Africa disappears

The black Africa of tribal dances, of swollen breasts offered to the glory of nature, survives only on movie sets. According to Sergio Rossi, that is. He's narrating a scene in the middle of Africa Addio (1966), the notorious documentary allegedly about the decolonization of Africa. (Mencius put me onto it two months ago. I responded with Salo—but Salo isn't online. Africa Addio was, until recently.) Rossi is talking in his stern, deadpan Italian, over a shot of a Zulu village and its dancers, and a white crew is filming them all. 'Come on, come on, more action!' the director shouts. Rossi continues—

Today, Zulu maidens come out of the academy, speak excellent English, and receive union wages for putting on nylon underwear and dancing the dance of their grandmothers. During their breaks, the ancient rhythm of the tom-tom gives them a few variations on the theme.

The Zulus rush into a mud hut and pull out a piano. A drum-kit and saxophone materialise out of nowhere:




Reality has been suspended, and mingles freely with fantasy. It hardly matters. Africa Addio compels belief by the sheer force of its imagery—and that's art, isn't it? Truth is grounded in the past, in expectation: it is a historical phenomenon. But Africa Addio flattens the past into a single moment of presence, feigning history—Zulus pretending to be savages for the camera, offering their swollen breasts and 'dancing the dance of their grandmothers'. And so it goes on:

The African female has discovered that she is a woman, and is beginning to behave as such. She wants to be modern because she feels the past is against her. . .

Africa Addio is about the disownment of the past, about a moment in which man revolts against tradition and authority in the most violent way imaginable. The film is flush with images of mutiny, murder, slaughter, dismemberment (a pile of severed hands), execution—possibly staged—drowning, explosions, and so on. Animals come in for their share of brutality. Natives fix a rope between jeeps and cut down fleeing wildlife; they chase around a mother elephant until she is too exhausted to protect her young; the camera pans for minutes over fields strewn with the skeletons of slain game. Old foxhunters have no foxes to hunt, so instead they hunt a man running with a piece of meat on a string. Thus there is always the suggestion of the pretend and the fantastic. In one scene a wounded zebra is airlifted into the sunset:





This is the Addio vision of what happened when the whites left the savages to their own devices. One reviewer, while admitting that the film is a 'masterpiece', calls it 'morally disgusting, despicably racist and consistently reprehensible'. Roger Ebert, that bastion of mediocrity, labels it 'brutal, dishonest, racist'. Sound familiar? Perhaps any cultural product that elicits such howls of moral outrage is worth taking seriously.

*

. . . When she was naked, she had two mammary glands. Now that she's clothed, she has two breasts. She does not want to display herself. She wants to be looked at, to make you guess what's under her alluring clothes. Naked she was prey, like a black female. Clothed she is a tyrant, like a white woman. Africa covers itself consciously, and all wrapped up in the veils of its consciousness, Africa disappears.

The dark continent has eaten of the apple, and lost all her innocence. She has transformed from an animal, part of the natural world, into a human, who triumphs over nature. She has become ironic, a fit subject—or object—for the ironising eye of documentary, casting away, in its lumen siccum, the rich shadows of the past. Hence she simultaneously 'wants to be looked at', and 'disappears'. It is the same in Sudan—

In the southern regions of Sudan, thousands of pairs of underwear, all one size, are distributed to the tribes in the interior by the "Legion of Decency". Among all things to hide, underwear covers what's most urgent. That's enough to decently begin to march toward the conquest of further dignity.

That last sentence, unless you're not concentrating, possesses a beautiful little irony. The narration accompanies a vision of naked locals lining up to receive white pants, yet another surrealist juxtaposition of raw and cooked:

*

All lies, of course—all lies and fabrications. But is Africa Addio not an allegory for itself? It is a rebellion of the documentary against its own form, a disownment of the past. It rejects the criteria of truth and accuracy: it is a triumph of rhetoric over logic, and so enacts the changes in intellectual fashion of the mid-60s. It is a lament for past values, whether real or imagined, but at the same time it is complicit in their demise. Africa, in Africa Addio, is not naked, but she pretends to be naked, and invites the gaze with astonishing images.