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"Dark Continent", Africa, Animals, Blackface, Bruce Cabot, colonialism, Elsa Martinelli, Film, film review, Giraffe, Hatari, history, Howard Hawks, imperialism, John Wayne, racism, Red Buttons, Rhino, wild animals
I mean they just let the black guys handle the ostriches while they watched and laughed. I’m not saying it’s openly racist, it’s just kinda messed up. Those birds are huge, scary, and they bite and it’s kinda-super-fucked how Kurt just gave up halfway through.
I’ve written before that growing up John Wayne was something of a personal hero of 
mine, and that relationship became complicated as I got older and realized that John Wayne was…complex.
Racist, I mean racist. The dude was just racist.
It’s for this reason I no longer idolize the man, but I do recognize that, since I spent most of my childhood watching his movies, I can’t ignore that a fair amount of my consciousness is built around his films. Mom and Dad always had his movies playing at night when they went to bed. I’ve never been a good sleeper, and in fact I usually wound up making a palette and sleeping on the floor of their bedroom instead, and while they would snore or rumble the way parents tend to, I would watch those movies over and over again until sleep would eventually take me. There were usually three I could rely on dependably: Rio Bravo, El Dorado, and Hatari. The last one always had a special significance for me, largely because it was set, not in the old West like the other two, but in a far more magical and mythical place to my young mind: Africa.
I’ve been wanting to write about Hatari for some time, largely because growing up Africa was always a bit of a mystery to me. Being part of the generation that was brought up on 
VHS Disney collections of original animated films I remember The Lion King and how it created this perception that Africa was a continent largely of incredible beauty and wild animals, and Hatari only added to this sense of wonder. Watching the film as I usually do once a year I’m still pretty spellbound as there are shots of John Wayne riding the front of an old beat-up truck lassoing zebras and giraffes and the camera shows these creatures reacting honestly to their capture. Whether it was rhinos, monkeys, water buffaloes, leopards, or even baby elephants Howard Hawks last major motion picture inspired me to learn more about the wild animals that populated the continent of Africa because they were foreign and wonderful. It also didn’t hurt that I lived twenty minutes from a zoo which was not only free to the public, it also had most of the animals I watched in the film.
Reflecting on it though, I’ve begun to reassess my love of the film. I’m not saying that I’ve abandoned it completely. Hatari is still a beautiful movie that I watch every year. The cinematography is breathtaking, the characters are fun, the music is a sumptuous collection of jazz, and more often than not there are actual scenes in the film which make me laugh. What I can’t get past though, is the implied racism of the film.
Hatari is about a group of American and European contract workers and adventurers who literally capture animals for zoos. As the film was made, and is set in the early 60s, there is no tranquilizer guns and so Sean Mercer (John Wayne Himself) and his crew have to wrangle and capture animals using only ropes and battered second-hand automobiles. The film begins with their attempt to capture a Rhino, and during this attempt Little Wolf “The Indian” (long-time Wayne co-star Bruce Cabot) is gored in the leg. The crew manage to rush him to the hospital where he’s saved with a blood-transfusion by a frenchman named Charles Maurey who eventually becomes part of the crew. Not long thereafter an Italian photographer named Anna Maria D’Allesandro (played by the rapturous Elsa Martinelli) joins the crew to take photographs of the crew capturing the animals. From this point onward Hatari becomes, like many Howard Hawkes movies, more of an exploration of the characters and their relationships than an actual plot. Sean and D’Allsesandro, who eventually goes by Dallas, fall in love and the reader is also entertained with a love triangle between Pockets (Red Buttons), Charles, Kurt, and a young woman of the crew named Brandy de la Court. And along with these character arcs the reader is given scene after scene of the crew capturing wild animals with nothing but ropes, crates, and willpower.
From afar this summary doesn’t appear to give much in the way of revealing the problems in the film, and in fact if one watches the characters themselves they’re entirely likable people. As a viewer I love these characters and I love watching them work towards their goal, and I love watching them fall in love. But the problems begin to appear when one looks at some of the small moments in the films that can go unnoticed.
As I noted at the start, at one point in the film the ostriches they have captured get out and so the crew has to capture them again, however in the film the only people doing any of the work are the local Africans who are often chased and attacked by the birds 
while the host of the crew, again all of them white Europeans or Americans, are laughing and enjoying themselves. In fact at one point Kurt, who began helping them stops, and Louis asks him why he he gasps laughing saying: “I better let the boys do it.”
THe use of the word “boy” to describe the Africans is problematic. Even if the reader is not American they’re sure to at least catch this moment and will probably have the same reaction I do now, which is usually a small “twist” followed by a small repressed gurgle.
