“Why the World Needs African Wildlife Filmmakers”
That is the question Dr. Paula Kahumbu, a Kenyan conservationist asks in her CNN opinion piece. Dr. Kahumbu herself has created a local TV series about Kenyan wildlife and conservation. At first the show was broadcasted just in Kenya, but it is now starting to reach other African countries such as South Africa and Nigeria. Dr. Kahumbu highlights some of the historical underpinnings of traditional wildlife and conservation work and filmmaking, which provide the context for her assertion that more indigenous filmmakers and environmentalists should have their voices platformed within conservation discourse.
One concept that is key to understanding the problem that Dr. Kahumbu outlines is the gaze. The gaze was a term that was first coined by the French philosopher Foucault (1973), who was describing the power dynamics involved in a physician observing a patient. Since then, scholars in other fields have applied the term to different instances of power imbalance in representation. For example, the esteemed African American writer Toni Morrison identified the white gaze as the lens through which African Americans and other people of color in the United States are viewed and represented within dominant American literature and media. A concept that is very similar to the white gaze is the colonial gaze, which identities the viewing relationship between European colonizers and indigenous people during colonial encounters.
You may wonder what all of this has to do with environmental filmmaking today. However, nothing exists in a vacuum. Media and practices of media making continue to be influenced by their origin stories. Centuries earlier, when Europeans first started traveling across oceans and “discovering” new lands, they wrote accounts of their experiences, which they presented as factual depiction of Reality. Yet their observations and interpretations of lands and their inhabitants were filtered though their ideology of European racial superiority. The discourse in early travel accounts was used as justification for the colonial project. Lands where indigenous people lived in harmony with nature were described as virgin lands that needed to be pillaged and civilized (of course the gendered language here also cannot be ignored).
Ironically, centuries later, when the West finally woke up to the harmful impacts of human activity on the climate, it once again borrowed from colonial discourse to fix the issue Western culture created in the first place. In other words, the colonial project aimed to “civilize” indigenous people and created industrialized economies across the globe. Now that a lot of indigenous practices of protecting the earth were systematically destroyed, contemporary Western conservationists are coming back to postcolonial nations to save the day and educate “the natives” about conservation. As an Ethiopian teenager living in Tanzania, the most prominent conservationist I knew of was Jane Goodall. She came to my high school to give a talk. But I never learned the names of African conservationists who were just as influential in the conservation movement. Dr. Kahumbu points out how traditional conservation films that are produced by Westerners and marketed to a Western audience, paint indigenous communities as the villains who are failing to protect the environment.
Dr. Kahumbu’s work aims to reclaim this Eurocentric narrative and reinvigorate African interest in the conservation movement. She and other voices within the African conservation movement point out how a lot of local Africans never set foot in the national parks of their nations because national parks are mostly marketed towards international tourists who will bring the most revenue. I myself never visited a national park in my own country in Ethiopia. It was only when I was living in Tanzania as a foreigner that I got to visit multiple national parks and learn about the diversity of wildlife on the continent. Hence Dr. Kahumbu’s TV program, which reaches about 50% of the Kenyan population, aims to help Kenyans fall in love with the wildlife around them. Dr. Kahumbu speaks of Kenyan children who, thanks to her work, are now realizing that conservation work is a viable profession to be aspired to.
To bring the argument full circle, I would like to point out that Dr. Kahumbu was not the first major African environmentalist to lead local movements to preserve the health of our planet. In fact, another Kenyan scientist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. Wangari Maathai, had started the Green Belt Movement decades earlier. Yet unlike Jane Goodall, the general public in the global audience barely knows about her contributions. Therefore, if you are a Western environmental filmmaker, there are a number of questions you can ask yourself to examine whether you are perpetuating colonial tropes in environmental filmmaking. The most important question is, whose perspective are you platforming in your films? How do you portray indigenous people and their role in environmental work? Do they have agency in the story you are telling? But beyond that, if you are in a position where you get to train or mentor the next generation of environmental filmmakers, you can do even more to make sure indigenous filmmakers receive the opportunities and the support they need to succeed in making their voices heard.
Note: Ideas expressed in this post were informed by the sources listed below. If you would like to delve deeper into the ideas explored or the people mentioned in this article, please follow the links provided below. Please share this article with your circle. We would also love to hear your thoughts on this topic so you are encouraged to leave comments below.
Further reading on Dr. Paula Kahumbu’s work and philosophy
Articles:
a. Opinion: Why the world needs African filmmakers — from CNN
b. A Kenyan Ecologist’s Crusade to Save her Country’s Wildlife — by the New Yorker
Podcast Episodes:
a. Whose Story — by the BBC Earth podcast: via Spotify | Apple Podcast | Acast
b. Meet Dr. Paula Kahumbu — by the Nairobi Ideas podcast: via Spotify | Apple Podcast | Sound Cloud
c. Changing the hearts of a nation with Dr. Paula Kahumbu — by Xploring podcast: via Spotify | Apple Podcast
d. Defending African Wildlife with Paula Kahumbu — by Princeton’s All for Earth podcast: via Spotify | Apple Podcast | Podcast Website
e. Paula Kahumbu: Saving Africa’s wild spaces — by BBC’s HARDtalk podcast: via Spotify | Apple Podcast | BBC Website
Further Reading on Dr. Wangari Maathai’s work and philosophy
Podcast Episodes featuring or about Dr, Maathai:
a. Wangari Maathai: Marching with Trees — by the On Being Podcast: via Spotify | Apple Podcast | Podcast Website
b. Resistance | Day 13 | Wangari Saved Planet Earth — by the GirlTrek’s Black History Bootcamp: via Spotify | Anchor | Podcast Website
References
1. Brewster, J. (2015, April 25). Hollywood: The power of the white gaze. HuffPost. Retrieved October 14, 2022, from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hollywood-the-power-of-th_b_6738578
2. Columpar, C. (2002). The Gaze As Theoretical Touchstone: The Intersection of Film Studies, Feminist Theory, and Postcolonial Theory. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 30(1/2), 25–44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40004635
3. Cooper, A. (2022). The american abroad: The imperial gaze in postwar hollywood cinema. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional.
4. Fischer, K. (2002). The Imperial Gaze: Native American, African American, and Colonial Women in European Eyes. In N. A. Hewitt (Ed.), A companion to American Women’s History. essay, Blackwell. Retrieved October 14, 2022, from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/aul/detail.action?docID=214121&pq-origsite=primo.
5. German, K. M. (2013). The European imperial gaze and Native American representation in American film. In P. Varner (Ed.), New Wests and post-wests: Literature and film of the American west (pp. 186–206). essay, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Retrieved October 14, 2022, from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/aul/detail.action?docID=1477555.
6. Lewi, R.N. (2021). How does the medical gaze change the way we understand ourselves and each other? [Unpublished paper]. Anthropology Department, School of Oriental and African Studies, Univeristy of London
7. Ntarangwi, Mwenda. Reversed Gaze an African Ethnography of American Anthropology. University of Illinois Press, 2010.
8. Pailey, R. N. (2019). De‐centring the ‘White gaze’ of development. Development and Change, 51(3), 729–745. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12550 Published on behalf of the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague
9. Stevenson, S. (2011). The Empire looks back: Subverting the Imperial Gaze. History of Photography, 35(2), 142–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2011.560454
