Local films, local cats

Last week, I was at the shop of one of my favorite local merchants, an old Arab electrician named Jaffar, and we got on the subject of movies. He began talking all about his cassette collection (over two thousand of them, apparently) and was wondering if I had a player. I only have the laptop and its internal DVD player available to me, but his son has recently begun sending him films from Canada. These include recent DVDs, and he asked if I would like to borrow any of them. When I said sure, he brought out a case with 15 or 20 movies, one of which was The Last King of Scotland. Being only an hour from Uganda, Bukoba was highly affected by Idi Amin’s reign, so I figured I ought to watch the Oscar-winner.

What did you all think of that movie? Being here, and having been in and around Kampala, I probably had a different perspective on it than you. The first thing that surprised me was to hear Idi Amin addressing people in Swahili. I didn’t know Swahili was ever spoken in Uganda; now, they use either Kiganda or English. (The subtitles weren’t so accurate, by the way). The second surprise was how sweepingly the East African life they depicted from the 1970’s resembles life here now. Honestly, the only difference I could spot was the type of cars people drive. The groups of kids in tattered clothes running alongside cars and yelling at foreigners still occurs just as it did in the film; in fact, they probably didn’t even have to plan or edit that footage at all, instead just filming as they drove around.

About the movie itself…it was powerful, huh? Forrest Whitaker really made the dictator come off as capricious, egomaniacal, and terrifying. I’ve heard James McAvoy has a pretty big cult following (wasn’t he the satyr in the Narnia movie?) and he was adept in his role as the Scottish doctor/advisor of Amin, showing the doctor’s inner turmoil as he slowly realized the evils of the regime with which he was so involved. But Whitaker stole the show, both physically and in terms of presence. I’m not sure how well the plot stuck to history, but I’d imagine it was more factual than Titanic. That’s good enough for me.

After watching it, I talked to various people around Bukoba who’d been here during that time. They had interesting things to say. When I asked Jaffar and his wife if Amin was truly as crazy as the film portrayed him, Jaffar’s wife replied, “Much, much crazier he was in reality” and shook her head sadly. Jaffar then informed me of Amin’s claim that “all of Kagera was his” over public television as an illustration of the megalomaniacal insanity. Kagera is the region of Tanzania where I live. While we were discussing Amin’s time in power, Jaffar informed me that even in Bukoba, people were killed and bombs were dropped. The building we were standing in had been hit by one bomb and his employees had been seriously injured. Amin’s troops never reached Bukoba, but other fanatics killed people in town in support of him, Jaffar told me. At Ihungo, I asked our old chemistry teacher, who’s been teaching here for almost forty years, what he remembered. Apparently, at all areas associated with the government, even public schools, they had to dig trenches and prepare for invasion by the Ugandan army. I asked Jaffar about this, and he too recalled Bukoba’s various preparations for war. (The army never reached Bukoba. The Tanzanian army stopped it at Mutukula, which is now the border town between Tanzania and Uganda. It was the only war Tanzania has fought in since its independence).

A little over a year ago, I wrote about a trip I took to Kampala. While there, I took a tour of the old kabaka’s palace. (Kabaka is the title the chieftains of Ugandan tribes used to have, and the Kampala kabaka was basically the king of the country). The palace was a disappointment- an unfinished mansion, still being built and lacking any historical significance- but the tour guide I had was fantastic. He had been a soldier in the kabaka’s army, which struggled against Idi Amin. This old veteran told me a few stories about the war, including one in which he’d been at the palace when Amin’s troops stormed it. The guards, including my guide, were sorely outmatched and he was one of very few that made it out alive. Halfway through the tour, he asked me if I wanted to see something Amin left behind. You know I did. He took me down a small overgrown path behind the palace and led me to what looked at first glance like a bunker or warehouse. There was a gaping opening leading to a wide hallway, slightly sunken and made of concrete. Two large steps ten meters apart each led up to concrete rooms with no doors. The rooms went far back into the hillside, under the palace, and had no other exits. The kabaka’s former guard told me this was where Amin had kept his prisoners of war. There was no way in or out of the rooms except through the sunken hallway. Apparently, about a foot of standing water was kept in the hallway at all times. This water was highly electrified, such that any prisoner trying to escape would be electrocuted to death. Despite the size of the two rooms, the old guard told me that both had been so full that there was no room even to lie down. I’m not sure how much of this was hearsay and how much was truth, but after talking to Jaffar, it seems clear that Amin was capable of any number of hard-to-believe atrocities.

