(Photo: "Sounds of Sand" website)
Today up the road in the Dutch capital, The Hague, the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone has resumed its trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor. We will hear much about his role in trafficking "blood diamonds" with the Sierra Leone RUF rebels to finance the arms trade.
For different reasons, we recently rented the DVD of "Blood Diamond," the Edward Zwick film that we had missed when it came out over a year ago. It has one of the best one-liners from a cynical journalist who imagines a headline "Government Bad; Rebels Worse" that could sum up many an African situation. I had remembered reading this article in the New Statesman by veteran Africa observer Michela Wrong, where she lamented the assassination of a Congolese journalist friend, and contrasted African reality with the way the continent is portrayed on film:
It's true that Blood Diamond's creators, alert to the accusations of neocolonialism routinely leveled at westerners setting films in Africa, put a lot of thought into the role of Solomon Vandy, a fisherman who finds a giant diamond in a Sierra Leonean river. Presented in noble counterpoint to the racist white mercenary played by Leonardo DiCaprio, Solomon is a man of dignity and pride and his quest to reunite a family dispersed by Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels serves as a key plot driver. The problem was that every time Solomon opened his mouth, verisimilitude flew out of the window. Djimon Hounsou, the over six-foot tall Beninois playing him, must have groaned inwardly as he was obliged to speak lines no African villager would ever articulate. Take the scene where Solomon is scouring lists at a displaced people's camp in Freetown, searching for his family. Ignoring the long queue, he storms to the aid official at its head, loudly demanding answers. He gets none, of course, but Solomon, we are supposed to think, is a real man, doing what real men do when crazed by anxiety: they demand a lot of attention. Then there's a scene where he discovers his wife and children in a vast refugee camp in Conakry. When his wife tells him his eldest boy has been recruited by the RUF, Solomon sinks to his knees. Shaking the wire fence convulsively, he bellows his despair to the heavens, shouting so loudly he brings the Guinean soldiers guarding the camp running.
I've visited plenty of African refugee camps in my time and I've never seen anyone behave like this. People whose villages have been raided, neighbours mutilated and relatives raped will do anything to avoid drawing the attention of the young men with guns.
Surviving the "young men with guns" is one of the major themes of a very different film about Africa that has made the rounds of European art cinemas, "Sounds of Sand" ("Si le vent souleve les sables," a Franco-Belgian production by director Marion Hansel), and which has been shown in several American film festivals.
I recommend "Sounds of Sand" to Michela Wrong and to anyone put off by the Hollywoodization of Africa - not only by "Blood Diamond," which we found to be a generally well made film, apart from the kind of departure from reality described by Ms. Wrong above - but by what has to be a mini-industry of recent years: Hotel Rwanda and Shooting Dogs on the Rwanda genocide; The Constant Gardener on the evils of big pharma in Kenya; The Last King of Scotland on Idi Amin's Uganda; Goodbye Bafana on Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa - check IMDB and you'll find some 553 films going back to 1912 under the keyword "Africa."
In "Sounds of Sand" - rather a good take on the original French title, and evocative of a film where relatively little is said - Africans trek across the deserted wastes of an unidentified African country suffering from war and drought. The film was shot in Djibouti, an interesting choice not often the scene of films, and features an African cast from across the continent (Carole Karemera from Rwanda is herself a genocide survivor). Don't expect pyrotechnics: though there is latent and real violence in "Sounds of Sand," the violence is, just like the film, quiet, matter of fact, and entirely credible. Contrast actor Isaka Sawadogo's (of Burkina Faso) portrayal of husband/father "Rahne" with that of Djimon Hounsou in "Blood Diamond." No false heroics here, and he doesn't become a millionaire in the end, either.
Back to Michela Wrong, in an interview at the end of her book on Eritrea, "I Didn't Do It For You," when she was asked how writing about Africa affected her personally
Graham Greene once took exception to the term "Greeneland," which people used to refer to the disintegrating, shabby, disease-ridden parts of the world he wrote about. Greene said: "Actually, this is the way most of humanity lives; it's just that my middle-class reviewers don't happen to live like this," and I completely endorse that. I'm very aware of there being a Western enclave in which a tiny proportion of humanity lives in the assumption that ghastly things don't happen to them. And if things go wrong, they get very angry and somebody has to compensate them. Such a tiny percentage of humanity has those attitudes: everybody else expects terrible things to happen to them, has had terrible things happen and knows that life is grim, hard, and short. That's a perspective living in Africa has given me. If you can get through life without having too many really nasty things happen to the people you love, you're doing very well.
So next time you see the glimpses of shacks burning in post-electoral Nairobi, of Kikuyu hunted by Luo, or read about Charles Taylor supping with the hackers-of-limbs and kidnappers of children who become child soldiers, think of Michela Wrong's insight into life for the majority of the world which doesn't live in our Western cocoon. And for a cinematic view of Africa that is anything but escapism, check out "Sounds of Sand."