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Popular Culture Review
especially with regards to power relations, African history, and the memory of
white supremacy in post-colonial Africa.
In colonial films, whiteness has been presented primarily in the stable
forms of such figures as the “great white hunter,” the “great white doctor,” the
“great white civilizer” with occasional departures from these formulas and
completely inaccurate and self-serving portrayals. In this post-colonial African
film, however, whiteness is perceived and established by the African oppositional
gaze, and is dismantled of its privilege and its centeredness. Instead of observing
the “great white man” from the position of white first world privilege and political
positionality, the gaze is reversed and the ethnographic spectacle of the film centers
around the study of the perception of the “Great White” of Lambarene.
As Bassek Ba Kobhio notes, Africans perceive whites through a series of
notions that are perhaps as strongly defined as the notion of African-ness as
perceived by the white gaze. “Africans perceive whites as being caricatures,
theatrical, obsequious, affected, ruled by time in their everyday lives and by death
in the future” (press release, 1). Bassek Ba Kobhio both demonstrates this perception
and problematizes it in many ways in this film. The "'Great White" o f Lambarene
dismantles the colonialist version of the life of Dr. Albert Schweitzer (played by
Andre Wilms), and tells his story through the eyes and gaze of a young African
named Koumba (Alex Descas), who grows up under the care of Schweitzer and is
inspired to become a doctor like the “great white” man himself Schweitzer is
examined, therefore, from the point of view of a youth who grows into political
understanding and eventual conflict with the internationally famous humanitarian.
The film ends with the two men locked in conflict, their relationship defined by
post-colonial realities, and Koumba is left to bury Schweitzer in Lambarene with
honor, as if he had been a chief, as if he had been his father. Tellingly, Schweitzer’s
wife, Helene (Marisa Berenson) is almost entirely marginalized by the film’s
narrative, which treats her as a figure of absence throughout the film. In contrast,
Schweitzer’s and Koumba’s actions are foregrounded throughout the work, as
Schweitzer fails to comprehend his own unyielding colonial instincts, and Koumba
gradually realizes that he must strike out on his own to achieve true cultural
independence from the “Great White.”
Though whiteness is rarely examined in first world films, it takes center
stage in this extraordinary film and it is divested of its imperialist power. As Richard
Dyer notes in White:
The white spirit organizes white flesh and in turn non-white fles h
and other material matters: it has enterprise. Imperialism is the
key historical form in which that process has been realized. (15)