[The purpose of this article is to examine whether Western Films have any relevance to education and especially to the widening and spread of general knowledge. Its limitation is that it is based on personal experience. Therefore,it may or may not be useful to the discussion under way on education in Ethiopia.]
My task, first and foremost, is where to begin. A definition could be the most acceptable way of treating the problem. The difficulty is that definitions do not necessarily lead to thesolution of aproblem. Rather, they may lead to lack of agreement. At least, they can show the exact nature ofthesubject that people are either speaking or writing about,according to their supporters.
By Western Films I have strictly restricted myself to feature films mostly produced in the United States of America. When did they first set foot on the Ethiopian soil? As a child, I watched films in what is now known as Arada area where I grew up, though I was born not far from one of the regional capitals of the country.
Film tickets had a fee of 0.50 cents each. There were watchers at the gate tokeep children away. Cinemas were identified with microphones that used to be audible outside their halls. Inside, projectors were placed behind two or three small windows on the topmost part of the wall for films to be screened for spectators below sitting on rows of chairs whose horizontal arrangementseemed diagonally misplaced. Naturally, late comers were guided by flashlight.
There was not a single Ethiopian film that used to be screened at that time. Practically all the films came from the U. S.A. I think the distributors were mostly foreign but stationed close to the country.
The predominant character of Western films is what is often described as action. There is always a fight in the interlude of the story of a film portrayed on the screen. The hero wins; the bad guy is defeated or dies. I think Tarzan was an exception. His challenger was the forest and the wild animals inhabiting it. I may have seen one or two films.
The attempt to make the chimpanzee as a friendly accessory is not easy to explain as the contrast between a very strong being like man and perhaps one of the smallest in the animal kingdom. This can be compared with fairy tale stories in our country. A baboon is always considered as a fool often outwitted by his next of kin. The definition of Tarzan is unknown to me.
Cow Boy films fall next in line for popular attraction. The hat and the pistol or the revolver are symbols of the struggle for survival amidst a peaceful environment where cows and horses exist. It seemed that theblue jeans spread fast in the fashion market in Ethiopia. A pair of jeans trousers cost 13Birr. That was about the same price as an arrow shirt which had the same trade mark as a parker pen.
Books that romanticized the Western Cow Boy life also existed alongside the films. A book that I did not read, but often kept among my collection was one entitled The Sombrero” which was Mexican in content but written in English.
Biblical themes featured prominently especially with the appearance of new film techniques like the CinemaScope. It must have added popularity to film actors such as Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren among woman and Robert Burton andVictor Matureamong the men.
Film stars came and went like Gregory Peck and many others like Syrney Poitier. Film companies that brought them to the spotlight included Columbia Pictures, the Universal, Warner Bros and MGM,.the full name of which I happened to forget but still remember the roaring lion as its symbol, if my memory serves me right.
Do the films help to teach the English language? I doubt. English is either spoken or written. As for speaking, American accents are not easy to catch. The writing aspect is hardly a matter for debate because writing involves constant practice which cannot be easily conveyed in feature films.
Can they teach geography or history? To a certain degree, yes. Ideas in social sciences can be absorbed easily. For example, the name Tulsa would have meant very little to me if I had not seen a film of a burning oil field. Colorado could mean nothing more than a name or even San Francisco or Los Angeles. Concepts and places such as Westerly Winds, cyclones, the Mississippi, the Rocky Mountains and the Niagara Falls,to me, would have not existed without feature films.
Empires and kingdoms would mean less than the way they are depicted in films. How different are the Middle Ages from the modern age in terms of ideas or custom? Answers could be found in feature films to questions based on geography and history.
Historically, the Greeks were the first to create the city state. They practised democracy by themselves and for themselves excluding slaves and barbarians. The long lasting conflict between the Athenians and the Spartans of whatever origin it may be led to their ultimate defeat by the Romans. Scientific principles such as those of Archimedes and philosophical concepts like those of Plato were said to have been preserved for succeeding generations by the Arabs.
This may or may not be true. But when one considers the study of Algebra, one is tempted to believe that it is true. Geometry is said to have started with land distribution on the Nile Delta. Again, this may be true or untrue. I have deliberately avoided the word false because in this case also what kind of contribution Ethiopia has made to the Egyptian civilization has not been explored.
In other words, education is a product of contact among peoples. There can be no better example for this than the use of tea or coffee irrespective of where it came from. To generalize the obvious, customs and commodities travel faster than humans.
With regard to transport and communication, the train and the railway provide ideas that help people cross frontiers and know other peoples and customs. Spreading general knowledge through films is one way of encouraging tourism both inside and outside the country. Knowledge is widened by direct contact with strangers and close neighbors.
There is no doubt that, without exaggeration, the corner-stone of building world peace is through greater understanding based on accurate knowledge partly nurtured by films.
The Ethiopian Herald Sunday Edition 1 September 2019
BY BERHANU TIBEBU ZEWOLDE
