Book Review: Stories from the fireplace: theological meditations on Haile Gerima’s cinema

This multi-disciplinary study examines the works of Ethiopian scholar and filmmaker Haile Gerima from a theological perspective. The author was inspired to write this book because of “the persisting, provoking and lingering representation of Africa as ‘the radical other’ through intellectual and artistic media” (xxi). Historians, anthropologists, and missionaries create and recreate Africa’s otherness in film and other texts. The “Afro-pessimistic” history of (mis)representations can be traced in travelogues, cartography (mapmaking), anthropozoology (human zoos), and the Hollywood types of conventional cinema (zoo-keepers) (57). By engaging with African cinematic discourses, Belachew tries to demonstrate the kind of positive role African Christian theology can play in the pursuit of human dignity and flourishing. He creates a counter narrative against Afro-pessimist films, which frequently perpetuate inferior images of the African other.