Faith Like Potatoes

Faith Like Potatoes (2006) is two hours of cognitive dissonance. The plot follows Angus Buchan (Frank Rautenbach) a Scotsman who fancies himself a “white African.” Looks like we’ve got ourselves a reverse Idi Amin. You know who also is from Africa? Storm from the X-Men. I always thought she was more a god than a mutant. I don’t know what the extent of her powers is, but if she can control all weather, she would arguably be mightier than God — at least the way he’s portrayed in this film. Weather has no moral allegiance, but if it did, the God of Faith Like Potatoes commands what we could call “good” weather. For example, you can count on Him for rain to put out a “runaway fire” — but the lightning that strikes a Zulu woman dead? Must have been Zeus. And don’t even get me started on El Niño. That’s Satan’s work right there. Angus explicitly calls it “a drought from hell… that’s where El Niño comes from and that’s where it belongs.” It never occurs to anyone that maybe God is just really good at PR. If He can control water why wouldn’t He have power over fire? Perhaps He started the conflagration just so He could extinguish it, and He waited for Angus to pray for rain so He could take the credit. Otherwise, God is neither omnipotent nor omniscient — He can’t stop the fire from igniting in the first place, and it must be brought to His attention before He can do anything about it. At one point, Angus mentions that in the Bible, “God used ordinary people” like himself. It seems as if God is doing just that — He’s using Angus to get to the Zulu. Is there a Zulu religion with Zulu rituals? A Zulu god or gods whom they pray to? Not in this movie. No wonder a little coincidental precipitation is enough to win them over to the side of Jehovah and His only Son, Angus Christ. Hey, don’t look at me. The filmmakers were the ones who had Angus bringing people from the dead. To say that Faith Like Potatoes has a paternalistic view of native Africans is putting it mildly. First, Angus is vengeful and wrathful like Old-Testament God. Later, he’s patient and understanding like Jesus. Either way, the Zulu are never any better than little children who crash your tractor when you’re not looking. Earlier, Angus’s wife said the Buchans were like “gypsies in the Garden of Eden” — do you think the tractor symbolizes the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? Speaking of symbolism, the title refers to the fact that potatoes are not like maize. You can see maize, but you gotta have faith in potatoes. I guess violence is like potatoes too. We hear a lot about deadly attacks on white farmers that have left thousands of casualties, and we’re told the Zulu “have been fighting blood feuds for generations.” Angus thinks they should pray all that violence away. From the lack of evidence on display here, someone else beat him to the punch.