Review of Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation

Greetings everyone! Last Thursday I was fortunate enough to attend the opening night gala for the Pan African Film Festival where I was able to see a special screening of Namibia: The Struggle for Independence. Knowing very little about African history and even less about the hardships of Namibia I had no idea what to expect from the film, having forgotten the brief synopsis I’d read the day before. However, considering that people such as Isaiah Washington and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had made it a point to clear their schedules in order to attend the crowded screening, I found that my interest had grown by the time the opening titles came on the screen.

Unfortunately, while I enjoyed certain aspects of the film, I found that my interest in the story began to fade sometime after the first hour, and this naturally affected my enjoyment of the movie as a whole since it clocks in at nearly three hours. There is a problem with continuity in the story, and it also seems that the filmmakers have attempted to cram too much factual information into the script, concerning themselves more with educating their audience than with entertaining it. (Of course there isn’t anything necessarily wrong with including lots of facts in a particular kind of film but when the film in question begins to feel more like a lengthy history lesson, it does make one wonder why the filmmakers didn’t opt to make a documentary film instead.) Had there been a bit less about facts and a little more character development, this might have been a more successful film.

The opening shots of the film immediately remind one of Binyavanga Wainaina’s essay “How to Write About Africa”. Wainaina writes, “There is always a big sky. Wide empty spaces and game are critical—Africa is the Land of Wide Empty Spaces.” The film opens with a shot of the teenaged Samuel Nujoma (future first president of Namibia) coming across a group of young boys singing a rebellious song about liberation. The sky features prominently in these early scenes and one gets the sense that Africa is indeed an enormous, wide-open space. The singing children are also herding their game along the seemingly endless stretch of desert sand and the audience is again reminded of the feeling of wide-open spaces, seeing that the children have miles to go before they reach their destination.

The editing of the story seems especially choppy when it comes to the development of Nujoma’s character. The story begins in 1945 when Nujoma is sixteen. The filmmakers then jump back to 1938 to give the audience a sense of what life was like under the oppression of the white South Africans, though this could easily have been done with bit of dialogue. Also, when the story takes a huge leap forward and Nujoma is suddenly a grown-up in the fifties, it is at first difficult to realize that this new actor is playing the same character the audience was introduced to earlier. Not only that but, as the story progresses, the cosmetic effects used to age Nujoma are almost laughably unrealistic to the point where they become distracting. (In all seriousness, the Santa Claus at my local mall probably had a more realistic looking beard than the one given to actor Carl Lumbly.) Given how far the film industry has progressed in terms of makeup and special effects, there is something inexcusable about a production team not being able to age an actor properly.

All of those complaints aside, there is a very satisfying feeling in *finally* seeing the Namibians gain their independence. In fact, the length of the film has a positive effect in that it emotionally drains the audience, giving the viewers a small idea of how exhausting it must have been for the Namibians to achieve their independence. By tiring its audience, the filmmakers are connecting this exhausting frustration to that which was felt by those Namibians who clamored ages for their independence. Had the filmmakers focused their energies on making the characters more defined and understandable, the audience would have had a clearer understanding as to the motivations of characters other than Nujoma, making the story more engaging, and the film more successful as a whole.