The ‘‘Great White” of Lambarene
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perhaps you give, but you don’t share.” It is Bissa who also points out to Schweitzer
that though he has seen thousands of African patients he made no attempt to
understand the African languages.
Schweitzer is unable to understand the changes in the African people that
came with independence. He does not attend the festivities to honor independence
day and he is shocked when Koumba returns, trained as a doctor and a lawyer, and
comes in the official capacity to take over the administration of the hospital.
Schweitzer’s response to independence is to retreat into his role as the “great white,”
and he becomes even less tolerant and more paternalistic and abusive towards the
Africans. He forms a relationship with the drummer who he has been trying to
drown out, but he is the teacher, not the student, never bothering to understand
what he may have learned from the African people in terms of music, language,
spirituality, or culture. Even this relationship is fraught with paternalistic overtones.
He buys a trumpet for the drummer and gives it to him. Yet, at the same time he
refers to him as “the tom-tom maniac.” The complexity of this post-colonial
relationship is rendered with great understanding of both sides. It is beautifully
orchestrated by the camerawork and design which places the drummer outside the
walls of Schweitzer’s colonial outpost, a prison of his own making, in a way, but
also a prison of whiteness and colonial privilege.
Schweitzer’s response to independence is to retreat into the past and
fervently deny that his status as colonial white great man is in question. At about
this time, Schweitzer isbeing considered for the Nobel Peace Prize. The arrival of
a white journalist, Ingrid Lombard (Elizabeth Bourgine), marks the arrival of post
colonialism in the world of Albert Schweitzer. For the first time, Schweitzer is
attacked and criticized for his behavior, but Schweitzer’s initial response is to
embrace the moment of the Journalist’s arrival as an opportunity for rebuilding
himself into the ‘'Great White.” Though at first he says there will be no photographs,
soon Schweitzer is posing as the “great white doctor” in a series of self-revealing
postures of nineteenth century photographic portraiture.
Schweitzer’s lack of respect for the African people is evident in the scene
in which he and the Joumalist use Africans as human props. Schweitzer and the
Joumalist pose a group of Africans in a boat with Schweitzer “as if returning from
a great trip.” This scene is a particularly important deconstruction of the politics of
ethnographic photography and imperialist control of images of African people. It
is a self-retlexive moment in a film that emerges from a decolonized gaze. To
suddenly switch to the colonizing gaze of the journalist’s camera is to jolt the
viewer out of the decolonized gaze and into a position of examining the positionality
of the colonized gaze. This is a deeply pivotal moment in the film, for it enacts on
the screen the remarks of Trinh T-Minh-ha, who writes that the goal is “not that
merely of correcting the images whites have of non-whites, nor of reacting to the