African Cinema: Manifesto and Practice for Cultural Decolonization: Volume 1: Colonial Antecedents, Constituents, Theory, and Articulations 0253066204, 9780253066206

Citation preview

AFRICAN CINEMA MANIFESTO AND PRACTICE FOR CULTURAL DECOLONIZATION

Edited (with contributions) by Michael T. Martin and Gaston Jean-Marie Kaboré

VOLUME 1

Colonial Antecedents, Constituents, Theory, and Articulations

AFRICAN CINEMA

AFRICAN CINEMA Manifesto and Practice for Cultural Decolonization Volume 1 Colonial Antecedents, Constituents, Theory, and Articulations

Edited by Michael T. Martin and Gaston J. M. Kaboré with Allison J. Brown, Cole Nelson, and Joseph E. Roskos

Indiana University Press

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.org © 2023 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America First Printing 2023 Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-253-06620-6 (hdbk.) ISBN 978-0-253-06621-3 (pbk.) ISBN 978-0-253-06622-0 (web PDF) This book is a collaboration of Black Camera: An International Film Journal, the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO), and IMAGINE Film Institute, Burkina Faso.

The Editors wish to dedicate this volume to to the women filmmakers of Africa and the diaspora

To make a film means to take a position. —S ARAH M ALDOROR , 1977

Africa’s experience with motion pictures for six decades had been one of existential distress. —C LYDE T AYLOR , 1985

Our continent, ridden with so many internal and external problems, is more alive than ever. We have to be daring and reconquer our cultural and cinematographic space. —O USMANE S EMBÈNE , 1995

Contents Acknowledgments On Decoloniality: African and Diasporic Cinema

MICHAEL T. MARTIN AND GASTON J. M. KABORÉ

xiii 1

Part I: Colonial Formations Colonial Cinema

19

The Colonialist Regime of Representation, 1945–1960

37

Politics of Cultural Conversion in Colonialist African Cinema

69

The African Bioscope: Movie-House Culture in British Colonial Africa

99

From the Inside: The Colonial Film Unit and the Beginning of the End

115

ROY ARMES

JAMES E. GENOVA

FEMI OKIREMUETTE SHAKA

JAMES BURNS

TOM RICE

The Independence Generation: Film Culture and the Anti-Colonial Struggle in the 1950s 137

ODILE GOERG

x

Contents

Part II: Constituting African Cinema What is Cinema for Us?

165

A Cinema Fighting for Its Liberation

169

Where Are the African Women Filmmakers?

176

The FEPACI and Its Artistic Legacies

184

New Avenues for FEPACI: Interview with Seipati Bulane-Hopa

211

The Six Decades of African Film

215

Africa, The Last Cinema

232

The Pan-African Cinema Movement: Achievements, Misadventures, and Failures (1969–2020)

248

MED HONDO

FÉRID BOUGHEDIR HAILE GERIMA SADA NIANG

MONIQUE MBEKA PHOBA OLIVIER BARLET CLYDE TAYLOR

FÉRID BOUGHEDIR

Part III: Theorizing African Cinema African Cinema(s): Definitions, Identity, and Theoretical Considerations

271

Theorizing African Cinema: Contemporary African Cinematic Discourse and Its Discontents

292

The Theoretical Construction of African Cinema

315

Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films

329

Africans Filming Africa: Questioning Theories of an Authentic African Cinema

349

ALEXIE TCHEUYAP

ESIABA IROBI

STEPHEN A. ZACKS

TESHOME H. GABRIEL

DAVID MURPHY

Contents

xi

Tradition/Modernity and the Discourse of African Cinema

369

Towards a Theory of Orality in African Cinema

383

Film and the Problem of Languages in Africa

404

In Defense of African Film Studies

410

JUDE AKUDINOBI

KEYAN G. TOMASELLI, ARNOLD SHEPPERSON, AND MAUREEN EKE PAULIN SOUMANOU VIEYRA BOUKARY SAWADOGO

Part IV: Articulations of African Cinema Dossier 1: Key Dates in the History of African Cinema

419

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

449

• Sembène’s Legacy to FESPACO SAMBA GADJIGO AND SADA NIANG • Vigil for a Centennial OUSMANE SEMBÈNE • Cinema as Evening School OUSMANE SEMBÈNE • Statement at Ouagadougou (1979) OUSMANE SEMBÈNE • Art for Man’s Sake: A Tribute to Ousmane Sembène SAMBA GADJIGO • On “Mediated Solidarity”: Reading Ousmane Sembène in Sembène! MICHAEL T. MARTIN • Ousmane Sembène: An Annotated Gallery COLE NELSON

451

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

533

Index

591

CURATED BY OLIVIER BARLET AND CLAUDE FOREST CURATED BY SAMBA GADJIGO AND SADA NIANG

CURATED BY BETI ELLERSON

459 460 463 479 485 523

Acknowledgments In recognition of this two-year collaboration, we salute the following individuals and institutions upon which was realized this three-volume scholarly endeavor and project of this scope, scale, and utility on African and Black diasporic cinema.

Advising Consultants • • • • • • • •

Erna Beumers, Museum Curator, Africa, Utrecht, Netherlands June Givanni, Curator & Director, Pan African Cinema Archives (JGPACA), London Eileen Julien, Professor Emeritus, Departments of Comparative Literature & French, Indiana University, Bloomington Ron Stoneman, Professor Emeritus & former Director, Huston School of Film & Digital Media, National University of Ireland, Galway Emma Sandon, Senior Lecturer, Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, School of Arts Birbeck, University of London Olivier Barlet, Film critic and scholar, former Director of Africultures, France Justin Ouoro, Professor of Film, University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso Somet Yoporeka, University of Strasbourg, France, Burkina Faso

Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO), Burkina Faso •

Ardiouma Soma, General Delegate, FESPACO, 2014–2020

Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI), Burkina Faso •

Dramane Deme, Executive Director, Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI)

Acknowledgments

xiv

Institut IMAGINE (Burkina Faso) • • • •

Edith Kaboré Edmond Sawodogo, Research Associate Toussaint Zongo, Filmmaker and Director of Administration Daouda Sanguisso, Interpreter/Translator, Burkina Faso

Media School, Indiana University, Bloomington • •

Walter Gantz, Interim Dean Radhika Parameswaran, Associate Dean

Black Camera: An International Film Journal • • •

Megan Connor, Former Managing Editor Katherine Tartaglia, Former Managing Editor David Coen, Freelance Copyeditor

AFRICAN CINEMA

On Decoloniality: African and Diasporic Cinema Michael T. Martin and Gaston J. M. Kaboré

T

he epoch of slavery and concomitant trauma of colonial settlement and rule in Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, and Pasifika is arguably without precedent in the long history of Western imperialism and ascendancy of capitalism. Africans and the resistance of their descendent peoples in the diaspora are no less a challenge today than they were during the period of conquest, settlement, and enslavement. Indeed, the legacy of this period and those defaced by it, the continuing struggle against its repressive cultural, systemic, and institutional practices in the contemporary world, constitutes an abiding summons to refute the denial, by design and ignorance, of Africa’s contribution to world culture and civilization. To this day, along with the hazards of globalization’s relentless homogenization of cultures and societies, the corporate project of accumulation sequesters and undermines humankind’s capacity and will to “act” in solidarity against the pillaging of the natural world that sustains life and planet Earth. In these relational historical determinations and their inherent collective trauma, what is to be discerned from African cinema and its varied iterations in the Black Atlantic and Pasifika? Like other artistic modes, evinced in and refracted by a kaleidoscope of genres, themes, aesthetics, and representations—emblematic and signifying—African cinema is a work in progress, recuperating the past, as it imagines and gestures a futurity. In the project of world making, and in the African specificity, cinematic texts labor as mediated solidarity between the filmmaker/cultural producer and marginalized peoples and social movements they identify with and endeavor to represent and advocate for. Such films are “about a subject and about itself,” in the former, as political praxis, and the latter, the process and apparatus of filmmaking.1 Differences in genre, aesthetic registers, and narrative storytelling notwithstanding, films of this kind are in correspondence with historical activity—the evidentiary and the fantastical. Such counterhistorical texts, indeed all cinematic texts, are no less contingent on the vagaries and determinations of circumstance, place, and the temporal by which they

2

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

are informed and constituted in local, regional, national, continental circuits of production and exchange. Broadly speaking, with these conditionalities in mind, the genealogy—the descent lines—of African cinema are situated and rendered intelligible, historical, and culturally distinct. What began in the colonial project of denial and cultural devaluation was followed by the formative utterances by African cineastes and their allies to forge and cohere a collective call for a cinema borne from and fashioned by Africanity, as a decolonial assertion and valorization of all manner of African experience. No less determining, this cinema’s nascita was first made manifest through the interplay of Pan-Africanism and anticolonial struggles from the mid-1950s and 1960s. In considering the postindependence period, with African cinema’s “nationalizations” in the early 1980s to late 1990s and under conditions of a “market economy,” Olivier Barlet and Claude Forest contend that this marked the decline of “collective awareness” and rise of a cinema of “individuation.”2 Since then to the present moment, the authors assert that the digital revolution has occasioned “a radical thematic and aesthetic revival” of African cinema, which this collection examines, along with earlier formations and stages in the evolution of the African cinematic.3 Mapping the African cinematographic encounter to the present is rendered in the following, and intentionally, simplified chronology. In 1895—the year of the Lumière brothers’ screening of La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon (France)—Félix Regnault documented the labors of a Wolof clay potter in Une Femme Ouolove / A Woman Ouolove. The following year, screenings took place in Egypt and South Africa, and in the next year, Tunisia and Morocco. During the period of colonial denunciation, René Vautier denounced the colonial project in the documentary Afrique 50 (1950, France), Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and Mamadou Sarr addressed identity among African students in Paris and the emblematic and locational meaning of Africa as a floating signifier in Afrique sur Seine (1955, France), and Chris Marker and Alain Resnais examined racism in readings of African art in Les Statues meurent aussi / Statues Also Die (1953, France). For film texts representative of the anticolonial period, see Borom Sarret by Ousmane Sembène (1963, Senegal) and Emitaï (1971, Senegal); Gillo Pontecorvo’s theorized meditation on the Algerian War of Independence in the Algerian-Italian production of La Bataille d’Alger / The Battle of Algiers (1966, Italy and Algeria), Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972, Angola and France), Med Hondo’s Soleil Ô (1967, Mauritania), Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973, Senegal), and Gaston J. M. Kaboré’s allegorical Wend Kuuni (1982, Burkina Faso). And during the period of market economy and nationalization, Souleymane Cissé’s Finyè (1982, Mali) and Yeelen (1987, Mali), Hondo’s Sarraounia (1986, Mauritania), Flora Gomes’s Mortu Nega (1988, Guinea-Bissau), Sembène’s Guelwaar (1993, Senegal), Jean-Marie

Michael T. Martin & Gaston J. M. Kaboré / On Decoloniality

3

Attendees and participants of FESPACO 1972. Image courtesy of FESPACO.

Téno’s Afrique, je te plumerai (1992) and Clando (1996, Cameroon), Kaboré’s Buud Yam (1997, Burkina Faso), and Bourlem Guerdjou, Vivre au paradis / Living in Paradise (1998, Algeria). Lastly, consigning films to Barlet and Forest’s contemporary “moment” (“Aesthetic renewal and digital revolution”), Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Bye Bye Africa (1999, France and Chad) and Un homme qui crie (2010, Chad); Sembène’s Faat Kiné (2001, Senegal) and Moolaadé (2003, Senegal); Abderrahmane Sissako’s Heremakono (2002, Mali), Bamako (2006, Mali), and Timbuktu (2014, Mali); Téno’s Le Malentendu colonial (2004, Cameroon); Haile Gerima’s Teza (2008, Ethiopia); Moussa Touré’s La Pirogue (2012, Senegal); Amor Hakkar’s La Maison jaune (2007, France and Algeria); Alain Gomis’s Félicité (2017, Senegal); and Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019, France and Senegal). Beginning with Vieyra and Sarr’s Afrique sur Seine, each film entry in the chronology is distinct, and together they foreground the thematics and diversity that is African (and Black diasporic) cinema as a continental and global project, at once particular and universal. And in this chronological continuum, each film is informed by the specificities of historical activity, its temporal and circumstantial registers, as well as by the modalities of storytelling particular to cultural formations. This collection was first conceived in 2019 during the twenty-sixth edition of the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) in Burkina Faso and then assembled and published in 2020–21

4

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (left) and Georges Caristan (right) during the filming of Afrique Sur Seine/ Africa on the Seine (dir. Mamadou Sarr and Vieyra, 1955, France). Image courtesy of Stéphane Vieyra.

in three successive issues of Black Camera: An International Film Journal (Indiana University Press) in partnership with FESPACO and IMAGINE Film Institute, both film entities in Burkina Faso. In this new iteration comprising three volumes, volumes 1 and 2 have been reversed in order for greater coherency, and additional materials have been added to the contents of each volume. Relational yet distinct, the following are the contents of each volume delineated.

Volume 1: Colonial Antecedents, Constituents, Theory, and Articulations Organized into four parts, this volume features foundational essays; thematic, practical, and theoretical conversations; and three dossiers that chronicle and enunciate the development of African cinema to the present.

Part 1: Colonial Formations Six chapters illumine the ideological project of colonial cinema to legitimize the economic exploitation, political control, and cultural hegemony of the African continent during the period of imperial rule. Roy Armes’s chapter, the first, is a case study of colonial policy and practice that is examined in the contexts of Tunisia, Egypt, and Algeria. This is followed by James E.

Michael T. Martin & Gaston J. M. Kaboré / On Decoloniality

5

The Gold Coast Film Unit disseminated government policy to local audiences. Here, a Mass Education team outlines scenes from the 1950 GCFU production Amenu’s Child. Image courtesy of the Public Relations Office, Gold Coast.

Genova’s take on the French “Colonialist Regime of Representation,” which is detailed in his expansive overview and critical reading of Georges Régnier’s Paysans noirs (1948, France). The film, Genova contends, “was intended to (re) construct images of Africa that would resonate with African audiences, and also challenge the prevailing tropes of Africa and Africans circulating among external audiences.”4 Next, Femi Okiremuette Shaka’s “Politics of Cultural Conversion in Colonialist African Cinema” examines two variants of colonial cinema: “instructional cinema” and “colonialist cinema,” the former deployed for public education in the project of modernization, the latter, commercial, emphasizing “conventionalized stereotypes of Africans in European culture.”5 James Burns’s chapter, “The African Bioscope: Movie-House Culture in British Colonial Africa,” assesses the evolution of urban screening sites designated for the nonwhite, largely poor and illiterate population, sites where such audiences “consumed the Hollywood films that their colonial masters found so threatening,” while constituting spaces to enable and sustain “urban sociability” among Africans of lower social standing. Tom Rice’s chapter, “From the Inside: The Colonial Film Unit and the Beginning of the End,” interrogates the shifting politics of British colonial policy engaged with “training Africans” in the postwar period, emphasizing the practice of policy in the Gold Coast (now Ghana). Last, consider in Odile Goerg’s

6

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

chapter “The Independence Generation: Film Culture and the Anti-Colonial Struggle in the 1950s,” on the development of film culture in the postwar years. Here Goerg maps the circulation of Western cinema and the reception of American films by African audiences, the role and variations of censorship practiced by the French and British colonies, and the emergent challenges to colonial discourses on cinema.

Part 2: Constituting African Cinema Eight chapters engage with (a) the “moment” of what would become African cinema as an anticolonial formation that challenged imperial rule in the continent and the global South; (b) the postindependence period and opposition to, and dependency on, foreign, largely Western, screens, production, and exhibition sites; and (c) the creation of major film festivals in Tunis (Journées cinématographiques de Carthage, also known as JCC) and Ouagadougou (FESPACO),6 as well as the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) that, in counterpoint to foreign domination, institutionalized and promoted African cinema and its role in the educational and cultural development of African societies. Beginning with two founding texts, Med Hondo’s “What Is Cinema for Us?” and Férid Boughedir’s “A Cinema Fighting for Its Liberation,” the problematique and organizing principles of African cinema are declared for its independence and development, decolonizing African minds, and advocacy for the self-determination of African societies. Haile Gerima’s contribution follows with “Where Are the African Women Filmmakers?,” which revisits patriarchy and sexism on African screens. Gerima asserts, “The depiction and portrayal of women in African cinema is by and large a deformed one,”7 and he cites three trajectories of this gendered disfigurement: (a) African women are portrayed as sexual objects; (b) symbols of a “pure” Africa; and (c) among “progressive” male filmmakers, portrayals of “liberated men and women with some kind of social, political, and economic vision.”8 The next two chapters address the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI), detailed in Monique Mbeka Phoba’s interview with Seipati Bulane-Hopa, “New Avenues for FEPACI,” and Sada Niang’s “The FEPACI and Its Artistic Legacies,” in which he assesses the postwar cinematic landscape and context of FEPACI, including the rise of anticolonial movements in the global South and the theorization and deployment of Third Cinema by tricontinental, particularly Caribbean and Latin American, filmmakers, among them Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Fernando Birri, Julio García Espinosa, Glauber Rocha, Fernando Solanas.9

Michael T. Martin & Gaston J. M. Kaboré / On Decoloniality

7

Attendees and participants of FESPACO 1972. Image courtesy of FESPACO.

In “The Six Decades of African Film,” Olivier Barlet maps and distinguishes each decade in the evolution of African cinema from the 1960s period of “mandatory commitment” to “mirroring society” (1970s), the “autofiction” of the 1980s, “the individual versus the world” (1990s), “towards humanity” (2000s), and during the 2010s “a tribute to concern,” which Barlet describes as “troubled times” marked by “the rise in inequality, populism, and dictatorships.” Part 2’s final chapters conclude with overviews of the colonial project and evolution of African cinema in Clyde Taylor’s “Africa, The Last Cinema” through to the 1980s and Férid Boughedir’s overview and critical summation of the past five decades of African cinema in “The Pan-African Cinema Movement: Achievements, Misfortunes, and Failures (1969–2020).”

Part 3: Theorizing African Cinema Part 3 interrogates the organizing premises and foregrounds the critical terms, categories, and frameworks upon which African cinema is constituted and debated. Here, such contingent, yet determining, factors, such as nationality, race, location, language, and orality, are examined, along with thorny questions such as “Who is an African filmmaker?”; “What is ‘Africanity’ in the conception and practice of African cinema?”; and “In defining African

8

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

cinema, are we creating a ‘theoretical ghetto’ and formulaic orthodoxy that will stifle new expressive forms and representational strategies?” In the first chapter “African Cinema(s): Definition, Identity, and Theoretical Considerations,” Alexie Tcheuyap examines the conundrum of fashioning a coherent conceptualization of African cinema. In surveying the theoretical landscape, he foregrounds the disputes and limitations of ensconced notions and arguments that support unsettled claims about African cinema. In doing so, and on behalf of clarity of terms and criteria, this chapter is particularly useful for discussion. Esiaba Irobi’s “Theorizing African Cinema: Contemporary African Cinematic Discourse and Its Discontents” proffers the construct of the Nsibidi as the framing edifice of a theory of African cinema, which posits “that our filmmakers should, as their own unique contribution into the fabric of world cinema, quilt complex, cultic, iconography that requires an authentic and deep understanding of a given African culture’s art history.”10 For comparisons between ideological discourses and frameworks, see Stephen A. Zacks’s chapter, “The Theoretical Construction of African Cinema,” on “neo-structuralism,” “popular modernism,” and the neo-Marxist approach of Frantz Fanon and Third Cinema to history and social transformation. Elaboration of this approach can be found in Teshome H. Gabriel’s chapter and seminal text “Toward a Critical Theory of Third World Films.” On the matter of authenticity, consult David Murphy’s “Africans Filming Africa: Questioning Theories of an Authentic African Cinema”; and on the binary of tradition/modernity, Jude Akudinobi’s “Tradition/Modernity and the Discourse of African Cinema.” To consider the saliency of “oral cultures” in theorizing African cinema, see “Towards a Theory of Orality in African Cinema,” by Keyan G. Tomaselli, Arnold Shepperson, and Maureen Eke; and for the importance of African languages on the reception of African cinema by African audiences, see Paulin Soumanou Vieyra’s defining chapter, “Film and the Problem of Languages in Africa.” Here, Vieyra sets out to address obstacles in indigenous filmmaking when the spoken language is not in the original. To invoke Gaston J. M. Kaboré in the construction of an African imaginary, in a people’s language, is the capacity to recover and interpret the past, as it is to develop a national and continental identity because language, Kaboré asserts, “brings specificity to our experience.”11 And Frantz Fanon, no less, declares in Black Skin, White Masks that “[t]o speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.”12 Against the limitations of dubbing and, ironically, its capacity to reaffirm Western values, Vieyra advocates for dubbing as a trade-off, “the lesser of two evils,” rather than support a [foreign] language that is understood by 10 percent of the audience, declaring that “grafting African language would bring local

Michael T. Martin & Gaston J. M. Kaboré / On Decoloniality

9

Panel discussion at the 2017 FESPACO. Gaston Kaboré, Burkinabe filmmaker, pictured on the right. Image courtesy of FESPACO.

meaning and affective dimension” for African audiences. In this regard, for Vieyra, “African cinema must start by being totally African,” if it is to contribute to the world, which means “that Africa must originate with African languages.”13 On the refashioning of African screens and their application to the training of media professionals and reorientation of African visual media, see Boukary Sawadogo’s chapter “In Defense of African Film Studies.”

Part 4: Articulations of African Cinema Part 4 is comprised of three commissioned dossiers, beginning with a comprehensive chronology, “Key Dates in the History of African Cinema,” by Olivier Barlet and Claude Forest, who distinguish the four “moments” in the evolution of African cinema and include entries for films, filmmakers, countries, defining events, and institutional formations. The second dossier, “African Women in Cinema,” curated by Beti Ellerson, maps the location, mobilizations, and contributions of African women filmmakers from African cinema’s nascency to the present. This much-needed intervention serves as a corrective to an understudied and under-valorized area of study in the literatures, as well as university curricula on film, visual, and cultural studies. And the third dossier, curated and introduced by Sada Niang and Samba Gadjigo, is devoted to the “father of African Cinema,” Ousmane Sembène, and features a poem and statement by Sembène; a tribute by Gadjigo; a lengthy conversation with filmmakers Gadjigo and Jason Silverman on their

10

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Entrance to the 1979 FESPACO in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Image courtesy of FESPACO.

feature documentary Sembene! (2015), by Michael T. Martin; and an annotated gallery of Sembène’s personal documents, curated by Cole Nelson.

Volume 2: Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO)—Formation, Evolution, Challenges The second volume of the collection, which begins with a preface by Ardiouma Soma, the former General Delegate of FESPACO (2014–2020) is organized into six parts, the latter part composed of three dossiers. This volume engages with the decolonizing intervention of FESPACO, the most celebrated, inclusive, and consequential cinematic convocation of its kind in the Black world. Since its formation in 1969, FESPACO’s mission is, in principle, remarkably unchanged, though organizationally distressed, undercapitalized, and dependent. In the long and fraught history of representation, FESPACO’s defining mission is to unapologetically recover, chronicle, affirm, and reconstitute the representation of the African continent and its global diaspora of peoples, thereby enunciating in the cinematic, all manner of Pan-African identity, experience, and, in the project of world making, the futurity of the Black world. With this raison d’être of FESPACO in mind, the festival is to neither be mistaken for merely a site of exhibition, nor a venue for the display of African

Michael T. Martin & Gaston J. M. Kaboré / On Decoloniality

11

and Black artistic achievement, nor a modality for cultural performance and representation. FESPACO is itself a historical activity and intervention on behalf, and in the play of art, politics, modernity, and most important, the cultural identity of African descended peoples and valorization of all manner of Black life on the African continent and diaspora worldwide. As noted earlier, first published in Black Camera in 2020 to coincide with and commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of FESPACO,14 this second volume includes landmark and commissioned essays, commentaries, conversations, dossiers, and programmatic statements and manifestos that mark and elaborate the key moments in the evolution of FESPACO over the span of the past five decades. Together, they document twenty-six editions of this biennial festival—time enough to assess its development, practice, reception, efficacy, and challenges. By examining FESPACO’s role as host to important and defining deliberations about cultural policy and artistic practice in forums, workshops, and colloquia among media professionals, scholars, critics, and cineastes in public conversation, we are able to discern how African cinema, as a local, national, continental, and increasingly in its diasporic iterations, constitutes a global cultural formation influencing other artistic traditions and movements internationally.

Part 1: Sites and Contexts of Exhibition Part 1 begins with an overview of the “Sites and Contexts of Exhibition” featuring five chapters by Lindiwe Dovey, Manthia Diawara, Beti Ellerson, Sambolgo Bangré, and Dorothee Wenner that together track the international festival circuit for screening African films, the presence of African women filmmakers in the “festival landscape,” how and in what exhibition sites African audiences are shaped and cultivated, and the politics that inform transcultural networking and exhibition of African films.

Part 2: FESPACO: An Ever-Evolving Cinematic and Cultural Formation Part 2 engages with the fifty-year history of the festival itself and comprises nineteen chapters in the form of essays, statements, and interviews by Diawara, M. Africanus Aveh, Mahir Şaul, Sembène, Wole Soyinka, Aboubakar Sanogo, Teresa Hoefert de Turégano, Claire Andrade-Watkins, and Colin Dupré; commissioned essays15 by Beti Ellerson, Rod Stoneman, Mbye Cham, Claire Diao, Férid Boughedir, Michel Amarger, and Sheila Petty; and interviews with Gaston J. M. Kaboré by Michael T. Martin and Alimata Salambéré by Olivier Barlet.

12

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Part 3: Conditionalities and Challenges The contents of part 3, “Conditionalities and Challenges,” consists of five chapters. Three are formerly commissioned by Imruh Bakari, June Givanni, and Rémi Abéga. The other two are by Mahir Şaul and Olivier Barlet. From the vantage of observation and participation in recent editions of the festival, several contributors project forward into the future of FESPACO and discuss the challenges ahead.16

Part 4: Commentaries: Filmmakers, Film Scholars, and Media Professionals Next in the lineup, part 4, “Commentaries,” consists of fifty-four commissioned short statements by filmmakers and other media professionals, film scholars, and critics reflecting on their experience—favorable and otherwise—at past editions, which illume the flaws and grandeur that is FESPACO. Among such statements, include by Françoise Pfaff, Jean-Marie Téno, Danny Glover, Mansour Sora Wade, Bridgett Davis, Jane Bryce, JeanPierre Bekolo, Dani Kouyaté, Joseph Gaï Ramaka, Zézé Gamboa, Cheryl Fabio, Cornelius Moore, Makéna Diop, Catherine Ruelle, Melissa Thackway, Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud, to name a few.

Part 5: Documents and Part 6: Dossiers While part 5 is devoted to the resolutions, regulations, manifestos, record of juried awards, and events obtained during past editions of FESPACO, part 6 constitutes three distinct dossiers. The first dossier addresses the Paul Robeson Award Initiative (PRAI), which was created to broaden the scope of FESPACO by celebrating filmmaking in the Black Diaspora, and the second and third dossiers address the two major film training institutes in Ouagadougou, the Institut Supérieur de l’Image et du Son/Ecole de Studio (Higher Institute of Image and Sound/Studio School, ISIS-SE) and IMAGINE Film Training Institute. Each dossier details the history, purpose, and essential labor of these cinematographic entities in Burkina Faso.

Volume 3: The Documentary Record: Declarations, Resolutions, Manifestos, Speeches Volume 3 spans the past century and documents decoloniality in cultural policy, emphasizing the cinematic. Closing the collection, it serves as a compendium of proclamations in the form of resolutions, declarations, manifestos, and programmatic statements that chronologically map the

Michael T. Martin & Gaston J. M. Kaboré / On Decoloniality

13

Representatives of Nigeria at the 1977 Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ’77). Public domain.

long history and trajectories of cultural policy in Africa and its diasporas in the Black Atlantic and Pasifika. Part 2 of the volume begins with the 1920 “Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World,” which refers to movies as “picture films” and an insidious mode of misrepresentation rather than an affirmation and valuation of African-descended peoples. We hereby protest against the publication of scandalous and inflammatory articles by an alien press tending to create racial strife and the exhibition of picture films [emphasis ours] showing the Negro as a cannibal.17

In counterpoint to such representation of African Americans as “cannibals,” the “Declaration” refutes as it anticipates [Black] filmmaking as a self-conscious and reflexive art form and practice that, foregrounding cinema’s role in decoloniality, labors to reconstitute African peoples as historical subjects in the project of world making. Later documents in the compendium prescribe and articulate the necessity of media—in its various forms and technologies—as no less important to the development of African societies against neo-imperial forms of globalization under such determinations of capitalism. However discrete and distinguished by time, institutional affiliation, country/region/continent of origin, venue of address, and historical circumstance and setting, each entry in the compendium is a “speech act” that

14

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

• • • • •

constitutes a public declaration of a decolonial purpose and intention prescribes the role of artist, as intellectual in the service of people dispossessed of their culture and humanity is ascendant and made manifest during moments of crisis—not stasis is instructive, describing means by which social progress and a different world might be realized conjures a futurity.

Consider this third volume an aggregate of oppositional assertions and claims in a living archive that as directives on cultural policy and cultural production—aspirational and practical—are in conversation with cinema. As the documentary record and appendix to volumes 1 and 2, this volume is intended to situate African and Black diasporic cinema in the ambit of modernity and the historical project of recovery and renewal. The compendium is organized into two parts: part 1 references formal statements that pertain directly to cultural policy and cinematic formations in Africa, while part 2 addresses the Black diaspora. Entries in each part are chronologically ordered to account for when such proclamations were created, followed by where and in which setting or context they were enunciated. In doing so, historical time serves to periodize cultural policy and particular cinematic iterations in both Africa and the diaspora alike—in the latter, North/South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Pasifika. While this organizing approach privileges the temporal and geographical, it draws attention to the cultural politics and determinations of circumstance for each entry in the compendium. Part 1, on Africa, consists of forty-seven entries. Among the formative and defining proclamations, consider the “Declaration and Resolutions of the Conference of Independent African States” (1958), the “Pan-African Cultural Manifesto, Algiers, Algeria” (1969), and the “Proposed Establishment of an All-African Cinema Union” (1970); and, too, such later statements: “The Algiers Charter on African Cinema” (1975), the “Cultural Charter of Africa” (1976), and “Niamey Manifesto of African Filmmakers” (1982); and on matters of gender and sexuality, the “Statement by the African Women Professionals of Cinema, Television, and Video” (1991), “Queer African Manifesto/Declaration” (2010), “Manifesto: Conference of African Women Filmmakers” (2010), and “Sisters Working in Film and Television (SWIFT)” (2016). Part 2, on the Black diaspora, comprises fifty-three entries. Note that the earlier entries in this part predate those in part 1 by several decades and start with (as noted earlier) the 1920 “Declaration of the Rights of the Negro

Michael T. Martin & Gaston J. M. Kaboré / On Decoloniality

15

Peoples of the World.” This and other defining proclamations are particularly consequential for their emblematic value as denunciations of imperial rule and raced doctrines of domination. Correspondingly, they mobilize and propose programmatic initiatives to decolonize African peoples in solidarity with allied social and political formations. Here, the “Selections from the Declarations and Resolutions of the Fifth Pan-African Congress” (1945), the resolutions of the “Congress of Negro Writers and Artists” (1956 and 1959), and “Towards a Third Cinema” (1970), among others, are foundational followed by the “Resolutions of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting” (1973) and the “Federation of Caribbean Audiovisual Professions” (FeCAVIP Manifesto, 1990). While the entries in the compendium document the history, evolution, and trajectories of cultural policy in Africa and the diaspora during the second half of the twentieth century, each proclamation has a backstory— a particular setting, circumstance, motivation, and impetus. In addition to these factors, we should contemplate the human protagonists, who were driven by personal concerns and class and gendered interests, along with competing ideological and philosophical orientations, as well as alliances that privileged one art form over others, and territorial claims and loyalties in national, regional, and continental contexts, which render specificity to each proclamation, and in relationship to larger economic and political affairs and considerations. Together, with these subjectivities and conditionalities, and the relative and shifting notions and practice of Negritude and Pan-Africanism as organizing conceptions, we refer you to volumes 2 and 3 of this collection and to the ever-growing corpus of literature that, in revisiting African decoloniality during the long and tumultuous twentieth century is cause to recalibrate our assessment of the Black world and the artistic and cultural renaissance it spawned.18

Notes 1. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Routledge, 1994), 279. 2. See in volume 1, Olivier Barlet and Claude Forest’s periodization of African cinema, “Key Dates in the History of African Cinema.” 3. Ibid. 4. Based on the novel of the same title by colonial administrator and ethnographer Robert Delavignette (1931). 5. Ibid. 6. For a comprehensive account of FESPACO, see volume 2; for FEPACI see also volume 2’s “The Long Take: Gaston Kaboré on FEPACI & FESPACO.” 7. Ibid.

16

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

8. Ibid. 9. For a consideration of the defining texts of Third Cinema, see Michael T. Martin, New Latin American Cinema: Theory, Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations (Vol. 1) (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 1997). 10. Ibid., 6. 11. Michael T. Martin, “I Am a Storyteller, Drawing Water from the Well of My Culture: Gaston Kaboré, Griot of African Cinema,” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 163–64. 12. Ibid., 164. 13. See volume 2, part 3. 14. Black Camera 12, no. 1 (Fall 2020). 15. Formerly published in Black Camera 12, no. 1 (2020). 16. Ibid. 17. Drafted and adopted at the UNIA International Convention of the Negroes of the World, New York City, August 31, 1920, see Bob Blaisdell, ed., Selected Writings and Speeches of Marcus Garvey (Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), 20. 18. For example, see Presence Africaine, nos. 8–10 (1956): 3–412; Presence Africaine, nos. 24–25 (1959): 3–472; Nathan Hare, “A Report on the Pan-African Cultural Festival,” The Black Scholar 1, no. 1 (1969): 2–10; Olivier Hadouchi, “‘African Culture Will Be Revolutionary or Will Not Be’: William Klein’s Film of the First-Pan-African Festival of Algiers,” Third Text 25, no. 1 (2011): 117–28; Christopher Bonner, “Alioune Diop and the Cultural Politics of Negritude: Reading the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists, 1956,” Research in African Literatures 50, no. 2 (2019): 1–18; Guirdex Masse, “A Diasporic Encounter: The Politics of Race and Culture at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists Open,” https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/ etds/p8418p06z?locaele=en; Babacar M’Baye, “Richard Wright and African Francophone Intellectuals: A Reassessment of the 1956 Congress of Black Writers in Paris,” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 2, no. (2009): 29–42; Merve Fejzula, “Women and the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris,” https://www.aaihs.org/ women-and-the-1956-congress-of-black-writers-and-artists-in-paris/; Robert W. July, An African Voice: The Role of the Humanities in African Independence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 24–44; David Murphy, The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016); Paul Cooke, “The Art of Africa for the Whole World: An Account of the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal—April 1–24, 1966,” Negro History Bulletin 29, no. 8 (1966): 172–89; John Povey, “Dakar: An African Rendez-vous,” Africa Today 13, no. 5 (1966): 4–6; Alioune Diop, “From the Festival of Negro Arts at Dakar to the Lagos Festival,” Presence Africaine, no. 92 (1974): 9–14; Andrew Apter, “Beyond Négritude: Black Cultural Citizenship and the Arab Question in FESTAC 77,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2016): 313–26; Etienne Lock, “The Intellectual Dimension of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC 1977) and Its Relevance Today,” Canadian Journal of African Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2020.18 35682; and E. Mveng, “General Report: 1st Pre-Colloquium of the 3rd World Festival of Negro Arts,” Presence Africaine, nos. 117–18 (1981): 365–74.

