Most history teachers would rightly wince at the idea of learning history through films. Similarly, few good literature teachers will ever accept a film as a proxy for a novel or play. The condensation, vulgarisation, artistic licence all oversimplify the facts and frequently misguide audiences into understandings of history that are wholly inaccurate and sometimes damagingly so.
As such, the clichéd post WW2 Hollywood productions of Biblical and Egyptian historical themes have impregnated minds with blonde Jesuses, white Cleopatras and Pharaohs. Worse, the earlier phenomenon of minstrelsy, which informed the first expressions of American cinema, created violent anti-Black stereotypes that for historians such as David Olusoga, were archetypal engines for racial prejudice. Similarly, glorified images of John Wayne shooting his way through Native Americans have drawn up a global collective unconscious of American history based on harmful stereotypes.
Life imitates art as Oscar Wilde once said. The truth of the matter is that while classroom and textbook efforts to educate students about history are important and formative, most people will have ideas about the past that come from movies they have seen, and few will be able to tell what is factual from imaginary. While historians and academics pore over manuscripts and archives, publishing articles on pedantic details of historical facts, the person on the street’s head is filled with a romanticised cinematic portrayal of the past: Russel Crowe, Colin Farrell and Joaquin Phoenix have written the popular history books.
We can fight against this truism, but where will that lead to? What if referring to popular media rather than ignoring it was a way of broadening education and understanding of the world? If our students are learning about the world through popular media, surely we should scaffold learning around that?
Recently I watched the Netflix series African Queens: Njinga by Jada Pinkett Smith. This documentary is about the mythic Ndongo Queen Njinga who resisted Portuguese slavery for decades in the early 17th Century. The documentary is based on academic research from Angolan Archives and the work of scholars from reputed universities. Importantly, the academic source material is from African and Black scholars, this being part of Pinkett Smith’s design to reappropriate Black history.
What struck me in watching the documentary was the tenacity, violence, greed and dishonesty of slave traders in the 1600s in Africa, who systematically and ruthlessly broke oaths and contracts, and the devastating impact on Angola of what they did. The Slave Trade remains a dramatically undertaught subject in history lessons. Worse, in some American states, such as Florida, the so-called benefits of slavery are being taught in the history standards. Relativists will compare it to other forms of slavery, pointing out that there are more slaves today than ever (there always have been but we have greater access to information today, that’s the difference). Make no mistake, up to 20 million people (probably more) were killed or displaced through one of the worst episodes of human history, and the scars remain. Films like Njinga are important, and should be watched as they relay the emotional and social violence of the times.
At the same time, I experienced a parallel biopic encounter with Napoleon, portrayed by Ridley Scott through a lens of sweeping frescoes like paintings by Jacques-Louis David. Here was a quite different experience, unlike Njinga, the untold story upon which light would be shone, here was a famous “great man” of history being narrated in an established blockbuster format much in the vein of traditional Hollywood depictions of the well beaten path. What struck me was less what was told (famous and heavily recounted events such as Napoleon’s coronation, his relationship with Josephine, the battles of Austerlitz and Waterloo) but more what was not told (pillaging of artworks across Italy, known as “i furti napoleonici”; grand scale theft of Egyptian treasures and his 1802 reinstatement of slavery). And at the same time, there was the contemporary obsession in biopics to deconstruct “heroes” by exploring Freudian or Jungian personality themes – all these “great men”, it would appear, suffered from some sort of narcissism, sexual frustration or neuroticism. Is this not more of the cult of the personality, drenched in postmodern psycho-sociological dogma?
The Brazilian pedagogue and philosopher Paulo Freire pointed out in his 1968 masterpiece Pedagogy of the Oppressed that historical narratives would change through time but would ultimately have to be rescued by a humane discourse that would almost certainly come from the oppressed themselves, who would reappropriate their own narratives. He also advocated for an educational journey that would take place outside of classrooms, in households and community centres. This is where the popular narrative would form a world view.
Watching Njinga, and reflecting on Napoleon, makes one think about what we teach, why we teach it, which stories should be told, through which media and why, and what representing the past means for the present and the future.
(image from wallpapers.com)