Tears of the Sun and Nigeria: A Film Without Context

SOURCE: http://www.wougnet.org

Tears of the Sun and Nigeria: A Film Without Context

By Tokunbo Ojo

“The starving African exists as a point in space from which we measure our own wealth, success and prosperity, a darkness against which we can view our own cultural triumphs.”---Michael Maren, an American and former Peace Corps’ aid worker in Kenya .

At the dawn of the 21st century, African continent is still often portrayed, in the words of Bosah Eboh, as “a crocodile-infested dark continent where jungle life has perpetually eluded civilization” by Western media, and many people across the globe.

These views of the continent have been greatly shaped by books such as Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and movies like The god must be crazy, The African Queen, and Tarzan. Most excerpts from these “novels, screenplays, movie reviews, and screen advertising demonstrate the vast propaganda our society has witnessed during the past fifty years about Africa as a “savage” place in need of conquest, “colonization”, and Christianity” according to Richard Maynard, author of Africa on Film: myth and reality, The protagonists are always “white men” who are out to save the dying African population.

These problematic characterization and images resonate in the recently released Hollywood movie, “Tears of the Sun”, which stars Bruce Willis and host of others. Shot in the “jungle” of Hawaii in the US (not the jungle of Africa ! as the movie intended to make us believe), the film is about the rescue of Dr. Lena Kendricks, an American citizen by marriage who was caught in the middle of civil unrest in Nigeria after a military coup. Navy SEAL Lieutenant A.K. Waters and his elite squadron of tactical specialists were sent to rescue Dr. Kendricks from a village in Nigeria before a newly installed military leader, a Muslim Fulani, start “ethnic cleansing of Christian Igbos” in the village.

While it seems like just an ordinary story for entertainment purpose, the movie through its narrative structure and imagery bastardized continent of Africa for to affirm the cultural superiority, economical and political hegemony of the West. With strong symbolism (such as white doves flying away from the village after the white priest was beheaded), hackneyed expressions (such as “God already left Africa”, “That’s what they do”), metaphors and archetype imagery of “savages”, “jungle”, and “beasts” in which people with the “hearts of darkness” were killing themselves for no reason, it dehumanized and misrepresented 120 millions of Nigerians and people of Africa as whole. Like the aids donor agencies that often use “the image of starving Ethiopian children” from the 1984 Ethiopian famine to depict the “reality of Africa” in their advertisement for fund raising, Tears of the Sun, which has a completely slanted story structure and characterization, opened with graphic footages of shooting and killing. Some of these footages, which were taken from Sorious Samura’s documentary, Cry Freetown, on the Sierra Leone civil war, were used to depict an “ethnic cleansing” in Nigeria . These footages were never referenced to Sierra Leone in an attempt to give an element of reality to the distorted and Hollywood manufactured story of “ethnic cleansing in Nigeria ”— that is Muslim Fulani’s mass massacre of Christian Igbos after a Muslim Fulani military dictator overthrew a democratically elected Nigerian government, of which a Christian Igbo was the president.

Nigeria is more than “Fulanis and Igbos.” There are over 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria . But just like the so-called white historians and experts on African affairs, who have never stepped their feet on African soils, the writer and producers of the Tears of the Sun seemed to have just gathered information about “AFRICA” (which is a small village in the minds of many a man in the Western world) and ritually framed it within the familiar Western dominant cognitive model of “usual African tribal killing“and “barbarism.” Why a need for a painstaking research about the characterization, setting and narrative structure when such a framing is familiar and comforting to audiences who are used to seeing the dehumanization of Africa and Africans; which Chinua Achebe, a Nigeria born world-renowned novelist, said is an “age-long attitude [that] has fostered, and continues to foster in the world" ? At least in the end, the white men triumphed "and the so-called savages were wiped out", added Niyi Osundare, Commonwealth poetry prize winner.

**Tokunbo Ojo is a Montreal based freelance journalist/writer.

This is culled from Montreal Community Contact.