Abstract
This chapter examines the ways in which cinematic representations of conflict and international intervention in Africa in the films Black Hawk Down (2001), Hotel Rwanda (2004), and Blood Diamond (2006) contribute to a “peacekeeping narrative” that continues to deploy old polarised notions of “self” and “other”. De-contextualised renditions of conflict through familiar stereotypes opposing African victims or warriors to Western saviours cannot be dismissed as harmless misrepresentation. Rather, Hollywood has the power to influence public opinion and the general perception of notions of intervention, responsibility, and agency. The chapter argues that a stereotypical binary representation of conflicts and intervention in Africa hinders the possibility of rethinking international peacekeeping through cooperation and collaboration between Africans and the international community.
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Notes
- 1.
See David Chandler, “The Road to Military Humanitarianism: How the Human Rights NGOs Shaped a New Humanitarian Agenda”, Human Rights Quarterly 23 (2001), pp. 678–700.
- 2.
Harry Garuba and Natasha Himmelman, “The Cited and the Uncited”, in Maryellen Higgins (ed.), Hollywood’s Africa After 1994 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), p. 16.
- 3.
Susan L. Carruthers, “Tribalism and Tribulation: Media Constructions of ‘African Savagery’ and ‘Western Humanitarianism’ in the 1990s”, in Allan Stuart and Barbie Zelizer (eds.), Reporting War: Journalism in War Time (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 157.
- 4.
Ali Al’Amin Mazrui, The African Predicament and the American Experience: A Tale of Two Edens (Westport: Greenwood, 2004), p. 29.
- 5.
Garuba and Himmelman, “The Cited and the Uncited”, p. 16.
- 6.
See Piers Robinson, The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy, and Intervention (London: Routledge, 2005).
- 7.
Robinson, The CNN Effect, p. 62.
- 8.
When former American president George H.W. Bush was asked why the United States (US) government had opted for an intervention in Somalia when Yugoslavia was also mired in a civil war, Bush’s rather revealing answer was that Somalia was “doable” in comparison to Yugoslavia ; quoted in Bruce Nelan, “Taking on the Thugs”, Time, 14 December 1992, pp. 41–43. In his televised address of 4 December 1992 on Somalia , Bush insisted that “[o]ur mission has a limited objective, to open the supply routes, to get the food moving, and to prepare the way for a UN peacekeeping force [UNOSOM II] to keep it moving”. Addressing the Somali population directly, he added: “we come to your country for one reason only, to enable the starving to be fed”. “Mission to Somalia: Transcript of President’s Address on Somalia”, New York Times, 5 December 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/05/world/mission-to-somalia-transcript-of-president-s-address-on-somalia.html (accessed 22 February 2016).
- 9.
For more on the media representation of the intervention in Somalia, see Ines Mzali, “Wars of Representation: Metonymy and Nuruddin Farah’s Links”, College Literature 37, no. 3 (2010), pp. 84–105.
- 10.
Thomas Keenan, “Mobilizing Shame”, South Atlantic Quarterly 103, nos. 2–3 (2004), p. 442.
- 11.
Mazrui, The African Predicament, p. 29.
- 12.
See William Shawcross, Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords, and a World of Endless Conflict (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), p. 221.
- 13.
Heike Härting, “Foreign Encounters: The Political and Visual Aesthetics of Humanitarianism in Contemporary Canadian Film Vulture”, University of Toronto Quarterly 82, no. 2 (2013), p. 332.
- 14.
Maryellen Higgins, “Hollywood’s Cowboy Humanitarianism”, in Higgins, Hollywood’s Africa, p. 70.
- 15.
Adekeye Adebajo, “Africa’s Image Suffers in the Hands of Hollywood”, Business Day (South Africa), 11 March 2013.
- 16.
South African–born US scholar Ashley Dawson argues that the scene in which Eversmann argues that “the U.S. has a burden to help those suffering human rights violations … recirculates World War II themes of just war”. Ashley Dawson , “The New World Disorder: Black Hawk Down and the Eclipse of US Military Humanitarianism”, African Studies Review 54, no. 2 (2011), p. 184.
- 17.
When the film ends, and after the names of the 18 US soldiers killed in the battle are listed, a single line informs the audience about the staggering number of Somali victims.
- 18.
Alex de Waal, Crimes, Politics, and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 159.
- 19.
For example, Paul Wolfowitz , US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy at the time Operation Restore Hope was launched, blames the UN for the tragic turn of the mission; “Clinton’s First Year”, Foreign Affairs, January/February 1994, p. 32. Also, US scholar Ryan Hendrickson notes a general “anti-UN stance” in Congress in the aftermath of the battle; The Clinton Wars, the Constitution, Congress, and War Powers (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), p. 36.
- 20.
By “Somalia syndrome”, US scholar Thomas Weiss refers to the fact that, in the wake of the debacle in Somalia , “multilateral interventions to thwart starvation, genocide, the forced movement of people and massive violations of human rights are no longer politically or operationally feasible”. Thomas Weiss, “Overcoming the Somalia Syndrome: ‘Operation Rekindle Hope’”, Global Governance 1 (1995), p. 171.
- 21.
Adekeye Adebajo, “Africa, African Americans, and the Avuncular Sam”, Africa Today 50, no. 3 (2004), p. 102.
- 22.
Examples include the documentary film When Good Men Do Nothing , directed by British BBC correspondent Steve Bradshaw . The tenth anniversary of the genocide also marked a renewed interest in the events with the release of several long feature films, such as Shooting Dogs (2005), by Scottish director Michael Caton-Jones; A Sunday in Kigali (2006), directed by Canadian Robert Favreau; and Shake Hands with the Devil (2007), by British-Canadian director Roger Spottswoode. The latter two films are based respectively on the novel A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali by Gil Courtemanche (translated by Patricia Claxton) (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004) and the autobiography Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Roméo Dallaire (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2003)—two examples of a large corpus of books on the Rwandan tragedy.
- 23.
For a more thorough analysis of the representation of the genocide in literature and film, see Alexandre Dauge-Roth, Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis: Dismembering and Remembering Traumatic History (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010).
- 24.
Heike Härting, “Global Humanitarianism, Race, and the Spectacle of the African Corpse in Current Western Representations of the Rwandan Genocide”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 28, no. 1 (2008), p. 62.
- 25.
Härting, “Global Humanitarianism”, p. 62.
- 26.
See savedarfur.org (accessed 26 February 2016).
- 27.
Härting, “Global Humanitarianism”, p. 64.
- 28.
Quoted in Higgins, Hollywood’s Africa, p. 4.
- 29.
Kenneth W. Harlow, “Again the Darkness: Shake Hands with the Devil”, in Higgins, Hollywood’s Africa, p. 83.
- 30.
Iyunolu Osagie, “Situating Agency in Blood Diamond and Ezra”, in Higgins, Hollywood’s Africa, p. 227.
- 31.
Martha Evans and Ian Glenn, “‘TIA—This Is Africa’: Afropessimism in Twenty-First-Century Narrative Film”, Black Camera 2, no. 1 (2010), p. 24.
- 32.
Maryellen Higgins, “Introduction: African Blood, Hollywood’s Diamonds?”, in Higgins, Hollywood’s Africa, p. 1.
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Mzali, I. (2018). Staging the Peacekeeping Narrative: Hollywood’s Portrayal of Peacekeeping Efforts in Africa. In: Karbo, T., Virk, K. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Peacebuilding in Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62202-6_15
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