Another moment, earlier in the film, is when Kurt arrives to take Brandy to the hospital. On the compound there are many native African people who cook and clean for the crew, one of them is named Argo. He is, for the record, the only black man in the film who receives any sort of meaningful line. Kurt is shuffling through the main hall telling Argo about the attack, looking at the floor. When Argo asks how bad Little Wolf is hurt Kurt says plainly, “I don’t know. Make me some coffee would you?”
No please. No eye contact. Just an order.
These are small moments, but they contribute to a larger whole. Perhaps a more obvious moment is the scene of actual blackface. Dallas, during the film adopts several baby elephants whose parents have either died or abandoned them and a local tribe decides to honor her by welcoming her as a member. They take her back to their village and the reader eventually discovers that they’ve covered her face and arms with clay to make her appear black. Sean and the crew laughs and the following exchange is offered:
Dallas: [Dressed as a Warusha] I don’t think it’s very funny. They want to shave my hair! They want to take my clothes off and there was a man in there.
Pockets: Why, he doesn’t speak any English.
Kurt Muller: You are now a member of the Warusha Tribe.
Sean Mercer: And they’ve given you name. Mother of Elephants. Mama Tembo! Well you’re supposed to dance with them.
Watching this scene today, I honestly cringe. It was probably funny at the time, but today I just can’t not see that we’re supposed to be entertained by the blackface which is the punchline of the scene.
At this point then my contester emerges. Well then so what? This sounds like a racist old movie about white people being dicks to Africans. How could there possibly be any relevant entertainment or art in such a movie? Why should I watch an arguably racist film.
To this I would argue, because it is an arguably racist film. But also an interesting one, largely because it has an element of colonialism that could be explored.
The Africa in Hatari is a not a “Dark Continent,” but that doesn’t mean that colonialism has been completely abandoned either. The white Europeans and Americans that the reader watches and follows aren’t plundering the land of its diamonds, gold, or ivory the way the Europeans and Americans had done in the past, but that doesn’t mean Africa still doesn’t possess wonder and wealth. Instead it’s the natural wonders, the animals which still inspire Western imagination that are being captured and sold to zoos.
Watching Hatari I’m struck by the fact that the native Africans help Sean Mercer and his crew capture giraffes and water buffaloes, the implication being that they’re somehow profiting from this venture, though probably not in the same level as the crew. There’s 
an implied idea that in this continent of wild and exotic beasts, white people can still find adventure and exoticism that they can’t necessarily find in their own homelands. They can also find, in their own way, a sort of wealth and domestic comfort. Africa, its animals, and in some ways even its people, become a backdrop for the Europeans and Americans who are looking to these native creatures and seeing personal opportunity, rather than a chance to help native Africans.
It could be that I’m looking too deeply in this film for some kind of troublesome narrative, but I don’t think I am. The implication of the narrative, and the small moments scattered throughout the film, contribute to a conclusion that Hatari is yet another in a long line of colonial narratives that paint Africa as a continent where fortune can be had, and adventure is to be gained by those willing and/or able to pursue it. And that, unfortunately, is a racist narrative. Africa is a complex continent with a rich history and a developing sense of itself in the aftermath of European colonialism, and as the peoples of that continent begin to rebuild their cultures and histories, narratives like “The Dark Continent” can hold the culture back.
I’m not saying that a film like Hatari should be wholly condemned. It’s still a beautiful film, with shots that can leave a modern audience who are tired of bloated CGI effects stunned and amazed. But the realities of contemporary existence, and the complexities of the actors who starred in such films, demand that the reader take a moment and ask themselves, is this movie a healthy presentation? Or is it plagued by the biases and unintended prejudices of its makers.
I’ll leave the reader to make up their own mind.
As for myself I still love watching John Wayne lasso a giraffe while hitched to the front of an old truck and yelling at Pockets when they drive through a river getting him soaking wet. Though I will say that I agree with my little sister who pointed out the problems of the last quotes directed at Dallas when she first arrives:
Luis Francisco Garcia Lopez: My name is Luis Francisco Garcia Lopez, and I don’t wear pajamas.
I don’t think Luis would have survived long in the #MeToo era, but then again he’s a Mexican man so I suppose it’s a wonder he was able to get any actual dialogue in this movie.
*Writer’s Note*
All quotes from Hatari were provided by IMDB.com. Though for the record I’m bothered by how few quotes there actually were. I think I used all of them actually.
