Made In Africa

For reasons that are hard to explain, I try and stay away from African Films. They are hardly educational to someone who has seen all of Africa’s devastation, wars and horror stories first hand. I find it hard to sit through a showing of sick babies so thin that they are all head, of children dying of hunger, their stomachs bloated with malnutrition. Of young boys made to grow up too fast, touting guns and fighting for things they don’t know or understand. If you watch most documentaries on Africa, all you get is an impression of a continent dying of every natural and man-made disaster conceivable, and of course the wild animals.

While all that suffering is a part of Africa’s reality, it’s not the entire picture. Most of Africa is recognized by its trouble spots. We know of the Sudan because of the devastation happening in Darfur. We know of Somalia because of the Mogadishu issue of Blank Hawk Down, and we know of Nigeria because of the scams Nigerians are so famous for running – oh yes, and they also have oil.
Zambia, on the other hand, is never in the news. Since our independence in 1964, we have only ever had one coup – which was highly unsuccessful and only resulted in a handful of deaths. The rest of Africa likes to tease us that we are lazy cowards. When someone calls for a public protest, no one shows up. Zambians love their peace too much to be bothered with things like marches and protests and riots. Probably why we’ll never make it into international news. Also probably why, when I tell most Americans I’m from Zambia, the first thing they ask is if it’s in South America or an Island in the Caribbean. No one has ever heard of us. We are too peaceful. We are never at war. Nothing ‘bad’ ever happens in Zambia. We are not worth talking about.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t know poverty, or hunger or experience the ravages of AIDS. We do. But we also have a lot of wonderful things happening there. Just like everywhere else, people wake up everyday and go to work at regular jobs. They drive cars, they send kids to schools, they date, they get married and throw huge 500 guest weddings, they have kids, and grand kids, they buy little plots of land in the village and keep chickens and grow vegetables and grow old and die happy and content. This happens in Africa too.

One of my major pet peeves is when they make a movie in Africa and only tell one side of the story. They have stereotyped the entire continent to such an extent that it is inconceivable to some that I can speak and write better English that many Americans. People still ask me if I learned English when I got here three years ago. ‘Yes’, I say, with an earnest expression on my face. ‘I took a crash course on the 20-hour flight to JFK.’ The weirdest thing is that they actually believe me!

Even more annoying is when they use an American to play an African role and the idiot hasn’t even bothered to get the accent right. I am from Zambia, so I can tell an African accent from almost every country on my continent. It’s like how you can tell the New Yorker slang to the Southern drawl. If you’re really good, you can even tell if the Southerner is from Georgia-Alabama or from Texas. Most Africans can do that about their people too. So when you are trying to sound South African and instead put on a questionable Australian accent, Leonardo Di Caprio, I can spot it right away, and you ruin the whole movie for me. Or when I’m watching the Broadway play, ‘The Color Purple’ and the Africans start talking, I know right away it’s a fake language and it pulls me back to reality and breaks the flow of what was turning out to be a good show.

I think now that Hollywood is looking to Africa as a source of good stories, ie The Last King Of Scotland, they really should make an effort to get to know the continent better. We may be a continent, just like Europe is a continent, but we are many different countries, many different tribes and many different peoples as well. It’s not fair to lump us all together. We are different, and diverse, and if you look hard enough, you’ll find a lot more than just another sad story of survival.