I asked my friend Herman Wasserman to unpack Louis Theroux’s (son of Paul) recent visit to South Africa as seen on the BBC:

‘… There he stood, poor Louis Theroux. Thin and civilised, black-rimmed spectacles and shirtsleeves, having to watch how an overweight Afrikaner, dressed in khaki, gets all excited about his daughter felling a wild hog with one shot from a crossbow. Initially, upon watching his program ‘African Hunting Holiday‘ (BBC), one sympathizes with Theroux to a certain extent – the dusty bush of Limpopo is no place for nuanced arguments or bookish chaps. As one of his interviewees less than delicately puts it in a heavy accent: “Africa does not have computers…it’s fucked, because we chop down everything and we eat everything. This (hunting) is a way of making money out what there is here.” But Theroux’s posh indignitation at the bloodlusty, weird Afrikaner father-and-daughter pair becomes annoying when he insists on framing the farmers as the brutes, and lets their clients go scot-free. One cringes at the poorly executed machismo of the American clients who pay good money for the thrill of the kill. Although towards the end it seems Theroux becomes a bit more sympathetic to the complexities of the hunting industry, what remains lost from sight is that these farmers play up an image of wildlife, the bush and ferocious animals to feed into Westerners’ fantasies about Africa. On several occasions what becomes clear is that the farmers actually care deeply about the animals and the bush, and try to arrive at an ethical way of doing their job. But Theroux does not allow himself to dwell on these contradictions. Rough farmers are part of the fantasy that the Americans come to enjoy, and Theroux actually is more complicit in upholding this colonial narrative than he would care to acknowledge. And then there are those parts of the fantasy which go wholly unspoken. Theroux never complains about the black workers having to sit on the back of the truck or clean the bloody carcasses while he and the hunters engage in elevated debate about animal rights or enjoy the scenery from air-conditioned comfort. Fantasies have many sides.. ‘

Darwin’s Nightmare is hardcore filmmaking. That it was nominated for an Oscar does not take away from its impact or importance. (It’s about the brutal politics and economics of globalization on Lake Victoria in East Africa; at the heart of the film is the arms trade and the export of nile perch to Europe.)  But I have always had that nagging feeling about it.

Michael Massing (he’s the one writing those long, thoughtful pieces on US stenographer ‘journalism’ in the New York Review of Books), unpacked the film this week as part of a larger rant on what’s wrong with documentary film-making in the US currently.

Full piece in the Columbia Journalism Review here. (Its about a 3rd into the piece).

One cliché after another including those dubious self-policing [South Africans] farmers who deport Zimbabweans back.

If you still feel compelled to be disappointed by this “journalism,” see for yourself here (you have to hurry up though as the BBC usually takes it off after 4 days).

In 1990 when the small West African country Benin made the transition from authoritarian to democratic rule, one of the byproducts of the new regime was community radio. Today there are about forty community radio stations in the country, the largest in the region. Owned and operated by local people, these stations play a central role in local political and community life, and as Radio Bani Ganse, a new documentary — in French with Dutch subtitles and produced by the Dutch TV station VPRO — illustrates, community radio also has direct impacts on communities’ economic survival.

For more about the film (if you can read Dutch) and to see the documentary, go here.

BTW, see also the ‘Africa‘ page of VPRO to view more films focusing on the continent.

Hat Tip: Wendy Willems.