Marion Edmunds
PETER GODWIN, author of the bestselling book Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, has slated the TV series Rhodes for judging a man of yesterday by the morals of today.
“Rhodes is a stirring and affecting television production, beautifully filmed, but it feels like a work overwhelmed by … the very worst interpretation of the man.”
In the London Guardian, Godwin writes that the series is an attempt by scriptwriter Anthony Thomas to be politically correct and to debunk the existing Rhodes mythology. But, he says, “there is little mythology left to debunk, so it goes further, presenting Rhodes as a caricature of pure evil”.
Godwin picks out the portrayal of the demise of Matabele Chief Lobengula as an example: “Before one dissolves into a sobbing heap at Lobengula’s terrible fate at Rhodes’s hands, for example, we should remember that Lobengula was a bloodthirsty tyrant himself, whose people had arrived as colonists themselves, only a generation before, wiping out most of the Mashona who lived there, and treating the rest as slaves.”
Godwin also takes issue with the BBC’s treatment of Rhodes’s homosexuality.
“The gaying of Rhodes is reinforced by some heavy-handed televisual nudging. Horse-play in the bath with his faithful black manservant, Christmas, playfully deploying a soda siphon; Rhodes’s smouldering glances at the eight-year-old Harry Currey clearly signal a penchant for little boys … The glee with which the homosexuality is portrayed verges itself on homophobic – it’s almost as if to taunt: Old Rhodes wasn’t just a racist, genocidal gangster – guess what? He was a poof to boot.”
Godwin concludes by pointing out that, despite Rhodes’s bad press, his grave in Zimbabwe has been left in peace where other white graves have been smashed.
Scriptwriter Anthony Thomas says Godwin’s criticism is bizarre and ignorant of historical facts.