Afrobeats songs, social media comment sections, and whispers occasionally reference a boogeyman figure: the “uncle” (biological or otherwise) who touches women inappropriately. Rungano Nyoni’s film On Becoming a Guinea Fowl asks, if this monster suddenly died, what would become of the women and girls who survived him?
Nyoni is an acclaimed Zambian-Welsh filmmaker. Her first feature film, I Am Not a Witch, demonstrates her penchant for telling culturally specific stories about the disenfranchisement of women and girls through Shula, a child banished by a rural Zambian community to a camp for women accused of witchcraft. (The name Shula means “to be uprooted.”) The 2017 film screened at numerous prestigious festivals and won important awards, including Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). Nyoni won several accolades for On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, including a Special Mention at the 2024 BFI London Film Festival, Best Director at the 2024 British Independent Film Awards, and the Un Certain Regard—Best Director Award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
In the wake of her Uncle Fred’s passing, Guinea Fowl’s protagonist, also named Shula, grapples with the trauma of the sexual abuse she suffered at his hands. Reviews of Nyoni’s film have focused on how its portrayal of gendered violence incorporates aspects of surrealism and horror. The darkly comedic film expertly wields sound, dreams, costumes, and other haunting formal techniques and narrative devices to evoke the lingering terror of sexual assault. For this viewer, its connection to critical African dramas is equally compelling. Like On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, “return to the source” films illuminate how prioritizing strict adherence to tradition over healthy social bonds can enable violence. Idrissa Ouédraogo’s Tilaï (The Law) (1990), for example, conveys this message through a father figure whose interpretation of custom leads to the destruction of his family. In Nyoni’s film, men and women alike wield tradition as a weapon to shield sexual predators from accountability. As they honor Uncle Fred with lavish funeral rites, Shula’s extended family and others compound the violence his survivors have endured by silencing them. This allows the rape culture that produced Uncle Fred to continue. In the return to the source films, children play a particularly important role in critiquing tradition. Nyoni’s film extends this cinematic lineage through its depiction of the young girls harmed by Uncle Fred—for example, Shula’s cousin Bupe. Through these pivotal characters and their interrogations of blind attachment to cultural codes, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl and the return to the source films reveal the tensions that lie beneath the seemingly placid surface of “tradition.” But Nyoni’s film is distinct in vital ways.
The return to the source films tend to present a binary in which certain characters uphold tradition and others—those subjugated by social conventions—question or openly defy it. Nyoni’s film blurs these lines through its rendering of the lack of consensus among women elders about the proper ways to mourn Uncle Fred. In one brief, striking scene, Uncle Fred’s widow—a young girl not only victimized by him but bound to him by marriage—loudly begins weeping in the middle of the night. She wakes all the women in the community, who sleep in the same room during the multi-day funeral. During the day, the women wail performatively as social expectations demand. The widow’s earnest tears exceed the boundaries of this prescribed grief. The elders clash as they pressure the widow to stop crying. Some call her cries improper, citing their experiences at other funerals. Others defend her, arguing that she should mourn her husband in this way. Amid the tense exchange, any recognition of the true reason for the girl’s cry is lost. Unable to come to an agreement, the elders ostracize the widow, ordering her and her kin to sleep in the empty pool on the grounds. As the sequence indicates, the women cannot integrate their ideas about how to correctly carry out end-of-life rites, even as they use tradition to exert power over the most vulnerable. Through such vexed moments, Nyoni’s film unveils the irony in clinging to the idea of tradition while traditions themselves splinter across multiple subjective interpretations.
The film occasionally raises questions—for example, is its protagonist too passive? The somber Shula spends much of the film looking bewildered and weathered by the events unfolding around her. After learning that Uncle Fred’s widow, her children, and her mother may lose their home to Uncle Fred’s side of the family, Shula seems to finally stand up for those harmed by him. Yet by the time she explicitly questions why her uncle was never held responsible for his offenses, her query feels naive. The film has depicted in rich detail the collective enforcement of the belief that men can behave however they please, even if their actions harm others. But seen another way, Shula’s slowness to act is a study in the kind of resignation that abuse can engender.
The film’s treatment of sexual abuse is powerful. An arresting shot of the nightclub where Shula’s father spends his days frames how young women are served up to aged men. The shot captures in mere seconds the social conditions that permitted Uncle Fred to persist unchecked. At the film’s end, an elder finally addresses Uncle Fred’s wrongdoing, but only obliquely. He claims that he cannot go into detail because children are present, but as the film has vividly demonstrated, young girls in this community already know too much about sexual violence.
Through its disquieting narrative and form, Nyoni’s daring work unravels perceptions of patriarchal traditions as resolved and unifying, instead framing them as contentious and dissonant. In her cinematic world, only the cry of the guinea fowl can bring harmony.
