More Films About Africa

I have been watching some more recent films about Africa.  I heard about one in a recent Atlantic article about Jack Abramoff, the powerful lobbyist sent to jail some four years ago.  Abramoff, with funding from the pre-Mandela South African government, helped to create the anti-Communist film Red Scorpion, which was a bomb at the box office and hardly approaches great art.  But the film--evidently intended to undermine support for the ANC--is very typical of its genre in showing how a wise and simple African man from the bush tutors a lost and alienated soul.  The redeemed soul in this instance is a nearly superhuman fighting machine who has been cast aside by the Russians and tortured by the Cubans.  (The film isn't long on subtlety.)  He gets his revenge--and serves black Africa--by kicking the living snot and a lot of other bodily fluids out of the Communists.  "A Far Off Place" is much less violent film that appeared four years later, in 1993 (and features a young Reese Witherspoon) that follows some of the same themes.  In this case it's a jaded teenager visiting from the U.S. who learns wisdom from a bushman.  These films show black Africans in much more favorable roles, on the whole, than their counterparts from the 1940s did, but the major black characters are always noble, never interesting or dynamic.