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• Hollywood’s flirtation with Africa: the cliché continuesPublished: February 16 2007 21:04 | Last updated: February 16 2007 21:04
• De Beers, the dominant player in the diamond trade, has decided to be a good sport about the film Blood Diamond, nominated for five Oscars at next weekend’s awards ceremony.
• The Leonardo DiCaprio blockbuster, set in the Sierra Leone civil war, is not quite how it would have wanted the subject treated. But the company’s line is that the film may help to raise awareness and speed up international compliance with the controls that are now in place.
• So much for the gloss. If truth be told, people at De Beers were scared stiff from the moment the film was planned about its potential impact on the public image of diamonds, which, after all, is what sustains their price. In the event, however, little if any damage seems to have been inflicted on customer demand.
• The film urges people to insist that jewellers sell only diamonds untainted by conflict. But that is not something anybody can be certain about. The rigorous certification scheme created under the Kimberley Process, designed to curb illegal sales, applies only to rough diamonds before they are cut, polished and made into jewels. A warranty system does enable jewellers to reassure customers that their gems are sourced from reputable suppliers. De Beers also has a pilot scheme for marking individual cut diamonds, in the way that diamonds mined in Canada’s Northwest Territories are already identified. But there is generally no foolproof way of knowing a jewel’s provenance. It is less likely than before to come from a conflict zone, but that is partly because the diamond-fuelled wars in Sierra Leone and Angola ran out of steam about five years ago.
• Films such as Blood Diamond would not be the same, however, without their sense of moral and educational purpose. There has been a clutch of them in the past three years dealing with contemporary African subjects, beginning with retrospectives on the 1994 massacres in Rwanda. African causes are in vogue. Hollywood actors from George Clooney to Angelina Jolie have got involved. The pointed semi-documentary African political thriller is becoming a genre on its own.
• The Constant Gardener, Fernando Meirelles’ 2005 version of the John le Carré novel, typically allows no confusion about its target. “Big pharmaceuticals,â€? one character is made to say, “are right up there with the arms dealers.â€?
• Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter, made the same year, involved a fictional African state with an invented language, but if anyone missed the parallels with Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe government clarified the point by banning the film.
• A cynic, though, might ask what the recent feast of cinematic indignation has done more to achieve: improve the lot of Africans or enable the film industry to feel righteous.
• In some cases, African audiences may quibble about historical simplification and geographical clangers – scenery from the wrong part of the continent, wrong music, wrong actors – but that is how Hollywood works. Many are also uncomfortable with the relentless portrayal of Africa as brutish,
• hostile and scary.
• It used to be that Africa was used mainly as an exotic, dangerous backdrop for stories about white people, of which the early 1950s productions The African Queen and Mogambo are classics. It is still usual to employ white characters to make African stories accessible to non-African filmgoers. The Last King of Scotland, the remarkable portrayal of Idi Amin, the Ugandan dictator, does this more subtly than others. Hotel Rwanda, starring the American actor Don Cheadle, was unusual in having as its central character a careerist middle-class African (although the film has incurred criticism for its rendering of the genocide, and the real-life hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina, for self-aggrandisement).
• Sadly, few authentically African films make the big distribution circuits. One that did, the South African redemption fable, Tsotsi, winner of last year’s foreign-language Oscar, can be faulted on grounds of plausibility, but has the virtues of both relying on local talent and avoiding the temptation of modish documentary overlay. Notably, it makes no attempt to explain or express guilt over South Africa’s brutalising apartheid past. Although specific in its setting, it could be transposed to any crime-ridden city. As Gavin Hood, its director, said in his acceptance speech: “Our stories are the same as your stories.â€?
• It should not be forgotten that, well before the recent series of politically conscious films, there was a noble tradition of African themes. If one goes back to King Solomon’s Mines, the H. Rider Haggard story first filmed in 1937 with Paul Robeson, the similarities to Blood Diamond are striking. The plot is much the same: intrepid adventurer trekking with guide deep into the interior in search of a buried diamond treasure against some nasty opposition. The ending, though, has to be different. It would not be acceptable nowadays for the white characters to claim the treasure while their companion took his rightful place as tribal chieftain. In Blood Diamond, the Sierra Leonean fisherman/co-hero is finally acknowledged by a standing ovation from a hallful of white dignitaries
• – a modern Hollywood cliché that, in its way, is no less patronising. Perhaps we have not come so far in those 70 years.

Last edited on Friday February 16th, 2007 23:31 by colo-mentality