apparently now have the authority to bomb a house in a residential neighbourhood of a friendly country, with no fear of reprisals from the sovereign state in question.
Fiction is fiction and no one can be sued for misrepresenting people in a fictional movie. Yet think back on how angry people get at Sasha Baron Cohen when he depicts Kazakhs as backwards (Borat) and Brits from up north as lager louts and football hooligans (The Brothers Grimsby) . People get up in arms over films that never pretend to be anything but comedy, silly films with some elements of satire but which are really only aimed at making its audiences laugh. So is it fair to express concern that a film that is communicating to the audience that these are real scenarios which can happen every day, fails to give any agency to those who will actually be affected by what’s going on? It would seem that Africans are forever doomed play second-fiddle to the white heroes that are there to save the day, and that “Africa Rising” just can’t fit into Hollywood’s narrative of the continent.
The Bechdel Test was created in 1985 by a woman called Allison Bechdel, to chart the way women are portrayed in movies. The test follows three simple criteria: does a film have two or more female characters in it? Do these women talk to each other? Do they talk about something that isn’t a man? You’d be surprised at how many films fail this test. More recently the concept of the Racial Bechdel Test has begun to take hold. The same rules apply: are there two or more minority characters in a film? Do they speak to each other? Do they speak to each other about anything other than white people? The vast majority of films and TV series that come out totally fail this test. While the Racial Bechdel Test brings us squarely back to the issue of whitewashing, it also shows us how most “Hollywood” films that are shot in a faraway “other” land, fail to give any role of substance to the “other” characters in it.
One can argue that it doesn’t matter how Nairobi is depicted, if stupid people are going to be put off coming here by a fictional film then they shouldn’t be coming here in the first place. One can even argue that Kenya doesn’t need more tourism, that tourism has brought little here beyond a whole load of (underage) prostitution and kilometres of ugly cement monstrosities up and down the coast. What Kenya needs is infrastructure not more disrespectful tourists. Do risk analysts take into account fictional films before telling a company: “yes it’s fine to go and invest there or no, don’t go and invest there, terrorists roam the streets with impunity and they’ll probably blow you up”? Hopefully not. Personally though, I believe it is important to be a bit sensitive about a film like this, especially a film that has gone to such lengths to realistically depict every detail of what is going on up “north” while entirely glossing over anything that would make the Kenyan government and security forces look like they have the power to think and act for themselves.
Whitewashing, black tar brushing and Hollywood’s attempts to control the narrative about the “other”, needs to be challenged today, tomorrow and for all eternity. So far Eye in the Sky has received pretty sturdy reviews and is a critic’s favourite. The film is good, well worth watching. So this begs the question: should we care? Does complaining about this sort of thing put us in the brackets of the people who couldn’t get the “joke” in Borat, or is it a worthy battle that deserves to be highlighted, if only so that every time someone googles “Eye in the Sky review” they aren’t only presented with glowing accolades?
