Nowhere in Africa and a plague of locusts

The “plague of locusts” scene in Nowhere in Africa (2001) took me back to a harvest grasshopper “plague” when I was a child. I don’t remember the exact year, just my parents reflecting on the level of destruction by the hoppers, the ruined fields, the question of whether it was worth getting the combine in working order that summer. The film’s depiction of the stark beauty of the area of Kenya where the story is set also reminds me of southwest Kansas . . . and the desert southwest. Sparse land, spare lifestyle, a world of deprivation and beauty. The film’s story is simply told by the Jewish child, Regina Redlich, uprooted from Germany in 1938 and finding how well she fit into the culture, not of European colonizers but the natives of the area. The cook, Owuor, was for me the heart of the film, the moral center of it, with the child’s mother, Jettel, learning to overcome racism against Blacks―a blatant irony to her fleeing Germany because of anti-Semitism―and the child’s father, Walter, learning to relax patriarchal expectations of wife and daughter. The director of this film version of Stefanie Zweig’s novel (autobiographical?) was Caroline Link. I will have to see what other films she has directed.