On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024) is a startling and surrealistic dive into the mechanics of family silence and the stifling weight of Zambian “middle-class respectability.” The film opens with a hypnotic, pitch-black comedic sequence: Shula (Susan Chardy) discovers her uncle Fred dead on an empty road in the middle of the night. Her reaction is not one of grief, but of profound, numb indifference—an early signal that the deceased man was far from a beloved patriarch. As the elaborate Zambian funeral proceedings begin, Nyoni utilizes a sharp, satirical lens to expose how traditional mourning rituals can be weaponized to bury inconvenient truths. The film transitions from a dry social comedy into a harrowing collective exorcism as Shula and her cousins begin to compare notes, realizing that Uncle Fred’s legacy was one of predatory violence hidden beneath a veneer of communal honor.

The film’s brilliance lies in its decolonial feminist critique of “reputation” as a trap for women. In the quest for status, the elder women of the family function as the primary enforcers of silence, coaching the younger generation on how to perform grief for a monster. Nyoni portrays these rituals—the choreographed wailing, the seating arrangements, the endless tea—as a meticulous architecture of denial. However, the “Guinea Fowl” of the title refers to the bird that alerts the flock to the presence of a predator. By speaking the unspoken, Shula and her cousins reclaim their voices, shifting the narrative from a eulogy for a perpetrator to a reclamation of their own survivor histories. The film argues that true family liberation requires the “becoming” of this alert system, even if it disrupts the fragile peace of the community.

Aesthetically, the film is a vibrant blend of Zambian landscape and sharp, surrealist visual beats that reflect the absurdity of the traumatic experience. Susan Chardy’s performance is a marvel of “emotional numbness,” capturing the specific psychological dissonance of the survivor who is forced to witness the canonization of their abuser. The choice of the Bemba language and the focus on the specificities of Zambian class dynamics provide a rich, intersectional depth that moves beyond Western-centric feminist tropes. Ultimately, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is a defiant and original work that suggests that the only way to heal a poisoned family tree is to stop tending the lies that keep it standing. It is a powerful testament to the fact that while silence is a tradition, the truth is a revolution.