I. COLONIAL FORMATIONS

Figure A. Film poster for the French film Brazza ou l’épopée du Congo / Epic of the Congo (dir. Léon Poirier, 1940, France). Image in the public domain.

Colonial Cinema Roy Armes

If we are to address questions of the history and culture of nationhood, the particular form taken by the intersection of contemporary history, culture, and politics which manifestly is a crucial question for the recent experiences of most of the world’s population, we ought similarly to consider not what ‘identity’ is . . . but how actual, specific, socially and historically located people, and groups of people, themselves articulate their self-conceptions, their historical experience and their place in society. JAMES MCDOUGAL1 North Africa has given us better wines than we could have imagined. I see no reason why she should not, tomorrow, give us the best French films.2 —FRENCH ACTOR HARRY BAUR, 1937

T

he cinema reached Africa at much the same time as it spread across Europe and the United States. There were film shows in Cairo and Alexandria as early as 1896, in Tunis and Fez in 1897, Dakar in 1900 and Lagos in 1903. The initial impulse behind this worldwide spread was purely commercial: the desire to exploit to the full the commercial potential of what its inventors, like the Lumière Brothers, feared might be just a passing novelty. But as film narrative developed in length and complexity, the export of film took on a new significance. As Férid Boughedir has observed: “Cinema reached Africa with colonialism. Its principal role was to supply a cultural and ideological justification for political domination and economic exploitation.”3 In many ways cinema succeeded in this role: “A native worker performs better when he believes that the representatives of colonial power are his betters by race, and that his own civilization is inferior to that of the whites.”4 Little one-minute films were also shot in Africa at the turn of the century, as the Lumière operators made a habit of shooting local “views” (a comparatively simple procedure since Lumière’s cinematograph was both camera and projector combined).The aim was both to increase the attractiveness of the Lumières’ local screenings and to provide films for subsequent worldwide

20

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

distribution. The Lumière catalogue of 1905 contains over fifty such views shot in North Africa. One of Lumière’s leading operators, whose career is of particular interest, is Alexandre Promio (1868–1926). He shot little scenes in Algiers and Tlemcen as early as 1896 and worked in Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt in 1897, returning to North Africa once more in 1903. Promio, who discovered the East on his first trip to Algeria, remained fascinated by it, but, as Jean-Claude Seguin notes, his gaze “may be subtle, but it is nonetheless obviously orientalist.”5 Promio went on in 1912 to work for the film and photographic service of the French government in Algiers, where he stayed for twelve years. Seguin sees a continuity in his thirty-year career, which can serve as an exemplar for the development and use of cinema in colonial Africa as a whole in the early years of the twentieth century. Working for the Lumière company for ten years, Promio “had explored the planet to reveal its comical, surprising or simply exotic aspects.” For the French administration he had subsequently “journeyed across the colony, travelling in the service of the vast propaganda project inspired by the French authorities.”6 The arrival in Tunisia in 1919 of the director Luitz-Morat—a former stage partner of Sarah Bernhardt in La Dame aux camélias and of Réjane in Madame Sans-gêne—to shoot scenes for his feature film The Five Cursed Gentlemen / Les Cinq gentlemen maudits,7 marked a new stage in the exploitation of the African colonies, namely their use as locations for foreign feature films. Of the handful of films set in West Africa, most—such as Léon Poirier’s Brazza or The Epic of the Congo / Brazza ou l’épopée du Congo (1939) and Jacques de Baroncelli’s The Man of the Niger / L’Homme du Niger (1939)— dealt with the French colonial experience in West Africa seen through the eyes of a heroic European protagonist. The tone of the latter film—and its ideological message—is clear from a 1940s French review: Thus, as you see, French cinema during recent years has done its utmost to show the true face of Africa and the true face too of France in the African domain. Through this magic lantern, the world has been able to perceive that France has accomplished the remarkable feat of making itself loved like a mother in its colonies, because everywhere and always it has shown itself to be just and humane.8

The overwhelming bulk of the colonial films were, however, set in North Africa. Even the Pierre Loti novel The Novel of a Colonial Soldier / Roman d’un spahi, which is set in Senegal, was filmed in 1935 by Michel Bernheim with the location changed to southern Morocco. A mythical North Africa became the location for a succession of notable films. As David Henry Slavin observes, “colonial films are melodramas, simple stories of individual lives and love they are suffused with racial and gender privilege.”9 In comparison with other mainstream European and Hollywood films, they also contain a

Roy Armes / Colonial Cinema

21

very high proportion of tales of defeat. The flavor of this cinema is excellently captured by Dina Sherzer. The colonies are presented as “territories waiting for European initiatives, virgin land where the White man with helmet and boots regenerated himself or was destroyed by alcoholism, malaria, or native women.” The films “displayed the heroism of French men, along with stereotypical images of desert, dunes and camels, and reinforced the idea that the Other is dangerous.” But what is most remarkable about this body of films is what they omitted: “They did not present the colonial experience, did not attach importance to colonial issues, and were amazingly silent on what happened in reality.” In this way they “contributed to the colonial spirit and temperament of conquest and to the construction of White identity and hegemony.”10 Common to all such colonial melodramas is a single ideology, well defined, from a South African viewpoint, by Keyan Tomaselli five years before the advent of black rule: For Africa as a whole, cinema has always been a powerful weapon deployed by colonial nations to maintain their respective spheres of political and economic influence. History is distorted and a Western view of Africa continues to be transmitted back to the colonized. Apart from the obvious monetary returns for the production companies themselves, the values Western cinema imparts and the ideologies it legitimates are beneficial for western cultural, financial, and political hegemony.11

Pépé le Moko (1936) is the archetypal French colonial film, though very little of the film was actually shot in North Africa—the Casbah was reconstructed by designer Jacques Krauss at the Joinville studios in Paris. Made by Julien Duvivier, one of French cinema’s most successful technicians who was then at the height of his powers, the film tells of the doomed love of the Parisian jewel thief Pépé le Moko (played by Jean Gabin), who has taken refuge in the casbah, and Gaby (Mireille Balin), a high-class prostitute (poule de luxe), who is visiting Algiers with her rich champagne-merchant lover. Though Pépé is aware that he will be arrested if he leaves the Casbah, he nonetheless tries to accompany Gaby when she leaves. Captured and handcuffed, he stabs himself on the dockside, as the unsuspecting Gaby sails away. Like most colonial films, this is a purely European drama, to which the inhabitants of Algiers (and to a considerable extent the setting itself) are irrelevant. What is very striking from a present-day standpoint is the handling of the setting and the Arab characters. When the local French police chief, Slimane, describes the Casbah, he mentions nine national or racial types as making up the Casbah’s forty thousand inhabitants, but the word “Arab” does not occur. There are, as most commentators on the film have noted, no Arabs in the Casbah! Slimane is stereotyped as a wily and treacherous

22

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

oriental, detested by his French superiors, and Pépé’s girlfriend Inès (French actress Line Noro) is depicted not as an Arab, but as a gypsy, complete with dark make-up, black frizzy hair, and large earrings. As the Algerian critic Abdelghani Megherbi notes, “Duvivier did not think it worthwhile to give even the slightest role to Algerians. The latter, as was the custom, formed an integral part of the decor on which colonial cinema fed so abundantly.”12 The sole Arab name in the credits is that of Mohamed Iguerbouchen, who supplied the “oriental” music to supplement Vincent Scotto’s effective but fundamentally Western score.

Tunisia The only pioneer filmmaker to work independently in either the Maghreb or West Africa under colonialism was the Tunisian Albert Samama Chikly (1872–1934), a remarkable figure in every respect to be a pioneer of Arab and African cinema. For one thing Chikly was a Jew, son of the Bey of Tunis’s banker, who had acquired French citizenship. Chikly’s Italian wife and his only child, his daughter Haydée, both converted to Islam, and there can be no doubt about his personal sense of his Tunisian identity. But after running away to sea as a teenager, Chikly remained fascinated with the West and its technology. He was one of the first Tunisians to own a bicycle, which he used to explore the Tunisian South. He then set up the first X-ray laboratory in Tunis and imported radio equipment within a few months of Marconi’s invention becoming known and while it was still an experimental technology. As an active photographer, he was inevitably fascinated by the Lumières’ invention of the cinematograph in 1895, and his daughter Haydée claims he organized a first film show in Tunis in 1896. Certainly, he and a fellow photographer, Soler, organised public ten-minute screenings for a week or so in 1897, to great acclaim according to his nephew Raoul Darmon: “Every showing was greeted with acclamation by the audience and the enthusiasm was such that when the programme finished, half the audience regularly refused to leave and paid for a second screening.”13 Ever the enthusiast, Chikly explored underwater photography in a submarine designed by the vicar of Carthage, the abbé Raoul, and aerial photography in collaboration with the aeronaut Valère Lecomte. He also attached his camera to both a microscope and a telescope. Continuing to use both his still and movie cameras, Chikly became a reporter, recording local issues for Paris newspapers and the Gaumont newsreels, and then embarking on a filmic documentation of all aspects of Tunisia. As Guillemette Mansour notes, his photographs are not orientalist compositions, but works that display “an acute sense for framing an image and a remarkable mastery of light.”14 His

Roy Armes / Colonial Cinema

23

Figure 1. Tunisian Filmmaker Albert Samama Chikly (1872–1934). Image in the public domain.

first experience as war reporter came when he filmed and reported on the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911, from the Turkish side. When the First World War began, Chikly became one of the dozen cameramen employed by the French Army film service (along with Abel Gance—future creator of Napoléon—and Louis Feuillade—author-to-be of the Fantômas and Judex series), filming at the front at Verdun in 1916. His services, in a war in which ten thousand Tunisian volunteers and conscripts died in the trenches, earned him the Military Medal. The extensive use of North African locations by French filmmakers began soon after the end of the First World War, and Chikly served as cameramen for one of these films, Tales of the Arabian Nights / Les Contes des mille et une nuits (1922) directed by the Russian émigré Victor Tourjansky. The same year Chikly directed his own first fictional film, Zohra, scripted by and starring his daughter Haydée. This short film tells the story of a young French woman shipwrecked on the coast of Tunisia and rescued by Bedouin tribesmen, with whom she lives for a while. Captured by bandits while travelling in a caravan taking her to a French settlement, she is again rescued, this time by a dashing French aviator, and restored to her parents. This simple tale

24

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

reflects two of Chikly’s passions, Bedouin life and aviation, and Haydée’s performance earned her a part in Rex Ingram’s The Arab (1924), which starred Ramon Navarro. Chikly’s second feature-length film, The Girl from Carthage / La Fille de Carthage / Aïn El-Ghazel (1924), was also scripted by Haydée who again took the leading role and also edited the film. If Zohra was, as Guillemette Mansour observes, “a semi-documentary,”15 The Girl from Carthage is the full fictional story of a young woman, under pressure to marry her father’s choice of husband (a rich and brutal landowner), who runs away to the desert and is followed by the gentle young teacher she loves. When he is killed by their pursuers, she stabs herself and falls dead across his body. Chikly’s personal friend, the Bey of Tunis, provided extras, allowed the use of one of his palaces, and even visited the shooting on several occasions. The film’s theme of forced marriage and the use of a female protagonist (together with the particularly important role in the production played by Haydée Chikly) make The Girl from Carthage a fascinating precursor of the kind of Tunisian cinema which would come into being over forty years later. Chikly refused to allow his daughter Haydée (later Haydée Tamzali) to take up Rex Ingram’s invitation to Hollywood (she was a teenager, taking her baccalaureate at the time), so her film career effectively ended with The Girl from Carthage, though she did appear, in old age, in Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud’s documentary about her father and in Férid Boughedir’s feature film One Summer in La Goulette / Un été à La Goulette. Since large portions of both his films are preserved, Chikly’s own place in film history—anticipating the first Egyptian-made feature by three years—is assured. But, like so many film pioneers, he was to die in poverty, succumbing in 1934 to lung cancer contracted at the front in a gas attack during the First World War and aggravated by his smoking.16

South Africa At the time of independence in the Maghreb and French colonial Africa— when the new African cinemas were about to come into being—there were only two film industries in Africa. One of these—that located in South Africa—could obviously be of no relevance, despite the state subsidy scheme established in 1956 and the existence of 1,300 or so feature films produced there between 1910 and 1996,17 since it was a white cinema constructed for a white audience. Writing in 1989, Keyan Tomaselli notes the strategic ideological importance of South African cinema: “Repression has to be legitimised in some way, and cinema has historically played an important role in presenting apartheid as a natural way of life,”18 South African cinema

Roy Armes / Colonial Cinema

25

during the apartheid era continued the traditional role of cinema in colonial societies. Though South Africa’s filmmakers “feel that their films lie outside politics, that they are merely entertainment,” Tomaselli argues that the films in fact serve the state through “their class position, their underlying social and cinematic assumptions,” as well as “their displacement of actual conditions by imaginary relations which delineate an apartheid view of the world.”19 In the one of the first comprehensive surveys of African filmmaking— Guy Hennebelle’s Les Cinémas africains en 1972—the white Zimbabwean (at that time, before Independence, Rhodesian) filmmaker Michael Raeburn gave an interesting introduction to South African cinema, pointing out that these films are “made by whites, for whites. The financing of this production is made possible by the extremely high standard of living of the white minority privileged by shameful racial laws.”20 Raeburn characterizes the hundred feature films shot since 1945 as “just pale imitations of AngloAmerican archetypes,”21 noting a striking resemblance to Western colonial cinema: “in the white films, the non-whites are only extras. If the script requires a non-white to talk to or touch a white, the role has to be played by a blacked-up white.”22 The one South African feature film to become an international success was The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), made by one of South Africa’s leading directors, Jamie (Jacobus Johannes) Uys. A former school teacher, Uys had been active as a film director for thirty years and was to be awarded South Africa’s highest civil award, the Order of Merit, for services to the film industry, in 1983.23 On the surface, the film—known in France as Les Dieux sont tombés sur la tête—is simply a very amusing comedy about a bushman, !Ky, who sets out to return an empty Coke bottle which he thinks is a gift from the gods. The other plot strand concerns a white scientist (whose speciality is elephant dung), who involves !Ky in his effort to help save a white school teacher who has been kidnapped—along with her class of black schoolchildren—by a black guerrilla leader. Though the film is seemingly innocuous, poking fun at blacks and whites alike, it is in fact, as the English documentary filmmaker Peter Davis notes, “with the spirit of apartheid.”24 The film masquerades as a Botswanan production, but the ‘Botswana’ where the bushmen lead their idyllic life in no way resembles the real landlocked republic of the same name. Significantly, the film could not have been set in South Africa, since there the pass laws restricting the movement of blacks would have rendered its plot impossible. The commentary accompanying the opening travelogue is highly condescending, and the name of the black guerrilla villain, Sam Boca, has curious connotations, since the sambok is the leather whip regularly used by white South African police to disperse black demonstrations. The name also recalls that of Sam Nujoma, leader of the

26

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Figure 2. Poster for the South African film The Gods Must Be Crazy (dir. Jamie Uys, 1980).

SWAPO liberation movement in neighboring Namibia, and indeed the film has disturbing echoes of the actual political situation there, since the South African authorities had enlisted the bushmen in their fight against SWAPO.25 Davis concludes that, whatever his intentions, Uys has created “an imaginary country which the architects of apartheid would like us to believe in, a South

Roy Armes / Colonial Cinema

27

Africa well-intentioned to all.”26 If the plot is read metaphorically, it shows that “the blacks are like children led astray by agitators coming from outside (the black liberation forces). But they are not the only ones under threat: the white race, personified by the heroine, is also threatened too.”27 The Gods Must Be Crazy embodies a particular moment in African history. Three years later (though still nine years before the end of apartheid in 1994), the filmmaker John van Zyl could already look towards the emergence of a very different South African cinema, which would relate more closely to developments elsewhere in the continent, a cinema “whose vigour and inspiration will have to come from the same roots as the vigour and inspiration of its theatre.” He recognizes that “the real industry of the future will be a predominantly black one, and will link itself to the energy of other Third World film industries.”28 There were indeed interesting coproduction links with West African filmmakers (Souleymane Cissé, Idrissa Ouédraogo, and Jean-Pierre Bekolo) in the mid-1990s, and by the beginning of the new millennium, some steps at least had been taken to transform South African cinema itself.29

Egypt The second African film industry in existence at the time of independence in the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa was that in Egypt, which also had a very different political and economic history from that of its neighbors. Notionally independent since 1922—though with British dominance persisting from 1882 until the 1952 military coup against King Farouk—Egypt had a history of industrial development going back to the early part of the nineteenth century, when, as Tom Kemp points out, Mohamed Ali “initiated a state programme, designed to strengthen the economy of his country, not unlike that of Peter the Great in Russia a century before.” For various reasons, not least the Anglo-Turkish Treaty of 1838 which insisted on the ending of state monopolies, Mohamed Ali’s project failed and “for the rest of the nineteenth century Egypt became a primary-exporting, predominantly agricultural country.” But with the attempts at industrialization came—for the élite at least—a growing sense of national identity. Fresh attempts at modernization were made in the twentieth century when “some import-substitution industries were established,” the trend being “assisted by the two world wars and the slump in export prices during the 1930s.”30 This was the context in which Egyptian cinema came into being. Initially, developments were the work of isolated pioneers, many belonging to Cairo’s thriving expatriate communities. As Kristina Bergmann puts it, “at first financed by Lebanese and Greeks, shot by Italians, designed and acted by

28

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Figure 3. Misr Studio in Egypt, circa 1935. Image in the public domain.

the French, films then became Egyptian.”31 The key date was the founding of the Misr Studios in 1935, after which Egyptian cinema became a genuine film industry, capable of producing a dozen films in 1935 and building continuously so as to reach over forty a year by 1945. The vision and drive behind this development was that of Talaat Harb, director of Bank Misr, who envisaged a company “capable of making Egyptian films with Egyptian subjects, Egyptian literature and Egyptian aesthetics, worthwhile films that can be shown in our own country and in the neighbouring countries of the East.”32 Since Bank Misr was the leading Egyptian bank, the film industry was at the heart of the development of Egyptian capitalism. As Patrick Clawson has explained, Bank Misr was established precisely to foster local industry . . . Through such firms as one of the world’s largest textile mills, printing presses, button factories,

Roy Armes / Colonial Cinema

29

linen-spinning mills, Bank Misr dominated the entire Egyptian economy until its nationalisation in 1960.33

The film industry itself was nationalized, to become the General Organization of Egyptian Cinema, a year later. In her foreword to a volume celebrating 100 years of Egyptian cinema, Magda Wassef notes the existence of 3,000 fictional feature films with which millions of Arabs could identify: “several dozen unforgettable titles, some out-standing filmmakers and, above all, an impact that exceeds the aim fixed at the outset: ‘entertainment.’”34 Through its stars and singers, Egyptian cinema became “an object of Arab desire and pride. Through it they feel reconciled with their identity, ridiculed and crushed by the destructive and often castrating colonial presence.”35 Egypt’s dominant genre, the melodrama, is worth considering briefly, not because of its direct influence on postindependence filmmakers elsewhere in Africa, which was virtually nil, but as a fascinating contrast to the European colonial film, and as another kind of baseline against which the particular approaches of the postindependence filmmakers north and south of the Sahara can be assessed. It is the form through which all future Arab filmmakers discovered cinema as children. Three basic features of melodrama are common to both the Egyptian film and the European or Hollywood colonial feature. The first is the focus on emotional intensity and calamitous events to which, from an Egyptian perspective, Ali Abu Shadi draws attention. Plots are “marked by the sudden movement between highly exaggerated situations in which coincidence plays a major role,” and melodramatic style “uses emotionalism in the writing and the directing and exploits any device to manipulate the feelings of the audience.”36 The second element shared with the colonial film is the use of “a succession of stereotypes and clichés,” and characters whose progress and relationships are structured so as to meet the needs of accessible dramatic patterns.37 The third shared feature is the manichean world, which Khémais Khayati sees as particularly characteristic of Egyptian cinema: “There is good and evil. There is God and the Devil. Between them no reconciliation is possible. Values are total and never relative … Nothing usurps the absolute nature of God.”38 There is immense comfort for the audiences—in the West as much as in the Arab world—in such a black-and-white world of total certainties. We know how people should behave and can appreciate when the accepted norms are violated. There is no ambiguity about how the world should be. The ambiguity for us comes from empathy with characters who transgress, but it is a comfortable ambiguity, because we know that they will, in the end, have to face up to the consequences of their actions. The key difference between Egyptian melodrama and the colonial film, whether European or Hollywood, lies in the treatment of character.

30

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

In Egyptian cinema, as Ali Abu Shadi demonstrates, the characters “do not change or grow emotionally, and the lines between good and evil are clearly demarcated. There is a relative absence of human will, with fate determining the outcome of events.”39 This view is supported by Abbas Fadhil Ibrahim in his analysis of three melodramas from the years 1959–60: “Fatality, fate and chance make and undo the happiness and misfortune of the characters. Accidents, incidents and slips multiply, modifying the course of their lives.”40 According to Khayati, in Arab-Muslim culture, the submission of the individual is complete and the allegiance of the community to God is total. Every revolt against the community is a revolt against God. And every revolt against God is an assault on the immutable order of the world and, for this reason, merits punishment.41

This is, of course, the very opposite of the Western ideology underlying Hollywood and European films, colonial or not, where the key assumption about characters is that they are individuals, able to make choices as the basis for action. Whatever the pressures or dangers, these choices are ultimately freely made by the individual, and cannot be blamed on background, family upbringing, heredity, social or economic pressures, and certainly not on fate. In contrast Egyptian tradition-based drama is “a drama of fatality and happy endings, a drama which does not know the anguish of free choice and which works in blocks and never by nuances.”42 The ideological differences between Egyptian and Hollywood melodrama result in a very different sense of temporality and plot structure. Sayed Saïd argues that in Egyptian melodramas “the time measured by the calendar” is drowned out by “everything which is linked to the past: lessons, meanings, values, traditions, ideas, illusions, even myths.”43 In the Western film, by contrast, time moves swiftly forward and, in conventional Hollywood cinema at least, the final part of a film is a veritable rush towards closure. In contrast, “the future is almost absent from Egyptian cinema and the exceptions can be counted on the fingers of one hand. As for an optimistic vision of the future, that is even rarer.”44 This difference in temporality—Egyptian cinema locked immutably in the past, Western cinema looking relentlessly forward—is reflected in a very different notion of identity. In Egyptian cinema, as defined by Saïd, the national Self is “implicitly defined by a whole series of urban and rural traditions under threat” while the Other “is the source of all evil, the source of all threats.” According to Saïd, “you cannot understand meanings in Egyptian cinema without locating the struggle with Western cultures and civilisations.” The struggle with the colonialist Other “is not just one of the subjects dealt with by cinema. It is its principal background.”45

Roy Armes / Colonial Cinema

31

A perfect example of the Egyptian approach to melodrama is Henry Barakat’s The Sin / Al-haram, produced by the General Organization for Egyptian Cinema in 1965. The Sin is widely regarded as the prolific Cairoborn director’s best work, and it figures in at least one list of the ten best Arab films of all time.46 Adapted from a novel by Youssef Idriss, the film deals with the sufferings of migrant farm workers, whose lives are precarious, since they are hired only by the day at crucial seasons of the year and forced to work far from their homes. Though filmed on location and including many villagers in its cast, the film’s stance is far from that of the Italian neorealists. The subject is softened and sentimentalized, the action is set safely back in 1950 (the Farouk era) and, in the central role, Faten Hamama gives a glittering star performance. What is fascinating is the way in which the film shapes its story of a woman who inadvertently kills her own newborn child, so that while its personal emotional impact is maintained, it is, at the same time, swallowed up, as it were, in the eternal, unchanging life of the peasantry. The Sin brings together all the key elements of Egyptian melodrama: a circular narrative structure using a long central flashback through which the past weighs down upon the present, a pattern of images and music that enhances the audience’s emotional response, a protagonist who suffers but lacks any individual responsibility for what happens to her, an overall sense of unchallengeable fatality, and the portrayal of an unchanging traditional community which is barely touched by the ripple of personal tragedy.

Algeria The final potential model of pre-independence filmmaking in Africa is to be found during the bitter Algerian war for independence (1954–62), when 16mm militant film was used as part of the liberation struggle. As the Algerian sociologist Mouny Berrah notes, “from 1957–1962, Algerian cinema was a site of solidarity, exchange and expression between members of the Algerian maquis and French intellectuals who sympathised with the liberation movement.”47 The catalyst for this was the French communist documentary filmmaker René Vautier (born 1928), who had been decorated with the croix de guerre at the age of sixteen for his resistance activities against the German occupiers in his native France. But in 1952 he had been imprisoned by the French government for violating the 1934 Laval law by filming without authorisation in Africa, where he had made the first French anticolonialist film, Africa 50 / Afrique 50 (1950).48 Vautier had already made an independent short (now lost), One Nation, Algeria / Une nation, l’Algérie, when he began filming with Algerian resistance fighters in 1957–1958 under

32

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

the auspices of the National Liberation Front (FLN) leader Abbane Ramdane. The result was the widely seen twenty-five-minute documentary Algeria in Flames / Algérie en flammes (1959), of which the technicians in East Germany, where it was edited, made 800 copies.49 Unfortunately for the director, by the time the film was complete, Ramdane had been murdered in one of the internecine disputes which characterised the FLN, and Vautier himself was imprisoned by the Algerians, without trial and largely in solitary confinement, for twenty-five months. The first film collective which Vautier set up in the Tebessa region in 1957, the Farid group, comprised a number of Algerians, including the future feature director Ahmed Rachedi. It aimed “to show the methods used by the French administration and army to deal with the Algerian population.”50 In 1958 the group was transferred to Tunis, then the base for the leaders of the Algerian liberation movement, where it became the film service of the Algerian Republican Provisional Government in exile (GPRA). The GPRA thought the role of film important enough for it to send another young filmmaker, Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina, to study film at FAMU in Prague in 1959. Vautier himself, who was wounded three times in his various frontier crossings into Algeria, set up a film school, whose pupils made two collective documentaries in 1957–1958. But before the end of the hostilities, four of the five students had been killed. A number of documentaries were made within the context of the liberation struggle,51 and, as Mouny Berrah notes, these were all “collective and committed films, immediate films devoted to their project with the intention of rehabilitating a self-image deconstructed and devalued by the occupier and arguing for the justice of a war condemned as ‘butchery’ by the enemy.”52 For the Algerian film historian Lotfi Maherzi, the films have a double value: recording the precise reality of the situation in Algeria, and showing the close support of the Algerian people for the struggle.53 They found an audience not only in the Arab countries and eastern Europe, but also on Western television, where they served to counter French propaganda efforts. Though they could not, of course, be shown at the time in Algeria, Abdelghani Megherbi notes that they were frequently projected there during the first years of independence.54 In postindependence Algiers, in 1962, Vautier and Rachedi went on to set up the short-lived audiovisual centre (CAV), in the context of which A People on the March / Peuple en marche (1963) was made. But their particular form of committed militant filmmaking had no part to play in the totally bureaucratized mode of film production that emerged in Algeria in the mid-1960s. Considering the post-liberation career of Ahmed Rachedi, Claude Michel Cluny notes what he considers a “fundamental error” in Algeria cinema:

Roy Armes / Colonial Cinema

33

Figure 4. French documentary filmmaker René Vautier (1928–2015). Date unknown. Image in the public domain.

“They had not worked out what role cinema could play in the elaboration of a new society; they gave priority to a celebration of past battles, rather than to a militant cinema with a revolutionary vocation.”55 Rachedi, like Lakhdar Hamina, became both a prominent feature filmmaker and a bureaucrat, and only René Vautier retained his stance as an independent militant filmmaker (making, among other committed films, the highly praised Being Twenty in the Aurès Mountains / Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès in 1972).

Conclusion This essay has set out to show the nature of the varying strands of film production which existed in Africa at the time when postindependence feature filmmaking was established, in both the Maghreb and sub-Saharan West Africa, in the mid-1960s. Foreign producers from Europe and the United States still use the rural landscapes of the Maghreb as locations for their films and, though the old colonial ideology no longer prevails, the works produced have as little relevance as ever to the realities of African life. A number of filmmakers in Morocco and Tunisia have taken the opportunity to gain some experience by working on these foreign features, but only very subordinate

34

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

roles—as production managers or assistant directors—are open to them. In any case this is a form of production beyond their aspirations, since the sheer size of the financial resources behind international productions such as Lawrence of Arabia or Raiders of the Lost Ark makes this model of production irrelevant to indigenous African producers. The nature of the African industries which emerged in Egypt and South Africa show clearly how filmmaking is of necessity shaped both by overall national industrial development and by ideological factors: Islamic beliefs about morality, social responsibilities and gender relations, on the one hand, apartheid assertions and assumptions about race, on the other. Both film industries continue with varying degrees of success to face new challenges in a very different world, confronting the very real threats to freedom of expression posed by Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt, and responding to the equally real opportunities of shaping a black cinema for a black-governed society in the new South Africa. But in the absence of the kinds of industrial infrastructures which were developed in Egypt and South Africa, the models of production developed there remain largely irrelevant to other African filmmakers north and south of the Sahara. Equally, the increasingly autocratic one-party states that emerged after independence throughout Africa made the Vautier model of militant documentary filmmaking—a perfect example of the “Third Cinema” advocated by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino and theorised by Teshome H. Gabriel56—totally impossible. The situation of postindependence filmmakers instead echoes that of Samama Chikly in Tunisia in the 1920s, in that they have no option but to work totally independently but within strict, statedefined limits, finding finance where they can, working as total creators (producing, directing, scripting) in a context lacking in technically trained local collaborators. Roy Armes is Emeritus Professor of Film at Middlesex University and the author of several important books on African and Arab film history, including Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film, African Filmmaking: North and South of the Sahara, and New Voices in Arab Cinema.

Notes Originally published as Roy Armes, “Beginnings,” in African Filmmaking: North and South of the Sahara (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 21–35. 1. James McDougal, “Introduction,” in James McDougal (ed.), Nation, Society and Culture in North Africa (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003), 2–3.

Roy Armes / Colonial Cinema

35

2. Harry Baur, quoted in Maurice-Robert Bataille and Claude Veillot, Caméras sous le soleil: Le Cinéma en Afrique du nord (Algiers: Esprit, 1956), 9. 3. Férid Boughedir, “Report and Prospects,” in Cinema and Society, ed. Enrico Fulchignoni (Paris: IFTC, 1981), 101. 4. Ibid. 5. Jean-Claude Seguin, Alexandre Promio ou les énigmes de la lumière (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), 250. 6. Ibid., 254. 7. Maurice-Robert Bataille and Claude Veillot, Caméras sous le soleil: Le Cinéma en Afrique du nord (Algiers, 1956), 13–14. 8. Rémy Carrigues, “L’Homme du Niger,” in L’Almanach Ciné-Miroir, 1940. 9. David Henry Slavin, Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919–1939 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 17. 10. Dina Sherzer, Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism: Perspectives from the French and Francophone Worlds (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 4. 11. Keyan Tomaselli, The Cinema of Apartheid (London: Routledge, 1989), 53. 12. Abdelghani Megherbi, Les Algériens au miroir du cinéma colonial (Algiers: SNED, 1982), 247. 13. Cited in Guillemette Mansour, Samama Chikly: Un Tunisien à la rencontre du XXème siècle (Tunis: Simpact Editions, 2000) (from which most of the information given here is derived), 29. 14. Ibid., 64. 15. Ibid., 254. 16. Ibid., 268. 17. Arnold Shepperson and Keyan G. Tomaselli, “Le Cinéma sud-africain après l’apartheid: La restructuration d’une industrie,” in Cinémas africains, une oasis dans le désert?, ed. Samuel Lelièvre (Paris: Corlet/Télérama/CinémAction 106, 2003), 252. 18. Tomaselli, Cinema of Apartheid, 11. 19. Ibid., 81. 20. Michael Raeburn, “Prétoria veut construire un ‘Hollywood’ sud-africain . . .” in Les Cinémas africains en 1972 (Paris: Société Africaine d’Edition, 1972), 261. 21. Ibid., 263. 22. Ibid. 23. Keyan Tomaselli, “Le Rôle de la Jamie Uys Film Company dans la culture afrikaner,” in Le cinéma sud-africain est-il tombé sur la tête?, ed. Keyan Tomaselli (Paris: L’Afrique littéraire, 78/CinémAction 39, 1986), 26. 24. Peter Davis, “Les dieux sont tombés sur la tête, de Jamie Uys: Délices et ambiguités de la position du missionnaire!,” in Le cinéma sud-africain est-il tombé sur la tête?, ed. Keyan Tomaselli (Paris: L’Afrique littéraire, 78/CinémAction 39, 1986), 53. 25. Ibid., 57. 26. Ibid., 56. 27. Ibid., 57–8. 28. John van Zyl, cited in Tomaselli, Cinema of Apartheid, 127. 29. See Gibson Boloko, “La Situation de l’industrie cinématographique Sud-africaine (1980–2000),” in Cinémas africains, une oasis dans le désert?, ed. Samuel Lelièvre (Paris: Corlet/Télérama/CinémAction 106, 2003), 258–63. 30. Tom Kemp, Industrialization in the Non-Western World (London and New York: Longman, 1983), 189.

36

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

31. Kristina Bergmann, Filmkultur und Filmindustrie in Ägypten (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993), 6. 32. Samir Farid, “Les Six générations du cinéma égyptien,” Écran 15, (1973): 40. 33. Patrick Clawson, “The Development of Capitalism in Egypt,” Khamsin 9 (1981): 92. 34. Magda Wassef (ed.), Egypte: Cent ans de cinéma (Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe, 1995), 14. 35. Ibid. 36. Ali Abu Shadi, “Genres in Egyptian Cinema,” in Screens of Life: Critical Film Writing from the Arab World, ed. Alia Arasoughly (Quebec: World Heritage Press, 1998), 85. 37. Khémais Khayati, Cinémas arabes: Topographie d’une image éclatée (Paris and Montreal: L’Harmattan, 1996), 204. 38. Ibid., 202. 39. Shadi, “Genres,” 82. 40. Abbas Fadhil Ibrahim, “Trois mélos égyptiens observés à la loupe,” in Mouny Berrah, Victor Bachy, Mohand Ben Salama and Férid Boughedir (eds.), Cinémas du Maghreb (Paris: CinémAction 14, 1981), 123. 41. Khayati, Cinémas arabes, 203 42. Ibid., 204. 43. Sayed Saïd, “Politique et cinema,” in Magda Wassef (ed.), Egypte: Cent ans de cinéma, 192. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 193. 46. Khayati, Cinémas arabes, 77–87. 47. Mouny Berrah, “Algerian Cinema and National Identity,” in Arasoughly, Screens of Life, 64. 48. The script of this rarely shown film has been published: René Vautier, Afrique 50 (Paris: Editions Paris Expérimental, 2001). 49. René Vautier, Caméra citroyenne (Rennes: Éditions Apogées, 1998), 156. 50. Lotfi Maherzi, Le Cinéma algérien: Institutions, imaginaire, idéologie (Algiers: SNED, 1980), 62. 51. See Mouloud Mimoun (ed.), France-Algérie: Images d’une guerre (Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe, 1992), 68–71. 52. Mouny Berrah, “Histoire et idéologie du cinéma algérien sur la guerre,” in La guerre d’Algérie à l’écran, ed. Guy Hennebelle, Mouny Berrah and Benjamin Stora (Paris: Corlet/Télérama/CinémAction 85, 1997), 160. 53. Maherzi, Le Cinéma algérien, 64. 54. Megherbi, Les Algériens au miroir du cinéma colonial, 269. 55. Claude Michel Cluny, Dictionnaire des nouveaux cinémas arabes (Paris: Sindbad, 1978), 264. 56. See Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” in TwentyFive Years of the New Latin American Cinema, ed. Michael Chanan (London: British Film Institute, 1983), and Teshome H. Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982).

