Grace will lead us home
It seems there are quite a few movies about Africa coming out these past few years: Hotel Rwanda, The Constant Gardener, Blood Diamond, The Last King of Scotland, to name a few. I’ll generally see anything that has to do with Africa, because I’m amazed by the history, richness, resilience, sadness and tragedy all mixed up into one big, huge, gigantic, amazingly diverse continent. In the West, we are taught that Africa is a huge messy mass of hopelessness. It is much more than that, just as you’ll hear from anyone who has been there. My mom’s friend told me years ago that “Africa changes people” and I thought it sounded silly and perhaps overdramatic. He was right because I’ve never been the same since and certainly wouldn’t be doing what I am doing now if my eyes hadn’t been opened a bit while I was there. Hopefully these movies coming out show some of the complexities and beauty of Africa.
We’re living in interesting times, when everything tragic looks very black and white and is distinctly historical, but the issue of now are overwhelming and ‘oh wait, didn’t I have something to do? Oh look someone is instant messaging me’. Hey, I am not above such distractions, at this point, I need distractions to keep trying to anything that is good in this world. I think I may need more of them, or perhaps some more faith, because I sometimes have nightmares.
The movie ‘Amazing Grace’ is the story of many men who worked together, for years, to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire. It is so simple now to regard the whole practice of slave trade as horrible, obviously wrong and clearly a human rights issue, but it was very much an economic issue for the empire. Economics are usually more important to superpowers than human rights.
The largest stories in this film were of two very spiritual men whose lives were called to fight against the slave trade.
William Wilberforce, a member of the British Parliament, spent years fighting for abolition and when he was older and quite ill, he finally saw this goal accomplished. Albert Finney, always amazing, played John Newton, the man who wrote the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ and who possibly inspired William Wilberforce to think of slavery in a different way than the status quo by telling him as a boy that he had 200,000 ‘ghosts’ in his church, from the slaveships he had once owned. Towards the end of the movie, the character tells Wilberforce, in his old age and completely blind “it’s true, I was blind and now I see”.
The power of popular thought and intertia and most of all, of power itself, should never be overlooked. Horrible things still occur today and hopefully there are still patiently impatient people fighting for these causes. Not just because there may be a big movie made about them someday, but because we are human.
Youssou N’Dour, Senegalese musical SUPERSTAR, did a wonderful job in this film playing Olaudau Equiano, a slave who was taken to the West Indies and then lived in London and although he died in his sleep before abolition, was very key in the movement.
http://www.theamazingchange.com/
This is a website containing more information about human rights causes that should be noticed today. Children are taken and turned into child soldiers, people die of AIDS while their leaders tell them they have a cure, genocide continues on in Sudan while everyone looks away, people are hungry and the Sahara grows larger every day. We all owe Africa at least a few thoughts, because it was ripped apart by the colonists and the wounds still have yet to heal. And also because, well, we are human.
I give this movie an 8 out of 10, it was lovely and educational and should be shown in history class, but it was also long and drawn out and the, parliament wigs were funny lookin’.
