It's not an easy process, but it still needs to be done
dir: Rungano Nyoni
2025
Because I am a creature of habit, and of several dark habits, I feel compelled to point out that this is not the sequel to Kirsten Dunst’s one season series On Becoming a God in Central Florida, and that it has nothing to do with mid-level marketing schemes or cult leaders, either. Yet similarly, no-one turns into a Floridian God nor does anyone physically turn into a guinea fowl.
So both titles suffer ultimately from false advertising. In this instance, however, there is more of an explanation as to why one would aspire to become as such.
A young woman driving home at night, happy, after a dress-up party (where I think she’d gone as Missy Elliot?), sees a body on the other side of the road. She is driving somewhere on the outskirts of the capital of Zambia, being Lukasa. She is not distressed by the sight of the body, and she happens to know the body’s name.
She is neither happy nor sad that she has found her uncle Fred here. Maybe she even feels relieved. Out of nowhere a drunk appears and starts calling her by name through the car windows, but she ignores the woman, who recognised her, since they’re cousins, and also recognises the body, since he was uncle to them both. Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) likes to party, though, so death hasn’t seemed to bum her out, as she twerks to a song playing from her portable speaker, mere metres from the body.
There is no urgency; the cops tell them to not worry, it will be all be sorted in the morning; the initial woman, Shula (Susan Chardy) calls her dad, and he doesn’t seem to care, but hits her up for some money for a taxi ride to the site that he never takes. The call to her mother, the sister of the dead uncle, has a different effect, though.
These are all guesses on my part from here on out. I’m not going to pretend I know anything about Zambia, Zambian culture, or that much about any of the other 54 countries on the African continent, but when the processes start that cover the funeral rites of dastardly Uncle Fred, I have to assume that they’re standard practice around those parts. To assume otherwise would render the experience somewhat pointless. I’m not saying this is a documentary, since the main people are clearly actors, but there are a lot of people in this flick that I’m going to assume are not professional actors. Our lead Shula is clearly an actor, because she is poised, coiled, contained, whereas a lot of other people (performing some somewhat extraordinary actions) going through these rites are doing some crazy stuff.
It’s not that the rites are that complex. Nor is that much happening that you wouldn’t expect from a film that is depicting and straining against the patriarchal and chauvinistic structures connected to a lot of tribal culture (wherever the protagonists may be found). Extended family / tribe gather: the elder men / uncles sit around drinking and doing absolutely nothing; the older aunties bully the younger women to do all of the food prep and to wait hand and foot on the uncles, and the aunties, but pointedly not to cater to the widow of the deceased, because she’s not part of their tribe.
There is ritualised wailing; there are the women moving around in the main part of the house only on their knees, and all the women are expected to sleep in the main room together, on the floor, over multiple days.
Shula, and the younger cousins, are consoling themselves with alcohol, and with dancing around the edges of something that they have in common, beyond being related. It isn’t made explicit until much further into the flick, but it is obvious from the very first scene, and it’s about the copious amounts of sexual abuse the younger women of this family suffered at the hands of this vile dead man, and the multiple ways in which the aunties either failed these younger women, or could not protect them, or were complicit in the abuse.
We know Shula loathes this dead man from the very first scene, but there are the expectations, of serving the family, that she feels compelled to adhere to. She isn’t allowed the luxury of feeling her actual feelings, or even to console those of her cousins who share the same wound, because she keeps being told by her mother and her aunties not to say anything to anyone about anything.
Nsansa relates an unconvincing story to Shula about a time when the same dreaded uncle tried to rape her, and passes it off as a joke, as a bad bullet dodged, but the fact that she is drunk for 90 per cent of the movie clues us in to a later confession that she had made light of what actually happened. A younger cousin, Bupe, records a video of herself confessing to having been abused by this uncle, and it’s structured as a confession as if she is the one who committed a crime by being assaulted. It’s somewhat implied, but not made explicit, that out of shame she has taken something in an instance of self-harm, but it’s referred to as her being “sick”.
Bupe’s mother watches the video, and then hurriedly urges Shula not to breathe a word to anyone.
When Shula confronts her drunken fuck-up of a father, at some strange kind of party happening in a swimming pool beneath a, um, library? he asks her if that uncle (no relation of his) did anything to her, and Shula answers no, even though we know she’s lying. When she asks her mother if she ever told her father about what she’d confided to her (back when it happened), the mother politely asserts “but you told me not to, so I didn’t”.
