African Natives and Spears and Conflict, Oh My!

[Whitty Whit]

Hey Whitty, ask Blitz more questions about machine guns. I'm dying to know everything there is to know.

Whatever you say, my friend.

A fully automatic assault rifle is modified. Assault rifles are generally either one shot or 3 bursts. A machine gun is of course limited to how much ammunition the soldier or what ever it is mounted on can carry and how fast it heats up, but in simple word a machine gun is unlimited by fire restrictions.

Most assault rifles (used in a lot of armies today) are selective fire (between semi-auto, burst, and full auto). Battle rifles, however, are generally semi-automatic. Do you mean sub-machine guns? Light machine guns? or even autocannons?

[Blitz]

Sub machine guns are short barreled, light, barreled machine guns.

[Leonard Meltsner]

I should note that the episode, in terms of plot, is amazingly detailed in its accuracy, according the the mini-documentaries the team filmed in Uganda with the Karamojong. I can't comment on the weapons except to say that in real life, they use automatic weapons, as well as in the episode. The clothes in the documentary are clearly the type worn in North America, though a bit more sun-beaten, the way you'd often see in documentaries of the same sort.

Know that the stories in the episode are very accurate. From Dr. Val putting horns on the front of her white truck because the tribes shot at her thinking she was from the other side, to the 3-day peace conference in No Man's Land. What what I understand, apart from Whit and Wooton's presence, the biggest thing that was technically inaccurate was that everyone was speaking Swahili, and not Ngakaramojong.

The weapons seem to be mostly a mix of automatic firearms and traditional spears, with more emphasis on the firearms. I think the bigger fallacy in the artwork is the clothes, but even then, they could wear traditional clothing for a formal peace conference.

Overall, I think that Focus should be commended for the effort they put into making this story as accurate as they could. They even brought in people to sit in the recording studio and help the actors make sure they pronounced all their lines in Swahili properly! I tip my hat to the efforts they made here, as I expressed in the last episode of the Oddcast (The review of The Launch, Part 2).

[jelly]

Leonard, thanks for information! It sounds like a very good episode, crafted with care and attention to detail. It's even more interesting to me, then, that Gary Locke's Focus-endorsed artwork would so carelessly undermine the integrity of the episode. Even if the racist elements in the artwork could be justified in the context of the episode, it was clearly designed to tap into people's misinformed fascination of primitive stereotypes, and that's pretty insulting to a huge portion of the show's fanbase. It's like a really, really bad movie trailer. Trying to sell smart material at a base-instinct level.

[Pound Foolish]

Racist? Gary Lock is a racist? Wow. Is Paul McCusker sexist? After all, Connie is the lone big female star. Whit, Eugene, and Wooton are all dudes. He's probably a war-monger too, look at how much violence is in some of his episodes.

This criticism all seems rather questionable. In the first place, there are many out of the way areas in Africa where people choose to live fairly primitively. Any national Geographic readers around? And all the complaining about the warring tribes. Sorry. but there are tribes in Africa, and they do go to war and fight with each other. If you people were more serious AIO fans, you might know that from the recent tie-in Clubhouse story on the subject.

Forgive me if I'm coming off as being rather insulting, it's what I do. But really, aren't we past calling everyone who portrays other races in a traditional way as racist yet? We. Have. An. African. American. President. People. It's commendable you're all trying to be politically sensitive, but in babying other races so much, objecting to a few spears, aren't WE treating other races differently than our own? As if they need coddling?

[Blitz]

I am part African.....
The spears is actually the main problem for me. Africans fight with gun currently... not spears.

[Pound Foolish]

Which is perfectly fine. It's the most natural and good thing in the world to want one's race (or partial race) portrayed accurately. Though, personally, I don't object, as a white American, to having my race portrayed as a bunch of loud mouthed, greedy nincompoops by other countries' media. Though perhaps that's not quite so inaccurate?

At any rate, my point is that, spears or no spears, there was clearly no need to call Gary Locke's art "racist." Surely you would agree. it was simply traditional and visually appealing? Would you expect an AIO poster to have people threatening Whit, a woman, and a little girl with guns? This is for little kids, remember.

[TigerintheShadows]

I don't think it had so much to do with racism as it had to do with culturalism—we have a tendency to portray stereotypes of other cultures rather than accurate depictions of who they are and what they do. I too was bothered by what I thought was a stereotype of African tribes, but after Daniel and LM posted in response to the hatred—stating that yes, indeed, the episodes and the artwork are more accurate than inaccurate—I was won over. As I say, this debate didn't come across to me so much as "The People Who Cry Race" so much as it was a question of why we still perpetuate inaccurate ideas about people who live differently from us—especially third world countries.

[Pound Foolish]

Excellent points, Miss Carnivore.

The answer to that would be, again, that it's traditional. A stereotype is, by definition, recognizable. Kids see a bunch of darker skinned people with spears and think, "Oh, some out of the way place in Africa." Which, as you acknowledged, isn't wholly illogical, either. It's not as if spears are out of use in Africa. Though it is certainly an exception to the rule. That is precisely what the characters were meant to be. An exception to the rule. Kids know that not all police officers are Irish O'rians, that most cheerleaders aren't snotty Shannons, and that in Africa most people don't go around with spears. The Africans were threatening because they look very different from what one is most likely to run into in Africa. If they were the rule, they would be far less threatening.

And, in the end, it's not really an issue here. As you said, the portrayals are fairly realistic. People in Africa still use spears and wear jewelry.