Explosive... Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou in Blood Diamond
In the coming months a glut of ambitious dramas set in Africa will hit our screens. But despite their high-minded intentions these films appear to perpetuate a clichéd view of the continent.
January will see the release of The Last King of Scotland, about the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, portrayed by Forest Whitaker. Next up will be Blood Diamond, a thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a South African smuggler during the 1990s civil war in Sierra Leone. And then there's Catch a Fire, a political drama set in apartheid-era South Africa, which depicts how an apolitical family man becomes an enemy of the regime.
These films, and more, come hot on the heels of The Constant Gardener and Hotel Rwanda, two Oscar-nominated and critically-acclaimed dramas about, respectively, western corruption in Kenya and the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
If this strikes you as a trend, you're not the only one to have noticed. Writing in this month's US edition of Premiere magazine, Anne Thompson suggests that "a new subgenre has emerged: the dramatic thriller based on real-life African horrors".
In many ways, these films mark a progression from earlier "dark continent" depictions - they at least feature complex African characters and shed some light on the issues affecting a landmass all too often ignored or dismissed by the west.
Plus, you can't really fault the creators of these films. Take Catch a Fire: it was written by Shawn Slovo, who is the daughter of anti-apartheid activists Joe Slovo and Ruth First. If anyone knows her subject, it's her.
However, it could be argued that all these films perpetuate the age-old cliché of Africa as a basket case; a place of violence, death and destruction. If there's a film about South Africa, it's got to be about apartheid, Aids or crime. If it's anywhere else on the continent, it's got to be about war or dictatorship. Why can't we have a family saga, a love story or a buddy comedy set in Tanzania, Mozambique or Senegal?
Perhaps it's a reflection of who we are as an audience that we only want to see Africa-set films dealing with these violent themes. But surely there must be more to Africa than that?
