Abstract
Göran Olsson’s filmic account of what is perhaps Frantz Fanon’s (1961) most famous chapter in The Wretched of the Earth, “Concerning Violence,” opens as a soldier, from his secure vantage point in a hovering helicopter, shoots a horned bull as it races across an open field. The animal is shot with the automatic gunfire and stumbles, its knees buckling and head stooping. Convulsing painfully in the dirt, the shooting continues until a bullet pierces the inner nostril. Blood pours from the animal’s nose in a thick, constant stream as his movements slow. Lauryn Hill’s powerful voice is heard, quoting Fanon, “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”
The dying bull, crudely shot from above without any intention of providing nutrition to the passing soldiers, embodies the illogical and brutal suffering effected upon colonized people through colonial violence. Olsson’s film is a powerful aesthetic backdrop for Fanon’s anti-colonial manifesto, one that unflinchingly engages with colonialism as a violent project. Against this illogical violence, counter-violence becomes a crucial component of emancipation. The film opens up new spaces for considerations of the use of violence in the face of terrible, absolute, and normalized violence, including today’s anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-capitalist movements, poised as they are against enormous infrastructures of normalized and everyday violence.
A Visual Essay on the Psychosis of Colonial Violence
Using Swedish archival footage from across the African continent, the film explores the operations of colonial violence in its varying forms, including direct, physical violence, and psychological violence. Direct colonial violence is easily spotted: In the Congo Free State, amputating, and subsequently smoking, human hands was a widespread technique used to enforce a sweeping system of colonial forced labor. The articles of Reverend E. V. Sjōblom and George Washington Williams documented the extensive and savage methods of torture used when people opposed or fled the forced labor of rubber tapping in the Congo during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Indeed, beatings with thick animal hide chicottes, pouring burning copal (tree resin) on human flesh, shooting and killing innocent passersby, burning and razing villages, cutting breasts off, and rape were all methods of direct violence that were variously used throughout the European colonial occupation of African territories.
Moving beyond these reiterations of colonialism’s direct violence, the film endeavors a subtle balance between the physical and psychological violence of colonialism. This is an examination of the colonial psyche that Fanon, as a psychiatrist, might have found to be of great significance. Against an absolute unthinking machine, Fanon describes the psychology of colonization: The native learns to stay in his place, and not to go beyond certain limits. This is why the dreams of the native are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and of aggression. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing; I dream that I burst out laughing, that I span a river in one stride, or that I am followed by a flood of motorcars which never catch up with me. During the period of colonization, the native never stops achieving his freedom from nine in the evening until six in the morning.
In one scene, Tonderai Makoni, an exiled political activist, describes an emotional numbness incited by torture and 5 years of imprisonment in Rhodesia (what is today the nation of Zimbabwe). Decades before the discovery of posttraumatic stress disorder, Makoni says, The torture that I’ve experienced in the last five years made me feel less and less feeling about things and just take life as it comes . . . so that when I came out, there was no great excitement on my part and I felt that I was still in prison.
The next scene, likewise in Rhodesia, opens with a slowly drawling settler song, “The country has been built and run by hearty pioneers . . . call us rogues. We were bounded by an Englishman by the name of Cecil Rhodes.” All the while, a group of White colonialists, dressed in starched white, engage in a game of bowling on a sunny green lawn. Sitting in a verdant garden, a settler discusses the coming end of colonialism in the country; he says, [I have] a staff of about eight Africans and they all think they are going to own houses . . . and I have never seen so many Africans learning to drive motorcars, because every one of them seems to think they’re going to get a motorcar . . . A little garden—we call him garden-boy—was washing my mother in-law’s car and he said to her, “Well, next year, that’s gonna be my car.” So my mother-in law went to him and said, “You see this box of matches and this lighter? I’ll burn it before I give it to you.” So, that’s the attitude of the Africans, it’s changed completely.
The settler thinks that he is providing a commentary on the attitude of Africans, but his words reflect his attitude, the settler attitude, and reiterate the absolute violence against which Fanon writes. This settler’s unflinching and facile objectification of Africans is the backbone of the irrational violence condemned by Fanon and the torture described by Makoni earlier in the film. Hill echoes Fanon, “In the colonies, the economic substructure is the superstructure. The cause is the consequence: You are rich because you are White. You are White because you are rich.” In a similar vein, the cause is the consequence: The settler commits colonial violence within his or her racist belief system. The settler has a racist belief system because she or he engages in colonial violence. The settler man in Rhodesia continues, [With] the ratios here at the moment, I think we are about 34 to 1, maybe a bit more, with everybody taking a gap like me. . . . In South Africa at the moment, I think it’s about 4 to 1 . . . so you could stand a chance [there] . . . Well, I could take out [i.e., kill] four Affies [i.e., Africans] before they take me out.
The boastful words are calmly spoken, with a slight smile and a direct gaze toward the interviewer.
The unnerving tension between colonialism’s artificial banality and its brute violence is brought to the fore, captured by the film’s juxtaposing of seemingly bland colonial picnics with scenes of bloodied soldiers and amputees. In the quiet scenes of untroubled settlers golfing, African caddies trail silently. As two White missionaries stand cleanly and respond to a filmmaker’s questions, Tanzanian laborers diligently dig and haul dirt in the background, presumably constructing the foundation for a Christian mission. Throughout, the clear and rich voice of Hill, quoting from Fanon, affirms the violence evidenced in such inaudible moments.
Colonial Myths and Poverty of Spirit
If, as Fanon writes, “decolonization is a historical process [that] cannot be understood except by the movements which give it historical context,” the film is strangely lacking in context. Of the film’s 9 scenes of anti-imperial self-defense, only the 1966 labor strike in Liberia against the Swedish American mining company, LAMCO, includes considerable background information. This limits the film’s potential to provide a thorough examination of particular anti-colonial movements.
However, the noted lack of situated information through which to engage the images has the effect of allowing Fanon’s words to reign supreme as the lens of analysis. In Scene 6, “That Poverty of Spirit,” Fanon scathingly describes colonial representations of Africans, who are described as “lacking in values” and “insensible to ethics.” Fanon concludes, “[native] myths, above all, are the sign of their poverty of spirit” and the scene transitions to an interview with a White missionary couple. Several minutes into the interview, the racist ethos is reversed: Colonial myths, above all, are the sign of the poverty of spirit of the colonizers. Fanon’s painful point, “colonialism is not a thinking machine,” is reemphasized, albeit silently as the viewer is challenged to make the connection. Here is a breakdown of the dialogue in this scene:
“What kind of religions existed before you came here?”
“The African religion . . . what can one say? It has always existed, so it continues to exist, of course. But the mission has gained a very strong hold on the soul of the people.”
“But this must have meant big changes in many aspects, for example in family relationships . . . ”
“Maybe you can answer that?”
“Well, as a mission we forbid our members to have more than one wife. It’s unthinkable for a member of our congregation to get married for a second or third time. He has to be satisfied with his first wife.”
“But is that a Christian point of view or a European point of view . . . ? Is there support for monogamy in the Bible?”
“There is, isn’t there . . . ?” [She looks at her husband, who coughs uncomfortably and turns away from her slightly, gazing out of the frame.] “In the New Testament.”
“Does it say somewhere that you can only have one wife?”
“It says that a congregation leader should be a one-man wife . . . ” [She smiles awkwardly] “A one-wife man.”
As the film provides no background on the specifics of this particular missionary couple or even their location in Tanzania, their ambivalent response to the question—are you implementing Christian or European values?—becomes representative of the missionary project in Africa more widely; a project whose divine tentacles uprooted and then replaced Indigenous worldviews. Again, the emphasis is on the violence just beneath the surface of the visible. Against such unthinking and absolute violence—Fanon proposes and the film reemphasizes—the only recourse is violence.
A Non-Violent Ending
The film ends with more helicopter footage. The effect is to re-center the perspective of the bull’s murderer from the opening scene, and so, that of the colonizer. The bleak and monotonous instrumental music combined with the helicopter-perspective looking down upon a heavily forested river corridor, probably the Congo River, echo the cinematography of Apocalypse Now, a film based loosely on Joseph Conrad’s (1899) Heart of Darkness (e.g., Conrad’s highly regarded but deeply racist narrative on the Democratic Republic of the Congo). This is an inadvertent and aesthetic parallel but one that, nonetheless, illustrates the pervasive dangers of recasting Africa as humanity’s Heart of Darkness.
The film turns to the parole of Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary Pan-African leader from Burkina Faso, in the last minutes. In an interview from 1987, mere weeks before his assassination, Sankara speaks with his usual graceful candor, likening foreign food aid in Africa to the practice of housing and stuffing geese, as in the production of foie gras. A more genuine effort for food security, he asserts, would be aid in the form of plows, tractors, hydroelectric dams, and fertilizer. Concerning Violence concludes with an emphasis on the need for the creation of a new human being, one that does not attempt to replicate Europe: “If we want Africa to become a new Europe,” Fanon writes, “then leave it to the Europeans, they will know better than us.” Instead, a new humanity and a fuller humanity will be achieved through creativity and invention—a language that echoes the political praxis of Sankara, who famously said, “We must dare to invent the future.”
Inexplicably, considering the film’s prodigious emphasis on anti-colonial violence as counter-violence, the concluding segment does not continue its focus on the necessity of violence for this emancipation. Instead it turns to another project, one of invention, courage, and self-sustainability. Is this slight turn away from violence (as counter-violence) done because the emphasis on the use of violence as an emancipatory political tool has been so thoroughly stigmatized? The heralding of a peaceful project against racialized capitalism is an intriguing paradox within the context of the film’s centralization of violence, and one that is left to the viewer to contemplate.