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colonial territorial mind by simply reversing the situation and setting up an
opposition that at best will hold up a mirror to the Master’s activities . . . the
question is that of tracking down and exposing the voice of power ’ (144).
The photograph session is followed by a dinner in which the journalist
begins a blistering verbal attack of Schweitzer, including criticism of his
administrative policies, his activities as a spy for the Germans in World War II, and
his brutality towards indigenous people. Schweitzer refuses to answer the journalist’s
allegations, but his trusted nurse, Berta, speaks for him, stating, “Don’t you punish
children in your country?” Here, Berta is exposed as a fervent racist, referring to
Africans as children. Later in the film, when she has been divested of all authority,
she shouts abuse at her former African patients. “Tell this white woman she must
respect us now,” an African man says in response.
The problematization of Berta and Schweitzer’s white paternalistic
missionary status as racist and paternalistic culminates in Koumba’s remark that
Schweitzer “only wanted to share in our hell in the hope of reaching heaven.” The
decolonized African will no longer tolerate being called a primitive or a native, nor
will he tolerate the white supremacist myth of the great white doctor/missionary
— and he deflates that myth and the man with this statement.
Ironically, upon his death, Schweitzer is made a panther prince and given
a proper African funeral. The African people are not trapped by the limits of
whiteness in the way that Schweitzer has been. The "Great White ” o f Lambarene
demonstrates the Pan African capacity for moving beyond cultural difference, while
recognizing it. Schweitzer, on the other hand, is seen as a dying remnant of empire,
trying desperately to hold on to a phantom authority he never really possessed.
Bassek Ba Kobhio’s film is thus a study in microcosm of the entire process of the
overthrow of the colonial presenc e within the African continent, and Schweitzer’s
presence within the colonial system is seen in a new light.
Far from being the bringer of wisdom and spiritual redemption, Schweitzer,
in his refusal to teach medicine to his assistants, in his refusal to learn the language
of the people he ostensibly serves, and in his brutal treatment of his patients, whom
he often operates on without benefit of anesthetic (see the opening tooth extraction
sequence for a devastating example of this), is the tool of a colonial government
which seeks to both enslave and degrade its unwilling constituents. The hagiographic
Schweitzer of Western colonial legend recedes from our collective vision, as Bassek
Ba Kobhio’s far more realistic portrait of the man emerges. In The "Great White ”
o f Lambarene, the historical record of colonialized Africa is re-written by those
who suffered under the oppression it imposed.
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster