Teaching Africa Through Movies: How to Distinguish Between Reality and Construction?

Referring to movies in International Relations (IR) courses has been an interesting and a dynamic way of teaching in recent years. Watching and interpreting movies in certain contexts such as IR theory, political history, or regional studies are certainly more intriguing for students than just reading without any images in their minds. Though this method can be considered a more interactive and enjoyable way of teaching and learning, it has a weight of its own, which is the power of constructing reality in the discipline. Either fictional or non-fictional, movies have the power of creating images and settling them into the minds of the audience. Therefore, from a constructivist point of view, it can be argued that movies are not only the means of constructing reality for all of us, but also, when they are used as teaching tools, one of the means of constructing IR discipline, how it is taught and how it is learned. This paper aims to point out this constructing power of movies in teaching IR, taking the example of Africa as a case study. Africa has not been considered an actor itself but a weak and marginal continent in international politics, and a poor and under-developed geography in the eyes of the most people. Even though it has started to attract attention recently in international politics, academic literature on Africa is still limited, and Africa is not a popular touristic destination. That is to say, for an ordinary student/lecturer/person, Africa has still been an unknown place to a great extent. In case movies are used as supplementary materials in courses related to Africa, the students encounter with the most common themes used in these movies such as poverty, war, ethnic clashes, child soldiers, and lack of help from other modern and powerful states. As the complementary characteristics, some movies depict beauty of the nature, colorful clothing and joy of the people despite the hard conditions in Africa. In this context, the paper aims to raise questions about constructing the image of Africa through movies in IR courses. Do we produce negative stereotypes with these films about Africa? Do we construct Africa as a poor, pre-modern, violent continent? Do these movies represent the whole continent? How do we know the differences between various African countries? What kind of images do we construct with these movies and what do we expect from students after watching these films about Africa? To what extent do movies about Africa help to teach Africa in IR courses? Rather than finding certain answers, the paper seeks to discuss the relation between the reality and its construction through the movies in the case of Africa, and to question whether these movies serve to the aims of the IR courses.