The Colonialist Regime of Representation, 1945–1960 James E. Genova

“B

etween the public and the screen,” Robert Delavignette observed in 1948, “there is a space for misunderstanding that risks altering the knowledge of the world that the screen projects. It is for this mutual comprehension that the film is an irreplaceable and superior instrument.”1 Delavignette’s concern centered on the potential for the distortion of meaning that inhered within the filmic image. The “real” world captured by the camera somehow had to be “properly” understood by the viewer. The problem was that the audience always brought to the space of the cinema certain cultural preconceptions, a universe of comprehension that structured the ways in which images were received. Motion pictures could fail if they did not take into consideration those who would be the consumers. Consequently, film was an intrinsically unstable device for transmitting “truth” and eliciting predetermined outcomes—the “space for misunderstanding” that troubled Delavignette in the previously cited passage. As Adorno notes, “[T]he potential gap between . . . intentions and their actual effect . . . is inherent in the medium.”2 The articulation of a comprehensive “film politics” around the cinema industrial complex of the 1950s in French West Africa was, therefore, accompanied by a deep concern over what transpired in the realm of “representation.” While the materialist aspects of filmmaking were essential to the development projects the French imperial nation-state aimed at its overseas territories, which would also assist the metropole’s postwar reconstruction, officials throughout the imperial hierarchy deemed the images projected to and about Africans to be of equal importance in their universal conceptualization of the cinematic field. The new postwar film politics included a shift in colonialist film imagery as government administrators expressed the concern that earlier tropes of the primitive African both failed to properly consider the “achievements” of the French civilizing mission and incited disorder in the colonies since the indigenous population objected to the racist stereotypes propagated about them to extra-African audiences. Consequently, officials throughout the

38

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

chain of command for Overseas France found themselves having to become film theorists of a certain order. As Delavignette intimated, everyone from the Minister for Overseas France down to the local official in West Africa had to become cognizant of the relationship between the images projected on the screen and the “mentality” of the viewer in the theater. More than that, though, the administrators of the empire had to control that connection and manage the outcomes so that film could play the important role it was now deemed to have in the realization of France’s ever-shifting colonial objectives. As Slavin notes in his study of movies set in North Africa between the two world wars, “Colonial film reflected and reinforced the machinery of cultural hegemony, noncoercive social control, and the underlying politics of privilege.”3 However, the role film was to play within the larger project of sustaining and deepening imperial power was never straightforward or consistent over time. Timothy Burke cautions, in his study of British film politics in colonial Zimbabwe, that “[f]rom the moment of its invention, film has provoked intense anxieties in every society exposed to it, and we should not suppose that white colonizers were any less anxious about the general power of cinema merely because they were colonizers.”4 With the explosive growth of the cinema industrial complex in West Africa, French colonial officials became increasingly unsettled about the images available to African audiences as well as those transmitted about Africa to outside viewers. Thus, administrators in the Federation suddenly found the prevailing racist representations of Africans and African culture that dominated movie screens before 1945 to be highly problematic if not subversive from the perspective of sustaining French power in the region. This did not in any sense lessen the imperialist nature of the cinematic images produced or authorized in the late colonial period. The change was itself the product of a transformed political environment in the metropole and colonies after the War, but reflected the continued desire to maintain the existing fundamental relationship between France and its overseas territories (formerly referred to as colonies). This subtlety is captured by Robert Stam and Louise Spence when they argue, “The insistence on ‘positive images’, finally, obscures the fact that ‘nice’ images might at times be as pernicious as overtly degrading ones, providing a bourgeois façade for paternalism, a more pervasive racism.”5 This increased pervasiveness reflected the general move by the colonial administration to fully articulate and control the cinema industrial complex in the 1950s in West Africa. Materialism and representation went hand in hand in the struggles that defined the field of film production. “Colonial cinema” has been the subject of scholarly attention for some time, becoming a sub-genre of research in its own right. Consequently, researchers across a variety of disciplines have enhanced our knowledge of empire, how images of the exotic participated in sustaining colonialism,

James E. Genova / The Colonialist Regime

39

and the ways in which representations of the colonized informed the articulation of imperialist identities. The consensus that has emerged from such studies generally follows the lines sketched by Pierre Boulanger in Le Cinéma Colonial. He writes, “This cinema carries several myths that are [ultimately] more damaging than that done by the [initial] aggression [of the conquest]. It makes an apology for the conquest, of murder, engenders ignorance, abasement [of the colonized,] and hatred. It [either] ignores the autochthonous populations or depicts them, with very few exceptions, as possessing the most malevolent of traits.”6 As Stam and Spence note, “Since the beginnings of the cinema coincided with the height of European imperialism, it is hardly surprising that European cinema portrayed the colonized in an unflattering light.”7 Despite the seeming convergence of interests between colonialism and colonial cinema, though, there was not often an overt relationship between those who made such films and the imperial state. In other words, the absence of a coherent film politics until the 1950s, at least in the case of French West Africa, meant that filmmakers were independent agents who operated in a specific hegemonic cultural environment and their work largely reflected prevailing tropes that reproduced the power relations that inhered within the imperial context. Moreover, the colonial state was not overly concerned with the images purveyed by those products as long as they did not lead to social disorder in the colonies. Prior to the Second World War the only films that consistently provoked the ire and censure of the imperial officials were those that explicitly challenged the legitimacy of colonialism or the specific practices of the overseas administration, including any movie that expressed the slightest sympathy for socialist politics or the Russian Revolution. It was the appropriation of screen images (and even films) by Africans for (potentially) subversive ends that prodded government officials in West Africa and Paris to begin to take seriously the kinds of portrayals available to cinema patrons, both licit and illicit. Paul Landau explains that Western images of Africa have a very old pedigree. Twentieth century cinema became merely the latest vehicle through which some well-entrenched tropes of “africanity” were made available to consumers around the world. The impact of photographic and cinematographic technology, though, did influence those representations in some profound ways. What Landau calls the “image-Africa became even simpler and flatter in its resonances” with the new machinery of mechanical reproduction. He continues, Items of visual media were . . . critical to the image-Africa. Colonial-era cinema, stereoscopic slides, tobacco-package inserts, Senegalese postcards, Tintin comic strips, half-tone news photographs, colonial exhibitions, Natural History Magazine, animal trophies, and mounted spears and shields all informed it.8

40

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Thus, by the time French rulers instantiated a film politics in West Africa they confronted a pre-existing hegemonic image-Africa that many officials in the region suddenly found troubling and potentially destabilizing of their power. Kenneth Cameron sees this same flattening of the image-Africa in colonial cinema from the 1890s to the 1950s. However, he raises the question of whether the flattening is the product of the films (and filmmakers) or of the tradition of film criticism that has taken motion pictures about Africa as its subject. He asks, “[I]s racism the only thing to be seen in these films?” Cameron does not deny the prominence of racist images and racial tropes in colonial cinema about Africa. However, he wants to broaden the field of vision to include an interrogation of the role of class, gender, and how these “films reveal things other than racism in the societies that produced them.”9 This is a good place to start for the discussion of “representation” at the center of this article. It leads back to the fundamental issue of the relationship of the cinema industrial complex and the colonial state for it was concern over the specific images conveyed on the screen and the manner in which they were interpreted by indigenous West African audiences that French officials first inaugurated the process of elaborating a film politics for the empire. Much of the scholarship of colonial cinema has centered on the convergence of interest between imperial power and the screen images in films about the colonized peoples and territories. Slavin’s analysis of the “overall role of colonial cinema as an expression of the interaction of cultural hegemony and political power” focuses on the impact that the motion picture genre had on the French political left and its base among the European working class. He argues that colonial cinema “legitimated the racial privileges of European workers, diverted attention from their own exploitation, and disabled impulses to solidarity with women and colonial peoples.” While the subject of the research is colonial cinema, the study itself is anchored to the metropole in an attempt to unpack the seeming ineptness of the radical left when it came to articulating a line of solidarity with colonized peoples or women prior to the Second World War. Slavin concludes that this debilitation resulted from their being “[t]ransfixed by exotic images and [being] blind to colonial and sexual realities.”10 Slavin’s analysis reflects the flattening that Cameron mused might be more a product of the critic than the films themselves. His pessimistic conclusion about the manner in which the French left was influenced by the racial and gender fantasies propagated by colonial cinema assumes that the images themselves could only be singularly interpreted and the audiences came to the space of the theater with a monolithic interpretive framework. Was there no possibility that the images projected on the screen might disturb as much as reinforce audience perceptions of themselves or their society? It seems Slavin did not pose the same order of

James E. Genova / The Colonialist Regime

41

questions in his analysis that colonial officials certainly posed in their debates over a film politics for the empire. Ironically, they were more open to the idea (even danger) of multiple readings of a film than Slavin is as a critic of the nefarious influences colonial cinema had on European society. While Slavin’s study offers important insights into the limitations of leftist solidarity with colonized populations due to the cultural blind spots captured so well in colonial cinema, he does not venture too far into the colonies to gauge potential reaction among the subjugated populations to those same films. It is Boulanger who brings the analysis to the colonies; in fact the same region of French-ruled North Africa that is Slavin’s focus. However, he flattens the indigenous audience in their reception of the colonial films assuming that they universally reject the images made available to them on the screen. He appeals for more “honest” portrayals of Muslims in the region and for a truthful representation of the colonial condition.11 His concern for a postcolonial correction of the cinematic record about Africans’ reality was taken up by the African filmmakers at the center of this study. Cameron’s interrogation of the ways in which Africa has figured in the history of cinema for a century from its invention in the 1890s begins to move more firmly to site of the colonies. He, in agreement with Slavin and Boulanger, notes the close structural interdependence of the colonial state with filmmaking that took the colonies or Africans as its setting/subject. This symbiosis of choice and stricture led to a constrained cinematic practice. Cameron concludes, “[W]hile the appeal of the mass audience led them (filmmakers) to turn their cameras on the exotic and the shocking, their reliance on colonialism led them not to turn their cameras on colonialism.” He continues, “Africa was greatly modernized in the thirty years after Keaton’s first effort, but film ignored the changes; rather, it had increasingly to seek out the primitive and the exotic, ultimately paying Africans to stage events and ceremonies and to wear costumes.” As noted above, this was a complaint voiced by colonial officials (for very different reasons) in their discussions of film in the empire. Cameron is certainly sensitive to the fact that despite the convergence of interest between colonial cinema and imperialism, officials were concerned that “[T]he Empire was . . . particularly vulnerable to the effects of motion pictures.”12 Because his timeframe transcends the interwar period that was the context for Slavin’s work, Cameron is able to note the shifts in the very nature of colonial film through different historical eras and the way in which cinema responded to and helped to shape the changing power dynamics of the colonial field.13 That alteration in the presentation of the African, noted also by Stam and Spence, is significant for grasping the complexity and instability of representation on the screen Delavignette and others in French West Africa wanted to contain in order to harness the power of the moving image to the imperial project. To echo Cameron, the films

42

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

produced in the late colonial and early post-colonial era may have appeared to be less racist than those generated in previous era, but the “structure and intent behind them” had not significantly changed.14 What was an informal, even abstract convergence of interest between filmmakers and the colonial state during the interwar period was transformed into a tightly controlled system where cineastes were expected to submit their vision to the interests of imperial hegemony. Ironically, this often meant colonial censors demanding that movie directors tone down their racism and make it more subtle. Despite the growing literature on colonial film this important pivotal period in the history of cinema in West Africa has been largely overlooked by scholars or glossed in a rush to get to the works of postcolonial African filmmakers who sought to “correct” the record in the representational arena. Femi Shaka’s analysis of the ways in which cinema figured in the constitution of modern African identities goes some way toward acknowledging the fluid nature of representation in the context of colonial film. He notes the dialectical relationship between “colonialist films” and postcolonial African cinema seeing the works of Sembène, Hondo, and others as “counter-discursive,” incorporating the heritage of the “Euro-African encounter,” but also transcending it to contribute to the adumbration of an African modernity. The colonial rulers actually prepared the ground for the antithetical position occupied by West African cineastes through their intervention in the medium of film. Specifically, Shaka finds the introduction of “instructional cinema” in the colonies as a key moment in the subsequent development of African motion picture production. He writes, “[T]he practices of colonial instructional cinema instituted a different regime of representation of Africa and Africans that stands in direct contrast to that of films of colonialist African cinema.” Shaka finds that, generally, the images conveyed through instructional cinema were “positive,” contributing to African modernity, while those from colonialist cinema were “negative,” representing an “arrested form of knowledge and perception.” The main problem that arises from instructional cinema for Shaka is its tendency to absolve the imperial government of any responsibility for the African condition by promoting the idea of “self-help” among the colonized populations.15 However, Shaka’s analysis still does not take into consideration the specificity of the developments in the 1950s. Partly that is the result of his choice to center much of the analysis of colonial film on the British Empire then to shift to a study of mostly francophone West African filmmakers in the postcolonial period. Dina Sherzer and Jean-Pierre Jeancolas highlight the first decade after World War II as crucial to the history of film in the francophone world, especially with respect to the relationship between France and its colonies.16 However, the essays in Sherzer’s edited volume almost entirely examine French films for their reconstruction of the colonial experience

James E. Genova / The Colonialist Regime

43

for French audiences. Sherzer argues that the later films (mostly from the post-colonial period) seek to “sensitize French viewers to the colonial past, and they have an impact on the formation of a common collective memory of the colonies.” They are, she concludes, “the only [real] colonial films.”17 As with Slavin, the question remains: What about African audiences? The consumer of film images is here strictly French and the subject to be represented is “France” in the colonial context. Jeancolas follows this same trajectory back to the metropole, despite his more explicit focus on the role of the French state in promoting cultural cooperation (including the cinema) with the former colonies. He sees the postcolonial French filmmakers as taking “over the role of agitators” by calling into question the received knowledge of France’s colonial past.18 Thus there is an acknowledgment of the important moment of the 1950s in the history of cinematic practice in the colonial context without an analysis of the actual shifts in representation and their impact in the colonies, such as in French West Africa. The imperial government in the Federation was increasingly concerned with and involved in constructing the kinds of images that circulated to Africans and about Africa to the outside world. The story now ventures into the prewar period to look at the kinds of portrayals that began to agitate colonial officials after 1945 and that generated a changed mandate in the representation of/to Africans.

Colonial Cinema in the Colonies The 1934 Laval Decree that for the first time erected the scaffolding around which a film politics for the empire would be constructed provided the grounds upon which the colonial state could first venture into debates over “representation” on the screen. In part four of the Decree it instructs the various censorship boards the act called into being that their deliberations should “take in[to] consideration the entirety of the national and local interests at stake and especially the interest of the preservation of the national and local mores and traditions.”19 With this broad mandate colonial officials were to submit the entire range of images available in the colonies to close scrutiny and judge their appropriateness on the basis of a delicate and unspecified balance between national (French) and local (indigenous) interests. The success of such an approach would invariably lead to a hybrid visual field that was neither/both French and African, sustaining the interests of both communities. In other words, the censors would achieve through their actions the goals of the civilizing mission at the time—to impart French values in a manner that enhanced and preserved the essential cultural attributes of Africans without making them into poor imitations of Frenchmen lacking a moral anchor in their traditions.20 Film was imputed with the

44

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

power to both represent and call into being the truth of the African condition regardless of whether the motion picture in question was “entertainment” or “instructional” in nature. The line of thinking embedded in the Laval Decree recalls André Bazin’s theory of cinema. In discussing the role of photographic and cinematographic technology in altering the way viewers understand images Bazin writes, [A]ll are agreed that the image helps us to remember the subject and to preserve him from a second spiritual death. Today the making of images no longer shares an anthropomorphic, utilitarian purpose. It is no longer a question of survival after death, but of a larger concept, the creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal destiny.

Finally, he notes with regard to cinema’s specific impact, “Viewed in this perspective, the cinema is objectivity in time.”21 Leaving aside the astonishing claim that creating the ideal world in the likeness of the real amounts to a greater accomplishment than survival after death Bazin’s notions meshed perfectly with the trajectory of colonial officials’ thinking about the role of film in the empire. The kinds of images that were to be made available on West African screens had to reflect the truth of the material world, but also go beyond it to a future reality that the film would call into existence in the minds of the audience. Harris and Ezra found this same process of portraying and adumbrating reality to be central among French leaders’ conceptualization of cinema within postwar French reconstruction. They write, “What is certain is that the French recognized earlier than most the importance of cultivating a national image—‘une certaine idée de la France’, as de Gaulle famously put it; and they also recognized the central role of cinema in constructing and disseminating this image.”22 The outcome hoped for through the process sketched in the Laval Decree would be a Franco-African identity that was essentially rooted in African traditions, but inflected by French modernity; the perfect embodiment of the notion of La Plus Grande France that Wilder explicates in his study of colonial humanism and négritude in interwar France.23 Upon the heels the Laval Decree’s enactment government officials had to determine what exactly conformed to these ideals and what representations were antithetical to the goals of France’s mission in West Africa. That determination was to be made through their examination of cinematic images circulating in the Federation. One report on the moviegoing practices of African audiences found that most viewers were young and therefore more susceptible to be influenced by the kinds of images they consumed from the screen. However, Marcel de Coppet, the Governor-General of French West Africa at the time, also noted that most “theatrical films do not touch the essence of the indigenous soul.” This was

James E. Genova / The Colonialist Regime

45

both good and bad. In the positive case it indicated Africans were sophisticated connoisseurs of the cinema and could distinguish between fantasy and reality. In the negative sense this suggested the paucity of films available to African audiences that would contribute to their further “evolution” along the path of modernity laid out by France. After all, motion pictures had to be able to affect Africans at some level if the cinema was to be used in the manner being discussed among colonial officials. Evidence this could still be the case was to be found in those movies that did resonate among indigenous audiences. Most of those fell into the categories of “police shoot-ups, and gangster” films. Those offerings tended to “wound their beliefs or their traditions,” not to mention the troubling image of the forces of order being shot up on the screen by street rebels, and had to be proscribed.24 Much of the work on this front, though, remained at the level of interministerial and administrative exchanges of reports and letters. In reality little action was taken with regard to banning films, censoring those movies still permitted onto West African screens, or even in making the kinds of educational films high colonial officials had advocated since at least 1932. Even the frequent requests by independent filmmakers or production studios to make educational and propaganda films for France were not acted upon during the 1930s.25 Finally, a suggestion from the director of colonial education in French Equatorial Africa that entertainment films available to African audiences would achieve great success if they put in “a certain number of actors of color” failed to go any farther than the desks of the Colonial Ministry.26 The main barriers to real movement in the realm of representation in cinema prior to the Second World War seemed to be a lack of personnel due to cutbacks during the Great Depression, a lack of financial resources, and French leaders’ understandable preoccupation with the gathering war clouds in Europe. Despite the propaganda initiative undertaken by Vichy France during the War, there was still not a very significant impact on altering the terrain of representation. The influence of the National Revolution’s ideology in the field of cinematic production was quite limited in West Africa and hardly ventured beyond what prewar colonial officials had already sketched in their internal memoranda.27 The only noticeable shift in the pattern of those films permitted, censored, or banned was in terms of the perceived political orientation or usefulness of the films in question. The fate of two movies was emblematic of the changes from Third Republic France to Vichy to the Fourth Republic. One is L’Heroïque Embuscade, a German film (Der Rebell) released in December 1932 and starring Luis Trenker as a medical student who returns home in the Tyrol region only to discover that his mother and sister have been murdered by Napoleon’s invading troops. Trenker’s character, Severin Anderlan, becomes a resistance fighter against foreign occupation. The film

46

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

is a classic tale of heroism in the face of immense odds celebrating the ideals of liberty and action against oppression. Ironically, its first showing in Berlin was on January 17, 1933, just thirteen days before Adolph Hitler was named Chancellor, the very embodiment of the anti-thesis of the virtues extolled by the movie.28 COMACICO immediately picked up the film and showed it throughout its theaters in West Africa during the 1930s where it managed to pass the scrutiny of censors despite its potentially anti-French theme. Perhaps it survived through a combination of neglect (I commented above on the paucity of structural support for the regulations promulgated at the top of the administrative hierarchy), and the fact that Anderlan’s stance accorded with the putative values of the Third Republic. Napoleon could be read as a monarchical tyrant who subverted the Republican ideals of the Revolution. Amazingly, colonial officials did not regard the overriding plot of the story—resistance to foreign occupation—as a cause for concern as to how that might be interpreted by African audiences chafing under French imperial domination. While the Third Republic may have missed the film’s main message (or deemed it to be non-threatening), Vichy officials did not. In 1942 the collaborationist government ordered L’Heroïque Embuscade banned without comment. One can reasonably surmise that officials within the colonial administration under Vichy realized a film celebrating resistance to foreign occupation would not only arouse anti-colonial passions, it could also complicate the government’s relations with Nazi Germany. Moreover, the Republican ideals embodied in Anderlan’s actions ran counter to those now embraced by Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain’s regime. Not surprisingly, then, in 1943 after the Government General for French West Africa switched sides to back Charles de Gaulle’s Free France government-in-exile the ban was lifted. COMACICO immediately began screening the film to wide approval among audiences throughout the Federation. Only in 1947, with the escalation of Cold War tensions that was reflected in a major shuffle within the French government, including the removal in May of the Communist Party from the Resistance coalition that had governed since 1946, did the film once again become a source of controversy. On May 3, 1947 Georges Poirier, the acting Lieutenant Governor of Mauritania, fired the first salvo in a letter to the High Commissioner of the Government General for French West Africa. He called for the movie to be banned because, “This film provokes diverse reactions, booed (whistled) by many of the French, applauded by a lot of the Africans, who, perhaps, don’t see the anti-French tendency because of the anachronistic uniforms that they don’t know about.”29 Interestingly, Poirier’s objections followed the lines laid down by Vichy when it banned the film. Specifically, the problem with L’Heroïque Embuscade was its anti-French message—Germans valiantly struggling against France—not the more universalist message of resistance

James E. Genova / The Colonialist Regime

47

to foreign (of any source) domination and the struggle for the human right to self-determination, enshrined in the recently installed United Nations Organization. The basis for banning the movie, besides its anti-French message, was that the African audiences did not get it. The use of costumes from the Napoleonic age confused Africans because they could not recognize that the villains portrayed on the screen were French soldiers. Following Poirier’s logic, if contemporary uniforms had been used and the Africans recognized they were French the indigenous viewers would have had a different reaction, one more akin to the negative response of the French in the audiences. This was the “misunderstanding” between the objective reality displayed on the screen and its reception by the viewer that troubled Delavignette in the quote at the beginning of this article. It did not occur to Poirier that Africans could be skilled and experienced readers of cinematic texts and applauded precisely because they got the universal message of the fight for liberation and vengeance against one’s oppressor that the French colonial officials seemed incapable of understanding. It is unclear what the film’s fate was at the time, but the first postwar systematic list of authorized movies, published in 1949, does not include L’Heroïque Embuscade.30 Another film that received contradictory treatment from the 1930s through the postwar period was L’Esclave Blanche (Pasha’s Wives) a 1939 French film directed by Marc Sorkin and Georg Wilhelm Pabst, and starring the American actor John Lodge as Vedad Bey and the French starlet Viviane Romance as Mireille. The plot centers on the marriage of a Turkish politician (Vedad Bey) to a French woman (Mireille), who then return to Turkey and settle into a highly orientalized version of Turkish life. Mireille expects to enjoy the exoticism of life in the Orient and the privilege that comes with being wed to a prominent figure in society. However, she soon discovers that wives in the Turkish tradition are “slaves” (hence the film’s title) and she is immediately subjected to the regimen of harem life, including her husband’s desire to add more wives. Mireille’s fate is made worse by her inclinations toward the trope of the “modern woman” that emerged after the First World War and the utter incongruity of that identity within a Turkish setting, locked as Turkey is in an eternal medieval culture, according to the film’s portrayal.31 L’Esclave Blanche was an instant box office success from its first release in February 1939. It easily passed the scrutiny of censors in West Africa and continued to be shown all through the Second World War. As one colonial official noted, the movie was shown with “the greatest success” in France, the colonies, and foreign countries alike (the U.S. release date was April 1942).32 However, the shifting sands of approved images in the area of “representation” during the late colonial period meant such previously acceptable portrayals were no longer consistent with the types of messages French officials wanted to convey to African cinema audiences. In 1949, after ten

48

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

successful years of uncensored viewings in the Federation, the film was banned. In explaining its decision, the Cinema Commission said, “[It] estimated that the film ‘L’Esclave Blanche’ was of a nature to offend the mores and traditions of the Islamicized populations of the Territor[ies].”33 This was an early indication of the colonial government’s perplexing concern with Islam as a potent anti-colonial force. It is even more surprising when one considers the ban occurred amidst the massive repression of the RDA for its supposed “communist” sympathies. The fate of L’Esclave Blanche reflects both a more concerted effort on the part of the colonial administration to control the range of representations available to African audiences in the cinematic field and a shift in the kinds of images deemed acceptable as part of the changing mission of French imperialism. The colonial apparatus erected a dense structure of control over the distribution of films after 1945 at the center of which was the Commission Fédérale de Contrôle Cinématographique (CFCC), founded in 1954. However, beyond censoring films produced by independent cineastes (the reactionary dimension to film politics embodied in the Laval Decree of 1934) the colonial state ventured into pro-active measures to actually generate movies that carried the “truth” it wanted to reach African spectators as well as extra-African consumers of motion pictures. The year L’Esclave Blanche was removed from screens across West Africa Paysans Noirs (dir. Georges Régnier, 1948, France), the film based on the 1931 novel of the same title written by the colonial administrator and ethnographer Robert Delavignette, was released to wide acclaim throughout the imperial hierarchy as a model for the kinds of motion pictures that should be made and supported by the cinema industrial complex in the Federation.

“Reality” and Representation on the Screen In the early 1950s, the period during which France developed a film politics for the overseas territories, André Bazin wrote, “[T]he image is evaluated not according to what it adds to reality but what it reveals of it.”34 This statement could just as well have been uttered by colonial officials who sought to use film as a truth-telling (and creating) form for validating the metropole’s imperial mission as well as advancing it along centrally-prescribed lines. As mentioned earlier, the decision by colonial administrators to engage directly, deeply, and systematically in the cinematic field meant that at a certain level they had to presume the role of film theorists. Consequently, it is important to discuss how “representation” was constructed and contested in West Africa during the late colonial period with regard to prevailing discussions among film theorists and critics about the nature of the cinema.

James E. Genova / The Colonialist Regime

49

Specifically, how the relationship between the image projected on the screen, the meaning attached to it by the spectator, and the intentions of the filmmakers or producers was understood at the time is central to elucidating the dynamics at play as the cinema industrial complex developed in the region during the 1950s. At the center of France’s imperial film politics in the 1950s was the notion of “reality” and its relationship to moving pictures. Even if the movie being viewed was purely “entertainment” and lacked any explicit political content, officials understood by the 1930s that films had real-world consequences whether it simply facilitated poor hygienic practices and social disorder of a juvenile nature, or morphed into a threat to French rule. Maya Deren’s work on the “creative use of reality” is particularly useful for understanding what was at stake for government agents as they grappled with representation on film as French power waned in West Africa. In discussing documentary filmmakers she writes, “[They] operate on a principle of minimal intervention, in the interests of bringing the authority of reality to the support of the moral purpose of the film.”35 This is an important point of departure, because colonial officials viewed the documentary (or documentary technique) as the most appropriate form of filmmaking for revealing/forging a truth for African audiences and about Africa to external viewers, a point also observed by Shaka in his study of modernity and film in Africa.36 Starting from the photographic image—a snapshot of reality—film moves the observer even closer to a replication of the objective world. As Deren notes, “The creative action in film, then, takes place in its time dimension; and for this reason the motion picture, though composed of spatial images, is primarily a time form. A major portion of the creative action consists of a manipulation of time and space. . . . By manipulation of time and space,” she concludes, “I mean also the creation of a relationship between separate times, places, and persons.”37 The coupling of temporal movement with photographic images approximates the lived reality of the viewer who exists in time and to whom motion is central to the way in which life is conceptualized. Thus, film marked a significant advance in the capacity of the artificial machine to reproduce reality, blurring the lines between the objective world and the subjective imagination. Motion pictures enabled not only the possibility of preserving the real and presenting it back to the spectator, but also of calling into being a certain reality that was the product of the filmmaker’s imagination combined with elements from the actual material world. This dimension of cinematic representation had been crucial in colonial officials’ thinking about the potential for cinema to either negatively or positively shape objective conditions in West Africa since at least the 1930s. Deren’s ideas about motion pictures and reality were shared by Sigfried Kracauer in his “theory of film.” Kracauer writes, “In establishing physical

50

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

existence, films differ from photographs in two respects: they represent reality as it evolves in time; and they do so with the aid of cinematic techniques and devices.”38 Interestingly, to make his point about the role that cultural pre-disposition plays in constructing meaning from the film image Kracauer uses African audiences as an example of the potential for “miscomprehension” that may result from the cinematic experience. He muses, The role which cultural standards and traditions may play in these processes of elimination (failing to notice certain things portrayed on the screen) is drastically illustrated by a report on the reactions of African natives to a film made on the spot. After the screening the spectators, all of them still unacquainted with the medium, talked volubly about a chicken they allegedly had seen picking food in the mud. The filmmaker himself, entirely unaware of its presence, attended several performances without being able to detect it.

Only by detailed examination was the filmmaker able to find the chicken in the film.39 This tale relates a double mis-cognition. The filmmaker shot something of which he was utterly unaware presumably due to his attaching little importance (culturally) to chickens grazing in public spaces. The African audience focused on the scene of the chicken eating while missing the larger film and, presumably, the meaning that the filmmaker wanted to convey to his erstwhile viewers. The task of the filmmaker, then, is to become more self-conscious of his/her own cultural blind spots in the production of the representations to be projected as well as the system of meaning in which the spectator will consume those images. A double cognition has to be brought to bear in order to limit the possibility for misunderstanding. Again, this was the fundamental problem that vexed colonial officials in West Africa, including Delavignette. They wanted to shape a film culture that followed Kracauer’s vision for cinema. Kracauer writes, “The cinema, then, aims at transforming the agitated witness into a conscious observer.”40 Even further, administrators in the Federation wanted the viewer to become a conscious participant in actualizing the imperial reality as imagined by the officials within the imperial apparatus. The model that became the gold standard for what film should be in West Africa was, in fact and ironically, the adaptation of Delavignette’s 1931 novel, Les Paysans Noirs to the screen in 1948. It is telling that a novel should be the basis for the presentation of “reality” in the region. The film was shot entirely in French West Africa during 1948 and released in France on 6 May 1949 to effusive praise from throughout the colonial government. Delavignette offered the following assessment of the process. He claimed, “[T]he film became a collective work, where Whites and Blacks served together the truth and the beauty of Africa.”41 In a presentation of the film to an audience in the Salle

James E. Genova / The Colonialist Regime

51

du Musée Social in 1953 he further added, “The Africans [were] going to see themselves on the screen,” fulfilling one of the goals of officials in the 1930s who sought to encourage the making of films that would be well-received by local audiences.42 The process of making the film, in Delavignette’s presentation of it, embodied at a fundamental level the myth of Franco-African cooperation in the making of modern Africa that was the ultimate objective of the colonial mission in the postwar years. This supports Burke’s contention when he writes of the experience of motion pictures in Zimbabwe, “Anxieties about the cinema have centered on its technologically driven capacity to make the imaginary come to life.”43 In the case at hand, participants actualized the imaginary in the real-life construction of a movie meant to project a “true” representation of African experiences that modeled behavior to be emulated by the consumer of the finished product. It demonstrates what Paul Stoller describes as film’s ability to construct and transform.44 Remarkably, there is not a single extant print of Paysans Noirs. Therefore, we must rely upon the records of colonial archives, published reaction, and Delavignette’s own personal papers (including the film treatment) in order to reconstruct the movie’s representational range and impact as well as the degree to which it faithfully reproduced the earlier novel. Beginning with Delavignette’s own detailed commentary on the movie, we know that he and the filmmakers viewed the “authenticity” of the representation of African reality and faithfulness to the book as paramount in the cinematic process. The film/novel transpires in the region of Banfora (present-day Burkina Faso). Consequently, the action is situated in a real place, inhabited by those who are said to be the subject of the film. Delavignette asserted that because of the temporal and spatial situated-ness of the film the “greatest question” at the heart of making the movie was to understand to what degree authentic Africa is communicable to other men than the Africans, in what measure the sensibility of the spectators of the cinema relates to the life of the Black Peasants. I say that this is a very big question. These Cinema spectators, you know them. We are among them. And as such, we are brothers of all Europeans, of all Americans, of all the men of every color who go into the darkened room to search for the unusual, for excitement, for diversion from daily life, for an enrichment of their personality.

