Colonialism has been a fact for centuries, but it’s only recently that it’s become part of the accepted history of the United States, a dark legacy that official figures like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton invoke as part of the long ago past. But as We Come As Friends, Hubert Sauper’s excellent portrait of the world’s newest nation, South Sudan, shows, the 21st century has merely been a new chapter in the history of colonialism, with changed forms and faces, but with exploitation continued unabated.
The south of Sudan occupies a central place in the story of colonial ambitions; coveted by the British as a way to hold contiguous territory from the North to South of Africa, and by the French to link their holdings from the East to West of the continent. Its status as a buffer between Arab North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa has come to the fore in recent years after long internecine conflict between the Muslim government of Sudan (headed for decades by Darfur war criminal Omar al-Bashir) and the mostly Christian South Sudanese, finally resulting in the South Sudan declaring independence in 2011. But decades of governmental neglect and a scarcely present economy have left the new nation extremely vulnerable to profit-hungry outsiders, who have already bought (or leased) 10% of the land. South Sudan’s foreign investment reflects the world’s new economic order, as the Chinese are among the largest players, satisfying their current and future energy needs and anticipating Africa’s emerging role in the future of agriculture.
We Come As Friends is an impressionistic affair, in which Sauper is making an argument by providing a surreal emotional experience with uncanny images, rather than by presenting facts. The precision lost in this approach is made up for by the lasting effect of the images. Sauper has a Herzog-like ability to capture indelible moments by holding a gaze a bit too long, or by swiveling to catch some previously unseen detail, like when the camera pans from the champagne corks of an all-white independence party to the black janitor picking up trash outside alone. One moment captures Chinese workers watching American sci-fi such as the Star Trek TV series and speculating on the ease of colonizing with superior technology. The Chinese do little mixing with the locals, which Sauper contrasts with the forced bonhomie that adopted by Americans (many of whom are missionaries, lured over by South Sudan’s explicit Christianity). Many of them profess good intentions, as in the title, but their comments can be cringe inducing, as in one case of a couple stating that the locals “loved it” when they built a house and fenced off traditional grazing pastures. But more than the foreigners, Sauper shows us the South Sudanese and allows them to speak for themselves. They have a well-earned cynicism to outsiders, but their lack of resources still makes outside aid for development hard to turn down. One of the film’s more hopeful scenes features a mother describing generations of deprivation and exploitation while insisting that each generation has grown smarter and wiser without forgetting, and she envisions a future where those children have taken power and used it responsibly.
