Colonialism: pretty bad news, right? Ever since ol’ Cristoforo Colombo “discovered” a landmass that had been known to humanity for centuries, we white people have demonstrated a real knack for taking land away from non-white peoples and claiming it as our own. Though some nations have been able to organize and successfully secure their own sovereignty, many countries have been economically and sociopolitically gutted by foreign interests. Our beloved United States is something of an odd bird, having learned nothing from our own experiences as a colony and now doing the exact same thing, only worse, to other countries around the globe. (In retrospect, it’s kind of adorable that taxes were the atrocities spurring American troops to revolution back in the day.)
Documentarian Hubert Sauper has no intention of sitting idly by and watching as superpowers exploit the natural resources of impoverished nations for profit, leaving the local cultures mangled in their wake. In his new documentary We Come As Friends, Sauper focuses on the 2011 “liberation” of South Sudan into a sovereign nation. As soon as the South Sudanese had earned their independence, American and European organizations began strip-mining the country for its natural bounty. Freedom, it would seem, does not make a country as free as one might imagine. Following through on his critical overfishing documentary Darwin’s Nightmare, Sauper continues to fight for that which is right and good in this wretched world. Consider how we are all implicated in this tangled network of international iniquity, and check out the trailer below:
The trail of the tape
Title: We Come As Friends
Director: Hubert Sauper
Screenwriter: Hubert Sauper
Cast: The shameful legacy of Western colonialism
Release date: August 14, 2015
The entire trailer in one line of dialogue: “Africa: It was where humans originated, and then much later, it was discovered, over and over.”
The entire trailer in one screengrab:
Even in the trailer, Saupert underscores the crucial point that colonialism is a cultural force, not just an economic one. When American interests flooded South Sudan in the wake of their independence, they weren’t just hungry for money. The enlightened white man (shouldering the same burden posited by Kipling decades ago) simply had to spread the gospel of Christianity to the African savages. It’s ethnocentrism in its purest form, arrogance inflated to a national level. If a two-minute trailer gets my blood boiling like this, then the full feature should stir quite a controversy when it make a theatrical run in August.