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‘Bling bang’: diamonds for dummies Blood Diamonds, Directed by Edward Zwick (2006) USA: Warner Bros Reviewed by Mona Pedersen, Hedmark University College

The film Blood Diamond is produced and distributed by Warner Bros and had its premiere in cinemas in the United States of America in December 2006 and in a number of other countries in the beginning of 2007. During the summer, the film was also released on DVD, with the documentary Blood on the Stone as the most interesting part of the extra material. Edward Zwick, the director, is known for directing films like Glory (1989), Legends of the Fall (1994) and The Last Samurai (2003), among others. The reviews praised Blood Diamond mainly for its high action pace, and it was nominated for Oscars in five different categories, but won none. Blood Diamond is set in Sierra Leone during the civil war. It portrays three very different people whose destinies become woven together in the search for a big pink diamond. Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) is a fish- erman and father of three children. In the opening sequence we see him fol- lowing his oldest son Dia (Kagiso Kuypers) to school, when the village is suddenly attacked by soldiers from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the ex-Zimbabwean soldier of fortune, now a cynical diamond smuggler, dealing diamonds and weapons for both the RUF and the government. The American journalist Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) is referred to as an ‘action junkie’, bringing her experi- ences from the battlefields in Bosnia and Afghanistan to the war zone in Sierra Leone. Blood Diamond also depicts the RUF treatment of child soldiers, and the psychic mechanisms that are at work between the military leaders and the children. This depiction is very similar to that of Ishmael Beah (2007) in his autobiographical book that addresses his youth as a child soldier. Initially military leaders break the children down with fright and terror, then offer false comfort and build seemingly new personalities with novel names like ‘Baby Killer’ or ‘Master of Disaster’. As the third stage in the process, the children are provided with drugs, weapons and violent movies, and sent out to kill. The title of this film refers to the term used to describe the illegal trade of diamonds from conflict areas; jewels smuggled out of war-torn nations with profits that further the bloodshed. Solomon is taken as a slave in a diamond mining camp controlled by the RUF, and his son becomes a child soldier in the RUF army. While searching for diamonds under the terrify- ing surveillance of RUF soldiers, Solomon finds a large, pink diamond,

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which he successfully hides in the mud while his guards are distracted by government troops attacking the mining camp. Solomon is placed in prison where he meets Danny, who is in jail for trying to smuggle diamonds over the border to Liberia. Danny sees the diamond as his ticket ‘out of this god-forsaken country’, while the diamond, for Solomon, repre- sents an opportunity to get his family back. Maddy decides to help them in exchange for information, because, for her, the quest for the diamond could be the material for her big, Pulitzer-prize-winning story. Their search takes the three of them through different situations and sceneries that depict the brutal, violent actions and the horrifying consequences of the civil war: battle scenes in Freetown; the slaughtering of ambulance personnel; the slavery in the diamond mining camps in Kono; the refugee camp in Guinea, with mutilated bodies everywhere. As is said in the film, ‘in the USA it is bling bling, but out here it is bling bang’.

Hollywood’s political turn Once again Hollywood has taken a political turn. In the 1930s, the rise of fascism and the threat of global conflict drove many (leftist) film-makers to politicize their films. Later the Cold War had political ramifications in Hollywood, which in turn led to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous ‘red scare’. During the Vietnam War, another political wave washed over Hollywood and established concepts of anti-war and human rights among other things. After the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001 we are now seeing a renewed interest in politically motivated films from Hollywood, but Ben Dickinson (2006) argues that the ‘new radicalism’ of today’s Hollywood started during the Reagan era, with Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987) as a turning point. For the Oscar Award in March 2007, all films nominated in the category of best picture were described as being ‘political’. DiCaprio also ‘lost’ in the competition for best male in a leading role when the award was given to Forest Whitaker for his por- trayal of Idi Amin. This political interest brings both domestic and foreign affairs to the screen. As Paul Virilio (1989) has shown in his intriguing essay, there are close ties between the American film industry and wars and conflict, not only on a political and economical level, but also in matters of developing technology and – in the end – perception. Also, the Western concept of Africa has been strongly influenced by popular Hollywood films, from The African Queen (Huston, 1951) to Out of Africa (Pollock, 1985). Over the last couple of years we have seen an increasing number of Hollywood films set in Africa. Besides Blood Diamond, some examples of the new ‘African turn’ in Hollywood are: In My Country (Boorman, 2004), Hotel Rwanda (George, 2004), Tsotsi (Hood, 2004), The Constant Gardener (Meirelles, 2005), Catch a Fire (Noyce, 2006), Babel (Iñárritu, 2006), Last King of Scotland (Macdonald, 2006) and Days of Glory (Bouchareb, 2007). This is also reflected in the documentary genre, for example Bling: A Planet Rock (Cepeda, 2007), which takes American hip-hop celebrities, known as mega-consumers of diamonds, or ‘bling bling’, on a journey to Sierra Leone, confronting them with the harsh realities of the diamond mining communities, meeting with former child soldiers, refugees and local hip-hop artists.

