4-02-06, 9:28 am
TREPIDATION is the feeling a few would share at another prospect of seeing Africa revealed to us through European filmic paraphernalia.
This is Rwanda in 1994. Joe Connor (Hugh Dancy) is spending his gap year teaching in a school in the capital Kigali. The school is headed by Father Christopher (John Hurt), an English Roman Catholic priest who has spent nearly all his working life in Africa, and he is now filled with foreboding.
A small UN troop is stationed at the school to monitor the fragile peace. Outside, the slaughter has begun and 2,500 Tutsis pour in, seeking refuge in the school compound.
The countdown to tragedy begins as crazed gangs of murderous Hutus are egged on by continual broadcasts of distilled hate, slowly surrounding the school and slaughtering the Tutsis with machetes.
The film is expertly made - the horror of the carnage is visceral and terrifying - and Hurt is forceful in his characterisation, delivering his nuanced narrative that still shocks, never mind the familiarity with events.
We know what happened as all attempts to get the UN troops to act are deflected by the commanding officer Captain Delon's (Dominique Horwitz) strict orders to do what they usually do - sit on the fence.
Evidence of genocide in progress, requiring UN troops to intervene immediately to stop it, is deliberately ignored.
We see UN officials, like ventriloquist dummies, spew out convoluted infantile semiotics splitting hairs over what really might constitute genocide. No such luxury is afforded to those about to die, as tension within the compound rises.
The Tutsis - largely a background for Joe, Father Christopher, the TV crew, Delon, etc rushing around on their behalf - are slowly beginning to realise that those they hoped would save them will, in fact, like latter-day Judases, betray them to the bloodthirsty mob outside the gates.
The whites' righteous efforts are, of course, doomed to failure. A philosophical adornment. All their noble talk isn't worth the saliva it produces as the die was cast elsewhere, decades ago, as Africa was being recolonised under the guise of liberation. In this mire, the gutless Delon's invocation of his own grandparents sheltering Jews in nazi-occupied Belgium sounds inappropriate and opportunistic.
Soon, UN lorries appear to evacuate the stranded whites and Delon makes his retreat as the despairing surviving Tutsis are being brutally held back.
Joe is on the back of one of the lorries double-fast - admittedly, not before shedding a tear or two over a girl student that he befriended, Marie (Claire-Hope Ashitey) but whom he is now leaving to her fate.
In the ensuing confusion and mayhem, Father Christopher, rather symbolically, ferries out a number of youngsters, among them Marie, who run into the night while he's gunned down in cold blood at a road block by a Hutu he knew well.
In the final and entirely surreal scene, Marie traces Joe not to a bog-standard comprehensive but to a stately public school, secluded in acres of pristine rolling landscape.
There, he is conducting the school choir in a church the size of Westminster Cathedral. When asked why he ran, he simply answers that he feared for his life. Quite why she should have bothered to find him is anybody's guess.
Equally baffling is her soppy final intimation, in a shadow of a tree, that we should do the best with the time we are given in this world. Quite right. African liberation leaders like Lumumba, Nkrumah, Kimathi, Cabral and Machel all knew what to do with the time they were given and said it loud and clear to our European faces.
For that they were never forgiven. But that's another story particularly worthy of telling.
From Morning Star