Delavignette then rhetorically asks, “What is it that Les Paysans Noirs brings to us; which is that part of ourselves that will be given satisfaction, and with which aspect [of the film] will there be established a mysterious accord?” His answer is, “I don’t know anything. It is the public who will respond. But,” he adds, “it appears essential to me that such a question be posed. And it is [a testament to] the social merit of the film to have posed it.”45

52

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

From Delavignette’s own assessment and his prominence within the colonial government as an official and moral force for influencing policy decisions it is clear that filming his book was a major undertaking designed to fulfill the representational aspect of the new film politics taking shape in West Africa. That is to (re)construct images of Africa that would resonate with African audiences and also challenge the prevailing tropes of Africa and Africans circulating among external audiences. Interestingly, Delavignette presupposes local audiences in the Federation would not find anything troubling about what was conveyed on the screen. They would recognize the truth of the images projected back to them. For African audiences, Paysans Noirs was to function as a validation of their lived experiences and their essential reality. The real mystery lay with how non-African audiences would respond to the film. However, it was vital for the film’s success in terms of structuring the representational framework within which notions of “Africanity” circulated that European, American, and all other non-African audiences connect with the movie at some level. That connection would be the circuit through which France could relate the beneficent impact it has had in shaping African modernity as well as restore humanity to the globally-consumed imageAfrica, something Delavignette and others in the French overseas administration claimed was in sore need of recovery. Consistent with established French colonial praxis, Delavignette and his collaborators on the film asserted they had captured aspects of “authentic Africa” and were expertly positioned to project them back to African and non-African spectators alike in a way that revealed the essential truth of the material and abstract existence of the local population, but of which the locals may not have been fully aware.46 This is part of a long-standing practice in the convergence of imperialist ideology and cinematic practice identified by Stam and Spence. They write, “[I]t (colonialist cinema) produces us as subjects, transforming us into armchair conquistadores, affirming our sense of power while making the inhabitants of the Third World objects of spectacle for the First World’s voyeuristic gaze.”47 Delavignette’s efforts to “correct” the cinematic record with regard to representations of Africa and Africans did not alter this fundamental relationship of power between the Western world and the colonized populations. In fact, the film deepened this structure through its masking of the racism at the core of the imperial system. Moreover, the African spectators of Paysans Noirs do not even have the privilege of being transformed into subjects by being consumers of the images projected back at them. Their ideal selves were in fact the subjects that were objectified on the screen and returned to the spectator in an objectifying process that reified preconceived Western notions of what it meant to be authentically African. Stam and Spence add, in discussing the mode of interrogation of colonialist cinema, that

James E. Genova / The Colonialist Regime

53

[a] comprehensive methodology must pay attention to the mediations which intervene between ‘reality’ and representation. Its emphasis should be on narrative structure, genre conventions, and cinematic style rather than on perfect correctness of representation or fidelity to an original ‘real’ model or prototype.48

A more systematic interrogation of the film/novel teases out the mediations at work that constitute the links connecting filmmakers, colonial officials, the film, and audiences in ways that reinforced French power in West Africa while calling into being an altered representational universe within which Africans were asked to locate their identity. Delavignette understood what was at stake in making a film such as Paysans Noirs. He observed, The French Union contains many diverse peoples of whom we have a need to understand. On one side are those who possess a scientific and literary culture that is written and tends toward the universal, but which must not forget the ancient truths acquired by oral tradition. On the other side are those who do not yet have a written culture, but they powerfully bring to life their customs from where they get their (spiritual?) sustenance. . . . A film like Les Paysans Noirs,” “aids us in confirming these relationships and these affinities.49

Significantly, the two groups about whom Delavignette was writing were both located in the colonies. The people who have acquired a “scientific and literary culture,” but remained attached to their roots in oral culture were the French-educated elite in the colonies. According to Delavignette, who merely reiterated what had been the hegemonic framework for articulating imperial policy since the 1920s, educated Africans should not have the link severed with their “source” since that led to disorder in the colonies and undermined local culture.50 The other group was comprised of those not yet profoundly touched by French civilization. The film was to mediate the rift between those two groups and become a bridge suturing the empire together in a harmonious relationship based on mutual comprehension and respect. Delavignette and his contemporaries in the administration of West Africa positioned the cinema industrial complex in its materialist and representational dimensions at the core of the colonial power structure. The images projected through Paysans Noirs, then, constituted a potent force promoting colonialist power relations as Africans struggled to jettison the imperial yoke in the 1950s. As Delavignette hoped, the 1949 movie faithfully followed the contours of his 1931 novel. It is a semi-autobiographical novel that has the air of documentary filmmaking, perhaps one of the reasons the Overseas Cinema Commission extolled it as an “example of how to produce useful films with mixed funding” in its June 15, 1950 meeting.51 Paysans Noirs centers on the travails of a newly appointed administrator, Guillon, sent to Banfora

54

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

following the assassination of the previous official. Consequently, we know from the start that this is going to be a difficult posting that requires the steady hand of an agent of the colonial state who can navigate the complex divisions of native society. Guillon’s ideas very much reflected those held by Delavignette. Emerging from a leftist tradition and embracing what Wilder and others have described as a “colonial humanism,” Guillon/ Delavignette embraced the diversity and legitimacy of indigenous traditions while also holding to the idea of French colonialism as a modernizing force for Africa/Africans.52 Consistent with prevailing notions of the civilizing mission in the 1930s Africans’ modernity was rooted in the fundamentally agricultural/peasant nature of their cultures. Consequently, France had to modernize Africa without destroying the essential aspects of Africans’ traditions. This was the delicate position into which Guillon, played in the film by Louis Arbessier, was thrust as he took up his post in Banfora. Once there he immersed himself in the local culture and worked with the resident engineer and doctor as well as traditional elites to forge a consensus in favor of modernization while conserving the extant culture. This process was bitterly opposed by a caste committed to archaic practices that tyrannized the people. In the end, the understanding Guillon forged with the elders as well as his acting as a bridge between the French and the Africans produced the formula to overcome oppression and open the door to a truly African modernity that was exemplary of the potential resulting from Franco-African cooperation.53 As William B. Cohen summarizes, [Delavignette] showed the Africans to be peasants, black peasants. He did not deny Africans their own personality, portraying them as inferior versions of French peasants. . . . [T]hey, too, had local traditions and beliefs that deserved respect. . . . Delavignette thought of change as a means of saving the village life while auguring a new era. . . . Humane administration would permit traditional societies to preserve much of their structure, but it was also creating a new Africa.54

As Delavignette later discussed, the film version closely followed the novel in its structure and dialogue.55 It was important the “colonial realist novel” of 1931 be translated into celluloid format as exactly as possible not only to preserve the naturalist effect of the original, but most importantly to create the kind of film that would be well-received by African audiences as well as present to external viewers the positive impact French rule had had in shaping African societies. While there is no known extant print of the film, its scenario (approved by Delavignette) survives in Delavignette’s private papers currently held at the French Colonial Archives

James E. Genova / The Colonialist Regime

55

in Aix-en-Provence, France. If the film version followed the treatment and scenario it would have closely resembled the novel, a point attested to by colonial officials and Delavignette after they viewed the finished product.56 The “regime of representation” contained in Paysans Noirs was meant to convey an extant reality while also actualizing it in the process of articulation.57 The film was the archetype of what cinema was to be in the late colonial period. It set the bar for what was acceptable in the area of representation while also demonstrating, through the very process of its production and its message, the role of film in the materialist dimension of the cinema industrial complex. However, French administrators were not alone in their conceptualization of African modernity as it took shape after 1945. Some Africans who had been trained in French schools also saw Franco-African cooperation as the only path toward formation of an African culture worthy of the twentieth century. In the spring of 1945 officials in West Africa discovered an essay published by a medical student, Conte Saidou, in Clarté, which they preserved as evidence the civilizing mission was being accepted by their subjects. Titled “Une Culture Africaine,” the essay explored the basis for an emergent African identity that would enable economic and social development while preserving the African essence. Saidou wrote, “The French school has perfectly realized the cohesion of the elements (French and African) and has begun the process of creating a federation that begins to understand and centralize their interests, that implies a community of culture and a homogeneity of aspirations.” The basis of this new formation is “a synthesis of French and African cultures.” He then cites a recent article by Mamadou Dia in Dakar-Jeunes in which he proclaimed, “It is really audacious to dream of a cultural renaissance in French West Africa that is accomplished (only) with the specifically African elements, untainted by any admixture.”58 This essay fit within the developing philosophical tradition called Négritude and best exemplified in the work of Senegal’s future president Léopold Sédar Senghor. His vision for a distinctly African modernity involved not only a rediscovery of the essential nature of the African as an existential being, but also the incorporation of aspects of French civilization that would enable Africa to meaningfully contribute to the further enhancement of the human condition.59 Senghor’s ideas and those expressed in Saidou’s essay reflected what Shaka describes in his study as the historical and dialectical basis of African modernity.60 Thus, by the late colonial period there was a growing convergence of interest between the aspirations of the West African educated elite and French rulers of the Federation that together, but for different ends, helped to delimit the regime of representation informing cinematic practice in the transition to independence.

56

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

The Regime of Representation in 1950s West Africa In his examination of sound in the cinematic experience John Belton writes, “Images attain credibility in the conformation to objective reality; sounds, in their conformation to the images of that reality, to a derivative reconstruction of objective reality.” “In the cinema, there is always present, in the positioning of the camera and the microphone(s), a consciousness that sees and (in the sound film) hears and that coexists with what is seen or heard. . . . The cinema remains the phenomenological art par excellence, wedding, if indeed not collapsing, consciousness with the world.”61 Following the success of Paysans Noirs, in the perception of colonial administrators, imperial officials set to work more aggressively defining the parameters of the “representation” of the image-Africa acceptable within the film politics of the age. They did so through financing or permitting films that continued the model provided by Paysans Noirs as well as restricting those movies that violated the principles the colonial state set forth as the basis of their program for the Federation. In the process, the language of the films’ dialogues and the cinema as a way of speaking became important considerations as a colonialist regime of representation took form in the latter years of French rule in the region. Sergei Eisenstein, writing at the threshold of cinema’s transition from the silent to the sound era, asked rhetorically, “Why then should cinema in its forms follow the theatre and painting rather than the methodology of language, which gives rise, through the combination of concrete descriptions and concrete objects, to quite new concepts and ideas?”62 What French rulers in West Africa did in the 1950s was to push along and structure a process whereby a certain film language emerged that became the representational pole against which future African cineastes would have to struggle in order to forge a postcolonial image landscape. More than that, though, the actual language spoken by the performers in the movies was crucial in the colonial state’s considerations of what films were allowed to be screened for local audiences, as well as those the French wanted to promote beyond their borders. Officials went so far as to engage in protracted discussions about the usefulness or not of dubbing and whether films performed in non-French languages could obtain the censors’ approval once they had been dubbed into French. The remainder of this chapter considers the dual meaning of cinematographic language and its place in the adumbration of a colonialist regime of representation. From the earliest days of French officials’ efforts to formulate a film politics for the colonies there existed among them a bias in favor of what they considered “realist” motion pictures. While documentaries represented the pinnacle of the genre, fiction films done in a naturalistic manner

James E. Genova / The Colonialist Regime

57

that accurately portrayed African cultures and their experiences under French rule were also acceptable. In fact, some argued those movies were even better vehicles for achieving colonial objectives in the cinematic field because they had the advantage of being educational and entertaining at the same time. Officials placed great emphasis on films that would provide “a benefit to the African” and movies that were “poorly adapted to autochthonous intelligences” should be avoided.63 As the debates unfolded among colonial administrators in West Africa and France the outlines of a colonialist film language took shape that privileged French understandings of authentic African culture wedded to a strong emphasis on the positive impact the imperial encounter had in moving traditional societies toward modernity. However, it was vital that in the process the Africans be portrayed on screen as being agents of their own transformation, willing collaborators in the civilizing mission while maintaining their ontological essence. The specific colonialist film language of such movies, though, had also to be true to the emerging cinematic discourse in general such that experienced motion picture audiences would be able to grasp the film as such. In other words, the successful movie had to register on Metz’s two levels of “cultural codes and specialized codes.” He explains, The first define the culture of each group; they are so ubiquitous and well ‘assimilated’ that the viewers generally consider them to be ‘natural.’ . . . On the other hand the codes I have called ‘specialized’ concern more specific and restricted social activities. . . . The cinema, which could have served a variety of uses, in fact is most often used to tell stories—to the extent that even supposedly nonnarrative films (short documentary films, educational films, etc.) are governed essentially by the same semiological mechanisms that govern the ‘feature films.’64

Consequently, the dichotomy established by Shaka in his study of African cinema between “instructional cinema” and “colonialist African cinema” does not hold in our current analysis of French cinematic practice in West Africa during the late colonial period.65 If Paysans Noirs set the standard for colonialist film in West Africa, the imperial state supported a variety of other motion pictures building on that foundation and solidifying its preferred cinematic language. The typical movie that gained the approval of or was financed by the colonial government deployed certain tropes that established its identity as “African” and connected it to the process of modernization. The films used grounding shots of the natural environment, animal life, and the indigenous population situated in those contexts. Once those associations had been fixed, the European element was introduced usually around some specific project or to locate a

58

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

dilemma in need of resolution. Those objectives or problems were cast across a wide spectrum encompassing conservation (of wildlife and land), facilitation of Western education, improvements in health, infrastructure development, political maturation, etc. The resolution to any situation centered on the coming together of Africans and Europeans in a manner whereby the outsider accepted the humanity of the indigenous people as well as the legitimacy of their culture, and the African embraced modernity as defined by the European. The narrative usually concluded with a harmonious movement into the future where only benefits awaited both Europeans and Africans. The composition of the scenes generally involved long shots allowing the viewer to absorb the specificity of the tale that was unfolding as well as the majesty of the subjects who enacted the drama. Unlike earlier films (such as the Tarzan movies) that were discouraged in the 1950s, the new colonialist cinema favored bright lighting, open spaces, and slower plot development that allowed for greater character development (within imperially-determined limits).66 It was crucial that African and extra-African audiences could each relate to the regime of representation projected on the screen while at the same time absorbing the message embedded in the narrative structure. The product had to speak an intelligible cinematographic language or it would fail in its purpose and risk sowing the kind of confusion Delavignette warned against in the passage cited at the beginning of this chapter. One film that received the support of the High Commissioner’s office in French West Africa was a production by the Swiss firm Studio RIF (Realizzazioni Industriali Fotocinematographiche) for their treatment, “Civilisation Europeenne en Afrique.” In presenting their argument why the colonial government should support the making of their film (with financing as well as the use of locals and shooting it on location) the company declared, “The Europeans who live in Africa have a mission to accomplish and a program to complete. The conditions of life among the primitives subsisting in the interior of the territory justifies completely and morally this mission.” The tenor of this introduction, while perhaps pleasing to French officials in the Federation nonetheless was archaic when viewed in light of the shift in the direction they had taken with regard to representation in films. However, the fuller elaboration of the proposed film converged with those redefined image parameters. Studio RIF’s proposal continued, It has become commonplace to say that the European has not done anything but ‘exploit’ the local populations: On the contrary [the European] has made more useful the treasures held in the forests or buried in the desert; the European also has ameliorated the way of life of the primitive populations, this manner of living which was incompatible with the social morality of the twentieth century.

James E. Genova / The Colonialist Regime

59

For the coup de grace, Studio RIF summed up their objectives as follows: To make a film that will show “(a) The aspects of primitive life that survive in the interior of the territory; (b) the public works achieved and others that are in the process of being executed; (c) a modern village with its school, its hospital, its organizations of social assistance.” Upon reviewing the treatment, the CFCC granted its permission on December 19, 1957.67 I could not determine whether the film was actually shot since the archival record goes cold in the following year. Moreover, movie databases do not contain any reference to a film by that title released in those years. Likely the proposal came too late in the day to be realized as just over two years later the Federation’s territories gained political independence. What is important for the current purposes is the manner in which such proposals were handled by the colonial state in comparison with other films banned or censored in the same period. A treatment such as the one advanced by Studio RIF fit within the cinematographic language favored by French officials in the Federation, while at the same time calling it into being through the production and distribution process. Significantly, the film was to be set in the village life of some unnamed community in the interior of French West Africa. The backdrop enabled the kind of “authentic” shots necessary to validate it as an “African” film portraying the “reality” of life among the local population. Such a setting would contain nature shots, landscapes, daily life, and most importantly the interaction of Europeans and Africans as they navigated the complexities of the transition from primitive to modern, or entering the “twentieth century” as Studio RIF’s proposal put it. Finally, the film was to follow the favored story logic of initial resistance transcended by establishing mutual comprehension and ending with a “modern village” that had all the accoutrements of “civilization,” but that remained firmly “African” in its essence. Such a film, had it been made, would have fit the requirements sketched by colonial officials that it be intelligible to African and non-African audiences alike. It “corrected” the prevailing image of an Africa as backward as ever after half-a-century of French rule while also showing the subject population that an African modernity was possible and desirable, under European direction. Another proposal acted upon favorably by the CFCC, but very late in the colonial period, was that put forward by Films Pierre Cellier Dakar on January 2, 1959. Beginning with the same premise as the earlier film treatment by Studio RIF, this company explained that, “With regard to our modern world and of the effects of its civilization, Africa still remains in our century one of the continents where one finds the ageless life of eternal nature. . . . One still finds some tribes with primitive morals.” The request continued, “All this beauty of nature, concretized by the life that takes place within it, gives

60

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

to Africa an attraction such that some spectators go there from all points of the world to play with the spectacle that it offers to them.” Films Pierre Cellier Dakar wanted to make a movie that centered on a “hunt” where Westerners battled “great beasts.” However, lest one think this was to be a typical colonial film from the interwar period the treatment’s authors reassured the readers that their story cast these Westerners as dilettantes who threatened Africa’s future by indiscriminately killing off the wildlife and thereby disrupting the natural way of life of the locals. Such actions, consequently, undermined the civilizing mission by causing disorder as well as discrediting the work of “good Europeans” in Africa. The film’s ultimate message was about the need for “safeguarding” Africans’ way of life (and the civilizing mission) as well as “conservation” of the natural world that was the context within which local cultures have been shaped and modernity must develop.68 As with the previous proposal, it is unlikely this film was ever made, especially coming at a time of tremendous upheaval in the Federation as well as in France itself. Nevertheless, it confirms that the colonial state had effectively articulated a film language it found appropriate for its purposes in the region. Beyond viewing cinema as a language and developing a particular colonialist movie grammar, the Federation’s government took the idea of “language” in film literally and wanted to make sure that French was promoted through the cinema industrial complex as the lingua franca of the region. Thus the idiom of the dialogue became a major point of concern for colonial officials as they engaged in the cinematic field during the late colonial period. In fact, this dimension of the regime of representation constructed as part of the cinema industrial complex in the 1950s formed one of the most important structural barriers to the development of an independent “African” cinema in the post-colonial period. As a statement published in 1949 by M. BouruetAubertot in the Bulletin du Conseil Economique for French West Africa read, “[T]he cinema serves, notably in the Overseas Territories, as a means for the expression and the diffusion of the French intelligence and thought.” Film should be used, he wrote, “[As a force] uniting the French people and those of the territories of the French Union.”69 The primary means through which French thought would be spread and the unity preserved between the metropole and its colonies was in the promotion of the French language as a vehicle of culture and a mode of communication that was to define the parameters of a francophone world.70 The colonial government’s concern with the language of the dialogue in films screened throughout West Africa went beyond the mere censorship of films in Arabic (perhaps the most dangerous language from the perspective of those officials) to the actual promotion of cinema as a means to draw larger sections of the population into the French-speaking universe. Through such a development the modernizing projects envisioned by the

James E. Genova / The Colonialist Regime

61

administration could be surreptitiously promoted and Africans would come to see those processes as their own, a basic tenet of the re-conceptualized imperial mission with regard to the cinema in the 1950s. As the Economic Council for French West Africa stated days after Bouruet-Aubertot offered his assessment, “[T]he cinema will be for [France] the best agent for propaganda and for the expansion of French thought.” The essay even outlined the full scope of the representational framework that the colonial administration was on the path to articulating. The Economic Council suggested, “First of all, the production of films must be established according to the principle of converging with the mentality of the different populations. There could be envisioned certain productions with the participation of the . . . autochthonous populations, on the [subject of] local history, art and dance, singing, the [daily] activities of the populations, etc.”71 That explication of the representational aspect of the cinema industrial complex could just as easily have been uttered by Delavignette, and coming as it did in the year that Paysans Noirs was released constitutes an endorsement of the type of motion picture officials throughout the imperial hierarchy embraced as a model in their film politics. However, merely dubbing foreign language films into French was insufficient to achieve the objectives envisioned by the government in the Federation. In fact, dubbed films often aroused the suspicion and approbation of the CFCC. John Belton discusses the epistemological problems of “dubbing” in his analysis of the impact of technology on the aesthetics of filmmaking. He writes, By the same token, dubbing, and especially the dubbing of foreign films in which one language is seen spoken but another is heard, is ‘read’ by audiences as false. . . . The rather obvious intervention of technology involved with dubbing severely circumscribes our faith in both sound and image, provoking a crisis in their credibility.72

For French officials, dubbing failed to achieve the double objectives of promoting the French language and preventing the spread of surreptitious and potentially seditious speech through the nuances contained within other vernaculars. In dubbed films the overlaid language often appeared alien and inauthentic. Moreover, viewers could still follow the original language by reading the lips of the actors on the screen, if they were versant in that idiom. Particularly troubling to many officials charged with regulating the cinema was the problem of dubbing Arab language films into French. This was especially vexing “because the commentaries in the Arab language often deposit unfavorable texts and contain allusions [that are] hostile or at least

62

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

unfavorable to the cause of countries which, like France, administer Arab populations (Egyptian nationalism).”73 French colonial rulers and their metropolitan counterparts imbued language with almost mystical powers. The words not only carried culturally specific meanings, the linguistic structure conveyed the national spirit as well.74 Consequently, the superimposition of French narration over a foreign (in this case Arabic) dialogue created a double alienation—the overlaid dubbed language comes off as artificial and disconnected from the action on the screen, while the original idiom remains decipherable for knowing audiences (even if silenced in the unfolding scenes) and is manifest as an anthesis to the imposed mode of expression. A dialogic cinema text was forged that enhanced the resistance credentials of the feared language while it diminished the authoritative voice (literally in this case) of the added dialect. Mikhail Bakhtin offers an explanation of the dialogic nature of language that is useful for the current discussion. He writes, “[I]mages of language are inseparable from images of various world views and from the living beings who are their agents—people who think, talk, and act in a setting that is social and historically concrete.”75 The dialogic nature of language for Bakhtin resulted from its temporal conversational essence. Language is a dynamic element of human consciousness in that it is shaped by the past while also shaping the past through interpretive acts ensconced within the meaning of specific words. Language contains within it the experiences of the linguistic community and simultaneously gives meaning to the present. The problem that confronted colonial officials in West Africa was that the superimposition of French over another language brought together two different cultural frameworks in an oppositional context masquerading as a synthesis. The audience was made conscious of the artificiality of the French dialogue thereby exposing the fraudulent claims of the civilizing mission. The dubbed film became a realistic representation of the fundamental imperial relationship where French power and culture were overlaid on indigenous cultures in a manner that sought to erase the local traditions, but in doing so only reified them in an oppositional manner. French administrators in West Africa could not ban the screening of dubbed films in any practical sense. Dubbed movies at least offered the possibility of exposing audiences to the imperial language, even if it was a poor substitute for having original French films. Censors in the Federation routinely authorized dubbed movies from Hollywood and other European productions. However, officials took a jaundiced view of dubbing Arab language motion pictures and generally concluded the dangers far outweighed any potential benefits in showing those films, no matter how innocuous the subject matter.76 Throughout the late colonial era French rulers in West

James E. Genova / The Colonialist Regime

63

Africa feared Arab or African nationalism more than any other political force that could challenge their hold on the region. The promotion of French cultural values through the language and images that constituted the representational framework of the cinema industrial complex became the main antidote to such threats. During the late stages of colonial rule officials in French West Africa and the metropole had struggled to articulate a new regime of representation that accorded with the altered imperial mission following the Second World War. From Delavignette to Pinay, and from Mitterrand to the members of the CFCC in the Federation, agents of the imperial nation-state sought to harness the power of moving pictures to the project of image/reality construction both in the overseas territories and that conveyed to audiences in the wider world. The racist tropes of the image-Africa that permeated films prior to 1945 subverted French rule in the region on two levels. Their pervasive portrayal of Africans as stuck in a primordial past denied the “progress” wrought through the civilizing mission, thereby undermining the legitimacy of the colonial project. Moreover, such images fueled opposition among the subject population who sought to wrest control of their own image construction from the imperialist rulers. French officials wanted to articulate a new representation for Africa and Africans that spoke to the beneficence of colonial rule, while also imbricating the colonized in the project of the construction of their own Francophone African modernity. In their search for a representational model for cinematic practice administrators in West Africa embraced Paysans Noirs. The film not only encapsulated the imagined reality of the situation in the region, it called it into being through the action portrayed on the screen. In addition, the movie had the advantage of also exemplifying the materialist component of the cinema industrial complex through its funding mechanisms, the manner of the film’s production, and the use of locals as actors. The African modernity French rulers sought to shepherd into existence depended on the articulation of a cinematographic language as well as the promotion of French as the lingua franca of the Federation. The idiom of colonialist cinema involved structuring the film through extensive shots of African scenery, daily life, close-ups of indigenous people, and deliberate (even slow) pacing. The narrative typically was to progress from an idyllic moment disturbed through the imposition of tyranny or the violation of tradition that generated disorder, oppression, and precluded the further development of the local culture. Subsequently, a French official arrived, imbued with a sense of moral sacrifice, and who was determined to really understand the indigenous community. In the course of such careful investigation, the official often found collaborators among the autochthonous group and together they overcame the forces constraining the culture. In terms of the

64

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

actual dialogue, where possible use of French was encouraged as a vehicle through which the ideas, values, and practices associated with modernity could be transmitted to the indigenous population. Consequently, by the late colonial era French officials had elaborated a regime of representation and materialist context that structured the cinema industrial complex in a manner designed to preserve the metropole’s power in the Federation. Simultaneously, those parameters were shaped by the engagement of African cultural activists and moviegoers who sought to their reclaim sovereignty in both representational and materialist terms. The story now turns to the elaboration of that anti-colonial African film politics in West Africa during the 1950s. James E. Genova is Professor of History and Film Studies at The Ohio State University-Marion Campus. He specializes in twentieth and twenty first century West African History with a focus on film, culture, identity, and globalization and has published two books including Cinema and Development in West Africa. Genova recently completed a manuscript on Thomas Sankara’s revolutionary government in Burkina Faso and is working on a new book about radical filmmaking in West Africa from the 1960s to the 1980s with an emphasis on its connection to Third World Cinema.

Notes Originally published as James E. Genova, “The Colonialist Regime of Representation, 1945–60,” in Cinema and Development in West Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 45–69. 1. CAOM, 19/PA/18/252, Robert Delavignette’s response to the making of a film based on his book, Les Paysans Noirs, 1948. Contained in the personal papers of Robert Delavignette. 2. Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), 181. 3. Henry David Slavin, Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919–1939: White Blind Spots, Male Fantasies, Settler Myths (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 3. 4. Timothy Burke, “‘Our Mosquitoes Are Not So Big’: Images and Modernity in Zimbabwe,” in Images & Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, ed. Paul S. Landau and Deborah D. Kaspin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 43. 5. Robert Stam and Louise Spence, “Colonialism, Racism, and Representation: An Introduction,” in Film Theory and Criticism: An Introduction, Fifth Edition, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 236. 6. Pierre Boulanger, Le Cinéma Colonial: De “L’Atlantide” à “Lawrence d’Arabie” (Paris: Éditions Seghers, 1975), 16.

James E. Genova / The Colonialist Regime

65

7. Stam and Spence, “Colonialism, Racism, and Representation,” in Film Theory and Criticism: An Introduction, Fifth Edition, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 239. 8. Paul S. Landau, “Introduction, An Amazing Distance: Pictures and People in Africa,” in Images & Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, ed. Paul S. Landau and Deborah D. Kaspin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1, 4, 5. 9. Kenneth M. Cameron, Africa on Film: Beyond Black and White (New York: Continuum, 1994), 13, 14. 10. Slavin, Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919–1939, xi, 3, 209. 11. Boulanger, Le Cinéma Colonial, 221–222. 12. Cameron, Africa on Film, 56, 59. 13. Ibid., 123. 14. Ibid., 188. 15. Femi Okiremuette Shaka, Modernity and the African Cinema: A Study in Colonialist Discourse, Postcoloniality, and Modern African Identities (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2004), 18, 8, 17, 172–173, 187, 215, 205, 211. 16. Dina Sherzer, “Introduction,” in Cinema, Colonialism, and Postcolonialism: Perspectives from the French and Francophone Worlds, ed. Dina Sherzer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 5. 17. Ibid., 9. 18. Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, “The Reconstruction of French Cinema,” in France in Focus: Film and National Identity, ed. Elizabeth Ezra and Sue Harris (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 21. 19. CAOM, 1/AP/2127/10, “Decret portant organization du contrôle des films cinématographiques, des disques phonographiques, des prises de vues cinématographiques et des enregistrements sonores en Afrique Occidentale Française,” March 8, 1934, signed by Pierre Laval, Minister of Colonies. 20. James E. Genova, Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity, and the Limitations of Mimicry in French-Ruled West Africa, 1914–1956 (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 97–98. 21. André Bazin, “From What Is Cinema?” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Fifth Edition, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 195–196, 198. The emphasis is mine. 22. Sue Harris and Elizabeth Ezra, “Introduction: The French Exception,” in France in Focus: Film and National Identity, ed. Elizabeth Ezra and Sue Harris (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 2. 23. Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 32–33. For additional analysis of the concept of “La Plus Grande France,” see: Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 \(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). 24. CAOM, 1/AP/859, Letter from Marcel de Coppet, Governor-General for French West Africa, to the Minister of Colonies in Paris and the Director of Political Affairs in the Federation, “Haut Comité Méditerranéan Artinisat-Cinéma,” October 5, 1938. 25. CAOM, 1/AP/859 (1), Letter from Les Films Mercure, August 6, 1929, requesting to make propaganda films for the French that would extol the “benefits derived from French rule.” This is one of many letters from a variety of film companies, including Films Robert Bastardie, that went, as far as can be deduced, without further official action.

66

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

26. CAOM, 1/AP/859, Rapport du Directeur de l’Enseignement de l’A.E.F., signed “Davesne,” October 1, 1938. 27. Eric T. Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940–1944 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 146. 28. Internet Movie Data Base (IMDb), http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0023379/. The synopsis paraphrased above is taken from this site. 29. ARS, 21/G/193 [174], Letter from Georges Poirier, acting Lieutenant Governor of Mauritania, to the High Commissioner of the Government General for French West Africa, May 3, 1947. The same file contains other notes and letters that relate to the history of how this particular film was received (in an official sense) in West Africa. 30. ARS, 21/G/19 [16], List of Authorized Films for French West Africa, January 18, 1949; amended and expanded on January 25, 1949. 31. Internet Movie Database (IMDb), http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0191993/. The plot summary and technical information are drawn from information compiled by this source. 32. ARS, 21/G/19 (16), Intergovernmental correspondence between officials throughout French West Africa undated but probably written sometime in 1949. 33. ARS, 21/G/19 (16), Letter from the Government General for French West Africa to the société “Interfilm,” November 14, 1949. Interfilm was likely the distributor of the film in the Federation at the time and, as such, had to get annual approval (the visa or license) to screen films in West Africa. 34. Bazin, “From What Is Cinema?” in Film Theory and Criticism: An Introduction, Fifth Edition, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 47. 35. Maya Deren, “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality,” in Film Theory and Criticism: An Introduction, Fifth Edition, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 220. 36. Shaka, Modernity and the African Cinema, 220–222. 37. Deren, “Cinematography,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Fifth Edition, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 224–225. The emphasis is in the original. 38. Sigfried Kracauer, “From Theory of Film: The Establishment of Physical Existence,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Fifth Edition, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 293. 39. Ibid., 299. 40. Ibid., 302. 41. CAOM, 19/PA/18/252, Robert Delavignette Papers, there is a lengthy report that Delavignette wrote offering his reactions to the film and describing the process of making the film. 42. CAOM, 19/PA/18/250, Robert Delavignette as one of the commentators on a panel for a screening of Paysans Noirs, at Salle du Musée Social in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, February 26, 1953. 43. Burke, “‘Our Mosquitoes Are Not So Big,’” in Images & Empires, ed. Landau and Kaspin, 53. 44. Paul Stoller, “Regarding Rouch: The Recasting of West African Colonial Culture,” in Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism: Perspectives from the French and Francophone Worlds, ed. Dina Sherzer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 74.

James E. Genova / The Colonialist Regime

67

45. CAOM, 19/PA/18/252, Robert Delavignette’s personal assessment and commentary on the meaning and nature of the film Paysans Noirs, undated but likely written in 1948 or 1949, at the time of filming or shortly thereafter, around the time of its release. 46. Genova, Colonial Ambivalence, 111–113. See also: Emmanuelle Sibeud, “Ethnographie africaniste et ‘inauthenticité’ coloniale,” French Politics, Culture, and Society 20 no. 2 (Summer 2002); and Benoît de L’Estoile, “Au nom des ‘vrais Africains’: Les élites scolarisées de l’Afrique coloniale face à l’anthropologie (1930–1950),” in Terrain (March 28, 1997). 47. Stam and Spence, “Colonialism, Racism, and Representation,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Fifth Edition, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 238. 48. Ibid., 242. The emphasis is in the original. 49. CAOM, 19/PA/18/252, Delavignette’s self-reflection on the importance of the film Paysans Noirs. 50. Genova, Colonial Ambivalence, 55–63. 51. CAOM, 1/AP/2127/9, Commission du Cinéma d’Outre-mer, séance, June 15, 1950. 52. Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, 76–77. See, also: Arthur Girault, Principes de colonisation et de législation coloniale, Fifth Edition (Paris: Sirey, 1927). 53. Robert Delavignette, Les Paysans Noirs (Paris: Editions Stode, 1947), 9, 12. 54. William B. Cohen, “Robert Delavignette: The Gentle Ruler (1897–1976),” in African Proconsuls: European Governors in Africa, ed. L.H. Gann and Peter Duigan (New York, London, Stanford: The Free Press/Collier Macmillan Publishers & Hoover Institution, 1978). Citation taken from WebAfriqa Online Library http://www.webafriqa.net/library /african_proconsuls/delavignette_gentle_ruler.html. 55. CAOM, 19/PA/18/251, Robert Delavignette commentary at a “Conférence d’Angers,” March 10, 1953, at which Paysans Noirs was screened and followed by a panel discussion. 56. CAOM, 19/PA/18/249, Paysans Noirs, Film Scenario and Treatment, 1948. 57. Here I am borrowing the phrase from John Ellis in his study of the relationship between sound and image in television. John Ellis, “From Visible Fictions: Broadcast TV as Sound and Image,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Fifth Edition, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 386. 58. CAOM, 1/AP/2097/4, Conte Saidou, “Une Culture Africaine,” in Clarté, March 2, 1945. The essay was included among papers from the same period that all dealt with general assessments of support for France in the region and any perceived threats to that influence, including from American propaganda. The essay gave encouragement to French officials that the educated Africans were loyal to the imperial rulers despite these other forces working to undermine French domination. 59. Genova, Colonial Ambivalence, 149–151. 60. Shaka, Modernity and the African Cinema, 8. 61. John Belton, “Technology and Aesthetics of Film Sound,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Fifth Edition, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 379, 384. 62. Sergei Eisenstein, “From Film Form: Beyond the Shot [The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram],” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Fifth Edition, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 40.

68

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

63. ARS, 21/G/193 [174], “Des Films pour l’Afrique,” in Afrique Nouvelle No. 159, August 19, 1950. 64. Christian Metz, “From Film Language: Some Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Fifth Edition, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 77, 88. The emphasis is in the original. 65. Shaka, Modernity and the African Cinema, 17. 66. ARS, 21/G/196 [174], Folder containing favored film treatments with annotations by officials indicating their preference for movies that center on “health, scenery, daily life,” as well as those that favor “ethnographic, and documentary” formats. 67. ARS, 21/G/196 [174], Proposal from Studio RIF to the Cinema Control Commission for the making of a film, “Civilisation Europeenne en Afrique,” 1957, with the approval of the Cinema Control Commission, December 19, 1957. 68. ARS, 21/G/196 [174], Film treatment proposal from Films Pierre Cellier Dakar, January 2, 1959. The same folder contains another film treatment for “Influsso civilizzatore della civilità europea” suggesting that filmmakers from around Europe and North America got the message about the kinds of films the colonial administration in French West Africa wanted for their audiences on site and abroad. 69. CAOM, 1/AP/2149/1, Statement of M. Bouruet-Aubertot in Bulletin du Conseil Economique, October 27, 1949, 675. 70. This is a subject I have explored in greater depth in earlier published work. See: Genova, Colonial Ambivalence, 281–82. See, also: James E. Genova, “Conflicted Missionaries: Power and Identity in French West Africa during the 1930s,” The Historian 66 no.1 (2004): 51–53. 71. CAOM, 1/AP/2149/1, Statement by the Economic Council for French West Africa published in the Bulletin du Conseil Economique, October 29, 1949, 317–18. 72. John Belton, “Technology and Aesthetics of Film Sound,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Braudy and Cohen, 378. 73. ARS, 21/G/14 [1], Undated inter-office communication in French West Africa, likely written in 1948 since the rest of the material in this file is stamped for that year. The signature on the memo is illegible. The commentary on “Egyptian nationalism” is inserted at the end of the text to make the appropriate connection and reveals the primary concern of officials with regard to the problem of the Arab language. 74. H.L. Wesseling, Certain Ideas of France: Essays on French History and Civilization (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 2002). In several of the essays included in his volume, Wesseling discusses the particular, even peculiar, French regard for their language and the powers that inhere within it. 75. M.M. Bakhtin, “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 49. 76. ARS, 21/G/188 [174], Decret No. 52–838 “Relatif à l’autorisation de distribution en version doublée de langue française des films étrangers de long metrage,” July 18, 1952, signed by Antoine Pinay, Prime Minister of France.

