Uganda Exodus

By J.C.

TWO MEN OF KARAMOJA

Directed by EUGENE S. JONES

In 1972 Iain Ross, a white British citizen born in Uganda, began turning his job over to a black man. For six years Ross had been chief warden of the Kidepo Valley National Park, 500 sq. mi. of wilderness near the border of Sudan and Kenya. Animals roam free there under park protection, but are in danger from poachers. Outside the park, a conflict splutters and periodically burns between Uganda and Tanzania, like the brushfires that menace the park itself.

The metaphor for racial tension is perfect, full of challenging complexity, but it is perhaps better suited to free-ranging fiction than the limited documentary treatment it receives here. Two Men of Karamoja is ambitious enough, but the form itself does not allow Director Eugene S. Jones (who made the Viet Nam documentary, A Face of War) to work past the restrictions of chronology and penetrate the true heart of the matter. Documentaries must rely on what actually happens; a dramatic narrative only has to start there.

Two Men of Karamoja does not have the appearance of a cinema-verite documentary. Although Jones denies it, some of his scenes look as if he had employed a somewhat older style, where the film maker used the real people to recreate and explain what had occurred. Whatever the cause, a certain dogged clumsiness prevails throughout, as when Ross ruminates aloud, "Many of the staff don't think I have any emotion," or when he and his successor, Paul Ssali, play a game of darts and discuss the difficulties of change.

Jones catches some moments that have the unmistakable tang of spontaneity: a band of poachers being rooted out, for instance, or an elephant attacking a Land-Rover. These are infrequent, however, and when they do occur are likely as not to have an expository fillip. The feature-length movie is much taken up with wild-animal footage. It was probably intended to convey a notion of the primitive majesty Ross was leaving behind, but after a while it comes to seem like padding, like rather elaborate vacation footage. A true or deep sense of this land, of the people who in habit it, or indeed of the two men who help supervise and maintain it, stays, like a deft game animal, just out of range.

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