Belgium became its own independent territory in 1831, a diverse space made up of German, Dutch and French cultural and linguistic presence. It became a parliamentary monarchy, and the throne was offered to Leopold I, a German prince from a small territory whose connections to the British Empire would bring balance to the region and avoid conflict with the surrounding monarchies.
During the Late nineteenth century, his son, King Leopold II, became determined to possess a colony in Africa like his fellow European empires. In Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost (1998), we learn how through a series of skillful manipulations carried out by the creation of philanthropist organizations, in 1885, Leopold was ultimately granted the Congo Free State as a private possession to be inherited to Belgium upon his death.
The Belgian Congo turned into one of the bloodiest and brutal colonist governments to set foot in Africa, unflinchingly exploiting the natural resources and inhabitants of the area. The presence of rubber vines made extraction much quicker in comparison to rubber plantations (which come from trees) and the colonizers enslaved the population of the Congo in order to obtain this precious material. Men were ordered to go into the jungle and fill a daily quota of rubber as their families where imprisoned as collateral. Those who failed to meet the high standards imposed by the government had their family members maimed and mutilated, including children.
This is the historical context of Emma De Swaef’s and Marc James Roels’s film This Magnificent Cake! (2018). Divided in five distinct chapters that follow different characters and their experiences in this territory It is a forty minute film that tells short stories that occur in or around the Belgian Congo during the late nineteenth century.
The film was developed with wool puppets and stop-motion animation, using natural-looking lighting techniques that make the audience feel like they’re submerged in the scenes they are witnessing. The colors present a stark contrast between the cold European backgrounds and the tropical rainforest in the Belgian Congo, accentuating the differences between both spaces with the differences in the color palette in each region.
These well-executed visuals do not, however, save the dehumanizing narratives told in the film. Out of the five sections of the movie, only two are focused on Black characters, and both ultimately meet an untimely death in humiliating circumstances. The fact that the first story is about King Leopold II himself, sets the tone for this attempt at redemption for the white/European characters. We see Leopold as a sort of melancholy caricature, a quirky old man whose aspirations towards greatness are projected through his dreams during the night. We witness the moment he signs the consolidation of the Belgian Congo in 1885, in a scene that reiterates the brutality of colonialist and imperialist policies — the fate of an entire continent is decided in a Palace thousands of miles away between powerful white men. This moment is interrupted by something so absurd as Leopold getting the hiccups, and the group of men running to his side trying to suggest cures. In the filmmakers words:
“I think the way we do it with this kind of absurdist humor is a way of confronting the audience. The audience laughs and then they kind of feel uncomfortable about laughing. It’s kind of an interesting tension to kind of create in the spectator.”[1]
This made me wonder: — What audience is this for? Which spectators did they have in mind while developing these jokes and punchlines?
During Act II, titled “The hotel pygmy,” we follow a man from one of the African populations popularly known as pygmies, who works at a hotel as a sort of bellhop — even though he has an ashtray on his head and stands in the corner as if he were furniture. We briefly see him speak to a family member that visits him and the chapter ends when he is crushed by a piano that fell from a higher floor. The other Black character appears during Act IV, titled “The Lost Porter,” and it is a continuation of Act III, where we see a bridge collapse and a group of enslaved African people fall into a river. Act IV also treats the plight of the only surviving man in this group with humor — the moving moment when he speaks to the head of one of his fellow workers ends when he is startled by a noise and slips into the river once more.
Both of these narratives may attempt to lighten the situations as the filmmakers explained, however, as a Black person I was insulted by the humiliation they make these characters go through. In the brief time they are on screen, we only see them through the white/European gaze; they are never more than a side-note or an accessory that serves to develop the stories of their white counterparts. The film transmits a racist image of Black bodies in the Belgian Congo; for they are not even allowed their humanity. They may speak, or move on their own, but they are not in control of their lives. people that invaded their territory dispossessed them even of their identities, turning them into caricatures as well as furniture (figuratively and literallly)[2]. The filmmakers’ explanation of their creative process helps us understand why these biases appear in their film:
“And of course, our country, where we’re from — Belgium has a very interesting colonial history that’s not talked about very often, at all. So when we started doing a bit of research into our countries’ history we realized how much we didn’t know about it and how much is swept under the rug all the time.
