Pseudo-Africanism in 'Coming to America': A Critique of Cultural Misrepresentation in Hollywood

             In Coming to America, we enter a persuasive discourse with Hollywood on the subject of Africa and its people. A few changes in orientation and the internally persuasive word becomes an object of representation (Bakhtin). Repeatedly, this film, a debauchery, crudely desecrates African architecture, language, naming systems, and styles. From a distance, Coming to America appears harmless, but to someone with a posteriori knowledge of what Africa really is, this film advocates the West’s attempt to keep Africa in a temps mort state of subordination: there is nothing modern about the ideology of Africa in it, despite being filmed in 1988 and representing the eighties, an era when Africa was already in a state of modernization. When telling a story about communities of color, filmmakers tend to completely ignore their histories and decontextualize their present realities (Yosso and Garcia).  

 

A misconstruction in signification is evident at the immediate beginning of Coming to America. At  the start, the camera hovers above a dark forest bereft of roads, dwellings, or even cars; the setting is devoid of the signs of modernization encountered in mega African countries like Nigeria, Ghana, or South Africa. This fictional country, Zamunda, is an Amazonesque landscape unrecognizable as a modern human habitat. Far off in the background of the ‘forest’ is a bright white structure noticeably, and ironically, elevated on a mountaintop, above everything else. Upon closer look, this structure mimics India’s Taj Mahal – except it lacks realism – it is Disneylandish and of no resemblance whatsoever to African architecture, past or present. Unsurprisingly, “one of the main observations about Disney’s representation of Others is that those representations are reductive or stereotypical” (Magee). As the camera zooms in on the structure, which we later discover is a palace, we observe a live parade of elephants, a constant manifestation throughout the film, as if to remind the audience that “we are indeed in Africa.” Upon entering the palace, the mixture of East and West is daunting. The interior is Oriental, reminiscent of the Bombay Hilton Hotel, while the amenities, electronics, and furniture are Western in design.  Disturbingly, this ‘African palace’ contains not an iota of African furniture, traditional art, or sculpture. The only indications of Africanism in Zamunda are Black characters in ‘African’ attire. This leads to the query: are pseudo-Africanistic costumes positive affirmations of African culture? Certainly not. “The surrogate does not substitute” (Derrida).

 

Coming to America contains a bevy of ‘African’ characters: Eddie Murphy as Prince Akeem, an archetype of the African male ─ he is youthful and muscular in appearance, with noticeable swag; Semmi, his personal assistant; King Jaffe Joffer, his father; Queen Aoleon, his mother; Oha, the head servant; and Imani Izi, Akeem’s future wife to-be. As an African by birth and thus sentient of the naming tendencies of Africans, I identify that besides “Akeem” and “Imani,” which are more Arabic in nature than African, Coming to America’s ‘African’ characters’ names are pseudo-phonic derivatives of African names, a distortion of Africa’s naming structure. Furthermore, the fictional name of Akeem’s country, Zamunda, a Victorian ‘Africa,’ is noteworthy. Interestingly, Africa seems to have more fictional countries assigned to it in literature and the media compared to Europe and America. Jim Carey’s film, Ace Ventura’s “Nibia,” “Kalubya” in Operation Thunderbolt arcade game, “Beninia” from John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, and “Kinjanja” of Sean Connery’s A Good Man in Africa are examples. Why do Hollywood and Western writers of fiction consider it more plausible to assign imaginary names to African countries rather than indulge in Africa’s truth? I blame the Conradian defamation of Africa and its people as “creatures” in a “God-forsaken wilderness” (Conrad) ─ “a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity into which the wandering European enters at his peril” (Achebe).

 

In “Dancing through the Minefield,” Annette Kolodny describes the effect of our prior reading experiences on our future reading choices and writing styles:

Frequently, our habits become fixed, so that each successive reading experience functions, in effect normatively, with one particular kind of novel stylizing our expectations of those to follow, the stylistic devices of any favorite author (or group of authors) alerting us to the presence or absence of those devices in the works of others, and so on. What we then choose to read ─ and, by extension, teach and thereby “canonize” ─ usually follows upon our previous reading. (1555-6).