Politics of Cultural Conversion in Colonialist African Cinema Femi Okiremuette Shaka

Figure 1. Lesley Banks and Paul Robeson in Sanders of the River (dir. Zoltán Korda, 1935, United Kingdom). Image courtesy of the author.

F

or some time now, the cinematic practices of Africa have often been assessed as a unified cinematic practice—one which was essentially colonialist. Historians and critics of African cinema have often overlooked the need to make a distinction between the two divergent cinematic practices, colonial African instructional cinema and colonialist African cinema, which existed side by side during the colonial era. Colonial African instructional cinema was a governmental and non-governmental agency

70

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

sponsored cinema that treats the medium essentially as a vehicle for social mobilization and public education. In most of its productions, the medium is used as a vehicle for teaching Africans modern methods of agriculture, medication, banking, taxation, personal hygiene, urban planning and development, youth mobilization, community self-help schemes, etc. The films do not represent Africans as lacking knowledge of these things; rather, they represent them as doing things in the old-fashioned traditional ways. The emphasis therefore is on using the medium as an aid to the process of modernization. On the other hand, colonialist African cinema was/is sponsored essentially by private commercial interests, and it lays claim to Africa through representation of colonialist conventionalized stereotypes of Africans in European culture. Thus the lack of any systematically argued critical criteria or theoretical propositions for qualifying a film as African or otherwise meant that the criticism of African cinema has often been silent, and has neglected several important issues necessary for a proper appraisal of the field. It is not the objective of this study to propose a theoretical framework for the criticism of postcolonial African cinema. By properly distinguishing between the two types of colonial cinematic practices, and by further comparing both practices with contemporary African cinematic practices, the roots of current practices will not only be formally established, but their distinctive features will also become apparent. In essence, I will try to define the various practices that preceded contemporary African cinema. I have attempted to map out some of the methodological problems plaguing the criticism of African cinema, as well as to provide the critical criteria for distinguishing between the two types of cinematic traditions. I have also examined the historical background of colonialist African cinema and undertaken an analysis of Zoltán Korda’s Sanders of the River (1935, United Kingdom) as a case study of cinematic practice. Certain terms require definition. By colonialist African discourse/ cinema, I mean both continental and diasporic European representations of Africans that use European metaphysical concepts, its moral values, ethics, and aesthetics, to judge through representation those of Africa as inferior imitations or types of European originals. I will be using the term “colonialist” to qualify and distinguish this mode of discourse in order to avoid generalizations that would otherwise give the wrong impression that all European representations of Africa and Africans are colonialist. Above all, I am using the term “African” to qualify the African experience in colonialist discourse in general. This is the sense in which I will be using terms such as colonialist African discourse, colonialist African literature and colonialist African cinema.

Femi Okiremuette Shaka / Politics of Cultural Conversion

71

Methodological Problems in the Criticism of Colonialist African Cinema The study of colonialist African cinema, unlike colonialist African literature, upon which the majority of its texts are based, has remained a neglected area in African film scholarship. Studies that have been carried out on the representation of Africans in cinema deal essentially with the images of African Americans in American cinema. Studies such as those carried out by Noble, Mapp, Bogle, Leab, Cripps, Nesteby, etc., deal only tangentially with Africa by virtue of the African origin of African Americans. The only exception in this regard is Richard Maynard’s work, Africa on Film, Myth and Reality. However this collection of essays by historians, anthropologists, and journalists pursues arguments that seem to equate representation with reality. Stam and Spence have questioned the validity of such a methodological approach to colonialist filmic studies: these studies of filmic colonialism and racism tend to focus on certain dimensions of film—social portrayal, plot, and character. While posing legitimate questions concerning narrative plausibility and mimetic accuracy, negative stereotypes and positive images, the emphasis on realism has often betrayed an exaggerated faith in the possibilities of verisimilitude in art in general and the cinema in particular, avoiding the fact that films are inevitably constructs, fabrications, representations.1 In spite of the issue raised by Stam and Spence, I should stress that the essential argument pursued in the works, the rejection of black stereotypical images in Euro-American scholarly and filmic practice, is not what is being questioned. While it is true that black film historians and critics often pursue arguments that seem to equate representations of blacks with blacks, one should not forget that the representations in disputation are not black representations but European stereotypical representations of blacks. And so, what is being questioned about the validity of the methodological approach is not the question of incorrectness in rejection of black stereotypical images. I will return to the issue of methodological approach in colonialist African cinema shortly. On the question of approach to the study of representation of Africans in Euro-American cinema, it is imperative that such studies proceed from an awareness of the African American experience of the practice, being the first people of African origin to be represented on cinema. Although most of the principal categories of stereotypes of blacks tabulated by Lawrence Reddick, which Peter Noble cites in his work, include modes that have been applied in the representation of Africans, Euro-American scholarly and filmic practices had specific modes of stereotypification applied in the representation of

72

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

continental Africans.2 What unites the African and African American experience is commonality of African descent. The reason advanced for the non-distinction between colonial African instructional cinema and colonialist African cinema is the often quoted views of its organizers, whose recommendation of instructional cinema for Africa is based on the colonialist reasoning that Africans are incapable of grasping complex cinematic narratives and of distinguishing between truth and falsehood. These views are exemplified in the following arguments of Notcutt and Latham: Yet surely reflection will convince any unprejudiced person that, with backward peoples unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood, it is surely our wisdom, if not our obvious duty, to prevent, so far as is possible, the dissemination of wrong ideas. Should we stand by and see a distorted presentation of the life of the white races accepted by millions of Africans when we have it in our power to show them the truth? There is much that is silly and sordid in the life of the West, but white people have other interests than money-making, gambling, crime and the pursuit of other people’s wives and husbands . . .3

The Belgian colonial government in the Congo (now the Republic of Zaire) expressed views similar to those of British counterparts. But its views were much more systematically encoded into laws regulating the practice of cinema. In 1936, a series of laws were introduced forbidding unauthorized filmmakers from filming in the territory. This was followed by another law passed in 1945 forbidding anyone to “admit to movie theaters public or private, people other than from the European and Asian races.”4 In addition, Pierre Piron, the director of the General secretariat of the Belgian Congo is quoted as observing that the study of the reaction of the Congolese spectators, supported by similar studies undertaken in neighboring territories, leads to a disappointing observation: the African is, in general, not mature enough for cinema. Cinematographic conventions disrupt him; psychological nuances escape him; rapid succession of sequences submerge him.5

Historians and critics of African cinema such as Diawara,6 Mgbejume,7 and Malkmus & Armes8 have cited the aforementioned administrative views of the sponsors and practitioners of colonial African instructional cinema, and concluded, often without seeing the films, that they were not different from those of colonialist African cinema. But, in fact, colonial African instructional cinema was essentially a cinema born of the desire to use the medium as a vehicle for instruction, social mobilization, and community

Femi Okiremuette Shaka / Politics of Cultural Conversion

73

development efforts. In this respect, the way in which African subjectivity and culture are constructed in the films of Bantu Educational Cinema Experiment and similar projects inspired by this pioneer effort, such as those of the Colonial Film Unit (CFU) of the British colonial government, the Film and Photo Bureau, and the Centre for Catholic Action Cinema (CCAC) of the Belgian Congo, is different from that of colonialist African cinema. In colonial African instructional cinema, Africans are constructed as knowing and knowledgeable people, able and eager to learn modern methods of social organization and development for the benefit of their communities. Africans form the center of attraction in these turns, and they are usually engaged in the execution of one project or the other in the process of social transformation. This is in contrast to colonialist African cinema, in which Africans are constructed as savage and bestial people always on the verge of slipping into barbarism in the slightest absence of colonial authority. African film scholarship is also somewhat lopsided in favor of the history of the film industry at the expense of textual analysis. When textual analyses are attempted, the specificity of the medium is often overlooked. The result is that the emphasis on narrative, with little attention paid to the cinematic codes of narration, make such studies appear indistinguishable from literary criticism. For instance, while paying particular attention to characterization, plot, sociohistorical and cultural issues, they often neglect codes of narration made manifest through character point-of-view, flashbacks, reflections, etc., and the significance of such codes to narrative authority or the concepts of subjectivity, race, ethnicity, and gender. Historical studies carried out thus far on the film industry in Africa include those by Opubor and Nwuneli, Martin, Gabriel, Boughedir, Bachy, Ekwuazi, Balogun, Mgbejume, and Diawara. While these historical studies have been helpful in shedding light on the problems of the film industry in Africa, they have nevertheless overlooked the very specialized nature of the industry—that in addition to being an artistic industry, cinema is also a product of an industrialized economy, and that its organizational infrastructures and personnel are as specialized as any other sector of an industrialized economy. Though these historical studies empahsize how patterns of colonial and postcolonial state sponsorship and the monopolistic and hegemonic influences of European and American film distribution conglomerates have affected the development of the film industry in Africa, by overlooking both the industrial and artistically specialized nature of cinema they give one the impression that setting up a film industry is like setting up a factory to produce bricks or toiletries. If it were that easy, then Nigeria, Ghana, and Burkina Faso, three West African countries with film laboratories, would have been self-sufficient in film production by now. The fact is that to build

74

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

a viable film industry, in addition to film laboratories, a country requires production companies and film studios, distribution companies and exhibition theaters trained manpower comprising producers, directors, writers, actors and actresses, cinematographers, sound engineers and production recordists, light designers and technicians, editors, production and costume designers, stunt personnel, etc. The industry must be profitable enough to attract the unwavering patronage of both the financial and advertising subsectors of the national economy. Such viability in turn requires the patronage of a willing ticket-purchasing cinema audience. Finally, such a country should possess both the geopolitical and economic muscle to ensure the international competitiveness of its national film industry.9 Thus, instead of assessing the problems of the film industry in Africa in terms of the general gross underdevelopment of the continent historians and critics of the film industry find a ready scapegoat in the erstwhile colonial authorities who, we are made to understand, conspired to let the industry remain underdeveloped.10 To analyze the film industry in this manner is to fail to see it globally in both its geopolitical and economic terms, as an internationally competitive industry dominated by Hollywood film practice, with European and other national cinemas adopting creative policies for the survival of their national cinemas.11 Higson particularly foregrounds the political and economic imperatives at play in the construction of national identities through national cinemas when he argues that: to identify a national cinema is first of all to specify a coherence and a unity; it is to proclaim a unique identity and a stable set of meanings. The process of identification is thus invariably a hegemonizing, mythologizing process, involving both the production and assignation of a particular set of meanings, and attempts to contain, or prevent, the potential proliferation of other meanings. At the same time, the concept of a national cinema has almost invariably been mobilized as a strategy of cultural (and economic) resistance, a means of asserting national autonomy in the face of (usually) Hollywood’s international domination.12

From Higson’s theorization of the concept of national cinemas and identity construction, it is clear that the concept is much more complex than most historians and critics of African cinema have conceived it. Stephen Crofts, in his reassessment of the notion of national cinema since the publication of Higson’s essay, has tabulated seven categories that operate in terms of an agenda set by Hollywood: the political, economic, and cultural regimes of different nation-states license some seven varieties of “national cinemas” sequenced in rough order of

Femi Okiremuette Shaka / Politics of Cultural Conversion

75

Figure 2. Sanders of the River. Image courtesy of the author.

decreasing familiarity . . . (1) cinemas which differ from Hollywood, but do not compete directly, by targeting a distinct, specialist market sector; (2) those which differ, do not compete directly but do directly critique Hollywood; (3) European and Third World entertainment cinemas which struggle with limited or no success; (4) cinemas which ignore Hollywood, an accomplishment managed by few; (5) anglophone cinemas which try to beat Hollywood at its own game; (6)

76

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

cinemas which work within a wholly state-controlled and often substantially state-subsidized industry, and, (7) regional or national cinemas whose culture and/or language take their distance from the nation-state which enclose them.13

While conceding the overlapping nature of several of the categories, Crofts however highlights the geopolitical, cultural, and economic complexities which underlie the concept, and the strategies which individual nations or even ethnic groups or regions within the same nation have adopted in response to the hegemonic domination of world cinema by Hollywood. What particularly stands out in his article is the fact that every nation, with the exception of the United States of America, is engaged in survival strategies aimed at preserving their national cinemas against the economic and cultural onslaught of Hollywood. In a situation where both former colonial powers and their erstwhile colonies are engaged in the same fight for the survival or development of their national cinemas, it is naive to expect that the former colonial powers in Africa would help to develop the film industry in Africa when the reality suggests that they need the African market, assuming they can wrestle it from the firm grip of Hollywood, to shore up their national cinemas. What most of the theoreticians and historians of African cinema fail to acknowledge is that pleas for the transfer of industrial technologies, either cinematic or otherwise, from Europe or elsewhere to Africa are futile exercises. It is like begging a neighborhood shop owner to assist you in setting up a competing shop on his street. To put an end to the embarrassment of such exercises, governments on the continent should follow the examples of other developing economies by setting up agencies for the funding of independent film producers, protecting and financing their national cinemas through control of film distribution and building of movie theatres in both urban and rural areas, especially in those countries where indigenous businessmen have shown no interest in developing the cinema subsector of the national economy. In countries where indigenous and/or foreign businessmen and women already own or manage movie theaters, they should be made to include all locally produced films in their programs, and the films should be shown within a potential time schedule when they are most likely to attract audiences, and the price of tickets should not exceed those charged for foreign films. If movie theaters, sustain losses from showing locally produced films, such losses should be deducted from their annual taxes to the state. Finally, African countries should use import duties charged on foreign films to finance “independent” indigenous filmmakers until their economies are industrialized enough for them to enter into industrial film production for the competitive commercial film market.

Femi Okiremuette Shaka / Politics of Cultural Conversion

77

The only exception to the aforementioned tradition in African film scholarship are auteurist critical studies of African filmmakers in which biographical information outweighs textual analysis, and the latter is restricted to analysis of film narrative, characterization, plot, sociohistory, and culture, with little attention paid to the specificity of filmic narration, as in the case of studies by Françoise Pfaff.14 Though Malkmus and Armes’ recent work is a welcome departure from the usual preoccupation with historical studies of the film industry or auteurist critical studies, it however fails to address, in a systematic manner, the object of study: African film. The deficiencies noticeable in the work can be traced to lack of a well-elaborated theoretical framework. For instance, no criteria are given for what qualifies to be referred to as African cinema and the nature of its narrative and production styles. Furthermore, the question of the assumed universal neutrality of the cinematic medium vis-à-vis disputations surrounding such assumptions, and what their implications are for film practice in Africa, is not addressed. Nor is the issue of point-of-view in the cinema as it affects the concepts of subjectivity and identity construction, class, gender, ethnicity, race, nationality, etc., and spectatorial textual positioning addressed. In addition, as in earlier studies of African cinema, the issue of the cinematic practices of colonial Africa is not fully explored.15 Even though Malkmus and Armes’ group films such as Zoltán Korda’s Sanders of the River and Jacques de Baroncelli’s L’Homme du Niger (1939, France), under European fictional films set in Africa, and though they reserve a subheading for the films of the colonial film units, no distinction is made between colonialist African cinema, the category to which Korda and Baroncelli’s cited films belong, and colonial African instructional cinema, to which films such as Alexander Shaw’s Men of Africa (1939, United Kingdom) and Terry Bishop’s Daybreak in Udi (1948, United Kingdom) belong. The themes of community self-help and modern methods of social adaptation exploited in both Men in Africa and Daybreak in Udi, to cite just two examples, do not place them in the same category as colonialist African films. Both films are social documentaries in the tradition of Grierson, and the emphasis on stereotypification that one comes across in colonialist African cinema is not the case in these films. For instance, though Daybreak in Udi is a dramatized social documentary, the main African characters (the only European character being Chadwick, the District Commissioner) are not the caricatured stereotypes of Africans that one finds in colonialist African cinema. Rather, representation in this film adheres to the tradition of social documentary in which villagers are seen engaged in mass literacy campaigns and self-help community development. In contrast to the conventions of colonialist African cinema where traditional rulers are represented as archrivals and villains to colonial

78

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

administration, in colonial African instructional cinema, and specifically in both Men of Africa and Daybreak in Udi, traditional rulers are represented as partners and the people as capable of social progress. The people themselves are represented as enthusiasts of social advancement once it becomes clear to them that the white man’s modern methods of social development are much more effective than the traditional ways of doing things. In Daybreak in Udi, for instance, both men and women, boys and girls, young and old alike, embrace mass literacy campaigns and community self-help development. Though the film is built around the objections of a member of the council of elders to the proposed maternity project, these objections are represented as deriving from fear of social change by Eze, a member of the council, and such individualist spoilers are not lacking in contemporary African communities. As depicted in the film, the collective will of the people often neutralizes the individual crusades of such people. I have made this methodological detour in order to arrive at the main subject matter, colonialist African cinema, partly because its study raises several questions, all bordering on the proper definition of what qualifies as an African film. Also, because as a mode of discourse I consider colonialist African cinema as part of a larger body of discursive tradition in Euro-American scholarly and literary practices, which has a long history stretching as far back in time as the classical era. The second reason is the need to bring into focus the views of earlier theoreticians and historians of African cinema, some of which I disagree with, but also because I believe most of these earlier theoretical propositions and critical practices need updating in view of changing trends in film criticism in general since the intervention of feminist film critics, whose works have brought into focus the role and image of women in cinema and the debates they have been inspiring.16 Using a combination of Freudian psychoanalytic and semiotic methods, Mulvey argues in her principal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” that woman . . . stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.17

The essay then goes on to analyze the various narrative techniques employed by the cinema to set up women as objects of male visual pleasure. Since the publication of that essay, feminist film criticism has witnessed several changes due to the intervention of black feminist critics like bell hooks, who accused white feminist critics of adopting the same universal categories and analytical concepts of their male counterparts, which occludes

Femi Okiremuette Shaka / Politics of Cultural Conversion

79

the issue of race and class among women and Bobo18 who accused black males of trying to legislate the aesthetic tastes of black women. On the racial and class question, for instance, hooks argues that white women who dominate feminist discourse today rarely question whether or not their perspective on women’s reality is true to the lived experiences of women as a collective group. Nor are they aware of the extent to which their perspective reflects race and class biases, although there has been a great awareness of biases in recent years. Racism abounds in the writings of white feminists, reinforcing white supremacy and negating the possibility that women will bond politically across ethnic and racial boundaries. Past feminist refusal to draw attention to and attack racial hierarchies suppressed the link between race and class.19

In view of these developments in film criticism, we cannot pretend to be untouched by the issues raised in the ongoing debates. The issues are not only relevant, they are, in fact, imperative for the reappraisal of critical perspectives on African cinema in general and colonialist African cinema in particular. Furthermore, I do not subscribe to the blanket qualification of the whole cinematic practices of colonial Africa as colonialist. Studies in colonialist discourse have, however, shown that is not a unified body of discourse.20 Rather, colonialist discourse has been shown to be plagued by textual gaps and silences which have been interpreted as presences of native counter-narratives, presences whose silence are vocal enough to undermine the authority of colonialist texts. In addition, the agonizing influence of the Imaginary psychical phase of miscognition, in both the conception and the representation of the Other, means that discourse is often caught in the boundary between fixed and variable definitions of the Other. As Jan Mohamed puts it: In the Imaginary text, the subject is eclipsed by his fixation on and fetishization of the Other: the self becomes a prisoner of the projected image. Even though the native is negated by the projection of the inverted image, his presence as an absence can never be cancelled. Thus the colonialist desire only entraps him in the dualism of the “imaginary” and ferments a violent hatred of the native.21

Todorov, in his work, The Conquest of America, has demonstrated how European images of internal Otherness were projected upon American Indians. According to him, various categories of Otherness exist in every society: other in relation to myself, to me; or else as a specific social group to which we do not belong. This group in turn can be interior to society: women for men, the

80

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

rich for the poor; the mad in the eyes of the normal; or it can be exterior to society, i.e., another society which will be near or far away depending on the case; beings whom everything links to me on the cultural, moral, historical plane; or else unknown quantities, outsiders whose language and customs I do not understand, so foreign that in extreme instances I am reluctant to admit they belong to the same species as my own.22

In the case of the encounter between Europeans and American Indians, the American Indian Other was not only external to the European, but their Otherness was also marked by color, language, customs, etc. As we shall later discover in our examination of the modes of representation in colonialist African cinema, the same tradition of projection of European internal images of Otherness upon American Indians was also effected through European representation of Africans. The phenomenon of European social degeneration in Africa or the propensity for “going native” either by marrying a “native” woman or by identifying too closely with “natives” is often projected upon members of the European lower classes, especially men of working class background. I should like to emphasize, however, that the underlying concept of fixity in colonialist African discourse is a product of the ambivalence of the politics of cultural conversion in colonialism. The project of colonialism is posited in colonialist African discourse as a civilizing mission. Yet in terms of its narrativization, that civilizing mission is subverted through fixation of the native in his nativity. The native is perpetually caught in the boundary between progress and regression. In fact, stress is placed on the need for the perpetual presence of the colonialist to avoid the regression of the native into nativity. But by stressing the potentiality for native regression, the success of the whole project of colonialism is itself called into question since that success is forever dependent upon the presence of the colonialist. In colonialist African discourse, the native is at once changeable and unchanging. Thus, on the one hand the native is changeable, but that changeability is tied to the perpetual presence of the colonialist; on the other hand, the native is unchangeable because of the very fragility of his cultural conversion. In addition, the acculturated native is despised for negating the “good” old ways of his people. But those same “good” old ways are represented as indices of barbarity and backwardness. The lesson to learn from the ambivalence of the politics of cultural conversion in colonialist African discourse is that it suits the colonialist to fixate the native through discursive practices within the framework of nativity. By fixating the native perpetually in the Imaginary, in psychoanalytic terms, his virtual cultural conversion is perpetually postponed and predicated upon the presence of the colonialist. This fixation is thus a strategy for the justification of colonialism.

Femi Okiremuette Shaka / Politics of Cultural Conversion

81

The Historical Background of Colonialist African Cinema The roots of colonialist African cinema can be traced to colonialist African discourse in general and colonialist African literature in particular. Most of its texts are either adaptations from literary texts or personal memoirs of colonial administrators, missionaries, travelers, settlers, etc. This pattern is however not peculiar to Africa. Robert Stam and Louise Spence note that colonialist representation did not begin with the cinema; it is rooted in a vast colonial intertext, a widely disseminated set of discursive practices. Long before the first racist images appeared on film screens of Europe and North America, the process of colonialist image-making, and resistance to that process, resonated through Western literature. Colonialist historians, speaking for the winners of history, exalted the colonial enterprise, at bottom little more than a gigantic act of pillage, whereby whole continents were bled of their human and material resources, as a philanthropic civilizing mission, motivated by a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease and tyranny.23

An earlier collection of essays on colonialist African cinema, edited by Richard A. Maynard, Africa on Film: Myth and Reality, has equally traced the roots of the cinematic practice to colonialist African literature,24 as has Jeffrey Richards, in his study of what he refers to as the Cinema of Empire, which includes many of the films I have classified under colonialist African cinema. Richards states that Hollywood’s involvement in the practice was driven by two factors: “the desire for exotic and romantic escapism” and “the commercial factor.”25 This perhaps explains the investments in the Tarzan series of films, the majority of which were set in Africa. Writing on the ideology of the Cinema of Empire, Richards observes that what becomes immediately obvious when viewing these films is that, although they are made in the last decades of the Empire’s existence, they do not reflect contemporary ideas about the Empire. The ideas they reflect are those of late nineteenth century. . . . The constitutional developments in the Empire in the inter-war years find no place in the cinema of Empire. In films, the Empire is unchanged and unchanging.26

The prevalent ideas propagated in the nineteenth century as they relate to Africa are racial theories aimed at proving the racial inferiority of Africans. The fallacy of such theories have since been the subject of many scholarly works.27 But the fact that these racial theories were propagated by the cream of Euro-American scholarship for more than three centuries has left its mark.

82

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Figure 3. Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. Image courtesy of the author.

These same theories are the ones that informed and continue to inform colonialist African films. In colonialist African cinema, people who are different, not only in culture but in skin color and physical outlook, are denied their difference and are measured by European concepts of social organization, cultural practices, and notions of aesthetics. Categories of cultural experience and physical outlook which mark out Africans as different from Europeans are cinematically highlighted not so much to acknowledge them as such but specifically to disavow such differences or use them as representative paradigms of perversions of European ideals. In essence, colonialist African discourse or its cinematic practice is an arrested form of knowledge and perception; it is a partial blindness that arises from the inability to see beyond oneself or one’s cultural boundaries or the extension of one’s cultural boundaries over others by means of physical force and discursive self-aggrandizement. Paul Bohanan has argued that “Africa was the Dark Continent, but the darkness had much more to do with the European and American visitors to it, and workers in it, than it had to do with Africans.”28

Femi Okiremuette Shaka / Politics of Cultural Conversion

83

The association of Africans with savagery and bestiality began with documentaries such as Tuaregs in Their Country (1909), Big Game Hunting in Africa (1909), Missionaries in Darkest Africa (1912), The Military Drill of the Kikuyu Tribes and Other Ceremonies (1914), and film shorts such as How a British Bull-dog Saved the Union Jack (1906), which deals with the BritishZulu war of 1906–1907, and D.W. Griffith’s The Zulu’s Heart (1908, United States), in which a Zulu turns on his fellows in order to aid the whites, etc. However, most film historians now cite Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915, United States) as the film that codified the stereotypical images of blacks, in general, in the cinematic medium.29 Though the film explores and exploits white fears and anxieties about the black presence in America, and in this respect, it can be considered as dealing specifically with an African American experience in colonialist filmic representation, in the opening sequence the film traces the problem of the black presence to Africa and the slave trade. Through this association, metaphors of African savagery and bestiality are transposed to African Americans and vice versa. With respect to Africa itself, the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Tarzan series of films based upon them helped to canonize these metaphors of African savagery and bestiality. Brian Street draws similar conclusions with respect to his analysis of the novels of empire when he states that Edgar Rice Burroughs, the inventor of Tarzan, for instance, helps to fix the notion for future generations of young readers that people like their ancestors may still be found in some forgotten jungles, dancing ape-like rituals in ways that European society has left behind. His florid jungle prose transforms the scientific theory of his day into vivid and memorable images.30

Not only do colonialist films deny Africans their individual identities and social values, as in almost every other aspect of the unequal Afro-European relationship, but Africans are made victims of European psychic projections and fantasies. Africans are cinematically represented as sexual perverts, cannibals, sadists, despots, idlers, indolent, gutless, timid, superstitious, and barbarous. Just about any social practice which European and Hollywood film producers and directors consider uncivil is projected upon Africans. When they are not being portrayed as childish and harmless, they are depicted at the other extreme as heartless despots and sadistic murderers; when they are not gutless, they are portrayed as irrational and bloodthirsty warriors. Broadly speaking, most colonialist African films can be categorized as melodramas. Melodrama has been defined variedly by various critics and theoreticians.31 The one thing that unites these varied definitions, however, is the centrality of opposing complex moral orders and social values. Rahill defines melodrama as

84

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

a form of dramatic composition in prose partaking of the nature of tragedy, comedy, pantomime, and spectacle, intended for a popular audience. Primarily concerned with situation and plot . . . a more or less fixed complement of stock characters, the most important of which are a suffering heroine or hero, a persecuting villain, and a benevolent comic. It is conventionally moral and humanitarian in point of view and sentimental and optimistic in temper, concluding its fable happily with virtue rewarded after many trials and vice punished. Characteristically, it offers elaborate scenic accessories and miscellaneous divertissements and introduces music freely, typically to underscore dramatic effects.32

He also states that from its roots in popular theater in the late eighteenth century, the form was taken up by the popular novel and film and television, and that as its audience grew in sophistication, especially in the nineteenth century with the rise of the bourgeoisie, it adopted a much subtler approach to characterization, the employment of music was curtailed and the extravagant embellishments in scenography were discarded. Heroes and heroines who were less than blameless, especially in love, began to emerge. So too were villains who were more to be pitied than censured when all the evidence was in, even heroes who refused to fight. The unhappy ending also became common. He also states that melodrama in its dramaturgic apparatus of villain-heroine conflict, a persecution plot with a happy ending and a raisonneur, offers an almost perfect instrument for propaganda. During the nineteenth century, this instrument was pressed into the service of innumerable crusades: national patriotism, anticlericalism, abolition of slavery, prohibition, and even tax and prison reform.33 With respect to film, Gledhill has offered one of the most comprehensive historical and theoretical studies of melodrama. In Gledhill’s words, the term denotes a fictional or theatrical kind, a specific cinematic genre or a pervasive mode across popular culture; melodrama both overlaps and competes with realism and tragedy, maintaining complex historical relations with them.34 She also states that melodramatic desire crosses moral boundaries, producing villains who, even as the drama sides with the good, articulate opposing principles, with equal, if not greater, power. In so doing it accesses the underside of official rationales for reigning moral orders—that which social convention, psychic repression, political dogma cannot articulate. Thus whether melodrama takes its categories from Victorian morality or modern psychology, its enactment of the continuing struggle of good and evil forces running through social, political and psychic life draws into a public arena desires, fears, values and identities which lie beneath the surface of publicly acknowledged world.35

Femi Okiremuette Shaka / Politics of Cultural Conversion

85

Gledhill further argues that in film the form has grown from its preoccupation with the “realism” associated with the masculine sphere of actions and violence, to the woman’s film, with its emphasis on talk rather than action. This generic shift has subsequently led to the empowerment of women within this genre.36 With respect to colonialist African cinema, melodrama takes the form of the opposition, through comparative schema, of European and African subjectivities, culture and moral values, belief systems, and other institutional practices. The genre does not empower Africans. Rather, it represents them, like American Indians in the Western, as degenerate and barbaric people. Villainy is identified with Africans, just as virtue and moral uprightness is identified with Europeans. The only exceptions are the “good” African who collaborates with the European colonial authority or the degenerate working class European who fraternizes with Africans. African counter-discourses emerge in these films mostly through the representations of violent confrontations between Europeans and Africans. Though these violent confrontations are represented as misguided and unwarranted savage attacks, since most of the films do not explain the rationale for the attacks, this silence can be interpreted as an admission of Africans’ objection to European colonial authority. From the above definitions, one can deduce the fact that melodrama is a complex generic form with various subgenres and categories. However, within this broad category, colonialist African films constitute a genre by themselves, since they employ recognizably colonialist tropes of representation in their narrative structure, characterization, spatio-temporal articulations, etc. What makes these films colonialist is the fact that they are constrained by colonialist thought. Thomas Sobchack has dwelt upon the various manners in which genre films become constrained by the conventions and thoughts underlying such forms. He observes that the genre film is a classical mode in which imitation not of life but of conventions is of paramount importance . . . Though there may be some charm in the particular arrangement of formular variables in the most current example of a genre, the audience seeks the solid and familiar referents of that genre, expecting and usually receiving a large measure of the known as opposed to the novel. Elevated and removed from everyday life, freed from the straight-jacket of mere representationalism, genre films are pure emotional articulation, fictional constructs of the imagination, growing essentially out of group interests and values.37

Though most colonialist African films belong to one genre by virtue of the fact that they subscribe to colonialist thought, they do reflect additional subgeneric narrative and thematic contingencies that require distinction. While some like Tarzan the Ape Man,38 King Solomon’s Mines,39 The African Queen,40 or Greystoke41 can be grouped under colonialist adventure films,

86

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

others like Sanders of the River,42 Men of Two Worlds,43 Simba,44 The Kitchen Toto,45 Chocolat46 or Mister Johnson47 can be categorized as colonial burden films because of the predominance of the theme of burden of colonial administration in them. Simba and Kitchen Toto can additionally be qualified as decolonization conflict films or liberation struggle films, even though their British producers intended them to be adventure thrillers exploiting the violent milieu of the Mau Mau for dramatic effects. Other subgenres include colonialist safari films, of which a most typical example is Mogambo,48 and colonialist autobiographical films.

Colonial Burden Films Colonial burden films are essentially films that propagate the necessity for colonial rule. For this reason, many of them tend to rationalize colonialism through a derogatory portrayal of institutions that obstruct the free flow of the colonial system. Historically speaking, the greatest opposition to colonial rule prior to the emergence of Western educated nationalists, came from African traditional rulers. As a result of this, most of the films situated in this era tend to represent traditional African rulers as despotic and barbaric. Through this method of representation of the case for colonial presence, the films also paradoxically expose the fragility of the whole system because of the potential for the slippage of Africans into barbarism in the absence of colonial authority. The strategy is of course to rationalize colonial presence, but it is a strategy that also inadvertently exposes the fragility of colonial rule. Evidence of this textual pattern can be glimpsed from Sanders of the Rivers, Four Feathers, Old Bones of the River, Men of Two Worlds, Mister Johnson etc. This pattern will become clearer in my analysis of Sanders of the River.

A Critical Reading of Sanders of the River Among the films that I have categorized as colonial burden films, Sanders of the River, Zoltán Korda’s film version of Edgar Wallace’s popular story book of the same title, can today be considered as a classic in the subgenre. Sanders of the River was conceived by its producer, Alexander Korda, the director’s elder brother, as part of an imperial trilogy that also include The Drum (dir. Zoltán Korda, 1938, United Kingdom) and The Four Feathers (dir. Zoltán Korda, 1939, United Kingdom). Of the three films, one, The Drum, was set outside Africa, in India. Most of the reputed success of Sanders of the River can be traced to the fact that it was one of the very first set of films in this subgenre of colonialist

Femi Okiremuette Shaka / Politics of Cultural Conversion

87

Figure 4. Mister Johnson (dir. Bruce Beresford, 1990 United States). Image courtesy of the author.

