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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Saturday, January 4, 2025

Approaching Southern Africa through images and performance

I approach teaching with the conviction either that most students of history, including myself, are visual learners or that learning is enhanced by imagery and performances. This semester I'm teaching two courses on Southern African history to students who know little about the region. I constructed a "Southern African Film Festival" to run parallel with these courses so that my students, and anyone else in the Tufts community, will have the opportunity to engage with the region's images. Many Southern African landscapes are dramatically beautiful, as are the region's diverse peoples. Anyone with even an inkling of the region's history, however, will know that some of its historical and contemporary images are dark and frightening. Presentation of imagery is not without risk, so we should take care about those that we promote.

The fact that television was never part of my daily universe may partially explain why I do not experience images on a screen as mere background. Once an image flashes to me, I carry it forever. The Vietnam−era film that included graphic torture of prisoners, "The Deer Hunter" (1978), should have taught me that lesson for good, but I foolishly allowed "Sophie's Choice" (1982) to confirm it. Predictably, around 2 a.m. on the day I am scheduled to give an important professional talk, I am awakened by the seduction to torture myself. My awake brain hovers around the deeply buried images those film planted, and it is all I can do to secure the integrity of the forty−foot−high and forty−foot−wide cement barrier that I constructed over the years between my consciousness and those images! By the time I fight off the hovering images, I'm too tired to get back to sleep. You know the feeling.

The films in this festival are diverse. Most are feature films located in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola and Mozambique, but some are documentaries. They range from the longish feature, "Cry Freedom" (1987), to the usual class−length documentary. They focus on events and dilemmas from the 1950s to the present and were produced and directed by people from Southern Africa, the United Kingdom, Portugal and the United States. Several illustrate the tendency to portray white characters as "saviors" of Africans, but the documentary films deconstruct that tendency. The range of films includes morality plays about the immense difficulties faced by AIDS orphans and sophisticated explorations of the feasibility of reconciliation and forgiveness in the aftermath of Apartheid and civil war.

As print books give way to digital books, we get closer to the possibility that historians might increasingly write in images and sounds as well as words. Indeed, as Shula Marks, one of the region's most noted scholars, once remarked, "Historians should be able to write in chords, for our very medium distorts our intentions with its linear imperatives." The festival is free and open to everyone; I hope you and your friends will attend.

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