Hollywood and Africa Recycling the ‘Dark Continent’ myth, 1908–2020

Abstract

Negative imaging of Africa through the Dark Continent trope continues unabated in Western cultural productions. While colonial historiography has been successfully challenged by various professional historians on the continent, like Ade Ajayi, Ali Mazrui, Adu Boahen, Grace Ogot and J. Kizerbo, among others, and most contemporary historical literature no longer entertains such biases, the same cannot be said of cultural productions on Africa emanating from the West. The negative representation of Africa has persisted in Western literature and more especially in Western film through to the postcolonial era via instruments of Euro-American cultural imperialism, with Hollywood as the biggest avenue for this warped image production, dissemination and consolidation. There is, therefore, a need to enlighten Hollywood’s viewership, literary adaptation scholars and policymakers on the systematic racism in the fantastical construction of Africa in Hollywood-Africa films and to challenge this derogatory framing of Africa as the Dark Continent with its negative impact on Africans This book is a study of stereotypical Hollywood film productions about Africa over a 112-year span. It traces the origins of the Dark Continent myth about Africa from the 19th century in order to situate this mode of image production in the context of British colonialism, racism and the ideology of empire, and to show how the tropes of this mode of seeing Africa are incarnated across time and space. I argue that the myth of the Dark Continent has influenced Western cultural productions about Africa for centuries as a cognitive-based system of knowledge, especially in history, literature, film and Western media at large, with a debilitating chain of negative consequences for Africa. Dark Continent tropes this book tackles include the first contact encounter between civilisation and savagery; Africa as the unpolished, Edenic romantic utopia; Africa as the dangerous alluring; default violence as a way of life in Africa; cannibalism as the primary marker of African savagery; the trope of virology, where Africa is seen as the source of all killer viruses; Africa as a cultural and intellectual tabula rasa needing to be filled with civilisation; Africa as mere background canvas for Western action flicks; and the helplessness of Africans and their need for Western saviours in line with Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden.” Other recurring colonial modes of representing African reality are selection/omission and contextualisation through which specific facts are projected without historical context; and the trope of ‘synecdoche’ where a particular crisis in an Africa country, or even in a part of a country, is used to characterise the entire continent of Africa