African films to deal with such a historically relevant subject matter as the potential problems of an archetypal colonial administrator at a time when the British had commenced colonial administration in Africa. Its success can also be traced to the elaborate use of Yoruba artistic carvings as objects of scenic decoration, both in Commissioner Sander’s office in Mofalaba’s court, and in Bosambo’s private dwelling, and its use of erotic African fertility songs and dances in the sequence dealing with the marriage of Bosambo and Lilongo. All these combine to satisfy the entertainment needs of a broad spectrum of spectators. The film is reputed to have been so successful that after its 1935 exhibition it was reissued in 1938, 1943, and 1947.49 A stage version, The Sun Never Sets, which also starred Leslie Banks was inspired by the film. Paul Robeson’s recording of the Canoe Song also became a hit

88

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

record. Richards and Aldgate state that the “box-office success of Sanders was such as to inspire Korda to produce The Drum, set in India, and The Four Feathers, set in Sudan.”50 The film begins with Commissioner Sanders (Leslie Banks), who has been peacefully ruling a set of communities on the estuaries of a river in West Africa for several years without leave, preparing to go on an annual leave to enable him to finalize his wedding plans. Commissioner Ferguson (Martin Walker) is sent to relieve him. But before he proceeds on leave, Bosambo (Paul Robeson), a Liberian ex-convict who has unofficially manipulated himself into position of chief of the Ochori, comes to seek official approval from Sanders. Sanders, playing the benevolent fatherly role, officially confers upon Bosambo the title of chief of the Ochori after chastising him for his naughty past behavior. Immediately Sanders goes on leave, the gin and gunrunners, Farini (Marquis de Portage) and Smith (Eric Maturin), spread the rumor that Sanders is dead. Ferguson, sensing that trouble is afoot, leaves for the Old King’s country on a peace mission, where he is murdered by King Mofalaba (Tony Wane). Not yet done, Mofalaba, who has been peeved by Bosambo’s audacious obstruction of his slave raids into neighbouring ethnic groups, plots his elimination now that his white master and protector, Sanders, is out of the way, by kidnapping Bosambo’s wife Lilongo (Nina Mae McKinney) to lure Bosambo into his trap. Bosambo falls for the trap and is captured. On learning of all these developments. Sanders who had been waiting for an auspicious moment to bring King Mofalaba to justice, sails up river in his steamboat, The Zaire, and arrives just in time to free the captives. The film ends with King Mofalaba killed and Bosambo installed in his place. As earlier stated, one of the reasons why Sanders of the River was successful was because of the choice of subject matter: the problems of an archetypal colonial administrator, especially one who served in Africa. This choice of theme and characterization helped to strengthen the narrative, and I shall accordingly start my analysis through examination of its central character, Commissioner Sanders. Richards and Aldgate state that the characteristics that Sanders embodies are entirely in line with the criteria actually employed to select colonial administrators. The selection was virtually controlled from 1910 to 1947 (with the exception of the World War I period) by one man—Sir Ralph Furse. Furse selected his men specifically on the basis of character and recruited them mainly from public schools.51

Furse himself is famous for stating that without the caliber of men like Sanders, Britain would not have been able to run such a vast empire with a small band of men. In addition, he observed that “In England, universities train the mind; the public schools train character and teach leadership.”52

Femi Okiremuette Shaka / Politics of Cultural Conversion

89

On their part, Richards and Aldgate state that the “public school taught duty and responsibility, a sense of fair play, qualities of leadership, above all a benevolent paternalism.”53 To qualify for recruitment as a District Commissioner, one would supposedly have served one’s apprenticeship for years as a school prefect or would have held leadership positions in voluntary organizations like the Boy Scouts or the Boys’ Brigade. The character of Sanders is therefore drawn to embody all the foregoing qualities. He is fair and firm toward his subordinates; he is mild mannered and good humored in the presence of his superiors; above all, he is benevolently paternalistic toward his subjects like Bosambo and the local chiefs appointed by him. Leslie Banks’s interpretation of the role of Commissioner Sanders was deemed to be so realistically carried out that the Colonial Office came to project the Sanders character as a role-model for newly recruited District Commissioners. One of them, Charles Alien, has explicitly recorded the central role played by this film in the lives of newly recruited District Commissioners: Most of us had seen a film called Sanders of the River before we went out, and suddenly here was the thing, and it was real, one was walking behind a long line of porters—and it was just like the film.54

Another talked of the “Sanders of the River touch” in the description of the conduct of his duties.55 The character of Sanders was therefore set up as an ideal model to which all would-be District Commissioners could aspire to. Since Sanders is the model character and protagonist, all other characters in the film tend to be defined in relation to him. Sanders is also the symbol of the uneven Afro-European power relation in this text. The measuring scale of both contending levels of authority is represented on opposing poles, by Mofalaba on the African side and Sanders on the British. The sequence which most graphically represents this uneven Afro-European power relation is that which deals with the meeting between Sanders and King Mofalaba after the first slave raid. I want to examine this sequence to show how power is projected in the text. The sequence begins with a medium long shot of soldiers standing on guard with their bayonetted rifles at the ready. This is followed by a cut to Sanders, Tibbet, and Bosambo. Sanders orders the soldiers to stand at attention as Bosambo points with his spear towards King Mofalaba, arriving in an entourage of armed warriors. Three of them then sit to await Mofalaba’s arrival—Sanders and Tibbet sit on chairs and Bosambo sits on the ground beside Sanders. As Mofalaba’s entourage gets closer, the soldiers adjust themselves, with their bayonetted rifles pointing aggressively toward them. This is followed by a cut back to King Mofalaba riding in a hammock. The entourage

90

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

arrives at the meeting ground chanting a war song and a chair is placed for the king. Sanders gets up to acknowledge his arrival, both of them bow to each other and they sit down, with King Mofalaba sitting opposite Sanders. A hot exchange then ensues between them, beginning with Sanders telling him that he called him to palaver (meeting), but not with his warriors, and King Mofalaba replying that the guard of Sanders’s little chief (Bosambo) killed the captain of his guard. Sanders replies that Mofalaba’s captain heard his orders but did not obey them. Mofalaba reminds Sanders that he promised that they (Sanders’ subjects) should keep their customs. He informs Sanders that it is one of their old customs to buy women. Sanders agrees, but adds that he permitted that only if the woman and the father consent. He warns Mofalaba that he will not tolerate slavery in his district. Mofalaba responds by reminding Sanders that his (Mofalaba’s) forefathers have ruled the area for three hundred years, that he is the greatest king in the country. Sanders replies that his king is the greatest king on earth, that if little kings and chiefs disobey his king’s order then he (Sanders) will remove them from their thrones. At the end of this hot exchange Mofalaba pauses, and then asks Sanders what he wants. Sanders tells him to take his spear and men back to his (Mofalaba’s) country and he (Sanders) will release Mofalaba’s men in his prison. Mofalaba replies that he will do what Sanders want because both of them are friends, but that he has nine war drums over which are stretched the skins of any chief who offends him. Casting an evil look at Bosambo, he adds that he knows the skin that will be stretched on the tenth. Sanders then warns him that if he touches one servant of his king, be it as little as a pigeon, then Mofalaba won’t be king any longer. He adds, as a measure of finality, that the meeting is finished. Both of them get up and as Mofalaba prepares to leave, he casts an evil look at Bosambo. The entourage leaves amidst humming, and Tibbet observes that he will be delighted to wring the king’s neck, to which Sanders replies that the British taxpayers won’t be delighted. When Tibbet asks why, Sanders replies that it will cost about one million pounds to do that, that war is an expensive thing. Throughout this sequence, the authority of Sanders is visibly displayed. His soldiers are positioned at the meeting ground to respond to any eventuality should the meeting degenerate into confrontation. But even though Sanders has his troops stand by for the meeting, to intimidate Mofalaba, he disapproves of Mofalaba’s right to self-defense. Authority and power is what is on display in this sequence. But this authority and power is, in the context of this sequence, tied to military prowess. From the way Sanders exercises power in this sequence, we know that British authority and power is established in the district through military superiority. It is this military superiority that gives Sanders the sole authority to undermine indigenous

Femi Okiremuette Shaka / Politics of Cultural Conversion

91

power structures, as well as appoint British Warrant Chiefs. With respect to the representation of African culture, the payment of bride price is deliberately linked in the narrative with the institution of slavery so that the condemnation of slavery is used to denigrate marital customs. This linkage is fully exercised in the Bosambo-Lilongo marriage sequence, where Sanders uses his position as the sole authority in the district to impose a European concept of marriage, one man, one wife, upon Bosambo. In keeping with the conventions of colonialist African cinema, King Mofalaba is represented as a barbaric despot who will go to any extent to impose his authority on his subjects, including killing and stretching the skins of disloyal chiefs over his drums. In terms of spatial articulation, the dialogue between Sanders and Mofalaba is shot in shot/reverse shots, with a brief cut to Bosambo’s reaction shot when Mofalaba says he knows the skin which will be stretched on his tenth drum. Though Sanders does not enjoy more spatial authority than Mofalaba in this sequence, the strength and authority of his speech reflects the imbalance of power between him and Mofalaba. The relationship between both contending levels of authority is therefore based on suspicion, tension, and violence. Sanders is always suspicious that the King is trying to undermine his authority, while the King sees the appointment of Warrant Chiefs who owe allegiance to the British colonial authorities as undermining his right to appoint chiefs. Characterization also reflects the general conventions of colonialist African discourse in which collaborators like Bosambo become the good African and traditional rulers like Mofalaba, who oppose British imperial presence, however self-centered such opposition may be, become the bad African. But ironically, too, the good African is the one who is treated with a lot of condescension, since the relationship between him and his British patrons is based on master-servant relationship, not on equality. For instance, the Bosambo character is tolerated and patronised by Sanders. When he appears before Sanders in the opening sequence of the film, for the purpose of the conferment of the tide of chief of Ochori he remains standing while being addressed like a child summoned before his father or headmaster. To reduce him further in stature, Paul Robeson’s huge frame notwithstanding, Sanders invokes his criminal past, his activities in Liberia. The fact that he is portrayed as a Liberian ex-convict symbolically links him up with Africans in diaspora, especially to African-Americans, since Liberia was created as a settlement colony for freed slaves of United States origin. As a Warrant Chief, Bosambo is a servant of British imperial authority. The chain of authority that dangles from his neck was often perceived by Africans during the colonial era as a symbol of collaboration, as pets of British imperialism. Hence, when confronted by Bosambo during a slave raid, the Captain of the Old King’s warriors addresses Bosambo in terms

92

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

used for pets by saying: “Whose dog are you?” However, as puppets of British imperialism, Warrant Chiefs enjoyed a lot of privileges. Beside wielding enormous authority on behalf of the British, their children enjoyed privileged education, thereby helping to perpetuate the tradition of a two-tier education system, with special elite schools forming the upper level, reserved for children of the emergent ruling class. This was how the idea of elite schools like Federal Government Colleges and Government Colleges was sown in countries like Nigeria. Bosambo is therefore reflecting this historical trend when he tells his wife, Lilongo, that if they persevere and remain in their present post, their children will have the opportunity to attend special schools for the children of chiefs. In terms of characters’ relationships, Sanders relates to Bosambo as well as other African characters in paternal terms. He supervises Bosambo’s marriage to Lilongo and specifies the type of marriage by insisting upon one wife, one certificate. In line with this paternal relationship, when Lilongo is kidnapped by King Mofalaba and Bosambo is going to seek her release, he sends his children to Sanders to be brought up as wards of the government in case Mofalaba kills him in the mission. Furthermore, in comparison to Sanders, who has kept his sexual and marital life under control, the Bosambo character, as well as other African characters, are portrayed as sexually promiscuous. For instance, the scene that precedes the rescuing of the slave girls depicts Bosambo and the girls as sexually loose persons. In his inquiry before ordering the return of the girls to their families, with the exception of Lilongo, whom he permits to marry Bosambo, the girls begin their confessions of sexual liaison with Bosambo amidst giggling, an indication that they did not mind going to bed with Bosambo. On his part, as the girls begin their confessions, Bosambo begins to fidget like a reprimanded child, in keeping with the film’s representation of Africans as children. The film also registers that underneath Bosambo’s meekness there is a valiant and dangerous underside. This is revealed in the battle scene where he confronts the Captain of the old king’s warriors shortly after the slave raid and in the scene where he tries to teach his son the survival principles of his society. In this latter scene, a war song meant to portray him as a warmonger is introduced: On, on into battle Make the wardrums rattle Mow them down like cattle On and on, on into battle, stamp them into dust Charge, kill, shoot, spill, and smash, smite, slash, fight and sky!

Femi Okiremuette Shaka / Politics of Cultural Conversion

93

The incorporation of this violence-laden war song seems to be the film’s own way of explaining the root causes of violent activities like slave raids and inter-ethnic warfare in precolonial African societies. The film seems to suggest that the methods of instruction in precolonial Africa were responsible for inter-ethnic wars. Since one of the film’s major themes is that of peace, peace in terms of total submission to British colonial authority, the film tends to blame this mode of instruction for lack of peace in colonial society. I have earlier stated that Mofalaba represents one of the contending levels of power and authority in this text by virtue of the fact that he symbolizes traditional African authority. However, while Sanders, his contending opposite symbol of authority, is depicted as a fair and forthright ruler, the Mofalaba character is portrayed as a despot. This manner of representation is, however, not unique to Mofalaba. It is consistent with the conventional pattern of representing traditional African rulers in colonialist African cinema. The King Mofalaba character is thus a reproduction of similar character types such as Twala in King Solomon’s Mines, Magole in Men of Two Worlds, Simba in Simba, etc. The traditional institution of authority is so derogatorily portrayed in Sanders of the River that no one is left in doubt of the necessity of British imperial presence. The use of propaganda clips in the film is also part of the overall strategy of discrediting the ruling capacities of traditional African rulers while celebrating British imperial presence. What is celebrated in this instance is the efficacy of indirect rule as the propaganda clip shows: AFRICA Tens of millions of natives under British rule, each tribe with its own chieftain, governed and protected by a handful of whitemen whose everyday work is an unsung saga of courage and efficiency. One of them was Commissioner Sanders.

With the penchant in colonialist films for spinning globes and maps, the propaganda clip in the opening sequence of the film is superimposed upon a fluttering British flag, the Union Jack, with the spinning globe signifying the all-embracing nature of British colonial authority. But if indirect rule was efficient and cost effective, as the film seems to imply, it also encouraged divide-and-rule, bred favoritism, suspicion, rivalry, violence, and the breach of peace, as the relationship between Mofalaba and Bosambo indicates—the very things colonial authority wanted to avoid. In addition to his subordination to Sanders, Mofalaba is also portrayed to be childlike in nature, displayed most explicitly in the sequence in which he kills Ferguson. An instance of this childlikeness is shown during the brief

94

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

verbal exchange between him and Ferguson. When Ferguson tells him that Sanders is alive and that Sanders will see to it that he, Mofalaba, is brought to justice if he kills him, Mofalaba retorts, childlike, that Sanders is dead, as he had been assured by the gun-runner, Smith. When Sanders has not been recalled from leave and Father O’Leary comes to report to Ferguson the violent situation in the district, Ferguson remarks that the arsonists who burnt O’Leary’s church acted just like wild beasts; rather, they are like misguided children and like a father, Ferguson must act quickly like Sanders would have done under similar circumstances. In another instance, Sanders, while introducing Ferguson to the chiefs of his district, addresses them the way a headmaster would normally address his pupils or, better still, the way a father would address his children. He specifically tells them that they should obey Ferguson as if they were Ferguson’s own children. Another colonialist trope exploited by the film is the representation of Africans as sexually promiscuous. This mode of representation is foregrounded through the examination of the traditional African marriage institution, with specific reference to polygamy. Polygamy is treated in the film as an index of sexual promiscuity. For instance, when the slave girls attempt to submit themselves voluntarily in marriage to Bosambo en masse, Sanders first applies all sorts of subterfuges to dissuade them. When that does not seem to work, he puts his foot down and insists that Bosambo must practice the doctrine of “one man one wife.” The girls’ readiness to marry Bosambo in spite of the fact that he has sexually exploited them can be considered an indication of their sexual permissiveness. Furthermore, the choice of erotic African fertility dances featuring bare-breasted girls is also informed by this underlying colonialist convention. These dances, which are featured for a fairly lengthy time during the Bosambo/Lilongo marriage sequence, and also during the victory dance sequence when captured female slaves are displayed in the sequence following the departure of Sanders on leave, do not only represent Africans as sexually permissive people but also as primitive and barbaric. In the Bosambo/Lilongo marriage sequence, for instance, the shots switch from male dancers to bare-breasted dancing girls, to a set of women breastfeeding babies, to a group of children already perfecting the sexual rhythms of the dance. The shots therefore appear ordered to represent the awesome procreational machinery of traditional African societies. The intention in this instance, as well as in similar ones already cited, is to portray the totality of African social experience as primitive and barbaric. More broadly, dances are utilized in the marriage sequence, both to create an erotic atmosphere as well as to present African cultural practices to Western spectators as part of the film’s package. Although the film sets out to celebrate indirect rule in Anglophone Africa, it also paradoxically exposes the fragility of the whole practice. As Richards and Aldgate observe:

Femi Okiremuette Shaka / Politics of Cultural Conversion

95

There is an implicit subtext in the apparent fragility of British rule, given that it collapses the moment Sanders leaves the scene. One of the great paradoxes of British imperial history was the simultaneous dominance of twin emotions, confidence and fear—confidence in the tightness of British presence in far-off lands and fear that British rule would be violently overthrown.56

The news of the death of Sanders appropriately demonstrates the fragility that Richards and Aldgate refer to. The commotion which the news of his death brings to the carefully painted picture of a district, peaceful as an Edenic paradise, also symbolizes the underlying fragility of British colonial rule as represented in Sanders of the River. For instance, once the news of his death is relayed through the district in drum messages, there is a sequence of shots representing the rapid slippage of Africans into savagery. This social degeneration or descent into barbarism is shown in the form of a resumption and celebration of slave raids, a man rapidly climbing a tall coconut tree barehandedly, and of animals lumbering in and out of water, as if in joyful celebration of the absence of the law from the river. Though the whole sequence is structured to signify a return to the old regime of jungle justice, it has inadvertently ended up portraying the fragility of British colonial rule through the exploitation of potentiality for such relapse. In conclusion, though Sanders of the River is not the first film to institute the conventions of colonialist African cinema, that tradition having been initiated by the Tarzan jungle series of films, there is no doubt that it stands out today as a classic example of the subgenre of films that it inaugurated, the colonial burden films. These films propagated the necessity for colonial rule. However, their attempts to reflect the contradictions of colonial societies often negate this message, thereby exposing the fragility of the whole project. This becomes both a lamentation and an acknowledgement of the burden of colonial rule. Evidence of this textual pattern can be glimpsed from Sanders of the River, Men of Two Worlds, Mister Johnson, etc., where attempts to portray the power play of colonial societies and the rationalization of colonialism result in the exposure of the fragility of the whole system. Femi Okiremuette Shaka studied at the Universities of Benin and Ibadan in Nigeria and took a doctorate degree in film studies at the University of Warwick as a Commonwealth Scholar. He was also Visiting Fulbright African Senior Scholar in the Africana Studies program at New York University. He currently teaches film/TV studies courses at the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

96

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Notes Originally published as Femi Okiremuette Shaka, “The Politics of Cultural Conversion in Colonialist African Cinema,” Cineaction, 37 (January 1995): 50–67. 1. Robert Stam and Louise Spence, “Colonialism, Racism and Representation: An Introduction,” Screen Vol. 24, No. 2 (March-April 1983), p. 3. 2. Peter Noble, The Negro in Films (London: Robinson, 1948), pp. 11–12. 3. L. A. Notcutt and G.C. Latham, The African and the Cinema (London: The Edinburgh House Press, 1937), pp. 22–23. 4. Cited in Manthia Diawara, “Sub-Saharan Film Production: Technological Paternalism,” Jump Cut (No. 32, April 1986), p. 64. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., p. 62. 7. Onyero Mgbejume, Film in Nigeria: Development, Problems and Promise (Nairobi: African Council on Communication Education, 1989), pp. 1–4. 8. Lizbeth Malkmus and Roy Armes, Arab and African Film Making (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1992), pp. 16–22. 9. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1976), pp. 3–25 10. Manthia Diawara, “Sub-Saharan Film Production: Technological Paternalism,” Jump Cut (No. 32, April 1986). 11. J Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen (Vol. 30, No. 4,1989). Richard Dyer and Ginette Vicendeau, Popular European Cinema (London: Routledge, 1992). Stephen Crofts, “Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s,” Quarterly Review of Film & Video (Vol. 14 (3), 1993). 12. Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen (Vol. 30, No. 4,1989), p. 37. 13. Stephen Crofts, “Reconceptualizing National Cinemas,” Quarterly Review of Film & Video (Vol. 14 (3), 1993), p. 50. 14. Françoise Pfaff, The Cinema of Outmane Sembene: A Pioneer of African film (Westport: Praeger/Greenwood Press, 1984). Françoise Pfaff, Twenty-five Black African Filmmakers (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988). 15. Lizbeth Malkmus and Roy Armes, Arab and African Film Making (London: Zed Books Ltd.. 1992), pp. 16–22. 16. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape (New York: Penguin Books, 1974). Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen (Vol. 16, No. 3, Autumn 1975). bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre (Boston: South End Press, 1984). 17. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Screen ,”(Vol. 16, No. 3, Autumn 1975), p. 7. 18. Jacqueline Bobo, “The Colour Purple: Black Women as Cultural Readers,” E. Deirdre Pribram (ed), Female Spectators (London: Verso, 1988). 19. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre (Boston: South End Press, 1984), p. 3. 20. Abdul R. JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1983). Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” Critical Inquiry (Vol. 12, No. 1, Autumn 1985). Homi Bhabha, “The Other

Femi Okiremuette Shaka / Politics of Cultural Conversion

97

Question”, Screen (Vol. 24, Nov-Dec 1983). Benita Parry, “Problems in Current theories of Colonial Discourse,” Oxford Literary Review (Nos. 1–2,1987). 21. Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” Critical Inquiry (Vol. 12, No. 1, Autumn 1985), p. 67. 22. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper Perenial, 1984), p. 3. 23. Robert Stam and Louise Spence, “Colonialism, Racism and Representation: An Introduction,” Screen (Vol 24, No. 2, March-April 1983), p. 5. 24. African on Film: Myth and Reality, ed. Richard A. Maynard (Rothell Park, New Jersey: Hayden Book Company, Inc., 1974). 25. Jeffrey Richards, Visions of Yesterday (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 3. 26. Ibid, p. 7. 27. V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (London: Jama Currey, 1988). Nancy Stephan, “Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science,” in David Theo Goldberg (ed) Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). Michael Banton, Social Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 28. Paul Bohanan, “The Myth and the Fact,” in Richard Maynard (ed) Africa on Film: Myth and Reality (Rochelle Park, New Jersey: Hayden Book Company Inc., 1974), p. 2. 29. Jim Pines, Blacks in Films: A Survey of Racial Themes and Images in the American Film (London: Studio Vista, 1975), pp. 7–32. Daniel Leab, From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), pp. 23–57. Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 15. James Nesteby, Black Images in American Films, 1896–1954 (Lanham: University Press of America, 1982), pp. 27–57. 30. Brian Street, “Reading the Novels of Empire: Race and Ideology in the Classic Tale of Adventure” in David Dabydeen (ed) The Black Presence in English Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 98. 31. Frank Rahill, The World of Melodrama (University Park & London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967). James L. Smith, Melodrama (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1973). Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). Christine Gledhill (ed), Home is Where the Heart Is (London: BFI Publishing, 1987). 32. Frank Rahill, The World of Melodrama (University Park & London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967), pp. xiv. 33. Ibid, pp. xv–xvi 34. Christine Gledhill (ed), Home is Where the Heart Is. (London: BFI Publishing, 1987), p. 1. 35. Ibid., p. 33. 36. Ibid., p. 35. 37. Thomas Sobchack, “Genre Film: A Classical Experience,” in Barry K. Grant (ed) Film Genre; Theory and Criticism (Methuchen, New Jersey & London: The Scarecrow Press Inc., 1977). p. 52. 38. W.S. Van Dyke, 1932. 39. Robert Stevenson, 1937. 40. John Huston, 1951.

98

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

41. Hugh Hudson, 1984. 42. Zoltán Korda, 1935. 43. Thorold Dickson, 1946. 44. Brian Desmond Hunt, 19S5. 45. Harry Hook, 1987. 46. Claire Denis, 1988. 47. Bruce Beresford, 1990. 48. John Ford, 1953. 49. Jeffrey Richards and Anthony Aldgate, Best of British Cinema and Society, 1930– 1970 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers, 1983), p. 25. 50. Ibid 51. Ibid., p. 16. 52. Ibid. cited, p. 16. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., p. 17. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., p. 18.

The African Bioscope—Movie-House Culture in British Colonial Africa James Burns

O

n May 13, 1951 a fire broke out at the al-Duniya theater in the Northern Nigerian city of Kano. In the ensuing panic more than half of the six hundred patrons lost their lives. A subsequent investigation revealed that the blaze began in the projection room, when a spark ignited the nitrate-based film. The flames spread rapidly along the theater’s makeshift kapok roof, which recently had been added to permit daytime screenings. Many of the dead had been trapped because the theater owner had locked the doors to prevent people sneaking in without paying. Others were caught in the crush as patrons rushed back into the burning theater to collect their bicycles. Almost all of the victims were young Hausa men, age 18 to 34.1 The tragedy of the al-Duniya disaster opens a window into the obscure world of movie houses, or “bioscopes,”2 in Britain’s African empire. Since the turn of the century these new venues had appeared in cities to service a growing community of movie fans. The first cinema for “non-white” audiences opened in 1909 in Durban, South Africa.3 Over the next five decades bioscopes appeared throughout colonial Africa until by the time the newly opened al-Duniya burned in 1951, there were movie theaters in most major cities on the continent. The emergence of bioscopes went largely unnoticed in Britain’s African empire. If Europeans gave any thought to the cinema in Africa, it was focused on the screen images Africans saw, rather than the venues where they saw them.4 Likewise many African elites ignored the bioscopes, and tended to look down on their mostly poor, frequently illiterate clientele. Thus, it was only under extraordinary circumstances, such as this tragic fire, that the urban bioscope received much attention. However, events such as the al-Duniya disaster illuminate the significance of this silent history. For example, the government inquiry into the origins of the fire attested to the cinema’s enormous popularity in Kano. On the day of the fire the cinema was packed with more than six hundred people in attendance. The manager’s fatal decision to lock the doors hints at a larger

100

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

crowd trying to get in to see the show. The use of the temporary (and in the event, highly flammable) roofing suggests that the owner was trying to add daytime shows to what were presumably already popular evening screenings. Thus, the new bioscope was apparently a thriving, popular pastime. In a recent monograph I have explored the history of colonial filmmaking in Britain’s African empire.5 Between 1925 and 1980 colonial governments in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa produced hundreds of films expressly for African audiences. This ambitious effort reflected Britain’s ambivalent view of cinema’s role in their African empire. British officials believed that Africans were more “impressionable” than Europeans, and thus more likely to be positively influenced by cinema images. But they also feared that exposure to the “negative” images found in Hollywood movies would have a corrosive influence on “white prestige,” and could inspire African audiences to acts of violence. Thus, these “films for Africans” programs were a kind of proactive censorship, which reflected colonial anxieties about the medium’s influence on African societies. Building on this work, this essay attempts to take the story of the history of cinema in British colonial Africa further by exploring the history of the movie houses where African audiences consumed the Hollywood films that their colonial masters found so threatening. My monograph is not the only one to ignore this important aspect of urban history. Thelma Gutsche, author of an exhaustive history of the cinema in South Africa,6 says almost nothing about African movie theaters, despite the fact that bioscopes have been a fixture of Southern African urban life since the 1920s.7 Many studies of African urban life mention the growth of bioscope culture in passing. However, to date, only a handful of academics have made the African cinema house the focus of their investigations.8 Part of this neglect can be attributed to a lack of sources. Most cinema houses were begun by African, or most commonly, Middle Eastern entrepreneurs who left few business records.9 Because cinemas were seen as a normative form of urban development, the establishment of these businesses elicited little attention from municipal authorities. And while the colonial press announced the opening of new movie houses for settler audiences with fanfare, it paid virtually no attention when similar businesses were opened for Africans. This lack of attention is unfortunate, because the bioscope played an important role in British colonial Africa. Bioscopes were novel sites of social and cultural interaction. On the one hand they were social spaces that were uniquely associated with colonial rule, having no precedent in precolonial African cities, and being modeled and even named after European and American examples. Yet they took on a social role that was unanticipated by those colonial authorities who shaped their creation. As anthropologist

James Burns / The African Bioscope

101

Brian Larkin has argued, “Cinema theaters created new modes of sociability that challenged existing relations of space, gender, and social hierarchy.”10 As such, it is worthwhile attempting to reconstruct and evaluate their history. This article provides a sketch of the evolution of these urban spaces, and an analysis of the unique and varied roles they played in colonial Africa. It is focused exclusively on British colonies, where the majority of cinema houses in sub-Saharan Africa were located. This article distinguishes between “bioscopes,” urban spaces in British colonies that were dedicated to regular film screenings, and other venues in which motion pictures were occasionally shown. These latter include missions, schools, social welfare halls, and other public places where groups could be gathered. Bioscopes were distinct locations where audiences came together on a regular basis. They were for-profit ventures that operated with little influence from urban colonial authorities. The bioscope was not the venue where most Africans were introduced to motion pictures. Ambitious government and commercial programs began bringing motion pictures to rural areas in the 1930s, before the rapid urbanization of the 1940s and 1950s that escalated the popularity of bioscopes in the cities. But bioscopes were more than just locations to see films. They were spaces that had specific cultural associations, and were patronized by people who saw themselves as participating in a unique form of urban sociability. Though they were often named after theaters in Europe and America (such as “Rex,” “Globe” and “Empire”) African bioscopes had features that distinguished them from Western cinema houses. Their architecture often reflected the unique demands of a colonial city. Racial segregation in Kano, Nigeria inspired plans for bioscopes with separate entrances, and the scheduling of separate shows, for “Africans” and “Arabs and Europeans.”11 Colonial prejudices also encouraged plans to equip Kano theaters with wide aisles in the expectation that African audiences were likely to panic when gathered in large crowds.12 In Kenya, on the other hand, where there were no racially integrated theaters, special entrances were unnecessary. Bioscopes in Northern Nigeria and Southern Rhodesia were often open air, reflecting the opportunities for evening shows in dry weather. In Nairobi, Kenyan government officials resisted the establishment of open-air bioscopes out of fear that evening screenings would encourage African “night-life”.13 The social role of bioscopes varied over time and place as well. In postwar Cape Town bioscopes were havens where young “colored” couples could be apart from the surveillance of their families.14 In the South African townships of Sophiatown and Alexandria they were places where newly arrived migrant workers could learn the slang and fashion styles of American culture that dominated township life.15 In the Kano township of Sabon Gari the first bioscope was associated with prostitution, alcohol, and Christian migrants

102

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

from the south. Muslim Hausa men could go to Sabon Gari to escape the conservative mores of Kano, or attend the bioscope in Kano, which Islamic authorities made the preserve of Hausa men.16 In Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, cinemas were raucous, male-dominated sites associated with alcohol and violence.17 But there were commonalities of movie-house culture that allow one to identify an “African” bioscope experience, distinctive from that found in cinema houses in the West. Virtually all contemporary discussions of bioscope audiences emphasize the sociability that distinguished them from their compatriots in Europe and America. One common criticism of African audiences was their tendency to talk incessantly during films.18 Colonial officials usually cited such behavior as evidence of the audiences’ limited comprehension. But clearly these conversations reflect the sociability of cinemas that marked an important contrast with similar venues in the Western world. Observers throughout the continent also remarked on the vocal interactions carried out by audience members with the characters on screen. In Cape Town,19 Northern Rhodesia,20 Tanzania, and elsewhere, bioscope performances were characterized by audiences challenging, warning, and generally carrying on conversations with the figures on the screen. As an anthropologist remarked on this aspect of bioscope shows in the 1950s: “The individual’s enjoyment was heightened by the sharing of his feeling with a thousand or more others, who were shouting their reactions. There was much greater excitement and overt emotional participation at the movies than at the Sunday afternoon tribal dances.”21 This gave the bioscope experience a performative dimension that separated it from similar shows in the West. Patronage of bioscopes also informed and reflected social status. In some instances, bioscope attendance carried with it a social stigma. In such cases the threat of the establishment of bioscopes inspired resistance from local authorities who feared their immoral influence.22 In other colonies bioscope patronage was a marker of “elite” or “emerged” status. In these colonies the threat of exclusion from the bioscope, through censorship or expense, frequently became a bone of contention between African audiences and colonial authorities.23

The Birth of the Bioscope Cinema houses for Africans evolved relatively late in the history of film in Africa. The first movies were shown to Africans to draw them to businesses such as tea merchants in Brazzaville,24 cafés in Botswana25 or mining compounds in South Africa.26 Strict racial segregation was maintained at film

James Burns / The African Bioscope

103

shows, the majority of which were arranged for European audiences shown at hotels and at theaters, especially in colonies such as Southern Rhodesia and South Africa with large settler populations. In the cinema’s early decades entrepreneurs brought traveling bioscope shows from city to city. Though most were Europeans, one notable exception was the South African man of letters Sol Plaatje, who toured South Africa and Botswana with a projector during the early 1920s. Plaatje’s was one of the first successful efforts to bring films to African consumers. Though he ultimately despaired at making money from itinerant film shows, he was encouraged by the enthusiasm of audiences for the new medium.27 Plaatje was one of many individuals who recognized the potential popularity of motion pictures in Africa. During and after the First World War the British Colonial Office received several applications from entrepreneurs eager to build movie theaters in the African colonies. All of these appear to have ended in failure, and their applications provide pathetic evidence of the ignorance of these businessmen about conditions on the continent. One of the earliest applications came from the Anglo-African Cinema Company, which ceased doing business when it ran out of money and its agent in Africa became incapacitated due to illness. Another similar venture ceased operations when its representative became a German prisoner during the First World War.28 Little came of these schemes, and when pioneering filmmaker William Sellers began showing films to Hausa audiences in the 1920s in northern Nigeria he could take it for granted that none had any previous exposure to the cinema.29 While these applications tell us little about the actual expansion of cinemas on the ground, they reflect the growing commercial interest in opening up Africa to the cinema in the early part of the century. In Europe and America, the transition from itinerant movies to the creation of static theaters was relatively short. In Africa, this change took place over a much longer period of time.30 Recreation halls that initially screened films periodically evolved into de facto bioscopes as the showing of movies became more popular than other events. Mining companies which began showing movies on their compounds during the First World War were, by the 1950s, erecting movie theaters in recognition of the importance of the bioscope to the cultural life of their miners. Besides these evolving bioscopes, gradually buildings were erected in many cities whose sole function was to show commercial movies. The first of these structures built specifically to screen films for Africans appeared in West Africa during the 1920s.31 Evidence of the growing interest in building movie houses in Africa is seen in a 1931 proposal that was submitted to the British government by an English company that wanted to create a string of cinemas specifically for African audiences in West Africa. The plan called for an initial building of

104

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

theaters “at 10 towns on the railway from Lagos to Kano in Nigeria.”32 The application hinted that there were potential profits to be made in cinema houses in West Africa: “The territory which could eventually be covered has a population of twenty million natives to the vast majority of whom the cinema is unknown.” This untapped cinema population was not being serviced. “There are in the territory at present approximately half a dozen existing cinemas, two only of any size, and all these with one exception are located at coast towns.” The proposal ended by paying lip service to the potential value of cinema to the African people of the region: “Apart from the Commercial part of the proposition there is a vast field for British Imperial Educational work and propaganda.” In the event nothing came of this ambitious plan, which colonial officials determined was unfeasible.33 While English companies were drawing up ambitious plans for cinema construction, entrepreneurs in the colonies were beginning to recognize the commercial potential of urban bioscopes. Colonial governments began receiving requests to build cinemas from local businessmen in the 1920s and 30s. These applications met with mixed results. In Gold Coast (now Ghana) an African businessman was permitted to establish the first bioscope in the 1920s.34 In Nigeria, officials permitted a Lebanese businessman to build the first bioscope in Kano in 1937. But they rejected an application to build a similar facility in Kaduna two years later.35 In that same year the government of Sudan rejected a local businessman’s application to build two bioscopes in Khartoum and Omdurman, despite the fact that the cities shared only one small cinema between them.36 By the eve of the Second World War there were two regions of Africa where bioscope construction was gathering momentum. The first was the coast of Britain’s West African colonies. Accra, Gold Coast had several cinemas as did Lagos, Nigeria. The other region was Southern Africa. South Africa, which had been the site of the continent’s first “African” bioscope, had cinema houses in most urban areas. To the north, in the settler colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) the establishment of regular “bioscopes” was well entrenched by the time Kano got its first movie house. Southern Rhodesia had experienced more urbanization during the 1930s than most British colonies. Its first bioscopes evolved out of urban social welfare halls established by municipal authorities. When the first static “bioscope” opened its doors is unclear, but movie-houses were a growing concern in the city of Bulawayo by 1929.37 What kinds of films did Africans see at the bioscope? The answer to this question varied widely throughout the continent. In all of Britain’s African colonies white officials stringently censored motion pictures. However, economics and demography at times tempered the heavy hand of government censorship. In South Africa, arguably Britain’s most racially

James Burns / The African Bioscope

105

segregated territory, cinema houses showed basically the same motion pictures to all audiences. In the African townships of Johannesburg, black audiences saw American “film noir” movies, which gave rise to the urban “Tsotsi,” or “gangster,” culture which many white settlers found menacing.38 In Cape Town, “Colored” audiences saw the same films as white audiences, albeit several months after their initial run at segregated theaters.39 This relatively “laissez-faire” approach to censorship indicates the economic power of the cinema industry in the Union. South Africa had the continent’s large European population, the most advanced economy, and the most densely populated urban areas. It also had its own commercial cinema industry and theater chains with ties to the big American movie studios. Thus there were powerful multinational corporations with a vested interest in cultivating a multiracial audience in the Union. However, to the north in Southern and Northern Rhodesia, urban areas were smaller, and the potential pool of cinema goers was much more limited. This made control of cinema segregation easier. Therefore, films that were regularly shown to all audiences in Cape Town and Johannesburg were forbidden to African audiences in the Rhodesias. Until the late 1950s virtually the only films screened for Africans in these colonies were heavily edited American westerns. African elites in the 1950s tried to “improve” the quality of films shown in Rhodesian bioscopes, with limited success.40 Similar issues influenced the types of films shown in other colonies. In the coastal West African cities, with relatively little racial segregation, and a long history of economic interaction with the Atlantic world, African audiences began seeing “mainstream” American movies in the

Figure 1. Grill Family Kinema in Northern Rhodesia (circa 1931). Image courtesy of the Sossen family.

