Africa News blog
African business, politics and lifestyle
Must we see rape in Britain to understand rape in Congo?
I was left somewhat traumatised after going to see a screening of a controversial new Hollywood-backed short released this week, aimed at highlighting the link between minerals mined for British mobile phones and the use of rape and murder as weapons of war in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The highly graphic campaign video – appropriately called Unwatchable – starts with a little English girl picking flowers in the garden of her family’s multi-million pound mansion in a picturesque Cotswolds village.
This tranquil scene is shattered in an instant when armed men descend on the house, gang-rape her sister on the kitchen table and then murder her parents. It ends five minutes later with the girl running for her life.
“We placed it in a sort of cliché idyllic countryside, and tracing it back to mobile phones would make it relevant to people on the street,” Marc Hawker of production company DarkFibre told AlertNet.
“It’s a foreign story and that’s how people think. We wanted to target 16 to 30-year-olds who know nothing about what is happening,” said Hawker, who wrote and directed the film.
The film is based on the story of a woman from eastern Congo, Masika, and her family’s suffering at the hands of militia, re-enacted in rural England. According to Hawker, Masika was made to eat her husband’s flesh before the rebels mutilated and killed him, and then raped her and her daughters.
“We wanted people to imagine what is going on in the Congo,” said Vava Tampa, director of Save the Congo, a human rights group made up of London-based Congolese students and professionals which is backing the campaign. “If they can imagine what is happening on the ground then perhaps we will be compelled to take more action.”
Nigeria’s image problem
For anyone who has seen the hit film District 9, it’s no surprise a Nigerian minister would be upset by it.
The science fiction film, set in South Africa, is an allegory on segregation and xenophobia, with alien life forms cooped up in a township of the type that grew up under apartheid and victimised and despised by humans of all descriptions.
No section of human society comes across particularly well, but the Nigerians are crudely caricatured as gangsters, cannibals, pimps, prostitutes and dealers in guns and addictive drugs (in this case cat food). The gang leader’s name sounds exactly like the surname of Nigeria’s former President Olusegun Obasanjo.
It’s just a film of course and the slurs needn’t overly detract from the entertainment. (They didn’t for the Nigerian half of my family anyway).
But this does raise a question as to why Nigerians should be seen as fair targets and casually turned into comic book gangsters? Would the film makers have got away with showing other nations or groups in this way? Would they have feared the backlash?
It also raises the question as to what Nigeria can do about really changing its image – beyond rebranding and advertising campaigns.
It could be argued that the immense and undoubted talent of law-abiding Nigerians, the vast majority at home and abroad, does not get the recognition it deserves in the rest of the world despite the acclaim for the greatest Nigerian writers, musicians, footballers and athletes. Nor may the sacrifice of Nigerians who have given their lives as peacekeepers in Africa and elsewhere.
I think the problems is not either the North or the South and criminality is not the property of any ethnic nationality, but the problem is inherent in the blood of Nigerians. Imagine that the President was sick for more than 4 weeks now and neither the National Assembly or the PDP party who have stolen the mandate of the people to fill properly, the power vacuum created by the ailing president. So how can the image of this kind of nation will be revamped. To me the possible solution is to follow the Dale Davidson and William Regmore model “megapolitics of society, violence as catalyst of change”. If we the citizens not wake up from our sleep and attack these criminals from looting our country and sending their children to study abroad, we will never change the system. We are so docile. So stand up and fight them with every power that we have.
Was white Kenyan aristocrat’s conviction fair?
It’s been almost three years since the son of the 5th Lord Delamere, Thomas Cholmondeley, first hopped down from a police truck and entered into Kenya’s High Court to face murder charges over the death of a local poacher on his estate.
Cholmondeley sat as impassively this week as he did that first day in court as the judge convicted him of a lesser charge of manslaughter.
Although the death penalty is off the table, he still could face life in prison.
It appears to me that this trial was blatantly turned into a race issue by certain Kenyan politians and the Judge was under huge political pressure to ensure a conviction no matter what the evidence produced. For the Judge to completly deregard the defence was a scandal in itself. In my opion this man did not get a fair trial and reflects the deep seated corruption in Kenya. Possibly the politians are trying to distract from the fact that they themselves are partaking in a land grab of their own.
I, myself grew up in a country that is predominatly black and was once ruled by the white man, as Kenya was, and I find the black man always seems to dwell on the past. To which the black politicians, who rule, are only too happy to remind him mainly to hind their own greed and misgovernment.
I think Kenyans should be ashamed of their Judicial system and the trial this man received. SHAME ON KENYA.
Welcome to Ugawood
Welcome to Ugawood, Uganda’s fledgling movie industry.
The country’s film-makers may only have limited production skills and equipment but they’re determined to grow the industry until it can compete with Nigeria’s Nollywood and other more established film industries in Africa.
“We’ve just started, I believe Nigerians are somewhere … but we will get there as time goes on,” film director Joseph Mabirizi told Reuters Africa Journal.
About 30 movies are released every year in Ugawood compared to 70 every week in Nigeria’s Nollywood. Government investment in Ugandan film is still lacking and most movies are shot on digital cameras with tight budgets.
Sought-after actors like Aisha Kyomuhanji make about $260 per movie. She works on various projects at a time, to make more money.
“I’m not satisfied the way they pay me but I am someone that can wait until I get what I want because I know if I go on acting the demand will increase, people will come looking for me,” she says.
Until Ugandans started producing their own films many people here watched Nigerian movies. But local productions are popular because viewers can easily relate to them.
I finally watched some “Ugawood”(are there other suggested names?, it just doesn’t sound the best). I couldn’t stop laughing at a lawyer cross examining a witness, ” did you see him with the buvera’s{plastic bags}” Do they actually use such vocabulary in a Uganda english court session? I thought that was funny.
How about someone asking the doctor what her patient’s “position”( for condition i guess) is. That is not funny, whoever was responsible should have corrected it.I’m not trying to be mean but these are the small details that make the difference in the product. I really hope to see this industry do better.
It is good that someone cares enough to do something to stop the atrocities. I hope that after seeing this re-enactment, more people will care and pressure manufacturers to do the right thing, applying pressure where it will help. I hope that this re-enactment will encourage and embolden people to raise awareness of this important issue, and lead to the understanding that rape of African women is just as intolerable as rape of blonde-haired, blue-eyed women.