When the West Brings Civilization Back to Africa
I just came back from a screening of a locally made film, When the West Brings Civilization Back to Africa. I'm pretty sure the title is meant to be ironic, although the film did have an unfortunate tendency to equate "technology" with "civilization."
The director and co-author is Ji Hoon Park, who is Korean but now teaching in the U.S. at a college in my area. His research interest is on representation of minorities in popular media. (Both PoC and sexual minorities; one of his films is on transexual persons.)
The film follows a group of college students (all white), led by Park and two other professors (both white), as they travel to Cameroon on a aid project to build infrastructure for a safe drinking water system in a remote village. The trip is seen through the eyes of Samantha, the narrator. She functions as co-author, in essence, because of the POV and because some of the narration is excerpts from her journal of the trip.
During the trip, Samantha tries very hard to understand the effects of the aid project, and Western aid projects in general. The health benefits had already been shown to be positive: the previous stage of the project, water filtering systems, had reduced deaths from water-borne diseases among children under 5 by 100%. The current stage was to build a water delivery mechanism to reduce the heavy labor of hauling water from the river.
At the same time, Samantha quickly noticed that every villager she talked to made statements about Africa needing help from white people, that America was better than Africa, that it was better to be white than black. She began to realize that the toys and gear everyone brought along (iPods, digital cameras, tents, hiking boots, etc) had the effect of teaching the villagers about their own poverty. She began to rethink an incident on the journey to the village, when she and her classmates took pictures of several children sitting by the side of the road: was it only because they were cute, or because young children without an adult nearby were just like Western media images of African orphans?
I debated about posting this to 12films_poc because this documentary is explicitly from the pov of a young white woman. On the other hand, I can't imagine that the director-professor didn't have a significant role in helping Samantha (who was bright and well-intentioned but, good heavens, only 20) sort through all the new experiences and make some of the hard connections. His pov must have helped shape the final product. So I think there are two stories here: one exploring the effect of white, Western aid workers on an African community; the other about a young woman starting to unlearn racism.
(Cross-posted to 12films_poc)
The director and co-author is Ji Hoon Park, who is Korean but now teaching in the U.S. at a college in my area. His research interest is on representation of minorities in popular media. (Both PoC and sexual minorities; one of his films is on transexual persons.)
The film follows a group of college students (all white), led by Park and two other professors (both white), as they travel to Cameroon on a aid project to build infrastructure for a safe drinking water system in a remote village. The trip is seen through the eyes of Samantha, the narrator. She functions as co-author, in essence, because of the POV and because some of the narration is excerpts from her journal of the trip.
During the trip, Samantha tries very hard to understand the effects of the aid project, and Western aid projects in general. The health benefits had already been shown to be positive: the previous stage of the project, water filtering systems, had reduced deaths from water-borne diseases among children under 5 by 100%. The current stage was to build a water delivery mechanism to reduce the heavy labor of hauling water from the river.
At the same time, Samantha quickly noticed that every villager she talked to made statements about Africa needing help from white people, that America was better than Africa, that it was better to be white than black. She began to realize that the toys and gear everyone brought along (iPods, digital cameras, tents, hiking boots, etc) had the effect of teaching the villagers about their own poverty. She began to rethink an incident on the journey to the village, when she and her classmates took pictures of several children sitting by the side of the road: was it only because they were cute, or because young children without an adult nearby were just like Western media images of African orphans?
I debated about posting this to 12films_poc because this documentary is explicitly from the pov of a young white woman. On the other hand, I can't imagine that the director-professor didn't have a significant role in helping Samantha (who was bright and well-intentioned but, good heavens, only 20) sort through all the new experiences and make some of the hard connections. His pov must have helped shape the final product. So I think there are two stories here: one exploring the effect of white, Western aid workers on an African community; the other about a young woman starting to unlearn racism.
(Cross-posted to 12films_poc)