“On Becoming A Guinea Fowl”: Rungano Nyoni’s Humorous Titivation of Grievous Sexual History and Family Traditions 

It is late in the evening when the story begins. We meet a young lady driving in a car, dressed in a puffed-up outfit, her face is adorned while returning from a party. Her car slows down when she sees something of interest on the road. She drops to confirm the corpse of Uncle Fred, her mother’s younger brother, a well-known relative in her middle-class family. While she scans the body for a few seconds, an apparition of her younger, similarly lushly dressed self flashes before her. This apparition, a figment of her imagination, presents us an almost negligible whiff of an unhealed trauma involving the deceased with her younger and older selves. Where most people, particularly women, would naturally go into shock after sighting a corpse and express grief when it is a loved one, the lady’s immediate attitude is a rather shocking emotionlessness. This is another prompt for the audience that, beyond bereavement, all is not really well with her.

The lady then returns to the car where she engages her father over a telephone call—a conversation that betrays the irresponsibility of the deceased during his lifetime. This lady, Shula, played by British-Zambian actress Susan Chardy, is the protagonist of Rungano Nyoni’s sophomore feature film, On Becoming A Guinea Fowl, a dark comedy drama which competed in the Un Certain Regard section at the 77th Cannes Film Festival on 16th May, 2024 before its recent global distribution this year, courtesy of A24. A co-production between the United Kingdom, Zambia, the United States and Ireland, the film is set in a contemporary Zambian society in which tradition intersects with modern values. Through the protagonist Shula’s brooding eyes, observational prowess, questioning silences and other investigative nuances, the Zambian-Welsh writer-director transports us into the world of a Zambian middle-class family’s funeral proceedings during which buried secrets of the deceased’s repulsive sexual history gradually unfold.

One of the beautiful things about the film is its stylized approach to storytelling, which is mostly achieved through the filmmaker’s oxymoronic attempts to macerate and distill immorality and criminality through the filters of humour. The film pokes fun at serious subjects—rape, sexual abuse, incest, pedophilia—while also reviewing the life of the deceased from testimonies and experiences of family members who are his victims, particularly Nsansa, Bupe, Fred’s widow and Shula herself. Their accounts of Uncle Fred’s behaviour are presented in downplayed bits. Nsansa makes a joke of her rape. Bupe has a recorded video testimony which she later dismisses because the perpetrator is dead. Fred’s widow was married to the man as a young girl below the legal age of consent, which no one, except Shula, pays attention to. Shula, in obedience to her mother, shields her sexual assault from her father. The uncritical older family members fail to hold their “brother” accountable for his actions and are instead more concerned about Fred’s inheritance as they cast aspersions on the teenage wife of the deceased for not taking proper care of her husband while he was alive. The women’s dirge labels the widow “a wicked woman”.

The film reveals the blame-shifting culture engraved in African patriarchy, an age-old structure in which men, being dominant symbols of authority, take selfish, unquestionable decisions regardless of how it affects the interests of women and the rest of the family or community. We get a glimpse of this in the inter-family meeting during which, after listening to the widow’s blameless account of her husband’s death, the presiding elderly men, in the manner of a kangaroo court, find her guilty, impose a fine on her family and retrieve all her husband’s belongings so that the poor widow is left with nothing to inherit. The patriarchal verdict leaves no room for moral considerations as the widow bears the brunt of her late husband’s folly. Through the subtle, introspective and yet comically chaotic evaluation of Uncle Fred’s character from the perspectives of other characters, the film unlocks a complex, interlocking relationship between patriarchy and morality in African societies.

In different cultures, people are encouraged to respect and honour the dead at funerals, regardless of the kind of life they led. This is particularly glaring in Africa where extended family members often feel entitled to making key decisions over the legacy of the deceased. If the dead was in possession of wealth, his earthly misconduct would likely be overlooked by greedy family members who develop emergency interest in his affairs for personal gains. Nyoni’s On Becoming A Guinea Fowl mocks this cultural game of ruthless hypocrisy and wilful amnesia—with the likes of the softhearted yet intelligent Shula and her carefree alcoholic cousin Nsansa interrogating the charade. “Why are they mourning Uncle Fred as if he was an angel, not a pervert?” Nsansa tells Shula and a friend in private where they drink and crack jokes in scornful acknowledgement of the mourning.

Nyoni’s symbolic references to the guinea fowl in the film is striking. There is a scene of the younger Shula watching a children’s television show in which the guinea fowl is a subject of discussion. The guinea fowl are one of several native African birds that are known for their making a noise to alert their kind to the presence of a predator. They are social birds that exist in flocks within complex social relationships. Many sub-Saharan African cultures consider these creatures totems of perseverance and productivity. Nyoni masterfully weaves this knowledge in the film’s evangelism against an anti-progressive culture of silence.

On two occasions in the film, the older Shula mimics the sound of the guinea fowl, at first a humorous gesture that awakens the victimised ladies to their shared sufferings. With the title inspired by this creature, the filmmaker tells the story of the women’s search for closure and journey towards identity reclamation. On Becoming A Guinea Fowl, thus, closes on a cryptic yet curious note. As tensions simmer within both families, the three key victims, led by Shula, in company of her uncle’s children and an older in-law, walk from outside towards the building. This bold step is punctuated by Shula’s final guinea fowl sound, symbolizing the group’s ultimate act of defiance against the forces silencing their voices.