'Black Girl': an appreciation

This African film from 1966 is a gem in more ways than one.  It's an oddly affecting existential film on the most basic of levels and it's a meta commentary on race relations, western imperialism, and African independence on it's other levels.

A white French couple in Dakar hires a young woman who desperately needs work.  She's hired to look after the children of the couple and she does such a good job at it that she's offered a job with the family when they move back to France. She leaps at the chance to go abroad, she thinks she'll get to see France and get to explore it's people and culture.  However once in France she becomes the family's housemaid.  She's expected to cook, clean, and do the laundry and she's kept as a virtual prisoner who can only go out to go to the grocery store.  She gazes out the windows longingly dreaming of seeing the real France.

Once she realizes what's going on, she slows down and becomes recalcitrant in her dealings with the mistress of the house, who treats her like she's a piece of shit or part of the furniture.  At one point after she calls the black girl lazy, she sneers that if she doesn't do the housework then she, the mistress, might have to become the house maid.

The girl gets a letter that the couple claims is from her mother.  In the letter her mother demands she send her wages home and that she thank her upstanding mistress for giving her a job and her cast off clothes.  The girl, already sick of being a slave and longing for home, knows straight off the letter is a fake and she rejects it outright.  She decides to fix things between her and the couple the only way she knows how, by taking her own life by slashing her throat in the couple's bathtub.

The film ends with the husband trying to make amends with the mother of the girl.  He goes to her and offers her the wages he tried to pay her daughter but the mother rebuffs him and he stalks out of the village.  He wears his impotence like an overcoat as he slinks away ashamed.  It's a series of pretty stunning scenes.

On a bigger level the film is about how shitty western countries treated African nations and African people.  The girl represents the whole of Africa, the colonial imperialist powers give her a meager job in her home country, nothing of real importance, it's just babysitting for them while they rape the land of it's resources.  Then they give her and her country their 'freedom' when it suits them but they force her to trade her freedom back to them when they dupe her into coming to France to work in an even more demeaning position.  And while in France she's taken advantage of both as an employee and as a woman, a house guest of the couple grabs her and kisses her and justifies his actions by saying it's okay, he always wanted to kiss a black girl.  Her working life isn't her own and neither is her body, even though she's technically free, white people still control her.

It's a very disturbing film but it's an essential one.  I had read about it her and there but nothing prepared me for the power it packs.  It's a really unassuming film that almost puts you off by it's simplicity but once you give yourself over to the story it really sucks you in and by the end, it's only a little more than fifty minutes long, you're surprised at how much you care and how affected you are by the story.  For a film made in 1966, this simple film is pretty complex and plenty disturbing.

MInd your own business

Human rights groups across the world have admonished Kenyan authorities for being too ruthless in trying to quell protests in the wake of the disputed Presidential election. They've specifically asked the Kenyan police to stop shooting unarmed protesters.

Kenyan police replied, "Come to Nairobi and say that shit, why don't you."

In other news four new Super Wal-Marts and three hundred new Starbucks opened in Kenya since the start of the rioting. The country should be safe for all corporations soon.

Out of Africa

Does the rioting in the wake of the "elections" in Kenya surprise anybody?

If you lived in abject poverty that was brought on by your government's greed and by the rape of your country's natural resources by western multi-national corporations and when you went to vote your vote was ignored or tossed aside, then I'm betting you'd riot too. If you saw that the only way out of a miserable existence was to attach yourself to whatever dictatorial strong man was in power then I guess you'd take up a machete and try to hack off the heads of the people who wanted him out. If you skimmed food and cash off all the charity that flows into your country and you got fat and rich off it then I'm sure you'd do whatever it took to keep that flow going.

For years western countries like the US and Britain have forced alien political systems on African nations. They've told them, "You must be a democracy like we are!" Of course it doesn't matter to the US or to Britain that for hundreds of thousands of years Africans got along fine without democracy. The US, Britain, and other countries have insisted that multi-national corporations be allowed to plunder Africa's resources and to make low paid wage slaves out of their citizens. We've also shoved our twisted brand of Christianity down their throats for hundreds of years and we've done our best to obliterate their tribal past.

********

I can't help but see that the past 40 years of trying to remake Africa into the USA and Britain has been a disaster for most every African and for Africa in general. Of course there have been some who have profited and have done well from our plunder of the dark continent, and as usual it's been the corporate CEO's and their henchmen in our governments.

********

Maybe if we got the hell out of Africa and we stop forcing our political and economic systems down their throats, then Africans might just work things out for themselves. After all, the one country that has rejected the IMF and the World Bank, Botswana, is one of the most peaceful and economically sound countries in Africa. They do things in Botswana the way they think best and not the way the technocrats in Washington and London think they ought to. Most every other country in Africa has adopted western style economics and aped western style political systems to their detriment. If we got the politicians, the missionaries, the corporations, and the zealots out of Africa then life would be better for millions of Africans once again.

Another damn Flickr photo set

I put up more sets of photos from picture books on Flickr. One of the sets is from a book called What Happens at a State Fair. The state fair in question was the 1972 Illinois State Fair .
People mill around at a state fair.

Polly "Kiss Mah Grits!" Holiday eats cotton candy at a state fair.
Young Splotchy and his hippie friends look towards the sky for their salvation at a state fair.

Another set is photos of Africa from one of those cheesy Time Life "Countries of the world" books.
I thought this shot was stunning.

"Do you mind if we dance with yo dates?"

Naked boobies, the reason why every pre-teen and teenage boy loves books and magazine articles about Africa.

********

Go, look, enjoy.