Hollywood films about Africa are just that: results of the Hollywood imagination, divorced from reality. Carefully crafted frames and soundbites only too eager to exploit the ignorance of the common viewer, someone who has little to no knowledge of Africa, who is willing to think of the continent as one, homogenous place, instead of home to dozens of countries and thousands of cultures.
A viewer who is, most importantly, not African, and will not challenge the images that have been presented to them.
Its still the same garbage they gave us 30 years ago. One might argue that they would have made progress after the first which was released at a time when American audiences had very little exposure to the varied realities of life across the African continent.
30 yrs later American audiences have been exposed to more complete and authentic accounts of African life, in part thanks to the global impact of the internet. And the increase in interest in African stories across television and film has also been of influence in increasing familiarity, especially as Africans themselves become even more active in reclaiming their narratives while targeting global audiences on every platform in the social media.
Lets see from the first:
1. Prince Akeem, cannot find an intelligent woman in Africa so he travels to Queens in New York City to find an American woman who will “arouse his intellect as well as his loins.” How’s that for starters?
2. African women in particular, did not have in the first and dont expect much in this second. The African women are voiceless and hyper-sexualized – a direct reflection of colonial mentality.
3.The topless harems that Akeem has to “bathe” him every morning are identical to the images of African women that appeared on postcards during the British, Portuguese, French, Dutch and German colonialism in Africa. Wazungu (White people in Swahili) aka CACS in the bush would send the postcards to other white men back in Europe to brag about the “looseness” of African women. The image of bare-breasted black and brown women was symbolic of dispossession, not to mention demeaning.
At least Ryan Coogler and his team traveled the African continent to create their version of Wakanda from authentic reference points (though he gave us
4. African-American women in the film fare no better. Cssepoint, montage of mental cases in the nightclub scene below, and pay close attention to Akeem’s analysis on the street afterward.. basically he joked about going to “Africa” to find an ignorant “bush bitch” to marry, rather than tolerate what he implied are conniving American women, whom he painted as gold-diggers. That view of African women is an ugly one, presenting them as mute, unintelligent, and hypersexual beings.
5. the royal occupants of the palace in Zamunda, as well as the Africans that attend the engagement party are “blackened whites.” They are all stock figures of upper class white European culture of yore (think Britain's Jane Austen), but their difference from that culture is marked namely by their blackness.
6. Africans watching the film will be far more watchful of how the continent is portrayed (and perhaps we’ll finally understand where the King Jaffe Joffer got all that money at a time when the World Bank and IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) were reshaping sub-Saharan economies.
7. It’s insulting to believe that American accents are ideal conduits to showcase the diversity of African accents. These pseudo-American-African accents were constant reminders of Hollywood’s deep misunderstanding of African people.
Brewer and his team could have done their homework and check out films from Senegalese Ousmane Sembène’s post-independence social satires “Xala” and “Mandabi,” to Nigerien Rahmatou Keïta’s royal romantic drama “The Wedding Ring,” about a Nigerian princess sent to France to study, where she falls in love with a prince, and more.
After all, there is no shortage of African filmmakers who could have done wonders with a revised take on the “Coming to America” premise. Possible notables y might have been “I Am Not a Witch” director Rungano Nyoni, a Zambian filmmaker who has already shown her penchant for satirizing perceptions of modern-day Africa. Also, Nigerian filmmaker Kenneth Gyang, whose acclaimed dark comedy “Confusion Na Wa” won an African Academy Award, then there’s Congolese filmmaker Djo Tunda Wa Munga, who made the unabashedly commercial thriller “Viva Riva,” which he intended to counter dominant perceptions of African cinema as rudimentary and didactic.
But accountability also matters. Africans living in America at the time of the first film’s release suffered through countless emotional “Coming to America” jokes — and, for some, the film’s depictions of Africa and Africans only helped further an ignorance that was prevalent at the time. For example, in Zamunda, animals that would be normally found in Serengeti or Ngorongoro are seen casually walking amongst Zamundans, which is not at all the reality for the vast majority of Africans be it in Tanzania, Zambia, Namibia, Congo, Kenya or Gabon to name a few.
Almost forgot how Africans were insulted with those fake African Accents in Black Panther.