106

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

1930s. However, in northern Nigeria, far from the economic dynamism of the coast, racial segregation, and a relatively small urban population, left African movie audiences watching the same edited Westerns found in the Rhodesias. Other factors influenced the types of films shown in a given colony as well. For example, in the predominantly Islamic towns of Tanzania, Kenya, and northern Nigeria, Southern Asian films began to displace Westerns after the Second World War.

Early Battles over the Bioscope Information about the establishment of bioscopes only appears in the historical record at moments when they became of concern to authorities. In Southern Rhodesia, for example, little is known about African movie houses until 1929. In that year violence at a film show in Bulawayo cast light on life inside the city’s most popular movie theater. The event that brought Rhodesia’s bioscopes into the public record was a brutal “faction fight” in Bulawayo between ethnic Shona and Ndebele gangs in 1929.41 The ensuing investigation into the disturbances found that conflict was sparked because MaShona men were taking Matabele women to the location bioscope. What is interesting about these reports is the alacrity with which whites involved in the Bulawayo township interceded to defend the bioscope. A clergyman named Father Escher wrote to assure the authorities that that “there is no fighting or rodyism [sic] in the Hall at these entertainments” though he did concede that “Mashona natives in the past have thrown stones through the windows at the audience.”42 Another defender of the Bulawayo bioscope was the Chief Native Commissioner of Southern Rhodesia, who expressed the opinion that “there is nothing wrong in a well-conducted bioscope” and assumed that the venue’s popularity was too great for it to be closed altogether.43 Clearly the Bulawayo bioscope was seen as a venue where mixed couples were expected to be able to enjoy the cinema unmolested. Far from suspending bioscopes, the Bulawayo Social Welfare Office built a new hall in 1937 which became the city’s most popular movie house. If the establishment of bioscopes went largely unnoticed in Southern Rhodesia, it led to problems in other colonies. Muslim authorities in Sokoto had misgivings about the building of Hausaland’s first bioscope in the 1930s, and staged protests against subsequent attempts to build a bioscope in the old city of Kano.44 In the Tanganyikan city of Rufiji elders tried to get a brand new bioscope closed down in 1931.45 In both cases local authorities were unable to stop the bioscopes from operating. But their opposition indicates that many African communities greeted these new entertainment venues with ambivalence.

James Burns / The African Bioscope

107

The Influence of the War By the advent of the Second World War there were still only a handful of theaters in Africa dedicated to showing movies to anything other than affluent white customers. The war provided a fillip to the creation of bioscopes in many areas of British Africa. It did so for two reasons. First, the recruitment, transportation, and provisioning of African soldiers for the war effort put demands on the entertainment facilities in several colonial cities. In Kenya, the arrival of West African troops en route to the east forced the colonial government to reassess its attitudes towards African bioscopes. The event that precipitated this reconsideration was a complaint voiced in the House of Commons regarding the fact that West African troops stationed in Kenya were facing racial segregation at movie houses. The root of the problem lay in the fact that the coastal city of Mombasa had no functioning African bioscope, a previous one having been closed during a cholera epidemic and never reopened. Thus while there were several theaters catering to white customers, West African troops, though used to attending bioscopes back home, found themselves refused admittance in Mombasa.46 The discrimination faced by the West African soldiers (most likely from Lagos or Accra) drew attention to the issue of racial segregation at the bioscopes, a problem that would become increasingly aggravating to urban Africans, and embarrassing to British authorities, as the popularity of movie houses expanded. In the prewar period the most stringent racial segregation policies tended to be associated with those territories with the largest populations of European settlers. The settler colony of Southern Rhodesia, and the European dominated Union of South Africa had separate theaters for “Whites” and “Natives,” while Kenya had no movie houses for Africans at all. However, the situation in regions without significant settler communities was varied. Within colonial Nigeria, bioscopes in the predominantly Islamic Hausa states in the north were racially segregated, while those on the southern coastal regions were not. In 1941 the Colonial Office administrator responsible for Social Welfare in Africa, J. L. Keith, observed that Europeans excluded Africans from seeing movies in Kenya, Northern Rhodesia, and Southern Rhodesia, because “Europeans object to their presence in places of amusement which the European community regard as their own.”47 However, colonial attitudes about segregation came under fire during the war. In the wake of the complaints from the West African troops, Kenyan officials immediately began considering plans for including cinema facilities in future urban planning.48 Within a decade of the war’s end only South Africa and Southern Rhodesia still retained segregated theaters; Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Uganda, and Northern Rhodesia (now

108

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Zambia and Zimbabwe) having abandoned segregated bioscopes by the end of the 1940s.49 The war also sparked a rush of migration into urban areas throughout the continent. In Southern Rhodesia, the adult male population of Bulawayo tripled between 1937 and 1948, a trend that was mirrored in many colonial cities. In Zanzibar, a government report issued in 1942 cited the cinema as an important factor attracting juveniles to leave rural areas for the city.50 Wartime urbanization led to a postwar boom in cinema construction. The ill-fated al-Dunyima was built in 1949. In Gold Coast Lebanese businessmen built several theaters in Kumasi and Accra during the 1940s.51 Tanganyika, which had only a handful of cinemas before the war, had seventeen within a decade of the war’s end.52 Not long after the war ended, authorities in Kenya began making plans to expand the capacity of cinema venues in that colony. Discussions over the expansion of cinemas in Kenya elicited some concern regarding the social impact of the shows. In order to address the demand for cinemas, a “committee on African Advance” suggested turning a Mombasa stadium into an open-air bioscope. This, however, prompted the following response from a Kenyan official: “Mombasa Africans do not need entertaining en masse after dark. Most of them like to be at home by then. Should they be encouraged to go out? Once out, will they not want to ‘go on’ somewhere after the show? Where will they go, if not to bars?”53 In the city of Nairobi bioscope remained a novelty, and by 1950 there was only one such facility for African use.54 Tanzania likewise saw a dramatic expansion of cinemas in the postwar decade. If building bioscopes before the war had been controversial, in the postwar period this was clearly no longer the case. By the mid-fifties bioscopes in Tanganyika were reputed to be doing great business.55 In the postwar decade cinema became such an important part of cultural life in urban areas that the Tanganyika African Government Servant’s Association, one of the most powerful worker’s groups in the colony, lodged protests with the government over the skyrocketing price of bioscope tickets.56 The British colonies where the postwar expansion of the bioscope was most pronounced was in Northern and Southern Rhodesia. This region experienced rapid economic growth and immigration during and after the war, and the bioscopes appeared in tandem with the swelling urban populations that accompanied this growth. In Southern Rhodesia, provincial towns such as Gatooma began erecting cinemas to match the example of the larger cities of Salisbury and Bulawayo.57 Indian merchants played a central role in the establishment of multiracial bioscopes in the Rhodesias following the war.58

James Burns / The African Bioscope

109

Domesticating the Bioscope Like the al-Duniya fire, extraordinary circumstances thrust the otherwise obscure Rhodesian bioscope culture into the public transcript. In this case it was a campaign launched by educated Africans in the colony to regain a space for themselves in a bioscope culture which was divided between raucous, lower class houses, and segregated “whites-only” picture palaces. The desire to reclaim the bioscope by this tiny elite class thrust the issue into the pages of the two African newspapers in the colony, the Bantu Mirror and the African Daily News. Articles, letters, and editorials brought the world of the bioscope to public attention. The environment portrayed by the press was a raucous world of drinking and rowdy behavior. As it had been in 1929, the city of Bulawayo was again at the center of a debate over bioscopes in the postwar era. The city had one main bioscope called Stanley Hall, which had been erected as a welfare center in 1937. However, by the 1950s it had become the preserve of young men whose comportment at the theater was roundly criticized in the African press. As one correspondent to the Bantu Mirror explained, “This section defied all decorum and shouted without restraint, with some of its members taking the role of unauthorized commentators on a picture they hardly followed.”59 Similar problems were associated with the bioscope in Southern Rhodesia’s other major city, Salisbury. There, in the African township of Harare, bioscope shows had also become infamous for the raucous behavior of their audiences. In 1957 a correspondent for the African News offered the following description of a performance: “Some of the people who came to the hall are so drunk that they are unconscious of their unruly behavior until an official reminds them that the toilet rooms are twenty feet from the hall.”60 Another reporter noted that a recent showing had resulted in “a big row because of the poor film shown.”61 Another confirmed that a recent screening at the Hall had nearly ended in a riot.62 This kind of violence was apparently not unusual at Harare cinema shows. The African Daily News’ story on a 1957 showing of Abbott and Costello Meet Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde assured readers that “to maintain order in the hall, African constables from Harare will be in attendance.”63 To address this problem, African elites established a new cinema hall in Bulawayo, which showed “quality” films instead of the Westerns that were the staple of the other bioscopes. It also led to a campaign to end the racial segregation that kept middle-class Africans from attending the “whites-only” cinemas in the colony.64 By 1959 their efforts had resulted in an end to legal segregation in both Rhodesias, though de facto segregation remained in effect in the large cities of Southern Rhodesia.65

110

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Conclusion Within a few years of this discussion Britain’s African colonies would be independent nations. With the coming of independence bioscope culture declined. Economic crises and military coups in the 1960s and 1970s effectively ended the distribution of Western films throughout much of Anglophone Africa. Though these were to some extent supplanted by films from Asia, most urban Africans lost the cinema habit during these initial decades of independence. Today the bioscope has faded in importance in African cities, as cinema houses are no longer widely frequented. In Kenya urban crime, combined with the proliferation of pirated media, has effectively ended moviegoing as a popular cultural activity.66 In Nigeria, video has replaced cinema as the most popular spectator attraction. Lagos, once the cinema capital of West Africa, went a decade without an active cinema house before an entrepreneur recently opened one. In South Africa enormous multiplex theaters have displaced local bioscopes almost completely. As a recent article from Reuters put it, “In South Africa . . . the sprawling black townships on the edge of the big cities have virtually no cinemas.”67 The bioscope is no longer a distinctive urban space in African cities. Many have been converted to other uses, such as churches and hospitals. Others have been demolished. Alternative methods of distributing film, from video clubs in Nigeria to “cinema shacks” in South Africa, are preferred by African spectators, for reasons of expense, convenience, and safety. But in their day, bioscopes were a diverse vibrant, and often controversial public space in most colonial cities. This article has attempted to provide an overview of the bioscope’s history in British Africa. Its goal is to begin a dialogue with scholars of cinema and urbanization in all parts of the colonial world. Specialists within the regions discussed will hopefully be able to complicate and clarify the arguments made about British colonies. Scholars working in francophone and lusophone Africa can use its argument as a departure point for exploring moviehouse culture in these regions. And scholars working in the Pacific, Asia, the Caribbean,68 and other former colonial territories can draw parallels with the history of these urban spaces in other regions. Movie houses were a fixture of virtually all major colonial cities. More original research, and comparative analysis, is needed to bring to light their rich and important story. James Burns is Professor of African History at Clemson University. He is the author of several books on Africa and media history, including Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (Ohio

James Burns / The African Bioscope

111

University Press, 2002),  Cinema and Society in the British Empire (Palgrave, 2013), and  The Cambridge History of Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge, 2013).

Notes Originally published as James Burns, “The African Bioscope—Movie House Culture in British Colonial Africa,” Afrique & Histoire 5, no. 1 (2006): 65–80. 1. This account of the fire is based on Colonial Office documents held at the Public Records Office at Kew, and newspaper accounts published in The Times of Lagos. For further details of the fire see Brian Larkin, “The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern Nigeria,” in Media Worlds: Anthropology on a New Terrain, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin (London: University of California Press, 2002), 331. 2. “Bioscope” was the name of an early motion picture projector and became synonymous with “cinema” throughout Great Britain’s Central and Southern African territories. The Oxford English Dictionary narrowly defines it as “an earlier form of cinematograph retained in South Africa as the usual term for a cinema or a moving film,” though the term was widely used in Malawi, Zambia, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. 3. Thelma Gutsche, The History and Social Significance of the Motion Picture in South Africa (Cape Town: H. Timmins, 1972) 4. For a discussion of colonial anxieties about commercial films and Africans, see my article, “Watching Africans Watch Movies: Theories of Spectatorship in Colonial Africa,” in The Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television (June, 2002). Several anthropologists working in the 1940s and 1950s did draw attention to the growing importance of the bioscope to urban culture. See for example B.W. Gussman, African Life in an Urban Area: A Study of the African Population of Bulawayo (The Federation of African Welfare Societies in Southern Rhodesia, 1952); Hortense Powdermaker, Copper Town: Changing Africa; the Human Situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt. (New York: Harper & Row, 1962); and B.A. Pauw, The Second Generation: A Study of the Family Among Urbanized Bantu in East (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1963). 5. J.M. Burns, Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002). 6. Thelma Gutsche, The History and Social Significance of the Motion Picture in South Africa (Cape Town: H. Timmins, 1972). 7. Ibid. Gutsche acknowledges that the movie house in the Johannesburg township of Alexandria was one of the oldest on the continent. 8. Two anthropologists, working a generation apart, have made the African moviehouse the focus of their studies. Hortense Powdermaker’s book Copper Town: Changing Africa devotes an entire chapter to the experiences of black audiences in the Zambian copper mines, while Brian Larkin’s above-mentioned study explores the evolution of movie houses in Kano, Nigeria. Rob Nixon also discusses cinema culture (though not cinema houses per se) in South Africa in Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 1994). David Gainer’s M.A. thesis on Cape Town Bioscopes is a valuable study of film distribution in that South African city during the 1930s and 1940s.

112

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

9. For the role of Asian immigrants in the construction of West African cinemas, see Toyin Falola, “Lebanese Traders in Southwestern Nigeria, 1900–1960,” in African Affairs, Vol. 89, No. 357 (October 1990): 523–553; and H. V. Merani and H. L. Van der Laan, “The Indian Traders in Sierra Leone,” in African Affairs, Vol. 78, No. 311 (April, 1979): 240–250. Indian traders established several bioscopes in Northern and Southern Rhodesia after the Second World War. See article in the March 10 issue of The African Daily News, “Only Bulawayo Cinema Open to Africans is Drive in.” 10. Larkin, “The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern Nigeria,” 323. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 325. It is unclear whether or not these instructions were implemented in the building of the cinema. The anxiety about cinema audience panicking may stem from a well-known story (probably apocryphal) of an audience in Tanganyika that fled the cinema in fear after a performance of the war-time documentary London Can Take It. The myth of the panicking audience, a familiar aspect of the lore early cinema in the West, has an equally dynamic history in colonial Africa. See chapter five of my book Flickering Shadows. 13. KNA MAA 7/800, “Open Air Cinema in Mombasa,” Letter to the Provincial Commissioner, Coast Province, 26 October 1953, quoted in Bodil Folke Frederiksen, Making Popular Culture From Above: Leisure in Nairobi 1940–1960 (Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, 1994). 14. Carol Muller, “Covers, Copiers and Co(u)leredness in Post-War Capetown,” in Cultural Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Forum on Folklore and Popular Culture, Volume 3 (2002): 19–46. 15. Rob Nixon discusses the influence of American gangsters on “Tsotsi” culture in Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood. 16. Larkin, “The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern Nigeria,” 331. 17. Flickering Shadows, Chapter 6. 18. Such complaints were heard in virtually every British colony. For the sociability of audiences in Northern Rhodesia, see Charles Ambler, “Popular Films and Colonial Audiences: The Movies in Northern Rhodesia,” in the American Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 1 (2001). 19. Bill Nasson, “‘She Preferred Living in a Cave with Harry the Snake-catcher’: Towards an Oral History of Popular Leisure and Class Expression in District Six, Cape Town, c. 1920s–1950s,” in Holding Their Ground: Class, Locality and Culture in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century South Africa, Philip Bonner, Isabel Hofmeyr, Deborah James, and Tom Lodge, eds. (Johannesburg, 1989). 20. See Ambler, 26. 21. Powdermaker, 259. 22. See Larkin for opposition to cinema houses in Northern Nigeria. 23. See for example a complaint to the Police from a self-described “Colored” man, Fred H. Barlmann, in which he invoked the legacy of Cecil Rhodes to argue against racial segregation in a Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia bioscope. ZNA A3/28/10–12 Cinematograph Ordinance. Fred H. Barlmann, Secretary African Political Association, to F. D. P. Chaplin May 18, 1917. 24. In 1916, see Martin, Phyllis M., Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 86.

James Burns / The African Bioscope

113

25. Neil Parsons, “The Kanye Cinema Experiment, 1944–1946,” Web published in 2004 at http://www.thuto.org/ubh/cinema/kanye-cinema.htm 26. Charles Van Onselen Chibaro, “African mine labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900– 1933” (London: Pluto Press, 1976). 27. For a discussion of Plaatje’s activities in Southern Africa see Parsons, “Kanye film.” 28. 3 BT 31/14211/133276 “The Anglo-African Cinema and Trading Company.” 29. For a discussion of these experiments in Northern Nigeria see my article, “Watching Africans Watch Movies.” 30. Itinerant bioscopes and mobile cinemas remain an important part of Southern African cinema culture today. 31. It is unclear which West African theater holds the distinction of being the first, though Birgit Meyer cites the existence of cinemas for Africans in Gold Coast by 1930. See her web published article “Ghanaian Popular Cinema and the Magic in and of Film,” http://www.africanfilmny.org/network/news/Fmeyer.html. 32. CO554/87/11“Cinemas. Proposed chain of in West Africa 1931.” 33. Ibid. 34. Meyer, “Ghanaian Popular Cinema and the Magic in and of Film,” http://www .africanfilmny.org/network/news/Fmeyer.html. 35. Larkin, 324. 36. FO 371/23358, “Cinemas and Films: request to show films in Sudan: desire to open cinema in Sudan.” 37. For an article on conflict at the Bulawayo bioscope, see Ian Phimister and Charles Van Onselen, “The Political Economy of Tribal Animosity: A Case Study of the 1929 Bulawayo Location ‘Faction Fight,’” Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Oct., 1979): 1–43. 38. Rob Nixon. 39. D. J. Gainer, “Hollywood, African Consolidated Films and ‘Bioskoopbeskawing’ or Bioscope Culture: Aspects of American Culture in Cape Town, 1945–1960” (MA thesis, UCT, 2000). 40. Flickering Shadows, Chapter 6. 41. Ibid. 42. S2784/3/A-Z 1917 Cinematographic Censorship Cartutt, Superintendent of Natives, Bulawayo, 10 January 1930 to CNC Salisbury “Bioscope: Bulawayo Municipal Location.” 43. CNC H. M. Jackson, to Superintendent of Natives, Matabeleland, 13 January 1930; “Bioscope: Bulawayo Municipal Location.” 44. Larkin, 330 45. Andrew Burton, “Urchins, Loafers, and the Cult of the Cowboy: Urbanization and Delinquency in Dar es Salaam, 1919–1961,” The Journal of African History, 42 (2001): 199–216, especially 206. 46. CO 859/80/15 “Color Discrimination in East Africa: Admission of Coloured Persons to Cinemas, etc.” 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. See the testimony of cinema managers before a Federal Committee on Film Censorship, recorded in ZNA F121C5/4 Film Censorship Procedure and Working Party Report 1960. The hearings took place in 1959.

114

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

50. CO 859/121/10 Juvenile Offenders—Comments on Report by Colonial Government. 51. G. B. Mensah, 1989. “The Film Industry in Ghana: Development, Potentials and Constraints.” University of Ghana, Legon: Unpublished Thesis. Quoted in Meyer, “Ghanaian Popular Cinema and the Magic in and of Film.” 52. Andreas Eckert, “Regulating the social: social security, social welfare and the state in late colonial Tanzania,” in The Journal of African History, Vol. 45, Issue 3 (Nov 2004): 467. 53. KNA MAA 7/800, “Open Air Cinema in Mombasa.” Letter to the Provincial Commisioner, Coast Province, 26 October 1953, quoted in Bodil Folke Frederiksen, Making Popular Culture from above: Leisure in Nairobi 1940–1960 (Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, 1994). 54. According to an anonymous article, “African Social Welfare in Nairobi,” in African Affairs, Vol. 49, No. 194 (January, 1950): 50–56. 55. Eckert; Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Zimbabwe National Archives S482/39/241/39 “Films General” 1938–1948. 58. The African Daily News, March 10, 1959, “Only Bulawayo Cinema Open to Africans is Drive in” describes the National cinema in Salisbury as being owned by an Asian businessman. In an earlier issue (September 3), the paper reported that “wellgroomed” Africans were welcome if they booked in advance, though even this policy had led to confrontations with angry white patrons. 59. The African Daily News, February 9, 1957 “That midnight kiss was a hit.” 60. The African Daily News, November 27, 1957 “Misuse of Recreation Hall Worries Welfare Dept.” 61. The African Daily News, February 9, 1957, “That midnight kiss was a hit.” 62. The African Daily News, February 28, 1959, “Cinema Shows at Macdonald Hall,” Letter to the Editor. 63. African Daily News, March 5, 1957. 64. For a discussion of the campaign to end bioscope segregation in Northern and Southern Rhodesia, see Chapter 6 of Flickering Shadows. 65. African Daily News, March 10, 1959, “Only Bulawayo Cinema Open to Africans is Drive in.” 66. Ogova Ondego, “Nu Metro opens cinema in Nairobi as film-going declines,” Web published at “Africa Film TV.” 67. Rebecca Harrison, “African films scoop awards but audience elusive,” Reuters, May 26, 2005. 68. Though little work has been done on Caribbean movie houses, see Lynne Macedo, Film and Fiction: the Influence of Cinema on Writers From Jamaica and Trinidad (Dido Press, 2003); and my article in “Cinema in the African Diaspora,” in Diasporas. Histoire et Sociétés (Fall 2004).

From the Inside: The Colonial Film Unit and the Beginning of the End Tom Rice

I

n January 1948 the British Film Institute organized a conference entitled “The Film in Colonial Development.” While speakers at the conference trotted out, as the journal West Africa termed it, “the old rusty arguments about primitive, illiterate peoples . . . ad nauseam,” they also acknowledged a shift in colonial film policy that was clearly closely aligned to broader political developments.1 “Throughout our Colonial Office policy we are working at one main thing,” explained K. W. Blackburn, the Director of Information Services at the Colonial Office, “trying to teach the people of the Colonies to run the show themselves and doing precisely that thing in the film world as in every other field.”2 Speaking at the conference, John Grierson further outlined the need to create “a genuine African Unit that can work with native units in other colonies,” what he described as a “Colonial Film Unit with true regard for decentralization and the part which natives will play in it.”3 The conference marks a public shift in colonial film policy, revealing at a moment when the British government was outlining concurrent changes in its political strategies toward Africa. It represents a moment of transition, one marked by uncertainty surrounding decentralization and the alacrity and extent to which power would be transferred. The discussions address the position, function, and structure of the Colonial Film Unit (CFU) and, as throughout the history of the CFU, these film policies were intricately connected to greater political changes. When the CFU began in 1939, under the aegis of the Ministry of Information (MOI), it sought to produce “propaganda” films encouraging African audiences, exemplified by its first production, Mr. English at Home (dir. Gordon Hales, 1940, Great Britain). After the war, the role of the CFU began to change in ways that often mirrored the broader processes of decolonization. At the start of 1946, the CFU sent units to East and West Africa. Now funded by the Colonial Development and Welfare Act and under the direction of the Films Division of the Central Office of Information (COI), the CFU made instructional films for African audiences, as practical

116

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

instruction replaced more general imperial propaganda. By 1948, the CFU was increasingly looking to take production (and with it expenditure) away from London and into the colonies. The Home Unit now accounted for no more than twenty percent of the CFU’s output and was financed separately as an allied service from the vote of the COI. The increasing marginalization of the Home Unit is indicative then of this shift in film policy, which closely mirrored changes in political policy.4 The Home Unit serves to connect the traditional functions and structure of the CFU with its ultimate ambitions. Its role in filming Africans brought over to London may appear anachronistic within the context of an administrative and film policy that was increasingly looking away from London and towards the colonies. Yet, in filming a series of conferences, tours, and public exhibitions, these Home Unit productions reveal some of the ways in which the Colonial Office visualized Britain’s changing relationship with Africa and, more significantly, sought to articulate these impending changes to an African audience. The films depict African sportsmen (Nigerian Footballers in England, 1949), musicians (Colonial Cinemagazine 9, 1947), and leaders (An African Conference in London, 1948). They celebrate British interest in the empire (Colonial Month, 1949) and show social and political events that sought to challenge popular perceptions of African political life. Yet, in their largely traditional formal structure, which defined London through its landmarks, institutions, and repeated references to the royal family, as the ideological center from which the empire could be controlled and contained, the films reveal the still tentative and reactionary nature of the British government’s moves toward decolonization. The films of the Home Unit thus provide a starting point when examining these shifts within colonial film and political policy. In showing official events and tours, they reveal some of the ways in which the Colonial Office and the COI sought to promote and represent a reconfigured empire to the British public and subsequently to African audiences. The demise of the Home Unit and the emergence of local film schools, the first of which opened in Accra on the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in September 1948, are a practical realization of these changes.5 Finally, the workings, and in particular failings, of the emerging local units reveal this continuing uncertainty and tension between local administration and centralized colonial policy. Colonial governments utilized film as a means of shaping, defining, and controlling imperial subjects, disseminating government information to local audiences. Yet, film was also now more closely aligned to central government policy as by 1950, the Colonial Film Unit was incorporated into the Colonial Office. While the Colonial Office publicly sought to foster decentralization, the CFU continued to coordinate and oversee an exchange of personnel, ideas, films, and equipment throughout the empire. These dynamics are mostly neatly encapsulated in

Tom Rice / The Colonial Film Unit

117

the physical films themselves, which continued to be processed in London. The notion of “local” African films traveling through London in order to reach their African audiences highlights to this ongoing negotiation between the center and periphery, between broader colonial film policy and local practices, between transnational exchanges and emerging regional cinema cultures. In this period of rapid social and political change, film offers a microcosm of the political processes of decolonization, often mirroring the stuttering, complex, and tentative moves towards independence.

Africans in England: Exhibiting Britain In 1940, Winston Churchill said, “If the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say this was their finest hour.”6 Never mind a millennium, the empire barely survived the decade as under the postwar Labour government, the imperial map was redrawn. While often unable to keep pace with the changing political situation, the Colonial Office staged a number of events designed to promote and consolidate Britain’s relationship with its African colonies. How then did it present this new imperial model to British audiences, and in what ways did the CFU films reimagine these events for African audiences? At the opening address of the African conference, also held in 1948, the Deputy Prime Minister Herbert Morrison sought to break away from traditional notions of imperialism. “We must wipe out the word exploitation,” he began, “put it amongst the antiques with piracy and slavery.” In a speech that successfully riled Churchill, Morrison further acknowledged the need for rapid change. “Let us keep our eyes on the clock and calendar,” he stated, adding that We in Britain are finding it difficult to adapt our ideas and ways and arrangements quickly enough to the greatly changed needs of the postwar world . . . a glance at Asia is enough to show the type of trouble which could break loose in your own continent if the right answers cannot be found and adapted much quicker than has ever before been thought possible.7

Despite these calls for action, the structure of the conference, which coordinated an African leadership within the British establishment, revealed a still conservative and traditional model of colonial authority. The conference brought over delegates from Africa, many of whom, as West Africa noted on more than one occasion, “were not at all sure why they had been invited or what exactly they were going to discuss.”8 This was, to an extent, a publicity exercise after the loss of Britain’s Asian colonies. The

118

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

conference sought to illustrate the prominent position now afforded to the African colonies within the empire and, given the intensification of nationalist movements with Africa, encourage loyalty among a British-approved leadership. Furthermore, while the conference discussed moves to decentralize colonial operations, particularly in the development of local governments, the resultant film of the conference largely overlooks the specific details. Instead, the film positions the African leadership within an image of Britain, which is defined by traditional signifiers of British authority, such as landmarks, institutions, and, in particular, the royal family. Further films produced during the delegates’ tour, including African Visitors to the Tower of London (1949), reinforced the notional that Britain was the ideological, economic, and geographic reference point against which life the colonies was measured.9 Interwar film had regularly depicted London as the “heart of the empire” and this image featured in some of the earliest organized film screenings for African audiences. Glenn Reynolds has noted how the outdoor film shows provided as part of the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) Nyasaland (now Malawi) Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe), Kenya, and Uganda between 1935 and 1937 often ended with an “interest” film showing images of London. The film would conclude with a picture of the King and then a performance of the national anthem.10 In their formal structure and ideological aims, these films of London may appear to mirror the conventions of early colonial travelogues, imaging a world that is deemed “exotic” and remote to its viewers. While those earlier films of foreign spaces represented the “primate” to British viewers, these British travelogues inverted this, providing a visual interpretation of a British notion of “civilization” to their African audience. Certainly, these CFU Home Unit productions reiterate the historical primacy and authority of Britain through this image of London, but important distinctions were also emerging. First, the central role of Africans in the Home Unit productions contrasts with their almost complete absence in interwar pictures of colonials in London. Africa is now positioned at the forefront of the empire.11 Second, this notion of the imperial center is supplemented by images of workers and performers traveling outside the metropole. While the initial scenes in An African Conference highlight the formal nature of this imperial relationship, later sequences move away from the London landmarks, showing the leaders working with, and learning from, their British counterparts on farms and in factories. The contrasts between these two sequences reveal the uneasy balance between a traditional imperial relationship, controlled from the center and this new model of imperial partnership. When introducing the African delegates in London, the film repeatedly foregrounds and displays those Africans wearing traditional costume as they enter the formal proceedings at

Tom Rice / The Colonial Film Unit

119

Lancaster House. Suited Africans can be glimpsed in the background, while British men and women are shown watching, in the words of the commentator, this “colorful scene.” Later, when visiting the farm, the Africans appear predominantly dressed in suits, now chatting informally and mingling with the British dignitaries and workers. While the formal sequences in London emphasize the division and the incongruity of the scene, the sequences outside London reveal an apparent transgression across class and gender boundaries, as the Africans talk “firsthand” with British dignitaries, local farmhands, and women workers. Further Home Unit productions reveal this dichotomy between modern cooperation and traditional centralized leadership. For example, Colonial Cinemagazine 14 (1947) shows colonial students meeting young farmers at Lampeter in Wales, but also a formal Colonial Office tea party in London at which David Rees-Williams, the Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, meets students from Malaya and Hong Kong.12 This uncertainty over the proper balance between centralization and decentralization is similarly apparent in Colonial Month. Colonial Month is bookended by staged shots of African and British men smoking and chatting informally in London. While supposedly highlighting this modern ideal of partnership and equality, the framing reveals a continued division. This is most acutely revealed in the

Figure 1. Filming Africans in England: colonial ‘visitors’ attend a tea party at the Colonial Office in 1946; footage of this event features in the CFU Home Unit production, Victory Parade (1946). Image courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.