**Writer’s Note**
Having taken an African History course in college I have a basic understanding of the complexities inherit of that particular field. A traditional approach to history, or at least a more Western approach is the reliance of written records to substantiate claims. This is one of the reasons why African History has become a controversial topic in historical dialogues largely because the traditions and histories were oral traditional and the few people who had those histories memorized were, well, killed, or else enslaved. Because of this historians working in Africa today are steadily trying to rewrite the history of their continent and regions.
In the interest then in giving a more nuanced view of the history of Africa I would point you towards this video by Blue of Overly Sarcastic Productions who provides a nice overview the topic while explaining some of the pitfalls of the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk3iOqKOD7g
I’m also going to post a link to his review of Egypt, because, don’t forget, Egypt is in Africa. Yeah. Too many people forget that shit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3hJHmomKvc
I’m also going to leave a link to Extra history’s video on the Zulu Empire. I haven’t disappeared into Extra History as much as OSP, but I have watched their reviews on Genghis Kahn and it’s amazing. Definitely check these guys out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZLGKFWlRzY
Finally, I thought I would share this, it’s the soundtrack to Hatari. Regardless of your opinion of the film what should never be denied is the fact that this film has a beautiful soundtrack. And I’m not just saying that, the AFI says so too. Check it out.
marathon probably wasn’t what she needed) but was in fact a member of the graphic novel book club I’m a part of.
who’s supposed to be dead but who turns out to actually be alive or a clone or some shit), Saga is drama about family centered in race, specifically race mixing.
discomfort, but it should be noted that pregnant women also tend to poop because, well, shit’s happening.
Zero Comics, and because of this prestige position he gets to decide which books are read in the group.
species and peoples, all of whom are impacted by the war between the two races.
of physiology, anatomy, or whether you’re a pothead actress made out of moss, people are people, and their qualities are what ultimately define them.
about when I’m shoveling my eggs, donuts, and tea down my throat as I get ready for work.
Noah’s memoir Born a Crime doesn’t just mirror Saga, it could almost be its own spin-off.
all of these concepts are realities that are still plaguing society.
story which, as Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime demonstrates, is an ongoing narrative.
consider my familiarity with cinema to be one of my weaknesses, and I’m hardly a neophyte to the field given how much I’ve written and studied in the subject, I’m real enough to know when I’m speaking with someone who has a far more nuanced perspective. Such a person is my friend TJ. I’ve known TJ for about four years, we were originally introduced when a mutual friend recommended that I join a graphic novel bookclub TJ had started up, and he’s quickly become one of the closest friends I have. I love having a friend and co-worker who has an educated opinion about comics, but it’s in film that the pair of us tend to have the most extended conversations.
struggle through the film was entirely centered in this problem. The very opening scenes of the film involves a black man walking through a neighborhood before he is abducted. His body is captured before the film opens and one of the first scenes the reader gets of Chris is his body while he’s shaving and he cuts himself. Chris, as the reader observes in the film, is a young photographer who’s dating a white woman and the film follows the pair of them as they drive up to the country (the region is never specified but it really shouldn’t matter because white people are crazy wherever you go) to see Rose’s parents. On the way to the house, while Rose is driving and the pair of them are discussing Chris’s friend Rod and Chris’s habit of smoking, a deer collides with the front of their car.
see it still breathing with a large hole in it’s chest. The scene is powerful as the reader watches the deer, wondering if it’s supposed to be an omen of what’s to come, whether the deer mirrors Chris, or if the entire scene is just used to create an early scare and build up the tension in the audience. The sensation of watching Get Out is more or less summarized in this small scene because, as I noted to my friend, virtually every element and component of Get Out is connected to something else.
“there goes the neighborhood,” which itself is connected to actual expressions by white racists when black families would move in. What’s taking place in this scene however is a double play because while Dean Armitage is saying this about deer, and mimicking racists, he’s trying to present himself as a man who is open minded but clumsily being racist. Throughout Get Out Peele has the family portrayed as Northern Progressive Liberals, the kind of people who enjoy their white privilege but who also profess dedication to helping African Americans who are “disadvantaged.” This is probably best exemplified when Dean is talking to Chris one on one:
people, white and black, believe is larger. What is also true, and probably more important, is that many of those white people believe that “larger” black penis has a major—read: “dangerous”—cultural meaning. (125).
my research, you know, ’cause as a TSA agent. You know, you guys are detectives. You know, I got the same training. We might know more than y’all sometimes, you know, ’cause we are dealing with some terrorist shit, so… but that’s a totally different story. So look, I-I go do my… my detective work, right? And I start putting pieces together. And see, this is what I came up with. They’re probably abducting black people, brainwashing them and making them slaves… or sex slaves. Not just regular slaves, but sex slaves and shit. See? I don’t know if it’s the hypnosis that’s making ’em slaves or what not, but all I know is they already got two brothas we know and there could be a whole bunch of brothas they got already. What’s the next move?
merely changes. Peele’s film allows the reader to see then how the racism has changed, yet ultimately remained the same.