King T’Challa, played by the late Chadwick Boseman, was supposed to be a South African one. Xhosa was allegedly the King’s native tongue. What Africans found instead was an over-exaggerated inflection, a strange slip into self-parody of a South African.
MZANSI, Cape Town Beach
A viewer who is, most importantly, not African, and will not challenge the images that have been presented to them.
Its still the same garbage they gave us 30 years ago. One might argue that they would have made progress after the first which was released at a time when American audiences had very little exposure to the varied realities of life across the African continent.
30 yrs later American audiences have been exposed to more complete and authentic accounts of African life, in part thanks to the global impact of the internet. And the increase in interest in African stories across television and film has also been of influence in increasing familiarity, especially as Africans themselves become even more active in reclaiming their narratives while targeting global audiences on every platform in the social media.
Lets see from the first:
1. Prince Akeem, cannot find an intelligent woman in Africa so he travels to Queens in New York City to find an American woman who will “arouse his intellect as well as his loins.” How’s that for starters?
2. African women in particular, did not have in the first and dont expect much in this second. The African women are voiceless and hyper-sexualized – a direct reflection of colonial mentality.
3.The topless harems that Akeem has to “bathe” him every morning are identical to the images of African women that appeared on postcards during the British, Portuguese, French, Dutch and German colonialism in Africa. Wazungu (White people in Swahili) aka CACS in the bush would send the postcards to other white men back in Europe to brag about the “looseness” of African women. The image of bare-breasted black and brown women was symbolic of dispossession, not to mention demeaning.
At least Ryan Coogler and his team traveled the African continent to create their version of Wakanda from authentic reference points (though he gave us
4. African-American women in the film fare no better. Cssepoint, montage of mental cases in the nightclub scene below, and pay close attention to Akeem’s analysis on the street afterward.. basically he joked about going to “Africa” to find an ignorant “bush bitch” to marry, rather than tolerate what he implied are conniving American women, whom he painted as gold-diggers. That view of African women is an ugly one, presenting them as mute, unintelligent, and hypersexual beings.
5. the royal occupants of the palace in Zamunda, as well as the Africans that attend the engagement party are “blackened whites.” They are all stock figures of upper class white European culture of yore (think Britain's Jane Austen), but their difference from that culture is marked namely by their blackness.
6. Africans watching the film will be far more watchful of how the continent is portrayed (and perhaps we’ll finally understand where the King Jaffe Joffer got all that money at a time when the World Bank and IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) were reshaping sub-Saharan economies.
7. It’s insulting to believe that American accents are ideal conduits to showcase the diversity of African accents. These pseudo-American-African accents were constant reminders of Hollywood’s deep misunderstanding of African people.
Brewer and his team could have done their homework and check out films from Senegalese Ousmane Sembène’s post-independence social satires “Xala” and “Mandabi,” to Nigerien Rahmatou Keïta’s royal romantic drama “The Wedding Ring,” about a Nigerian princess sent to France to study, where she falls in love with a prince, and more.
After all, there is no shortage of African filmmakers who could have done wonders with a revised take on the “Coming to America” premise. Possible notables y might have been “I Am Not a Witch” director Rungano Nyoni, a Zambian filmmaker who has already shown her penchant for satirizing perceptions of modern-day Africa. Also, Nigerian filmmaker Kenneth Gyang, whose acclaimed dark comedy “Confusion Na Wa” won an African Academy Award, then there’s Congolese filmmaker Djo Tunda Wa Munga, who made the unabashedly commercial thriller “Viva Riva,” which he intended to counter dominant perceptions of African cinema as rudimentary and didactic.
But accountability also matters. Africans living in America at the time of the first film’s release suffered through countless emotional “Coming to America” jokes — and, for some, the film’s depictions of Africa and Africans only helped further an ignorance that was prevalent at the time. For example, in Zamunda, animals that would be normally found in Serengeti or Ngorongoro are seen casually walking amongst Zamundans, which is not at all the reality for the vast majority of Africans be it in Tanzania, Zambia, Namibia, Congo, Kenya or Gabon to name a few.
Almost forgot how Africans were insulted with those fake African Accents in Black Panther.
King T’Challa, played by the late Chadwick Boseman, was supposed to be a South African one. Xhosa was allegedly the King’s native tongue. What Africans found instead was an over-exaggerated inflection, a strange slip into self-parody of a South African.
MZANSI, Cape Town Beach
