Comments on What Could Have Been

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.