Congo Calling invites us to discuss the concept of 'Africa', and critically engage with European (and US American, and other privileged) modes of imagining and acting in 'Africa'. It is thus not related to this specific course session, but to the whole course, and to the very idea of 'studying Africa' and being a student of social anthropology.
Although part of the ‘African’ season of the SAI Cinema, the film is not primarily about 'Africans', but about expatriates - the likes of Max Gluckman's 'Zululanders' - who work in and on Africa.
If we take seriously Gluckman's once revolutionary call for social anthropologists to "analyse scientifically the social life of modern [humans], indigeneous and immigrant" , the figure of the expat should have a place in African studies, as protagonists of colonial continuities, but also on account of the 'unbearable lightness of expats' that Peter Redfield wrote about (speaking of MSF, 2012), and because of the models of social and economic life that expatriates embody to many of us, and their impact on citizenship and social participation.
Congo Calling is a patient, empathetic but clear-sighted if not disillusioned film about three people of European and American origin, who work in Eastern Congo in the present. It gains its strength from its lack of commentary and, it might seem, judgement.
The main protagonist is an eventually highly successful, North American male social science PhD student during his doctoral fieldwork. His portrait is flanked by that a young female Belgian emergency worker, and a very elderly German, recently unemployed ex-aid worker who eventually has to return to Berlin, where he and his wife work are refugee activists. The film is about white privilege – not least academic privilege – about imaginaries of aid and about helplessness, futility and harm, success and failure - which in the end might not seem to be what they are.
The film has been screened at major festivals and won numerous documentary prices - and apart from doing what any good ethnographic film should do - making one wonder what it is to be human - it can truly make you wonder, as social anthropologists et al., what exactly it is that we think we are doing in ‘Africa’ (and indeed, what ‘Africa’ is to us). At a recent screening in a UK University town, students and faculty kept discussing these questions for an hour or more after the screening, and a local Professor of African Anthropology suggested that it was a must-see for future Africanists, if they still are to be found. This might be true or not - we can discuss it after the screening for the filmmaker, Stephan Hilpert, who kindly agreed to join us online.
The trailer gives quite a poor impression of the film's actual quality (in the opinion of Wenzel, who suggested it), hence please take this review as a primer.