In Zambia, an extended family’s beloved uncle has died, but one of his nieces holds a secret about him.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, Zambian writer and director Rungano Nyoni’s second feature film, is a highly accomplished ensemble drama about family secrets. Secrets don’t just reveal themselves right away, and the film’s style is accordingly a matter of glimpses and intuitions.
Shula, a young woman played by Susan Chardy, is driving home from a costume party, still wearing her elaborate disguise, when she finds a dead body in the road. When she gets out of the car to look at it, we briefly see a young girl in her place wearing the same costume. Back in the car, she calls her father to tell him: it’s Uncle Fred. He tells her to wait for him, but promptly forgets to come. Meanwhile an annoyingly drunk female cousin arrives, laughing about Uncle Fred. Apparently he has died on a road exiting a local brothel.
What follows can be placed in the minor category of “funeral movies” in which the entire story takes place at a wake or a funeral. Shula’s mother sobs hysterically about her “little brother” dying. A whole group of aunts and other female relatives band together, cooking for the mourners, furiously gossiping, and berating Shula for not crying or showing any grief at all.
Chardy’s performance is the still eye of this storm. She is quiet and solemn, with an air of passive resistance to all the family pressure surrounding her. Only with two of her young female cousins—the drunk one and another who on the occasion of the funeral has suddenly become ill—do we see her smile. With everyone at the funeral crying and shouting praises of Uncle Fred, these three have a different experience. The secret is not really a surprise, not at a time when the frequency of sexual abuse in the family has become an urgent subject worldwide. But the way of the older women, the aunties, is to cover it up in silence, while giving their love to the young cousins in private.
There’s a surprise when people find out that Uncle Fred had a wife, an inarticulate young woman who shows up at the funeral and is blamed and shunned by everyone excpt Shula. With a little bit of investigating, she figures out that Uncle Fred got her pregnant at fifteen, and there are now five kids dependent on her.
Through the course of the film, Nyoni presents a fascinating range of Zambian customs and mores, sometimes with affection, sometimes with a sharp critical eye. The men are kept free from accountability, while the women work to keep the families together. The interaction between all the characters has a spontaneous feel, as if unscripted, and I think this is largely due to the director’s skill at facilitating natural performances from the actors.
The film has a gentle rhythm. We only ever know what is happening through overhearing of conversations, or casual muttering under the breath. The story is brought slowly to a boil, and at the point when the crisis is about to break, the curtain falls.
The film’s odd title, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, is from an educational TV show about a farm that Shula watched as a kid. Guinea fowls are domesticated African game birds, known for making a lot of noise when predators are near, alerting not only each other but all the animals on the farm. To become a guinea fowl is to break the silence.