I feel fortunate being able to hear these stories first-hand, to discuss how peoples’ lives were affected by the tyrant. It reminds me of when I went to Rwanda and stayed with Jean-Pierre, and heard about his family. As strongly as a film may affect you, hearing someone who lived through a tragedy recant it to you will always affect you more, and have a deeper, more permanent impact. I’ll never forget going to the genocide memorial and listening to Jean-Pierre’s story afterward, nor will I forget about Amin’s prison and the old guard.

When I returned his DVD, Jaffar asked me if I’d like to borrow another. Without asking what I’d like, he brought me out Darwin’s Nightmare, an expose in the guise of a documentary that showcases the Nile perch fishing industry of Lake Victoria. Guess it was my week for watching intense films which concern my immediate surroundings. To be completely honest, I didn’t like this movie at all. At times it reminded me of a Michael Moore film- designed to prejudice the viewer by showing only negative aspects of a situation.

Let me explain a little more about the film. Its title derives from the extinctions which are occurring in the lake due to the introduction of the perch some 30 or 40 years ago. Apparently, as a foreign species, it has already begun wiping out many of the natural inhabitants of the lake. This is partly due to it reducing oxygen levels in the lake and thereby killing certain types of algae and microorganisms that other fish survive on and partly due to the perch just eating the other fish. I guess Darwin must’ve had really bad dreams about this happening. However, the film only discussed the ecological impact of the fish briefly, instead focusing on the socioeconomic issues which are related to the fishing industry. My first problem with the movie is that it never cohesively linked these two areas together; there was no connection shown between the environmental and the social crises which stem from the Nile perch’s existence in Lake Victoria. It was more like the filmmaker wanted to condemn the fish to hell, and thereby showed it’s every negative aspect, whether or not they were even tenuously related. I hope no one ever makes a film like that about me, huh?

On top of this, some part of the movie were highly suspect. There is one narrator/guide who takes the filmmaker all around Mwanza. This man is introduced as a night watchman for some offices, a common enough job here. What stuck out was the man’s amazing English ability. Having talked to lots of guards around Tanzania, I feel confident in saying that if that man was really who he claimed to be, then he is the most educated guard in Tanzania. His vocabulary even exceeded that of the university students who are currently at my school. Hmmm… Beyond this guard/professor anomaly, many of the Tanzanians who were interviewed were led to make statements that they didn’t even understand. The filmmaker would ask them questions in English, and as they struggled to respond coherently, he would prompt them to answer a certain way by asking another question. In Tanzania, you can say almost anything you want in English and get the average person to agree with it completely. I’ve done this many times to entertain myself (yes, I’m an immoral person). Jodi and I watched the movie together, and both of us started getting pissed at the inaccurate comments he was soliciting from the Tanzanians.

It’s a filmmaker’s prerogative to show whatever aspects of a situation that he might choose, but it was hard for me to swallow such a pessimistic pill. Rather than showing normal life in Mwanza, he chose to only film crippled street children who fight each other for food. Well yeah, this does happen here, and its terrible. But at the same time, this happens all over the world, and it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the introduction of a foreign species of animal into their environment. Lastly, he kept juxtaposing scenes of all this fish which would be exported to foreign consumers with shots of these emaciated children, or with vignettes of people discussing a soon-to-come rice famine in Tanzania, as though saying that keeping the fish from being exported could halt the incipient starvation. He neglected to show that the area which reported the possible famine is so far away from Mwanza, separated by such terrible roads, that it is simply not viable to transport fish there before it rots. Learn the logistics before you make a movie, chump. If I write much more about it, I’ll just get more worked up.

On a sad but funny note, today I saw the town veterinarian. He was on his motorcycle, leaving my school and heading towards town. Hanging from the back of the motorcycle was a bag that was "meowing" in a very forlorn manner. Don't worry, the cat was ok, I think that is just the vet's way of transporting cats to his clinic. Welcome to Tanzania.