Generally we’re attracted to these kinds of subjects that have a tension in it…we thought this was also a very kind of tense and ambiguous subject that would be interesting to talk about in a very interesting setting when people go to these colonies. Who is it who go there? What are their intentions? And how do they behave once they get there? We thought it was an interesting setting.”[3]
The authors use of the term “ambiguous” is not clear, but it is strange to refer to violent colonization as an ambiguous subject, particularly when it was as recent as the Belgian Congo. It may seem like a distant historical occurrence to De Swaef and Roels, so it becomes necessary to place it in perspective; this territory didn’t gain its independence until 1960, only 60 years ago. The creative process behind the film becomes increasingly problematic once we learn of the sources that the stories were based:
“We constantly do research, so everything is based on archive footage, photos, we’re reading a lot of diaries written by people, missionaries, back then. There’s a scene where all these kinds of porters plummet down from this bridge…Those are things that actually happened. And the fact that they were all chained together so…when you read it in the diaries, they aren’t considered a tragedy, they consider it more like an annoyance that they lost so much cargo. I always thought that this is a very strange kind of way of dealing with the fact that so many people have just died…its kind of absurd. So this kind of…this absurd kind of atmosphere and this idea that these people going to these colonies that didn’t have any kind of moral boundaries…there was no one to police them, they could just kind of do whatever they wanted. And it just creates this kind of weird, almost like a playground for them, they considered it as a playground. And it’s so absurd that there’s this kind of dark humor that we were interested in tackling.”[4]
Merriam-Webster defines “absurd” as “having no rational or orderly relationship to human life, lacking order or value” or “extremely silly or ridiculous”[5]. In this sense, considering the fact that racist and colonialist parameters have never considered Black lives as human, the absurdity with which the filmmakers portray their Black characters is not provocative, it is not an attempt to question the racist system these individuals faced during Belgian colonization; instead, it upholds it. This directly derives from the filmmakers willful ignorance. This racist view of African people could have been avoided if they had Black people on their creative team. De Swaef and Roels’ vague statements about their sources on the era clearly demonstrate that they only read the sources produced by white colonizers.
While the circumstances of the era make it difficult to find documented accounts of the inhuman treatment of African people went through in this territory told through their own, they are not impossible to find. Two Black men from the U.S., George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, traveled to the Belgian Congo in the late nineteenth century and interviewed many Africans about the treatment they received from their white colonizers[6]. So what motivated two white, South African and Belgian filmmakers to write and produce a film set in Africa during European colonization without including Black people in the creative process or as substantial characters in their story?
In contrast, the white/European characters highlighted in the film are complex, multi-layered individuals. They have highs and lows, they succeed and fail, and are allowed to explore their humanity in every space they inhabit (and invade) throughout the narratives. The last act, titled “The deserter”, tells us the story of Louis, a young man who is terrified of entering the military, and thus, decides to run away to the African colony his country has acquired, a space he has heard is rife with opportunities for young men like himself. He ends up more scared and lost once he arrives, and the story ends with him returning home in a sort of fevered dream (a hallucination, perhaps) with his parents warmly welcoming him home, tucking him in into bed.
During act III, “The fate of Van Molle” we witness a man run away to the Belgian Congo with his family’s fortune, spending it all on a large mansion filled with beer. It is during this act that the scene of the porters alluded to by the directors is mentioned. Van Molle drops food behind him on a wooden bridge and the enslaved man that is behind him slips and falls, dragging the line of men chained to him fall into the river. In the brief moments that he tries to hold on to the bridge, we see a single tear stream down his cheek, until he falls to his violent death. Meanwhile, Van Molle remains unphazed. The rest of the act focuses on this man in a cave within his mansion, where he befriends a snail with a human face, accidentally crushing it with a rock after some hours. Van Molle weeps inconsolably over the loss of his new found friend.
These stark differences infuriated me. The white/European characters were allowed to be fallible, to make mistakes, to be human every sense of the word. The world was their oyster, and they had adventures everywhere. Meanwhile, the Black characters seemed like afterthoughts. They were the butt of jokes, and there bodies were easily ripped apart on screen without a glimpse of compassion or emotion. Even though the directors/writers criticized the lack of emotion the colonizers showed when the people they enslaved perished violently, they emulated this point of view through their film. Van Molle’s mansion has a fence of human skulls surrounding it, and we see him use a coat hanger who’s hooks are made from (Black) human fingers.
The absurdity of the film resides in its complete obliviousness of itself. By treating every character with the same amount of humor, but a reduced degree of humanity for the Africans, the filmmakers ultimately perpetuated the racist violence that occurred in the Belgian Congo. Not only did they graphically show the horrors the white colonizers imposed unto them, they also killed the Africans point of view and ignored stories told by Africans themselves. They erased any possibility for the Black people in the story to be seen as anything but slaves, instead of enslaved persons.
This Magnificent Cake highlights the dire need for antiracism as a vital political standpoint, not only as filmmakers, but as human beings in general. While their intentions may have been positive, De Swaef and Roels perpetuated a racist point of view on colonial invasion.
Antiracism asks them — Why does the development of white Europeans have to come at the cost of African (and particularly Black) lives? Why are white narratives allowed a full range of emotions and complexity while we, as a people, are still perceived and treated as sub-human? More importantly, why must the lives of Black people — our bodies, our resources, our labor be the price for a better life for white people? Unfortunately, This Magnificent Cake! misses the opportunity to explore their question with depth and seriousness.
[1] CartoonBrew.com Official, “Emma De Swaef and Marc James Roels: On Making ‘This Magnificent Cake!’, Youtube, January 14, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBeH7Jo3kRs
[2] Hochschild details in his book how government officials placed skull of African people outside their houses as a warning to others not to rebel. The film shows this reference as well as a coat hanger made from the fingers of African people.
[3] CartoonBrew.com Official, “Emma De Swaef and Marc James Roels: On Making ‘This Magnificent Cake!’, Youtube, January 14, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBeH7Jo3kRs
[4] CartoonBrew.com Official, “Emma De Swaef and Marc James Roels: On Making ‘This Magnificent Cake!’, Youtube, January 14, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBeH7Jo3kRs
[5] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/absurd
[6] Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, Houghton Mifflin, Company, New York, 1998, p. 10