Ta-Nehisi Coates in his landmark book, Between the World and Me, reflects on the death of a friend who was shot by a policeman and the entire book is written as a series of letters to his son. Coates addresses his son directly noting the position of his body in the culture:
the tobacco, and the spirit was the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first fruits of the American garden. And the fruits were secured through the bashing of children with stove wood, through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn.
and while the Marxists would latch onto this in order to explain deeper notions of hegemony and economic domination, what is at heart in all of this is the idea that people are not allowed the agency of their own bodies.
win. While there is some Victory in Chris escaping, and killing the entire Armitage family as he fights his way out, there is still the deeper implication that even if he escapes there the lingering question of the victims. Upon finishing Get Out again recently I asked my friend this question: what happens to the people who were stolen? There was no answer to this question and in fact I don’t have one.
win in this society, and even if he does it comes at a great cost. Chris will never be the same after this experience, the reader is able to see that as the car drives away and he stares detached out into the forrest.
this, but this absence of rap also seemed to follow the pattern of “whiteness” that was my upbringing. 
gets a sense of the man’s vulnerability.
are the implications of blackface performance tropes. Gambino is constantly dancing through the film, making jerking motions and contortion his face randomly. The bent elbows, the erratic facial twists, and the near cakewalk on top of the car near the end of the video all call back to minstrel shows where white performers would done black face paint and behave in cartoonish representations of African Americans. I’m not the first person to observe this similarity, in fact many of the people who watched this film have observed how Childish Gambino uses a pseudo-minstrel-show persona throughout the video to distract the viewer from the violence and mayhem taking place in the background behind him. This reference to a morbid form of entertainment continues the body narrative because ultimately the black man’s body is observed
You gon’ tell somebody
promises so much opportunity to explore violence and the problems facing the black body in American Society.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner.
bar, Kendrick continues reflecting his pain outward and trying to understand it in the larger cultural context:
But is America honest, or do we bask in sin?
and in these essays, and while it feels repetitive to keep acknowledging my whiteness I do not believe that the sentiment loses any of its significance.
about how one is going to get to work is a privilege.
relevance to the self.
memoir The Beautiful Struggle. All of these books eventually came through the book drop at the library, and each time that they did I would scramble to pick them up and read them.
has been compared to numerous times and fittingly so.
shouting out into the infinite white noise that is the internet is that any argument which bothers to actually dig into the actual discourse that is history is worth consideration. And Coates’s article does just that.
educations.
Reagan beating the Soviet Union using only his wit and his Iron Man technology which he built with his bare hands. In hindsight I’m pretty sure my dad was over-emphasizing Reagan’s engineering skills. But the stories of World War II were always stories about heroes, and young men overcoming great odds to defeat the forces of real evil. It seems fitting that a narrative built on “othering” should blow up in my face and reveal, not a “Greatest Generation,” but a generation of people who benefitted economically at the expense of others.
beacon what happens when government works, yet Coates article, along with mountains of historical discourse have largely revealed the New Deal to be one lord line of fuck-ups and FDR to be an adulterous egomaniac.
slavery, and so I was given the general outline of the travesties that blacks my home country have been subjected to, but the nuances and details were largely ignored. And this negation of details leads me to a deeper conclusion about my country, which is that there is an unwillingness to really atone for what has been done.
The perception of perfection or moral superiority is a dangerous concept for a people to internalize because it allows for the possibility of “othering” other people. When any group believes themselves naturally superior and drafts a cultural rhetoric which justifies atrocity, or worse, freedom from responsibility then tragedy is soon to follow.
could probably spend an entire page listing out the offenses of the United States this list is meant only to affirm one central point: the United States is not an innocent nation. There is blood on our hands, and for some reason no one really wants to acknowledge it and offer some kind of atonement. There is more an impulse to argue, “yes it happened, let’s move on,” which in itself is yet another form of denial of the issue.
the question of what kind of democracy is it when that same group negates the reality that their success is coming at the expense of others? The Case for Reparations is not about arguing for a simple pay-off the African-American community, because money is an empty gesture. The health of a democracy is measure by the maturity of it’s populace to understand what a real equality is, and so looking at The Case for Reparations I observe not just a beautifully written essay about the differing economic levels of blacks and whites, but a real call for Americans to recognize their past and deepen their emotional understanding of their culture’s past.
at first while I intend to explore this notion of privilege, the larger concern for the health of a democracy seems far more, if not equally, relevant. I’ve watched in just the last few months how my country has become more and more divided over the issues of the past and race, and it seems, at first, like any kind of hope for a healthy and reasonable conversation is next to impossible.
right, who were laughing. I just remember that family laughing because most of the rest of the theater were white people who gave me nasty looks as I was walked out of the theater. I just couldn’t help it. There’s something about watching a group of white men complain about not being able to see through their hoods that’s just pathetic and hilarious.
