|
On The Mark By With Alan Tacca |
Hollywood, Museveni and Saddam's porridge days
Dec 21 - 27, 2003
|
I have a thing about the human scale. A couple of weeks ago, I was watching Matrix Revolutions, a movie so bad that even at Cineplex's Wilson Road prices I felt cheated. It is amazing how an industry can use the devices of marketing and advertising to condition so many people to a desired mindset. To bring pretentiousness to a new level, one reviewer actually lamented that the Garden City premiere (of Matrix...) had been several minutes late, denying the audience the feeling of oneness with other audiences around the world! With the mind-bending budgets put together for pictures like Matrix... and Lord of the Rings, many commentators feel too small to recognise the trashy vulgarity concealed behind the endless flow of monsters, mechanical contraptions, "special effects" and arbitrary violence. The hype is so overwhelming that one fear it is "backward" not to enthuse over the production, and to find some exotic meaning or artistic merit in what are truly third-rate escapist exercises, the Oscars notwithstanding. It looks an awfully long time since the likes of David Lean showed us what to do with a story, good actors and a moving lens. The distance between the events in Matrix... and real life experiences is largely responsible for the impossibility of enlightened emotional involvement in the action. It is an ugly myth (and the central religious fallacy) that the enemies of man belong to another world, with attributes hardly comprehensible to us, and that our salvation lies in the hands of gods, or men and women who are superhumanly strong, intelligent or endowed with magical powers. And yet, in our own experience, we often encounter situations that seem to perpetuate that myth, and we should always sit up when something deflates it. First (for Ugandans) was the Museveni-Ruzindana controversy. Sunday Monitor journalists did a wonderful job, piecing together the reactions from former Fronasa guerillas to the missive in which President Museveni rubbished John Ruzindana's contribution to the wars that ousted Amin, Obote etc. The word "disgusting" had rolled out of the president's pen. Understandably, some of the former fighters dared not say much about the dispute, but those who talked left impressions that restored Museveni's wars to the human scale. For one thing, heroic as the total picture may be, it seems that the late Tanzanian President, Julius Nyerere, and the lords of Frelimo (which subsequently liberated Mozambique) did not think as much of Fronasa as we have been led to believe. Perhaps Fronasa's incursions into Uganda in the early 1970's had looked hasty and amateurish, only providing fodder for Amin's barbaric firing squads, and discouraging those who had nurtured and helped to feed and arm the organisation. If Ruzindana was away from action in the mid to the late nineties, it seems that no one else was seeing much action. Museveni was partly teaching. Others were toiling and scrounging in different ways. These apparently were very lean years, when the heroes who today look so brave and invincible were vulnerable, and before the number of egos was reduced to one. Women are wonderful. They save us from hunger, humiliation and death in ways we don't always fully appreciate, perhaps because not many enough of them wield spears to kill off our enemies. (Comrade) Chef Gayane tells the touching story of Mama Muhoozi (now Uganda's first lady) mixing jam and marmalade in her kitchen and personally hurrying to Karioko Market to sell her products to support the Spartan existence in Museveni's guerilla-station household. You can see how we are down to the human scale. But is there here also a hint of a lost opportunity? You, too, may be imagining. Supposing, on returning to her native land, Mama Muhoozi had built on her experience and set up a modest jam and fruit-processing outfit. Just think of all the fruits that rot in this favoured land! The project would already be a sprawling giant, augmenting the husband's political enterprise; and an example to the whole nation. Kananathan and Rosa Whittaker's Agoa dances or Gilbert Bukenya's rice schemes would have found us on a strong ladder, going up. The squabbling of former guerillas has shown us glimpses of a more regular-sized Museveni at the beginning of his quest for power. It has also indirectly explained why he was virtually unknown in Uganda even as Tanzanian gunners pounded Amin's forces in the 1978/9 war. In the Middle East, at the end of his journey in power, the pit that was Saddam's last hideout has brought the former dictator to truly human dimensions. Saddam of course believed that his life and journey was the very stuff of an epic. Indeed it is, if we remember that the greatest epic stories often end tragically. A cardinal in Rome (Renato Martino) was appalled by pictures of a US military doctor examining Saddam's teeth, "as if he was a cow". Well, sometimes you have to sink to the cowshed before realising how limited the human scale is. But it is the only valid scale. |
� 2003 The Monitor Publications
Yahoo! Messenger - Communicate instantly..."Ping" your friends today! Download Messenger Now