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What are the reasons for Hollywood’s renewed interest in Africa? Africa is a continent seemingly overflowing with conflicts, and conflicts are the main ingredient in the Hollywood drama. As Kevin Macdonald, director of The Last King of Scotland, said: ‘Film-makers cast around. Should I make another film in New York? It’ll be the 10,000th film to shoot in New York. Or should I go somewhere else that hasn’t been filmed, where it’s literally a different landscape, different people, different kinds of stories?’ (The Independent, 28 October 2006). In this respect, Africa simply offers opportu- nities to tell new, dramatic stories. Another reason is that the public is in need for a deepened understanding of the conflicts that involve US politics and economics around the world in a post-September 11 perspective.

Educating the audience First of all, Blood Diamond’s intention is to entertain its audience. The film is told in a classic Hollywood manner, action-packed and with a compulsory romance plot between the characters of Connelly and DiCaprio. Second, this film is concerned with educating and enlightening its audience. Blood Diamond has its serious side, which is underlined by the producers’ decision to co-sponsor an informative website on blood diamonds, together with Amnesty International and Global Witness (see www.blooddiamondaction. org). The film-makers want to enlighten the American diamond-buying audience, and make them aware of the role they are playing in the buying end of the illicit business. DiCaprio’s character formulates the core of this purpose: ‘Who do you think buys the stones that I bring out? Dreamy American girls, who all want a storybook wedding and a big rock, like the ones in the advertisements of your politically correct magazines.’ The educational aspect of Blood Diamond is highlighted in both the films’ dialogue – as the citation above exemplifies – and in its narrative. After the intense opening sequence where the RUF attack Solomon’s village, the next scene provides a calm, educational purpose, feeding the audience with facts about the diamond trade and the overall importance of the American market. The United States purchases about nine billion dollars’ worth of diamonds every year, more than two-thirds of the world’s sales. In many aspects, Blood Diamond serves an instructional purpose for diamond purchasing consumers, a sort of ‘diamonds for dummies’. The main characters function as ‘micro-advocates’ for the political and cultural conflicts that make the backdrop for the film. This narrative strategy of reducing larger problems on a macro level in society to seemingly personal matters is well known, and as the drama evolves, strategies for solving these problems are suggested through the characters’ actions. The benefit of this strategy is the construction of identification and understanding for such impersonal large-scale issues among the audience, but the drawback is often the simplifying of what are rather complex difficulties in real life. In Blood Diamond it is the cultural and historical aspects that suffer, as the film-makers choose instead to depict, for example, the characters’ backgrounds, in unnecessary, sentimental detail.

Stereotyping Africa While Blood Diamond is concerned with portraying the complex patterns of the illicit diamond trade, the portrait of the country itself, and the civil

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war, is reinforcing stereotyped images of Africa. Although the action in Blood Diamond is set in Sierra Leone, the filming took place at locations mainly in Mozambique and South Africa, besides London. The film’s plot could easily have been located in Angola, Côte d’Ivoire or Congo, for that matter. ‘TIA: this is Africa’, as Danny puts it in the film, from a Western point of view, and it’s not Sierra Leone per se. Africa is depicted as a continent devastated by war, cruelty and bad leadership. As Patrick Chabal and Jean Pascal Daloz point out, the concept of a modern Weberian state is non-relevant in most of Africa when trying to understand conflicts. The problem is not that the state has collapsed or been privatized, ‘Rather the state, and norms of impartial professionalism, was never properly established in the first place. The notion that politicians, bureaucrats or military chiefs should be servants of the state simply does not make any sense’ (Chabal and Daloz 1999: 15). Many of the characteristics of the war in Sierra Leone reflect the weaknesses of the Sierra Leonean ‘state’, but in Blood Diamond the complex ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of the civil war are not spelled out. The film’s insistence on depicting the RUF as the classic ‘bad guys’ who are causing all the chaos, violence and fear in Sierra Leone alone is also a simplification. As David Keen (2005) has pointed out:

Despite the almost universal condemnation of the RUF, a key problem has been that some people – both inside and outside Sierra Leone – have found the RUF to be a ‘useful’ phenomenon, not least because it has provided an alibi for abuse and justification for various forms of undemocratic and abu- sive rule. (Keen 2005: 5)