I suppose I understand. There’s a lot of dialogue which surrounds the film Django Unchained and a lot of it has to do with history.
appearance on the “Fuck Tarantino” program, and people on Facebook got into really nasty arguments about who’s allowed to use the word “nigger” and when and in what context and then someone said “reverse racism” and everybody who liked their brain left the room before that bullshit polluted their frontal lobes. And when the issue of Slavery and historical accuracy was thrown down, I like most people tuned out. Not because there wasn’t an argument to be made, but because I had already assured myself that this interpretation was the best reason to enjoy the film. I enjoy Tarantino movies period and will regularly defend the man’s work. But since I’ve seen the film around ten times since it came out I’ve realized more and more than this argument can only go so far. Tarantino movies tend to be hyperbolic in terms of violence and persona and sometimes plot structure, and within the film there is another, and I’d argue far more interesting, analysis that few people really discussed.
In the course of these struggles the hero frequently forms a bond with another man—sometimes his rival, more often a comrade—a bond that is more important than any relationship he has with a woman and is frequently tinged with homoeroticism. There is very little free expression of the emotions. The hero is a man of few words who expresses himself through physical action—usually fighting. And when death occurs it is never at home in bed but always sudden death, usually murder. (38-9).
-tale, myth, of Siegfried. Fairy-tales, much like myth, are stories that are purposefully hyperbolic in order to explain phenomena in the world. Zeus and Thor are non-scientific means explain lightning, and likewise the story of Siegfried is designed to explain the absurd state of being in love. One of the best examples of the fairy-tale is George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm which, when it first published, had the subtitle of “A Modern Fairy Tale.” In Animal Farm Orwell was using the structure of the fairy tale to tell a modern story about the terrors of Stalinism, but also of political corruption in general.
Nuclear Arsenal Diplomacy on the international stage. The problem with the library, like almost every library I’m sure, is funding. Because only the city of Tyler’s taxes go to fund us, people who live within the county but not the city have to pay a membership fee. My reader may be wondering what this has to do with my mother or Trevor Noah’s wonderful autobiography Born a Crime. I’m sorry, I like to talk, but I’m getting to it.
The Daily Show and people were looking to disrupt the institution at this supposed moment of weakness. Stewart left, Noah began, I stopped watching for a while. It wasn’t that he wasn’t funny, it just that he was new and I’m one of those obnoxious people who has to settle into things slowly. Still I enjoy The Daily Show and Noah himself has begun to really demonstrate that he’s made The Daily Show into his own and so I’ve become a regular watcher again, and in fact, in the last few months I’ve come to adore Trevor Noah as a comedian, and even more as a writer and Born a Crime is largely responsible.
criminality. The only time I could be with my father was indoors. If we left the house, he’d half to walk across the street from us. My mom and I used to go to Joubert Park all the time. It’s the Central Park of Johannesburg—beautiful gardens a zoo, a giant chess-board with human-sized pieces that people would play. My mother tells me that once, when I was a toddler, my dad tried to go with us, and I ran after him, screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” People started. He panicked and ran away. I thought it was a game and kept chasing him. (27).
Revolutionary Life by Jo Lee Anderson comes next, Jim Henson: A Life by Brian Jay Jones (Also look up his George Lucas), Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens, I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai, and recently I’ve begun Life by Keith Richards. This list may seem to contradict my statement before about the scarcity of truly great biographies but in fact it only reinforces it. These books are products of a careful craft (pardon the alliteration) that tries to leave the reader with a real sense of the person under discussion, and rather than try to chronicle every detail of a person’s existence, it instead tries to offer the heart and personality in all its beauty and flaws.
After that she never raised her hand to her children again. Unfortunately, by the time she stopped Abel had started. (262).
of Batman Vs Superman. But mothers are important for a young man’s development because she becomes the first relationship. Mothers, the good ones anyway, teach their sons emotional strength and then eventually how to interact with the world. They teach them the proper ways to speak and act towards women. They teach them about the importance of family. They teach their sons love, and what that word really means against the supposed images and representations of it that crowd the media. This last lesson is important, the most important, because as Noah’s biography demonstrates that love is what helps develop people into the individuals they are and instills in them their ideals and moral constructions.