Movie Critique of Basil Davidson s The Bible and The Gun
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No two people view history the same. Variances in beliefs arise from personal beliefs, familial influences, social experience, educational background, and the religion in which we are raised. Since the advent of audiovisual devices students and educators have strayed away from hands on investigation of history in the stacks of a library to videos, which quickly become ultimate authorities on a subject, but in actuality tend to be one sided and monothematic. Students tend to internalize the perspective from which the film is produced rather than use the films content as fodder for further research.
Basil Davidson's video "The Bible and the Gun" forced me to acknowledge a reality, which I have always kept just outside the grasp of my self, imposed nave Christian consciousness. While I was taught to view the world as a whole, I still tend to compartmentalize and adapt information to a gentler historical view as I am acquiring, assimilating, and reworking the comfortable edifice of history that I have built in my minds eye.
I was raised to have a rather Eurocentric understanding of the colonization of Africa, slavery, exploration and missionary pursuits. Davidson addresses cycle of European invasion of Africa in a more sympathetic, apologetic manner than most. His African explanation of the sociopolitical evolution that took place during the period of conquest takes subjects that have been rather abstract to me and has added dimension and solidity to them.
Slave traders gave way to explorers such as David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley...