On Acts of Devouring: Days of Cannibalism
Days of Cannibalism (2020) by Teboho Edkins is situated at the intersection of the Western and the documentary―a hybrid of genres that combines the aesthetic of observational vérité with a meta-commentary on power and its many negotiations. The film focuses on an emerging China-Africa relationship in rural Lesotho, an enclaved country in South Africa. Inhabited by traditional cattle breeders, the arrival of Chinese immigrants―in their body, tongue and trade―causes seismic shifts in the ethics, politics and logic of the former. A trade-based economy, they hold their cows in high regard, labelling them the “Wet-nosed god”―a sentiment that has its genesis in the animal’s currency as community wealth in the Basotho culture. A particular scene in the film records two natives sentenced to ten years in prison for stealing (and selling) cows, thereby violating the legal precedents of Basotho culture. This sets the premise for understanding the changes brought on by the influx of Chinese immigrants in the region. Having also taken to the trade, the Chinese are looked down upon by the locals for not caring after the cows in accordance with the norm. The filmmaker reflects on these conflicts between host and guest along with a radio-jockey at the local station whose rhetoric progressively gravitates towards the need for harmony in the vein of assimilation of the Chinese body.
Neither culture carries the weight of its colonial past in their interaction with each other, nor can the Chinese be seen as traditional settlers. They are individuals moving to Africa in search of opportunities―a reality true of many communities that are positioned at an economic disadvantage across sociocultural contexts. They are seen building factories and exploiting former miners from the area for cheap labour, as the latter hope to work in the employ of Chinese entrepreneurs to avoid penury and crime. But the reciprocal hostility causes friction in Lesotho as it does in China, the minority body in either context is subjected to racial abuse and condescension by the respective residents. In the Thaba Tseka district of Lesotho, the conflicts are stark, as an integrated understanding of the economy and religion now stands against the utilitarian and transactional ideology of the immigrants looking to make space on the terrain. The latter are seen engaged in mahjong, billiards and banter, having retreated into affirming micro-pockets. Despite attempts at assimilation, the Chinese are regarded as foreign to the pastoral economy and its ancestral persistence. The microaggressions gain in velocity, and culminate in a sequence of CCTV footage that records an armed robbery of a Chinese-owned store. A conclusion to the ethnic fractures in low resolution, the incident on camera is a reaction to what is perceived as the predatory presence and expansion by the Other. Even among the Chinese, there looms a threat of infiltration of more of their peoples, which increases anxieties around potential competition.
Cannibalism then refers to how each culture devours not only the Other, but also their own in order to secure survival and establish an anchor. The film makes use of tropes from the genre of the Western―bare, expansive landscapes, cattle rustling, banditry, and the arrival of stranger(s) that disrupts the local way of life―to craft an image of the ethnic conflict that has consumed Thaba Tseka. With cultivated access and trust of the local community, Edkins filmed the arrival of Chinese immigrants in the region over four years, capturing the evolving relationship between the cultures in a frontier space. The Western genre resists narrative monopoly; no event is definitive and rules are in constant flux, thus speaking closely to the precarity of the circumstances in Thaba Tseka. The documentary impulse of the project is thus informed by the tools of the Western, as it explores power dynamics at the margins of global capitalism. But the director also problematises the distinctions inherent to the genre, and refuses a moral stance on the subject. Devouring the Other denotes violence, but also illuminates an intense physical and erotic contact through which the distance between the bodies is compressed. In conflict, the cultures in question are attempting to resist erasure by either claiming or reclaiming space from the Other through an entanglement with them. The bodies thus consume each other in new orders of miscegenation, staged against the drama of bovine ownership and conditions of disruption.
Days of Cannibalism is screening online till the 14th of November as part of the Dharamshala International Film Festival 2021.
All images from Days of Cannibalism by Teboho Edkins. 2020. Images courtesy of the director.
To read about some of the other films playing at the festival, please click here, here, here and here.