In this perspective, Blood Diamond makes no exception. The film ends with Solomon speaking at a meeting among politicians and businessmen in Kimberley, South Africa, pointing forward to the Kimberly process of 2003. The Kimberley process is a joint government, international diamond industry and civil society initiative to stem the flow of conflict diamonds. Kimberley-process participants account for approxi- mately 99.8 per cent of the global production of rough diamonds, it is said. Stability and security have increased in Sierra Leone since 2002 with the end of the country’s decade-long war. However, significant challenges face the establishment of a cultural and political system that honours and defends human rights for Sierra Leoneans. The characteristics of Sierra Leone’s war reflect the incompleteness of the country’s incorporation into a global system – a system that has provided access to dreams of a Western lifestyle, access to arms, access to quick money from diamonds for a few and, increasingly, access to a discourse about rights and the need for legal ‘justice’ alongside precious little access to development, dignity and recognition (Keen 2005: 5). Films like Blood Diamond will probably not increase the Western understanding of these challenges, but will maybe prevent some of the Western public’s indifference towards Africa’s development, and will hopefully enhance awareness about where diamonds come from, and prevent us from buying ‘bling bang’.

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References Beah, I. (2007), A Long Way Home: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Chabal, P. and Daloz, J. P. (1999), Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dickinson, B. (2006), Hollywood’s New Radicalism: War, Globalisation and the Movies from Reagan to George W. Bush, London/New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd. Gumbel, A. (2006), “Africa provides storyline for next generation of Hollywood blockbusters” in The Independent, 28 October 2006 http://www.independent.co.uk/ arts-entertainment/film-and-tv/news/africa-provides-storyline-for-next- generation-of-hollywood-blockbusters-421953.html. Down loaded 19 June 2008. Keen, D. (2005), Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone, New York: Palgrave. Virilio, P. (1989), War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, London/NY: Verso.

Contributor details Mona Pedersen is Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies at Hedmark University College, Rena, Norway.

Contact: Hedmark University College, Faculty of Business Administration, Social Sciences and Computer Science, N-2450 Rena, Norway. E-mail: [email protected]

Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood South African release 3 February 2006; USA & Canada, Miramax, 24 February 2006; UK, Momentum, 17 March 2006 Reviewed by Herman Wasserman, University of Sheffield

Watching a film from one’s own country win an Oscar is a bit like seeing your home team score a goal in the World Cup – it elicits feelings of patri- otism that could blind you to the faulty footwork and fouls committed along the way. When Tsotsi was awarded the 2006 Academy Award for best foreign film, one’s usual cynicism about the commercial aesthetics of the Oscars momentarily made way for celebration of the fact that, for a change, the South African landscape was not a stand-in for Los Angeles or some unnamed desert, and its own actors and not Samuel L. Jackson or James Earl Jones got to star in their own story. But the fact that the film was Oscar material also meant that it conformed to the perspectives of the global commercial film industry rather than offering resistance to it. The film tells the story of a character known as Tsotsi (roughly trans- lated, ‘thug’), leader of a criminal gang in Johannesburg. After a violent altercation with one of his comrades, Tsotsi (movingly played by Presley Chweneyagae) is confronted by his inner demons. He runs off into the night, traversing the empty space between the township and the suburbs, the no-man’s land that signifies what still seems like an insurmountable (and growing) divide between rich and poor in post-apartheid South Africa. In a series of flashbacks, hints are given to Tsotsi’s childhood expe- riences of hardship. In a suburban street, Tsotsi, still in emotional turmoil,

