On Becoming a Guinea Fowl review - mordant seriocomedy about buried abuse

The writer-director of 2017’s I Am Not a Witch, Rungano Nyoni, has come up with another scorcher, this time taking aim at Zambia’s social structures, in which women’s power can become petty tyranny. Nyoni’s Zambian scenarios are populated with “aunties” and “uncles” and the occasional “grandma”. These titles designate the elders of the kinship group, the leaders who speak for the rest.

In the case of our heroine’s Auntie Christine, that means a non-stop stream of aggressive accusations. She and the other aunties are the arbiters of correctness in their extended family, the ones who take over the running of family occasions. But they in turn must bow to their menfolk.

Christine’s niece is called Shula, like the lead character in the earlier film, who was told her name denotes somebody uprooted. This is palpably true of the taciturn Shula (Susan Chardy) in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. She and her middle-class family coiuld almost be from different eras. When we first meet her, she is driving at night on an empty road, returning from a costume party dressed as an exotic clown in an inflated black onesie, topped with a diamanté headpiece that’s like a party version of the headgear on ritualistic figures she sees out of the corner of her eye. She is joined at the roadside by her slurring cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela, pictured below right, with Chardy), a blonde-cornrowed woman with giant false eyelashes and a bottle of beer in her hand. Shula’s reluctance to let her into the car only minimally lifts while they wait for the police to pick up the body of their Uncle Fred, lying dead in the road.

Shula is a modern miss who works via Zoom meetings; with her fashionable jacket and wheelie suitcase, she could be from any modern country in the world. The family home is minimalist in style, filled with chrome-framed furniture and objets. Her female relatives favour wraps and long skirts, their heads wound round with scarves, for the funeral. Their views are traditional too. As soon as Shula enters her mother’s house, she is caught up in these older women’s notions of appropriate behaviour. For starters she is reprimanded for having a shower, frowned on before a funeral. The aunties instantly cast her as a cook-shopper-chauffeur at everybody’s beck and call, crowded out by the older women sleeping on floors. Some crawl in on elbows and knees, whimpering and keening about the loss of their beloved “brother Fred”. Shula and Nsansa take refuge in the pantry with a bottle of booze and a spliff.So far, so social comedy. But the emotional landscape changes when the women’s young cousin Bupe (Esther Singini) is summoned from a local college to take part in the mourning and help service the grievers too. Shula finds her ill and distressed in her dorm, the floor around her a foot deep in water. Bupe goes to hospital briefly but soon joins the funeral rituals insisting nothing is wrong. Slowly the roots of Shula’s iciness towards her family begin to emerge. Her father (Henry B J  Phiri) is a party animal who’s always on the cadge. More crucially, the late Fred had been a serial rapist of young girls. His widow, barely 18 but with a squad of children under seven, is the most overtly abused of his victims, but all these women – and we meet several of them – are nursing wounds, both literal and psychological. We watch as Shula decides to take on her family's omerta.

Nyoni’s anger in this script is not just directed at the feckless, officious men who purport to run things, and the predators like Fred who hide in plain sight among them. She also has her sights on the women who become complicit in the rape, in the name of family unity, and stay silent when informed by their daughters of Fred’s abuse. Even his young widow is reluctant to speak out about him and is horribly humiliated and punished when she does, not least by the relentless army of aunties.

Nyoni’s ire is also aimed at the empty platitudes the women intone: the Christian doctrine they like to bandy about, the wilful blanketing of Fred’s monstrous behaviour in the formalities accorded the dead – the knee-jerk, formulaic tributes, the communal singing, the formal “discussion” about the widow’s future (and possessions). Given that she and her children and grandmother aren’t allowed to eat or sleep inside the main house or use its toilets, one fears that petty cruelties will be the outcome of this debate. It’s as if a vicious caste system is in operation.Popping up in the narrative are bursts of memories that become increasingly urgent, relating to an old television programme Shula watched as a young teenager: Farm Club, depicted as the Acorn Antiques of Zambian children’s TV. As a posh Englishman’s voice-over explains what a guinea fowl is and why these chattering creatures are invaluable lookouts on the savannah, it’s a toe-curling reminder of the tone of imperialism, paternalistic and patronising. The ruling class now in charge, though, are hollow men, indolent and ineffectual, yet expecting women to be ruled by them. 

Ryoni’s films are not just polemics. They are fascinating to listen to, Shula and Nsansa’s pop tracks here giving way to intermittent incidental music (by Lucrecia Dalt) using local instruments that twang and rumble moodily. And they are wonderful to watch, thanks to I Am Not a Witch’s DP David Gallego, whose inventive camerawork is perfectly judged, never distracting. He seems to relish shooting through car windows and electricity-less rooms, or in dark chicken huts lit only by infra-red lamps. In daylight, he makes the sunshine somehow dusty and bleak. As in the memorable shot through the back window of Shula’s car as she drives away from Fred’s modest home while the widow’s tearful grandmother and one of Fred’s little daughters, dressed in a white net skirt like a little princess, watch her go. Both seem a picture of sadness and abandonment as they recede into the distance.

Even more powerful is the final shot, which emerges from the ruckus the family “discussion” descends into, where silhouetted angry people animatedly pass before the camera shouting and pointing fingers at each other. What happens next is masterly, typical of Nyoni’s carefully deployed touches of surrealism. 

This extraordinary film is as stirring in its way as I Am Not a Witch, while more earthbound in content and tone. It’s billed as a comedy, but it also delivers a blistering critique of social ties that have become gags and blindfolds. Nyoni’s is proving to be a unique voice.

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