Problems of Representation in Flame (1996)

The Second Chimurenga (a Shona language word meaning ‘revolutionary struggle’) took place in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, between 1967-1979. This conflict, known alternatively as the Rhodesian Bush War, was fought by three major players: the Rhodesian army backing Ian Smith’s white-minority government and two Black revolutionary forces, ZIPRA, the military wing of Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union, and ZANLA, the military wing of future Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union. All parties were in conflict with one another and sought to maintain, in the case of the Rhodesian government, or assume, in the case of ZAPU and ZANU, control of Zimbabwe. By 1975 many guerrilla soldiers, from both the outlawed revolutionary groups, were hiding out and training in newly independent Mozambique where they could evade arrest by the Rhodesian government. It is this conflict, which is explored in far more detail in chapter 6 of Richard Dowden’s book, Africa Altered States Ordinary Miracles, and specifically the camps in Mozambique, that forms the backdrop to Ingrid Sinclair’s 1996 film Flame.

Still from Flame (1996) showing Flame and Liberty

Hinging upon the relationship between two girls, Florence and Nyasha, as they leave their homeland to train with ZANLA and assume new identities as the revolutionaries Flame and Liberty, Flame is as much a film about female solidarity and friendship in a violent, male-dominated environment as it is about the war itself. The film was very controversial upon its release for its depiction of Flame’s rape by a higher ranking soldier; it was deemed to be anti-national and critical of the movement that ultimately toppled the white-minority Rhodesian government. Furthermore, Sinclair was a white British woman who had not lived in the country at the time of the Second Chimurenga, and therefore this film was considered, as Katrina Daly Thompson writes in her book, Zimbabwe's Cinematic Arts : Language, Power, Identity, to be “a prime example of a Zimbabwean story told through white eyes” by many who “thought the first fiction film about Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle should be told by a black Zimbabwean.” The question of representation is a tricky one: not only what should be represented, but how and by who it ought to be represented.

Poster for Flame (1996)

In my opinion, however, Sinclair depicts the violence that Flame faces, both as a result of the war and of the violent men she is surrounded by, as well as the ongoing trauma that she lives with caused by this, in a way that both sensitive to that trauma and hard-hitting for the audience. It is a film that clearly attempts to give a voice to the voiceless, the female revolutionaries upon whom Sinclair based her film. For many of whom the violence and oppression did not end when the war was won, as we see in the film with the abuse Flame’s husband inflicts upon her. Feeling emasculated by her suggestion that she find work, he strikes her and asks “do you think I am a woman?” She responds with defiance, “no, you are a man!” And it is at this point that it becomes clear, both to the audience and to Flame herself, that the only person who has ever supported her and tried to protect her is Liberty. The relationship between the two women, whether subtextually queer coded or one of binding platonic or sisterly love, is defining and it is through it that Flame can finally find freedom from the male violence that has plagued her life.

Questions of representation, then, are very important when it comes to this film, but not to the extent that they might overwrite this key message of the importance of female solidarity in breaking cycles of violence, as well as an acknowledgement of the existence of these ongoing cycles of violence and the ways in which they silence victims, therefore rendering them potentially unable to tell their own stories in a way that would be listened to. That is to say, perhaps a story itself, and its message, is of equal importance to the mode of its representation.