When the Westerners leave
In several scenes of the movie Blended, starring Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore, an all-male singing group accompanies shots of the movie’s characters and punctuates the plot. “Welcome to Africa,” the group sings as families arrive at a resort in an unnamed African country. “We are blending!” they sing, as American stepfamilies participate in family bonding exercises. Terry Crews, an American football player, leads the singers in what looks like an addled recollection of a minstrel show. The result is a movie that presents an American idea of Africa, one that’s embarrassing and desperately in need of revision.
Blended’s producers should have looked at James Ault’s two-part documentary African Christianity Rising. Ault is an ethnographer and filmmaker whose 1987 Born Again offered an intimate portrait of American fundamentalism. He filmed in Zimbabwe and Ghana over a period of almost 20 years and depicts each country in its ordinariness. Each of the two parts leaves you with the feeling that you’ve been to the place—you can feel the dust on your feet.
One person Ault interviewed notes that Westerners have come to Africa to teach for millennia and that perhaps now they should come to learn. Ault does just that. He walks and talks with theologian Kwame Bediako through a former mission district in Ghana. We see the streets they walk on, the kids playing, the mopeds and the traffic jams, the banks and the billboards. This Africa is not made into an exotic myth. On the contrary, Ault narrows the view to one country, one town, and one specific history.