So many blind eyes were turned, so many times, over so many years, allowing it to happen again and again and again, and all with the tacit acceptance of the aunties. Not approval, but acceptance that nothing would change.
For whatever reason, being that the oppressed sometimes find someone else to oppress in order to feel better about themselves, the hatred two of the aunties have towards Uncle Fred’s widow does not abate. Shula goes to visit them in the shack she lives in with her mother and her many children, and Shula asks basic questions with which to do basic mathematics with, questions no-one else bothered to ask, she figures out quite easily that her uncle was abusing this poor woman from the age of 11 onwards.
The aunties don’t care, they would happily see this woman and her kids, kids they’re related to, cast out into the dirt. This malice… is easy to see but hard to explain.
A meeting between the main tribe, the Uncle’s tribe, and the widow’s people, becomes a ritualised process, where the uncles decide their tribe has been insulted in several ways, therefore they demand payments, or that someone needs to beg forgiveness and express shame for misdeeds, which again is done in a ritualised manner. They also decide, with no evidence, that the widow was clearly a bad wife, and therefore they themselves will retain ownership of the shack and even the dead man’s clothes, and she and her kids will get nothing.
Like, fucking hell. If I hadn’t seen this happen before (in various films), I would have been shocked, but then you have to compare it to the appalling set of cultural expectations whereby a predator will predate upon his own family members, and everyone who’s an adult, male or female, won’t be concerned at all, because why bother? If woman aren’t valued, then where is the crime, they think? If they don’t even value each other, how can they protect anyone?
Is Shula the only one that can see it? No, we have to believe it’s not the case, but she’s the only one with enough distance to see that it is beyond not right. That the fact that her tribe have a seemingly middle class existence contrasted with the widow’s family’s comparative poverty doesn’t in Shula provoke feelings of viciousness towards the other, but she is only one member of her tribe, and not an “important” one at that, in that she is neither an auntie nor a man.
The price of maintaining this status, of being one of the allegedly (Christian) God’s elect, is of course the silence of women. It makes Shula’s blood boil, and the audience’s, too.
It may seem like I’m describing a film that is direct and melodramatic, but the flick is far more abstracted than what I’m making out. There are visual metaphors, of flooded floors that connect the women, both in seeming reality (at Bupe’s college dorm?) but also dreamt by Shula at the house, as if connecting and constraining all the women regardless of their status, yet it offers neither salve nor protection. And the central motif of the guinea fowl, and the “purpose” it serves on the savannah (that their call warns other animals of the presence of predators, thus perhaps putting the guinea fowl at greater risk, but protecting others) and how Shula wishes she could make that purpose literal within her own family, within society, yet it also ties into to her horrific childhood experience, and what she watched one afternoon to comfort herself.
The aunties, the wise aunties, they failed these young women, and yet there is a scene towards the end where they apologise (to keep them quiet) that is ambiguous to me in terms of whether it constitutes some form of genuine apology and reconciliation, or whether it’s just a continuation of the same fucking system. Shula, for one of the only times in the movie, seems genuinely moved, but it doesn’t change anything, and it happens just before the brutal scene when the aunties go after the widow and try to leave her destitute.
And yet during this climactic scene, Shula walks towards the feuding family, clutching one of the widow’s children, replicating the call of the guinea fowl as she walks, resolute that she will remain silent no longer, in order to protect the next generation…
Maybe it ends on a hopeful note. This was a pretty amazing flick, with a strong message demanding societal and personal change, at its core. It makes no apologies for the predators, but it does try to make its case that the victims of these belief systems extend well beyond the ones being abused.
It’s strangely compelling, and it benefits from the director’s insider/outsider viewpoint as someone from a Zambian background who’s also grew up in Wales. She’s close enough to see the wrongness of these patriarchal systems, but sympathetic enough to see the wider impact on everyone (except the other uncles, for whom everything seems hunky dory). And she somehow sees a path forward and has some hope, which makes her a much, much smarter and better person than me.
8 times Uncle Fred should have been killed decades ago out of 10
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“This isn’t the time to point fingers and accuse each other of murder and witchcraft.” – sure it is, there’s no time like the present - On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
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