Analogous to Kolodny’s assertion, with texts generated by the likes of Conrad and prominent philosophers like Kant and Hegel ─ texts parallelizing darkness of skin with inferiority ─ circulating in our mental orbits for decades, the memory of Africa as a repulsive place, undesirable, has been etched into the mind of the West to a point that filmmakers and writers would rather imagine Africa as what it is not than explore and narrate Africa for what it is.  As a matter of fact, “psychologists have found more generally that people remember the negative information more readily” (Entman).  And “popular culture is important to consider because throughout the world, a vast majority of significant education takes place in this realm” (Magee). With this in mind, I shudder to imagine, considering the West’s, America’s especially, limited indulgence in geographic studies, forty or fifty years from now, someone, a victim of entertainment hegemony, is convinced that “Zamunda” is in fact an authentic African country. Carol Magee writes in Africa in the American Imagination:

This informal education occurs through engagement with the cultural products that fill our lives. The music one listens to, the books one reads, the films one sees, can significantly impact and shape one’s politics and worldview.

Miseducation through the West’s substitution of the beauty of Ivory Coast’s vast plateau, the breathtaking mountains of Chad, the crystalline waves of Djibouti’s beaches, all, with pseudo-phonic, pseudo-Africanistic names conjured in a split second by a Westerner, in the name of ‘entertainment,’ who, if not for a Global Positioning System, can barely locate the city of West, Mississippi, screams slaughter of Africa and its culture. And since “a culture is to a community what a flower is to a plant” (Thiong ’o), Africa has been plucked, reduced to a barren tree bereft of color and spice, resembling a field of corps, once blooming, devoured by a swarm of locusts.

 

            Paradoxically, one thing Coming to America is in abundance of is ‘tradition.’ Characters don overtly exaggerated ‘African’ costumes; the women are dressed in either hypersexual jungle-style coverings with exposed midriffs (reminiscent of Tarzan and Jane) or in maternal frocks with clownishly bouffant headgears nowhere close to the regal gele headwraps worn by West African women. As for the male characters, their garments are divisible into categories based on hierarchy. Lowly servants wear 1940’s type colonial khaki uniforms consisting of a shirt and shorts, an example of Hollywood’s attempt to congeal Africa in colonialism. The following rank of servants wear derivatives of Western suits, and, ironically, so does King Jaffe Joffer, except his is boisterously adorned with medals, as if he were a gallantly decorated Vietnam veteran, topped off with a tawdry golden necklace more suitable for a nineties wishful American hip-hop rapper.  

            What I find peculiar is that while in Zamunda, in ‘Africa,’ Akeem and his assistant, Semmi, wear no recognizable African attires. Rather, they don Ralph Lauren Polo-esque riding outfits complete with leggings and leather boots ─ a style as disconcerting to Africa as wearing a friar’s frock to an atheists’ convention. The only male characters (not even the horde of male guests) who wear African clothing are a group of tuba and violin playing musicians; instruments that I am yet to witness played in Africa. They are adorned in dashikis with matching bent Yoruba fila(s) on their heads. The juxtaposition of cliché African apparels with European musical instruments is mind boggling.  Africa’s musical instruments consist mainly of drums. In Coming to America, we meet the absence of “speaking” djembe and dundun drums – their voices are silenced by Hollywood.

(Original essay is 40 pages.)

Works Cited:

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          Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2010. 

          1261-1273. 

            Bakhtin, Mikhail. “The Topic of the Speaking Person.” The Critical Tradition: Classic 

          Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Ritcher. New York: Norton, 2007. 578-594.

             Conrad, Joseph. “Heart of Darkness.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. 

           Abrams et al. New York: Norton, 2000. 1958-2017. 

Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” The Critical    

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Kolodny, Annette. “Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice,   

            and Politics of Feminist Literacy Criticism.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and  

           Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Ritcher. New York: Norton, 2007. 1550-1562. 

           Magee, Carol. Africa in the American Imagination: Pop Culture, Racialized Identities, and African 

                    Visual Culture. University of Mississippi Press, 2012. 

            Thiong’o. N, “Europhonism, Universities, and the Magic Fountain: The Future of African 

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