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sees a woman get out of her car to buzz open the gate to her house and as she turns her back, Tsotsi – in what seems like an involuntary, mechanical action – shoots the woman, hijacks the car and speeds off. A few blocks away he hears crying from the back seat – a baby had been left in the car. For a moment Tsotsi hesitates, then stuffs the baby in a carrier bag and takes him along. The rest of the narrative centres around the consequences of this decision, both on a mundane level (some comic effect is gained from the impracticalities of Tsotsi plying his trade as a gangster while having to care for the infant), but, more significantly, on a psycho- logical level. As the narrative unfolds, the child confronts Tsotsi with his lost innocence, helps him rediscover empathy and finally leads him to a kind of salvation. These Christian nuances are echoed in the film’s tagline – ‘In this world…redemption just comes once’ – as well as in Tsotsi’s encounter with a beggar in a wheelchair, who he, albeit still in an abrasive tone, commands to stand up and walk. If he doesn’t, it is Tsotsi that walks away from what previously would have turned into a violent incident. The key to understanding this change in Tsotsi, brought about by his accidental relationship with the child, is provided in a scene between the criminal mastermind Fela and members of Tsotsi’s gang. As the gang structure starts crumbling as a result of Tsotsi’s frequent absences, Fela invites Tsotsi’s comrades to come and work for him. As they discuss Tsotsi’s change of behaviour, one of them, the stereotypical educated-and-therefore-outsider figure Boston, remarks that Tsotsi never went to school, and therefore does not know the meaning of the word ‘decency’. He then asks Fela if he can even spell the word, whereupon Fela proceeds to spit out the letters one by one, offering an interpretation: ‘Do you know what decency means? Decency means making a fucking decent living, sonny.’ To which Boston replies: ‘Respect. For yourself. It’s got nothing at all to do with your standard of living.’ What it all comes down to, the film seems to suggest, is an individual road of self-discovery and regained respect, the ‘triumph of the human spirit’ so typical of Hollywood’s feel-good gospel. Instead of taking a political stance, of going below the surface of post-apartheid poverty and exposing the structural mechanics of a society that continues to produce the conditions for crime and violence, the film chooses to transcend rather than engage with this messiness. In ignoring structure and cele- brating individual agency, the narrative sheds the political resonance of Athol Fugard’s original novel (in which Tsotsi was left homeless as a result of the razing of their township and his mother’s arrest by the apartheid police) and constructs the causes for Tsotsi’s criminality in individual terms – the neglect by his alcoholic father and the inability of his bedridden (perhaps as a result of AIDS, although this remains unspo- ken) mother to care for him. Leaving politics behind, Gavin Hood’s adap- tion buys into the more innocuous discourse of one man’s journey from pathological criminal to conscientized citizen. This of course means that Tsotsi has to succumb to the rationality of the modern state – a message brought home powerfully in the final scene, where Tsotsi submits to the police. He is surrounded by a veritable panopticon of spotlights and aimed firearms, and has no choice but to raise his hands in surrender (or cruci- fixion?) to the state-ordained surveillance. The possibility that the state itself (the current democratic one as well as its historical oppressive

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antecedents) may be structurally complicit in the circumstances leading up to this moment is excluded completely (the closest one gets to such a suggestion is perhaps the ironic hint in the clothing label displayed on gang member Aap’s dungarees: ‘State Property’). Instead, the primary role of the police, as agents of the state, is portrayed as the protection of ‘our’ private property (the individual family struck by crime) against ‘them’ (the inchoate mass of township dwellers) that threaten the suburban peace. The shot of the sprawling township early in the film is indicative of this binary: when the police find the car that Tsotsi had hijacked, the camera first dwells on how the car has been stripped of all removable parts that can be sold for scrap, and then pans to show a wide expanse of shacks on the other side of an open field. The camera favours the vantage point of the police, standing helplessly outside the massive township. This perspective of individuals up against a mass is soon thereafter affirmed by dialogue in which the police officers tell the despairing mother of the missing child that they cannot even find a stolen car in the township, never mind a baby. But the South Africa ten years into democracy is also one in which the Freedom Charter’s ‘security for all’ has largely been narrowed down to those that can afford to pay for it, one in which ‘private–public partnerships’ are the order of the day, and as such it is no coincidence that it is a private security firm that is called upon to save the good middle-class citizen from the claws of Tsotsi and his gang. When the narrative is seen to serve the hegemonic logic of individual responsibility for rampant crime, and the appropriate response by the state (and by capital) is constructed as that of surveillance and ret- ribution, some other choices exercised by the film-makers in retelling Fugard’s story also start to make sense. The film is only populated by black characters, with the exception of the one white policeman who speaks Zulu fluently. By taking race out of the equation, the playing field becomes levelled, history dissolves into amnesia and the explana- tion for one’s social position (for instance as either a thug scraping by in a township shack or a middle-class family man living in suburban comfort) becomes thoroughly individualized. Through this process of erasure, the continued correlation between race and class in contemporary South Africa is rendered invisible. On the topic of representation, much can also be said about the gen- derized gaze of the camera, the colourful depiction of poverty and township life and so forth, although this could warrant a separate discussion. That the film is problematic in many respects does not mean that it is without merit. As a testimony to the technical prowess of the South African film industry and the acting talent at its disposal, Tsotsi is a good advertisement that will hopefully attract more international attention. What it should also draw attention to, however, is the uncritical views of individual agency vis-à-vis structural fault lines in society, the narrow understanding of what post-apartheid democracy should come to mean and the type of responses to poverty and crime that have become pre- dictable in debates about contemporary South Africa. That this discourse has been foregrounded in an Oscar-winning film should not obscure the

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less prominent but nonetheless pervasive manifestations thereof across a wide spectrum of other media platforms as well.

Contributor details Dr Herman Wasserman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. He edits Ecquid Novi: Journal of African Journalism Studies and is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of African Media Studies (JAMS). Contact: Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield, 18–22 Regent Street, Sheffield, S1 3NJ. E-mail: [email protected]

188 Film Reviews