Life What Could Have Been
posted by on October 11 at 10:24 AM
Two recent experiences brought this picture to mind: 
. The picture was taken in 1977, and the young family that’s arranged into an indestructible unity by a portrait photographer is an African family.
While reading the last story in Dambudzo Marechera ‘s House of Hunger (published in 1979 and shared that year first prize for the Guardian Award for fiction—the other winner was Neil Jordan, the now-famous Irish filmmaker), I thought about the new film The Last King of Scotland, which is set in the capital of Uganda, Kampala, during Idi Amin’s rule (72 to 79). What connects the portrait, Dumbudzo’s short story, and the movie is the lost spirit of African modernity.
To use Dumbudzo’s words (which are far from words of praise), the pictured African family is a “modern African family”—the future unit and standard of a fully commodified African society. If all had gone as planned and desired for Zimbabwe, and Uganda, whose capital attempted to modernize its look and architecture—as is shown in the movie The Last King of Scotland—the pictured “undifferentiated unity” would have been as universal as toasters in this society.
That's the saddest thing I've ever heard. I can't imagine what it's like to lose not just a country but a continent. Is Africa really lost forever? It's not just about poverty and hunger and disease: it's about a belief in the future, and a set of ideas and principles about what that future will or could or should be. Have Africans lost that irredeemably?
A reverse of Marxism and a return to the rural.
This, from the Congo's Filip de Boeck:
"surreal transformations have occurred as such urban and once self-consciously urbane places are increasingly imagined by their inhabitants as reverting to a malignant rurality. Noting that urban spaces have not only undergone a marked ruralisation in terms of their architectural, urbanisational and socio economic (dis)arrangement, the city has also become, in the collective social instituting imaginary, the space of the forest, thereby mapping the hunter's landscape, which is one of the potentially dangerous, frontier like margin, onto the urban, and thus "central" landscape ."
And also, like Latin America, the growth of Pentecostal Churches, which is based in rural idiocy.
Harri Englund, from Malawi, " addressed one of Africa's most conspicuous "post-urban" phenomena--the ever increasing pervasiveness and popularity of Pentacostal Christianity--which he argues plays havoc with any kind of dichotomizing discourse about the rural and the urban"
The point about Pentecostal Christianity is dead on. Just as Catholicism (and to a certain extent Anglican Christianity) was used to "soften the masses" for the colonizers, Pentecostal Christianity keeps the disconteded urban poor at bay.
Gee, the people of Zimbabwe and Uganda must be overjoyed to have dodged the bullet of posing stiffly in capitalist photo studios.
Famine, AIDS, civil war and oppressive dictatorship are a little harder to deal with in the short run, but at least they don't compromise the naturalist African Identity that intellectuals like Dumbudzo hold dear.
It's sad that a man as bright as Charles Mudede still cherishes the "Noble Savage" archetype born of colonialism (albeit dressed up in more acceptable contemporary terminology).
Robotslave, I think you're completely missing the point.
The photo is evidence of a Zimbabwean family with hopes and aspirations for a modern future. That future was not to be, and whatever the reasons are--you name a few--that's a tragic thing not just for this family but for entire countries and continents. Africa reels, and is settling into mute acceptance of defeat and civic collapse.
That's what that picture represents: an Africa where you could dream of a better life. If you can't dream of a better life, what do you have? Nothing. How can you live with nothing? A billion people find out every day.
Charles, I would love to read (or post) your review of 'Scotland.' I think I might even love it better if I attended your review screening.
As a preadolescent, I had an older friend from Kinshasa who iterated the tragedy of Uganda in the seventies to me in real time. Certainly I don't expect this film to match his experience; I remain interested in the film.
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