I recently watched a film that was released in 2009, and as I sat down I wondered why I had never heard of it until a couple of weeks ago. After all the film was highly rated and advertised to have all the elements that generally send the media into promotional hyperdrive. It's a true story with racism galore and an oppressed minority fighting the government in ways that can only be described as heroic despite beatings and death threats from the racist majority. I'm not exactly immersed in contemporary culture so I thought perhaps I had missed all the publicity about it and didn't give matter much more thought.
As the film unfolded, however, a dark suspicion overtook me. I tried hard to fend it off, I really did, but I couldn't help it.
The suspicion was that the film didn't receive much notice because though it had all the elements that are catnip to the media, those elements just didn't fit the left's preferred narrative. The heroes of the story are white, and worse, the racists are black. The tyrannical government is actually putting socialist principles into practice, and, ensuring complete media silence about the film, the heroes happen to be Christians with a strong, unabashed faith in God.
The movie is a documentary, much of it filmed surreptitiously, of the horrific treatment suffered by white farmers in Zimbabwe at the hands of a clearly racist black government that's confiscating white-owned farms that have belonged to those families for generations and giving them to political cronies. The government, under the execrable Robert Mugabe, offers no compensation for the confiscated land and beats and/or murders those who refuse to leave.
One family, the Campbells, was resolved to withstand the intimidation, and the film documents what the elderly Campbells, their daughter, and their son-in-law had to endure as they fought their government in international court in 2008. Their courage, tenacity, and faith are absolutely remarkable, as is the almost preternatural absence of bitterness and desire for retribution against their persecutors.
It's a film that should be watched by those, like Nancy Pelosi, who think that it's racist to oppose Mr. Obama's policies. They may learn what real racism looks like. It would also be salutary viewing for some of our liberal academics who think that racism is an exclusively white malaise.
The film is titled Mugabe and the White African. Watch it with a liberal friend, especially if he or she is a secularist. It'd be a fun evening were the story not so terribly tragic.