NAIROBI, Kenya -- A leading Kenyan magazine Saturday called the smash hit movie 'Out of Africa' racist and said the Oscar-winning film depicts Africans as objects of derision.
The widely read Weekly Review rekindled a long-standing controversy over the $30 million Sidney Pollack production, which was filmed in Kenya, with a weekend review that said the racist film depicted Africans as less than human.
'The extent to which the African is held in derision as an inferior is clearly discernible,' the unsigned article said of the movie, which last week won five Oscars at the Acadaemy Awards, including the prize for best picture.
'It is naive to expect Hollywood to deal meaningfully with the reality of colonialism,' the review said of the movie, which depicts a 1920s love affair of Danish aristocrat Karen Blixen and her life in Africa.
The review said Blixen, using the pen name Isak Dinesen, wrote of Africans in her autobiography 'Out of Africa' as if they were animals and that her view was reflected in the movie. The film, which stars Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, was largely based on the book.
'For the most part, she could only understand Africans in animal terms ... No wonder then that none of the African characters in the film is developed,' the review complained.
The article was the latest in a series of critical comments by Africans about the film, which depicts Blixen's struggle to run a coffee plantation just outside Nairobi and her relations with local tribesmen and black servants.
While the movie was being filmed on location in Kenya last year, there were complaints that African film extras were being demeaned by requests to pose almost naked.
Indignant headlines also reported that the extras were earning less than 5 Kenya shillings, or 50 cents, a day.
A succession of writers also said Blixen and her story were offensive to modern Kenyans.
'Take it or leave it, there are writers of African and European origin who have thoroughly distorted the picture of the African ... The pioneers of the tradition include Karen Blixen ... at face value liberals but in reality downright racists,' said a commentary in the Kenyan Times.
But all reaction to the film and to Blixen has not been negative. Her farmhouse in the township of Karen, which was named after her, has been renovated and turned into a museum.