120

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

final staged sequence, which shows the African and British men talking on either side of the frame, before walking off in opposite directions. These are then often conflicted texts, rendered ambiguous by the uncertainty of the political shifts. Colonial Month celebrates the colonies’ continued dependence and loyalty to the imperial center, yet it also acknowledges shifts within this imperial relationship, as it promotes the government’s developmental agenda. In one scene, the commentator describes how “Eda, a little Malayan girl whose father in now studying at Oxford University presented the Queen with a bouquet.” The Queen, as a universally recognizable imperial figurehead, receives gifts from her colonies, yet the commentator also points out here Britain’s continued responsibilities and role in educating and training an African (and in this case Malayan) elite. The example of Colonial Month, both as an event and a subsequent CFU film, illustrates some of the complexities and contradictions within the Colonial Office’s representation of Africa. The Colonial Office began organizing Colonial Month shortly after the completion of the African conference, as a further celebration and promotion of Britain’s modern empire. In publicizing the event, the Colonial Office explained why such an initiative was necessary. An enquiry carried out by the Social Survey in 1948 revealed that there is astonishing ignorance in this country about the Colonies. This ignorance is particularly unfortunate at the present time when so much depends upon a wise development of Colonial resources in the interests of the Colonial peoples (to enable them to raise their standard of living), of the people of the country (in view of the need for developing imports from sterling sources), and of the people of the world as a whole (in view of the world shortage of food supplies and raw materials).13

The Colonial Office stressed that the event would not only stimulate interest in the colonies within Britain, but would also demonstrate this popular support back to the colonies. “Plans for colonial development can only succeed,” it wrote, “if they receive the wholehearted support of the Colonial peoples; and one bar to obtaining their support is their feeling that the people of this country are not interested in them and their problems.” Stimulating interest in colonial affairs was, the Colonial Office added, “of vital importance in the long term if we are to maintain the unity of thought and feeling between Britain and the Colonies which is essential to a survival of the Empire.” A letter from the Colonial Office in February 1949 reiterated the month’s dual function: There can be few better ways of strengthening these links [between Britain and the Colonies] than by awakening the interest of the British public, and thereby

Tom Rice / The Colonial Film Unit

121

showing the colonial people that we in this country are really concerned in their problems and in their development.14

In strengthening these links, the staging of Colonial Month hoped to convince the British public of the financial benefits of supporting colonial development. The film of Colonial Month then illustrated this support to African audiences. The Colonial Office reasoned that this, in turn, would ensure that Africans reciprocated this support for colonial development programs. This again highlights the paradoxical nature of these films. While Colonial Month appears to reveal a traditional and regressive imperial identity in much of its structure and content, this was intended in a circuitous way to promote modern “Africanization” programs and to support the work of the CFU’s African productions. Colonial Month was centered around an exhibition in Oxford Street in London, which was intended to organize, connect, and display the colonies together within the city. While allowing visitors to “make their way along a realistic jungle pathway” and to see life-sized models of Africans, the exhibition’s prime purpose was to highlight the economic value of the colonies at a moment when public opinion was increasingly opposed to large-scale colonial expenditure. Colonial Month reveals how raw materials from the colonies are used in Britain. The commentator notes here “that this section of the exhibition is most important. It shows very clearly that Britain and the colonies need each other today more than they have ever done before.” The colonies were largely defined within the exhibition by their economic value to Britain, usually in the form of an easily recognizable product. Delineating colonies in economic terms by products was a standard feature of colonial rhetoric (the empire exhibition of 1924–1925 was largely organized in this way) and was particularly prevalent in interwar colonial documentary cinema. This emphasis on trade and economic partnership responded to American economic dominance as the Colonial Office sought to enact a form of union by promoting the sterling area, an economic bloc (tied to the pound) of which most colonies and Dominions were a part. The Colonial Office directly emphasized the economic benefits of hosting colonial workers in Britain, and of continued colonial investment. This is evident in Spotlight on the Colonies (1950), which uses much of the FU Home Unit’s material, but which was overseen by the government’s Economic Information Unit for British cinemagoers. “To us in the factories at home, this plan for mutual exchange may seem remote,” the commentator notes, “but we are—every one of us—a part of it; for if the colonies are to send us the food and raw materials we’re short of, we must send them the tools to do the job.” The press release for the film followed a similar rhetoric. “If the Colonies are given our continued help,” the release concluded,

122

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Figure 2. Fulham footballer John Finch coaching the Nigerian footballers on their tour of England in 1949. Image courtesy of BFI National Archive.

“we shall in the coming years have staunch partners on our common road to progress.”15 Dr. Rita Hinden, a socialist campaigner on colonial issues who initially advised on Spotlight on the Colonies, argued that the government was instigating a shift here. She explained in 1948: The trouble in the past was that only the economic interests of Britain were considered, and colonial economies were geared to suit British needs It is now a matter of mutual advantage, each country concentrating on producing what it is best suited for—even though we may not have yet succeeded in convincing all the colonial peoples that it is as above board as that.16

The CFU served in part then to convince the colonial audiences of the benefits of this “development.” This is achieved not by foregrounding the economic value of this alliance (as in Britain), but rather by referencing imperial trade as a further means of partnership. For example, in An African Conference, the delegates visit the Bourneville factory and watch the export of “good African cocoa,” seeing the “process through from beginning to end.” This imperial partnership was also imagined through a series of tours that the Colonial Office arranged, which sought to challenge British perceptions of the colonies. In May 1947, the Gold Coast Police Band embarked on

Tom Rice / The Colonial Film Unit

123

a four-month tour of the UK, which was featured in Colonial Cinemagazine 9, while in August 1949, the Nigerian football team, the first to leave West Africa, embarked on a five-week tour. Historian Phil Vasili argued that the selectors wanted the players to present a collective face to the British public that went some way to dispelling racial myths about Africans and which would also stand testament to the positive contribution made by the expatriates, confirming the legitimacy of their presence in the colony.

Fourteen of the eighteen Nigerian footballers were civil servants, and another two were teachers. The team’s player/secretary Kanno had been educated in England and had thus, it was deemed, “acquired the refinements necessary for the public engagements.”17 The films of the tours reveal an overarching, central colonial presence, both formally in deploying a British voiceover and also in their staging as they depict a collective African group gathered around, looking up at, and learning from, a single British figure. This reiterates one of the primary functions of the tours: to emphasize the successful role undertaken by British leadership in the social development of colonial subjects. In writing about the Nigerian footballers, the CFU quarterly, Colonial Cinema, argued that “the team did not take long to establish a fine reputation not only for fast, clever footballers but also for excellent manners and sporting behavior on the field.” An editorial in the magazine added that “of even greater importance than their technical ability was the fine atmosphere of sportsmanship they left along their trail.”18 The tours of Africans to England reveal the difficulties that the Colonial Office faced in promoting “Africanization” to British audiences. In order to highlight African “readiness” and “social development,” the Colonial Office defined the Africans in relation to supposedly British ideals and customs, in this case “sportsmanship” and “fairness.” This process threatened the African identity of these figures, yet conversely, public responses to the tour reasserted perceived African “characteristics,” albeit in a regressive manner that played on established notions of primitivism and dominant racial assumptions. For example, newspaper reports of the Nigerian footballers’ tour of England were preoccupied with the cultural differences between the Nigerians and English players, noting in particular that the Nigerians played barefoot. “If during the next month, you see a full back put a football on the spot for a goal kick and hoof it beyond midfield with his bare foot,” a Daily Mirror report began, “there’s no need to cringe. He likes doing it. In fact, he prefers it that way.”19 Reports of the Gold Coast band suggested that British audiences were particularly curious as to whether the musicians were playing the music from a

124

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

score. One report even claimed that during a performance, the lighting crew switched off the lights “out of curiosity and doubtfulness.” “To the surprise of the audience,” the report added, “the band stopped played abruptly.”20 Such assumptions and stereotypes were similarly evident in the press coverage of the tour. African Affairs commented on the “foolish British press descriptions of the Gold Coast Police Band as ‘Jungle Musicians.’”21 These events and tours showed Africans in Britain at a moment when immigration and questions of citizenship were once again prominent in public discourse. The British Nationality Act of 1948, which instituted a new status of “Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies,” elicited broad discussion on the position of colonials within a British identity. At the same time, increased immigration and reports of race riots in Liverpool positioned Black men and women more visibly in Britain (and potentially altered the ways in which African viewers would now perceive Britain). For African audiences, the films sought to dispel any notions of racial animosity, most notably in Nigerian Footballers, which shows crowd scenes of seven thousand Britons and Africans cheering together in Liverpool. They emphasize African recognition and validation within Britain, as both Nigerian Footballers and Colonial Cinemagazine 9 conclude with shots of British crowds applauding the African performers. Furthermore, they aim to reassure African audiences of the care and welfare provided for those Africans now living in Britain. This is most notable in the uncomfortable analogy in Colonial Cinemagazine 8 (1947), which shows African animals well looked after in their new homes in London Zoo. It is significant that, given both fears within Britain over immigration and the moves towards self-government, these films largely define the Africans as “visitors.” The films frequently show Africans waving goodbye and note that the colonial men will take their accrued knowledge back to their own countries and form the political leadership there. The films suggest then a move back to the colonies, yet they crucially outline the importance of British instruction, values, and economic cooperation in these moves. The films of the Home Unit may appear increasingly anachronistic by 1949, as film production and colonial administration began to move away from London and into the colonies. Yet these films reveal the still tentative and complex nature of this move, both in their formal structure and in the events that they depict. They also anticipate impending shifts in film policy. Presaging the work of the film training schools, the films show British leaders training skilled African workers and performers, and highlight the economic motivations behind colonial policy. In representing events and tours organized by the Colonial Office, they also envisage an increasingly prominent role for film within colonial administration. This would be more fully realized in 1950 when, as part of the major restructure of the CFU, full control of the unit shifted from the Films Division of the COI to the Colonial Office.22 This

Tom Rice / The Colonial Film Unit

125

long-proposed move to the Colonial Office ensured that film policy was now more closely administered as part of the remit of a single, central organization in Britain. Paradoxically, at the same time, the Colonial Office advanced its plan to decentralize. The negotiation between a central policy overseen from London and the work of local colonial governments was a defining feature of these last years of colonial rule.

Training Africans While the Home Unit shut down in 1949, it had a staff of three. Two of these were cameramen, Sydney Samuelson and George Noble, who were immediately reassigned to the colonies, joining the recently formed Nigerian and Gold Coast Film Units. They were charged with working alongside the local film workers, who had trained at the CFU’s first “school of instruction” set up in Accra in September 1949. Further training schools followed, in Jamaica in 1950 and Cyprus in 1951, while the CFU also continued to train colonial students in London.23 In describing the work of the first school of instruction in Accra, Colonial Cinema stated that “One of the long-term objectives of the Colonial Film Unit and perhaps its most important one is the creation of an organization in each colony to produce its own films.24 The formation of these schools illustrates these moves to develop local film production—a move away from the work of the Home Unit—but their ongoing organization through the CFU suggests that this was still part of a central film policy. Martin Rennalls, one of six students to attend the West Indian school, recognized this as a problem when he criticized the school for its failure to cater specifically for the “cultural characteristics of the local audiences,” and to “relate the methods of production to the customs and ways of life” of the West Indians.25 The school was announced by William Sellers, the head of the CFU, at the end of a month-long tour of the West Indies in December 1949 and was then run by R. W. Harris and Gareth Evans, who had also run the first colonial training school in Accra.26 Certainly the training programs highlight the transfer of personnel and ideas across British territories, but there are also regional deviations based on institutional racial assumptions and imperial hierarchies. In Africa, the film school had catered for what its convener referred to as “the ignorance of cinema convention,” following the approach of William Sellers in arguing that African audiences would have different cognitive responses and required “extreme simplicity” in their films. Yet in Jamaica, the convener noted the influence of American and British “sophisticated pleasures” in the “cosmopolitan” West Indies and suggested that no dispensation

126

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

was required for the local audiences.27 Furthermore, the CFU scrapped plans to set up a film school at Makerere College in Uganda in 1949, after East African officials argued that no suitable stunts could be found and that the “proposed training course may be overloaded beyond the capacity of African trainees.”28 The example of East Africa reveals the continued importance of racial prejudices in colonial film policy and it also highlights the tensions between the central and local authorities. The CFU had sent out ten technicians under the control of H. L. Bradshaw to Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, and later Zanzibar, at the start of 1949. Briefed with the task of founding a government film service in the East African territories and of training Africans to “make educational films themselves for their own people,” the unit operated for less than a year.29 Throughout this year, the film personnel in East Africa were in almost constant disagreement with their bosses in London. At a conference of Information Officers in Nairobi in June 1949, “the territorial delegates unanimously expressed a lack of confidence in the London Administration of the Colonial Film Unit.” The feeling was evidently mutual. H. M. K. Howson, the Films Officer of the COI, complained about the poor standard of the unit’s work and their “low reputation” at home and overseas. The breakdown in communication was such that the COI wrote to John Grierson, who was planning on visiting East Africa in December 1949, asking him to “do a job for this side of the house” by chasing up the CFU store accounts in East Africa. The COI representative explained that he had asked for the accounts on six occasions, but had had no response. He concluded by asking Grierson, “Would you please apply a rocket?”30 When the unit was shut down, the delegates threatened legal action against Howson and signed a lengthy petition in which they complained that they had suffered “innumerable setbacks by not having a well-organized and intelligent backing from England.” However, the acrimonious closure of the unit was largely a result of the restructuring of the CFU within the Colonial Office, a change ironically championed by the East African delegates.31 Funding now moved from London to the colonies, and while the Gold Coast and Nigerian governments met the costs of their nascent units, the East African government was not willing to do the same. This reorganization had a number of repercussions, as I have suggested. First, the colonial governments were now financially responsible for film production and so film became more closely integrated into local government policy. Second, the Colonial Office was now in charge of the CFU, positioning film more prominently within a single, centralized British colonial administration. This paradox is at the heart of colonial filmmaking in the latter years of empire, as the CFU is caught between idealizing centralization and trying to foster decentralization.

Tom Rice / The Colonial Film Unit

127

Speaking in 1952 at a conference entitled “New Direction in Documentary,” the Director of the Colonial Office Information Department, C. Y. Carstairs, outlined the altered role of the CFU. “It makes no films and it gives no orders,” he began, but it performs a whole series of services without which the Colonial Cinema as a whole would certainly suffer. It edits films, attends to titling, sound dubbing, and recruitment of staff, the ordering of equipment and stock, the running of the “raw stock scheme” and training; it collects and disseminates information by means of its quarterlies and sponsors research.32

This decentralized model was still promoting transnational modes of distribution and exhibition, of personnel, ideas, stock, and material throughout the empire. This approach largely followed the suggestions of “The Film in Colonial Development” conference which, with no “colonials” among its seven invited speakers, had proposed a similarly ambiguous and tentative model of decentralization. John Grierson had argued for local film production “created from the inside by and for the Colonial peoples themselves” which he suggested should be integrated more fully into local government administration. However, he had also proposed a central “School of the Colonies” to administer and oversee a cultural exchange of films, personnel, and ideas throughout the empire.33 In discussing the changes made to the CFU, Carstairs acknowledged that these “Africanization” policies were certainly not entirely idealistic, but were once again driven by financial considerations. “The European staff of Colonial Film Units do not live soft, but they are still a relatively costly item,” he claimed, “it is important on cost grounds alone, even if there were no others, to train likely local lads for the work.”34 The Colonial Office’s organization of Colonial Month had acknowledged and responded to a growing backlash in Britain to colonial expenditure. Furthermore, for all the rhetoric of “Africanization” in film and administrative policy, Carstairs and his colleagues at the Colonial Office continued to validate traditional theories of colonial spectatorship and institutional racial assumptions. When discussing the limitations of the film-training programs, Carstairs argued that such limitations satisfied the requirements of the intended audience. “Trainees are turning out a type of straightforward film,” he argued, “eschewing frills, but strong in content and local touch, which very closely fits the stage of film education which their audiences have reached.”35 Even as late as 1954, when Harold Evans, a colleague of Carstairs at the Colonial Office, discussed the closure of CFU training programs, he still emphasized the value of this centralized body. “It does seem to us,” he stated, “that a fatherly eye will have to be kept on the output of some of the smaller units for some time to come.”36

128

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

The CFU’s training programs may have been presented as evidence of the government’s Africanization drive, yet they again reveal the complexities and continuing caution in this process. The Colonial Office continued to coordinate and oversee these schemes, which often perpetuated establish colonial rhetoric. Rather than revealing a new model of African filmmakers and production, the programs selected trainees from various government departments to produce short instructional films, which closely followed CFU conventions and which were then processed in London. Upon completing their training, the workers became part of the newly formed local units, yet the roles that they assumed again demonstrated the limitations in this Africanization process even as moves toward decolonization gathered pace.

The Film Units in Operation In 1953, the Gold Coast Film Unit produced a two-reel comedy, which was used as part of a “vigorous and prolonged campaign” to promote the work of the local council and to outline recent change to local government.37

Figure 3. The Gold Coast Film Unit disseminated government policy to local audiences. Here, a Mass Education team outlines scenes from the 1950 GCFU production Amenu’s Child. Image courtesy of the Public Relations Office, Gold Coast.

Tom Rice / The Colonial Film Unit

129

Progress in Kojokrom (dir. Sean Graham, 1953) the latest stage in this decentralization process, showing democratically elected African leaders and councilors, and depicting an idealized, Western model of government to its African audience. Yet while the completed film sought to highlight the successful competition of this Africanization process, its production reveals once more the continuing challenges and failing in this move to develop an African leadership. Progress in Kojokrom is typical of the ways in which colonial governments used film in this last decade of colonial rule. It was shown by a fleet of mobile cinema vans and, according to government reports, reached an audience of 1.5 million. The film was supplemented by government pamphlets (“Your Council and Your Progress”) and was often followed by a discussion with a local council member.38 Sean Graham, the head of the Gold Coast Film Unit, noted the importance of these films to the government. “In an illiterate society they [films] are the only means government has of speaking to the people with authority and understanding,” he explained in 1952, “far from being a luxury, [films] are at the forefront of the drive to help Africans to help themselves.” Graham recalled regular meetings at which different government departments would propose suitable subjects, as the units were now more closely aligned to local government, working with and propagating specific policies.39 Despite these moves to decentralize and to develop local production, emerging “local” units often worked to similar ends in disseminating government policy, indicating an ongoing exchange of ideas, personnel, and exhibition practices throughout the empire. The Colonial Office and the shadow of the CFU continued to influence and direct these units, yet there were also significant regional variations in their operations. While the Nigerian Film Unit (NFU) “remained very much in the pragmatic mold of the CFU in terms of the kind of films produced,” the Gold Coast Film Unit deviated from colonial-film orthodoxy in the formal techniques that it used to address its African audiences, rejecting the “special technique” espoused by William Sellers and the CFU.40 Writing in 1952, George Noble explained that [m]ostly, the films made by other units in the Colonies were small, single-reelers. Sean Graham decided to make longer films, story films, films about the Africans themselves, played by themselves, in their own land, about their own people.41

Noble’s comments suggest that this model of Africanization, what Grierson referred to a “genuine African unit,” was now realized in the Gold Coast. Images from the making of Progress in Kojokrom also show

130

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

a predominantly African crew working alongside the all-African cast. Speaking recently, Graham rejected the suggestion that this was a colonial unit. “No, ‘colonial’ was a dirty word in my vocabulary,” he stated, “we were a local unit.”42 Graham’s comments highlight once more this tension between the “local” and the “colonial” or, as the East African example suggested, between regional practices and central policy. Yet it is important to recognize that the “local” does not necessarily equate to what we might understand as “African,” but rather to an administration run by Europeans working and living in the colonies. Indeed, the Gold Coast Film Unit was certainly not a fully realized model of large-scale “Africanization.” The example of Progress in Kojokrom demonstrates a continuing British presence, both on screen through the voice-of-God narration and off screen where, despite employing “about twenty African junior technical staff,” the directors and writers were predominantly still European.43 Indeed, the opening credits feature exclusively European personnel, while the soundtrack for the film and, in particular the ways in which the character repeatedly switch between English and local dialects, reveal again the gradual and uncertain nature of this process of Africanization. In outline the desire for a modern African unit, neither Grierson nor Graham suggested that this should comprise an entirely African leadership although Grierson did call for men who would make this their “lifework.” “It is no longer a question of people dropping into Africa to make a picture,” he had challenged, “We have got to create a body of men who live and work with the African problem, who are the African problem in its creative aspect, knowing it and living with it.”44 Sean Graham also emphasized that an understanding of the local culture should be a prerequisite for this work, but this was certainly not always the case, as the units continued to import European personnel on short-term contracts, Graham frequently complained that the European writer and filmmakers brought out to assist the unit, such as Ray Elton, Louis MacNeice, and Montgomery Tully, did not understand the local culture. Writing in 1952 to Basil Wright, who worked from London as an associate producer on The Boy Kumasenu (1952), Graham complained about Tully’s failure “to make any friends among the Africans.” “The man is so sensitive that I cannot push him out into the village and tell him to make friend with the locals,” Graham wrote, “Yet I cannot see what good it will do our scripts for Tully to swap confidences with the Europeans in the club.”45 The example of the West African units reveals the regional variations in this colonial framework and these may again reflect the varying levels of political advancement within the regions. Sydney Samuelson, who worked briefly for the NFU stated that the Gold Coast Film Unit was “way ahead of

Tom Rice / The Colonial Film Unit

131

Figure 4. The Gold Coast Film Unit in action. Image courtesy of Image Service Department, Ghana.

us” in terms of its production and organization and argued that this reflected the more progressive nature of the Gold Coast as a country and as a government.46 The operations of the film units evidence again the close links between local administrative and film policy. Indeed, the NFU was reorganized into smaller regional units throughout the decade in accordance with broader constitutional changes, although once more these smaller units continued to produce, exhibit, and utilize films in very similar ways. To an extent then, the developments in these units mirrored the social political changes in the respective countries. The often tentative moves towards decolonization are played out on screen, yet the organization of the units is indicative of the failings in this process. While Progress in Kojokrom espouses moves towards self-government and this much-vaunted “Africanization,” the units themselves largely fail in their oft-quoted aim to develop local filmmakers and ultimately, Europeans continue to occupy prominent positions as independence approaches.

132

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Conclusion This essay has focused predominantly on government policy and on how local and central administrations tried to prepare and then respond to rapid, largely unforeseen shifts within the empire. The events staged in London and the work of the Home Unit sought to articulate the Labour government’s new policies on Africa to British and African audiences, outlining moves to decentralize colonial operations, promote colonial development, and encourage gradual progress towards self-government. The training programs and resultant local units then revealed the contradictions, challenges, and failures in instigating these moves. Yet the rise of nationalist and resistance movements throughout Africa in the postwar era highlights the fact that colonial governments could not always control the pace of the progress toward decolonization. Similarly, in cinema, there is evidence of an increasing African presence escaping the control of the colonial governments. While governments maintained Europeans in what they believed to be senior positions of responsibility, they failed to recognize fully that, in the context of African cinema, the responsibility lay elsewhere. Europeans headed the units and held what were widely perceived as the most significant roles in film production (as directors and writers), yet it was African people that invariably relayed these messages directly to the audiences. In recent conversation with Sydney Samuelson and Sean Graham, both spoke independently of the problems that they faced in delivering official information to culturally diverse audiences, and acknowledged the importance of the often untrained traveling commentator, who would translate the English script into different local dialects. Sean Graham noted how local commentators often developed their own narratives, moving away from the script and from the official line. “I was appalled at the divergence, what was on screen and what they said,” he stated. “In most cases the showings of the film were useless,” Samuelson added, suggesting that the commentators were often “showmen,” adding their own interpretation to the film or generating comedy by responding to the action on screen.47 The mobile exhibition of these films often occurred without a European presence, and it is perhaps here that we should look to understand better the development both of African cinema culture but also inadvertently of this more fully realized African voice within cinema. The local commentator may then provide an example of an African presence in this cinema, the revealing emergence of a new voice, at times resistant to government pedagogy, as independence approaches. Tom Rice is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews. He is the author of White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan and Film for the Colonies: Cinema and the Preservation of the British Empire.

Tom Rice / The Colonial Film Unit

133

Notes Originally published as: Tom Rice, “From the Inside: The Colonial Film Unit and the Beginning of the End,” in Film and the End of Empire, ed. Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 135–153. 1. Most of the films mentioned in this essay are now available to view online at “Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire,” www.colonialfilm.org.uk. I would like to thank Lee Grieveson for his help on earlier drafts of this essay, and Colin MacCabe and Emma Sandon. “Film Talk . . . African Outlets . . . Non-White Britons,” West Africa, 24 January 1949, 59. 2. K. W. Blackburne, “Financial Problems and Future Policy in British Colonies,” in The Film in Colonial Development: A Report of a Conference (London: BFI, 1948), 35. 3. John Grierson, “The Film and Primitive Peoples,” in The Film in Colonial Development, 13. 4. Tom Rice, “Colonial Film Unit,” and “Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire,” www.colonialfilm.org.uk/production-company/colonial-film-unit. For a closer consideration of this development in cinema, see Rosaleen Smyth, “Images of Empires on Shifting Sands: The Colonial Film Unit in West Africa in the Post-war Period,” in Film and the End of Empire, ed. Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 155–175. 5. In the same month that the CFU launched its training school in Accra, the Colonial Office directly contacted William Sellers, the head of the CFU, requesting that his unit film the forthcoming African conference in London. The CFU was asked to film the visiting delegates “both at the formal proceedings at Lancaster House and during their visits and tours in London and the Provinces.” The Colonial House explained that this was with a view “to providing suitable publicity for this important Conference in the Colonial territories, particularly in Africa.” Letter from H. C. Cocks of the Colonial Office to William Sellers, director of CFU, dated 27 September 1948, “African Conference in London,” INF 6/55, accessed at the National Archives, London. 6. Hansard, House of Commons, 18 June 1940, Volume 361, Cols 787–98. 7. West Africa, 2 October 1948, 996. 8. “Colorful Scene as the Delegates Arrive,” West Africa, 2 October 1948, 996. 9. Additional films include Colonial Cinemagazine No. 20, which showed the delegates visiting the zoo and Colonial Cinemagazine No. 21, in which Nigerians studying in England greeted the Oni of Ife. 10. Glenn Reynolds, “The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment and the Struggle for Hegemony in British East and Central Africa, 1935–1937,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, vol. 29 no. 1, March 2009, 64. See Tom Rice, “Bekefilm,” www .colonialfilm.org.uk. 11. In films such as the Empire Marketing Board’s One Family (1930) or Heart of an Empire (1935), the Dominions and India feature, while Africa is barely a footnote. 12. This is again apparent in Colonial Cinemagazine 15 (1947) where colonial students learn about cooperative methods at Loughborough College. 13. Letter from A. A. W. Johnson of the Empire Advisory Unit to Sir E. Graham Savage, Chief Education Officer, LCC, dated 14 January 1949, INF 12/350, accessed at the National Archives. Johnson explained that the survey had revealed that “only a quarter knew the difference between a Dominion and Colony: a half could not name a single Colony correctly: only a third knew that the Colonies do not pay taxes to us.”

134

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

14. “Colonial Month—1949,” INF 12/350; “Letter from Colonial Office, February 1949,” INF 12/350, both accessed at the National Archives. 15. “Spotlight on the Colonies,” INF 6/1337, accessed at the National Archives. 16. Rita Hinden, “The Empire,” in Donald Munro (ed.), Socialism: The British Way (London: Essential Books, 1948), 283. 17. Phil Vasili, “Colonialism and Football: The First Nigerian Tour to Britain,” Race and Class vol. 36 no. 4, 1995, 60–1. 18. “Nigierian Footballers in England,” Colonial Cinema, December 1949, 68; Colonial Cinema, December 1949, 55. 19. “Bare Feet Give Them a Kick,” Daily Mirror, 30 August 1949, 6. Cameraman Sydney Samuelson, who filmed the tourists’ first game against Marine Crosby in Liverpool, recently recalled specifically filming the feet of the Nigerians as they came on to their pitch, although the commentator makes no mention of this. “Personal Interview with Sir Sydney Samuelson,” conducted by Tom Rice and Emma Sandon, 15 June 2010. 20. “Police Band,” Ghana Police Website, http://64.226.23.153/others/band.htm. 21. Henry Swanzy, “Quarterly Notes,” African Affairs, October 1947, p. 188. 22. The shift to the Colonial Office saw the closure of the Home Unit. The Colonial Office explained that “With the transfer to the Colonial Office, the Unit will no longer be responsible for producing any films to project Britain to the Colonies.” There were still requests for these Home Unit productions though. The Governor’s office in the Gold Coast wrote in September 1950 that “It is hoped that the Colonial Film Unit will continue to cover news items in the United Kingdom which are of interest to Africans: for example, the recent film ’Nigerian Footballers’ enjoyed a great success in the Gold Coast.” “Colonial Film Unit: Long Term Policy,” CO 875/52/1, accessed at the National Archives; “Colonial Film Unit Estimates for 1950/51,” CO 875/52/2, accessed at the National Archives. 23. The Accra and Jamaican training schools each comprised six students selected from government departments, while the school in Cyprus had nine students from Cyprus, Mauritius, Hong Kong, and the Sudan. The short training courses in London had catered for fifty-one visitors by the end of 1951. See Tom Rice, “Colonial Film Unit,” www.colonialfilm.org.uk/production-company/colonial-film-unit. 24. “The School of Instruction, Accra, Gold Coast,” Colonial Cinema (December 1948), 78. 25. Helen-Ann E. Wilkinson, “Limited Core Technology Transfer: The Case of the Moving Image Industry in Jamaica” (unpublished thesis, York University, Ontario, 1994). See also Tom Rice, “Jamaica Film Unit,” www.colonialfilm.org.uk/production-company /jamaica-film-unit. 26. The CFU produced a detailed geographically non-specific “Syllabus for Film Training Schools,” and in some respects the school endorsed established colonial filmmaking conventions, for example, in focusing on instructional 16mm films and promoting parables that followed the “Mr. Wise and Mr. Foolish” format. 27. G. Evans, “The Colonial Film Unit’s West Indian Training Course in Jamaica,” in Visual Aids in Fundamental Education: Some Personal Experiences (Paris: UNESCO, 1952), 130–9. Evans further argued that the purpose of the Jamaican school “was to train West Indians in the art of film production so that they can make films of and for their own people in an environment that they alone thoroughly understand.” 28. Quoted in Rosaleen Smyth, “The Post-war Career of the Colonial Film Unit in Africa: 1946–1955,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, vol. 12 no. 2, 1992, 170.

Tom Rice / The Colonial Film Unit

135

29. “Colonial Film Unit. Expansion of Activities,” CO 875/26/2, accessed at the National Archives. 30. Letter from COI to Grierson, dated 2 December 1949, G5:6:4, accessed at the John Grierson Archive, University of Stirling. 31. “Colonial Film Unit: East African Project; Possible Abandonment of Education Film Production,” CO 875/52/4, accessed at the National Archives. Colonial Cinema stated that “in certain respects this organization was cumbrous, unsuitable, and not as efficient as it might be. It was proposed as a first essential (sic) that the Colonial Film Unit should be removed from the control of the COI and placed under that of the Colonial Office.” Colonial Cinema, June 1950, 27. 32. “New Directions in Documentary: Report of the International Conference Held at Edinburgh August 25–26, 1952,” G6:42:1, accessed at the John Grierson Archive, University of Stirling. By the end of 1950, the CFU had ceased all production, and over half of its twenty-nine staff had been made redundant. The CFU continued to use its quarterly Colonial Cinema as a means to direct, determine, and disseminate the theoretical and practical approaches to film production and exhibition in the colonies. Its ongoing rawstock scheme provided film in areas that were too small to have their own units, such as Somaliland, Sierra Leone, the Gambia, and Malta. 33. Grierson, The Film in Colonial Development, 12–13. “We want, for this school, not only the experience of the Colonial Office,” Grierson stated, “we also have to know what is being done elsewhere and bring worldwide experience to bear on our problem. We will need a first-class library, a growing and developing information service, an exchange of teachers and lecturers and other people interested in colonial problems.” 34. “New Directions in Documentary,” 15. 35. Ibid. 36. Letter from Evans to Sir Robert Fraser, 19 June 1954, INF 12/505, accessed at the National Archives. 37. Colonial Office, ‘Report on the Gold Coast for the Year 1954” (London: HMSO, 1954), 120. 38. Tom Rice, “Progress in Kojokrom,” www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/2566; “The Impact of Information Services on the People of Ghana,” Ghana Today, 25 (December 1957), 4–5. 39. Sean Graham, “The Work of the Gold Coast Film Unit,” in Visual Aids in Fundamental Education, 77–87; “Personal Interview with Sean Graham,” conducted by Tom Rice, Emma Sandon, and Peter Bloom, 5 February 2010. 40. Ikechukwu Obiaya, “A Break with the Past: The Nigerian Video-Film Industry in the Context of Colonial Filmmaking,” forthcoming in Film History. The NFU was run by Lionel Snazelle, a disciple of Sellers, who had filmed many of the recent CFU films in Nigeria. Its first production, Smallpox, a health parable that adopted the “Mr. Wise and Mr. Foolish” format is indicative of the NFU’s acceptance and continuing enactment of establishment colonial-film conventions. 41. George Nobel, ‘Cameraman on the Gold Coast,” Colonial Cinema, (June 1952), 36. Graham saw himself as a “storyteller,” in contrast to Sellers and Snazelle, who he suggested were “educators really.” 42. “Personal Interview with Sean Graham,” 5 February 2010. There is little evidence of the West African units working together. Sean Graham did visit the Nigerian Film Unit and shared equipment with them on occasion, but he personally clashed with its head,

136

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Lionel Snazelle, and saw himself in “ferocious competition” with them. See letter dated 8 August 1952, accessed at BFI Special Collections, BCW 1/16/1. 43. “Gold Coast Film Catalog, 1949–1954” (1954). 44. Grierson, The Film in Colonial Development, 13. 45. “Letter from Sean Graham to Basil Wright, dated 29 July 1952,” accessed at BFI Special Collections, BCW 1/16/1. 46. “Personal Interview with Sir Sydney Samuelson.” 47. Ibid.; “Personal Interview with Sean Graham,” 5 February 2010. Graham suggested that he subsequently sought to manage the commentators more closely, yet he did not attend the screenings himself. Writing in 1951, William Sellers also acknowledged a need for closer supervision of the commentators. “Experience has shown the need for checking all translations before they are used in public,” he wrote, although there is little evidence to suggest that this was done. William Sellers, “Mobile Cinema Shows in Africa,” Colonial Cinema, December 1951, 77–82.

The Independence Generation: Film Culture and the Anti-Colonial Struggle in the 1950s Odile Goerg We should do as the French in Paris and not be afraid to shed our blood for our country and our freedom.1

T

his call to struggle, pronounced in Niamey, Niger, at a screening of René Clément’s La Bataille du rail / The Battle of the Rails (1946, France), reflects changing political circumstances. Although this film celebrating the French Resistance was screened in Dakar at the time of its release in 1946, it was a screening in 1949 that provoked this heartfelt reaction from a Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA, African Democratic Rally) militant, and revealed how unprepared the colonial authorities were for resistance. The film was immediately banned. Gustave Borgnis-Desbordes, Superior Commander of the French West African land force, drew an immediate parallel between the film’s events and the colonial situation, fearing that it would offer dangerous knowledge to the colonized: Films about the Resistance constitute very thorough and highly varied lessons on ways to clandestinely fight an established order, smuggle arms, organize secret meetings, and carry out sabotage. It seems to me absolutely counterproductive to give such lessons to those who see us as occupiers whom they wish to throw out.2

In the years that saw the unraveling of colonial domination, the cinema was at the center of important questions: films proposed alternative modes of action and reflection; demands could be voiced in cinemas opening and without punishment; and censorship incarnated the authorities’ illusion that tight control would stop the march of history and limits activists’ perception of colonial authoritarianism. Censorship was a matter of difficult compromise. In 1958, for example, it was lamented that certain westerns judged to be “lessons in rape, murder, and immorality” were shown to

138

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

“an audience that still believes what it sees.”3 This was not the opinion of a colonial administrator concerned about public order but of Daniel Ouezzin Coulibaly, Vice President of the Governing Council of Burkina Faso, who was worried about young people’s behavior in the light of his country’s coming independence. His remarks reflect the contemporary debates that animated the emerging postcolonial societies, which were torn between attachment to the past and modernity, African value, and Western depravity. In Ghana, the elite, who were very active on the censorship board, expressed the same desire to remove images that might encourage reprehensible behavior from screens in working-class areas. Throughout the 1950s, cinema was the site of tensions between audiences, the authorities, and the rising elites, while at the same time remaining, fundamentally, a place to relax. For both African politicians and the administration, films seemed to contain a subversive dimension beneath their unassuming air of entertainment that needed to be combatted. As the colonial territories opened up to the world considerably thanks to the increasing circulation of people and information (through written press, radio, and education), the authorities were caught between their fear of disorder and protest and the acknowledgment of spectators’ ability to judge filmic content; between rowdiness in the cinemas and the activism of pressure groups with diverging aims.

Beyond Western cinema? When I think of my own childhood, it’s cinema that first comes to mind, its very premises even. It symbolized the town more than anything else, a town wasn’t a proper town unless it had a cinema house. As a child, it was the place where you could escape into your imagination.4 Multiple witnesses emphasize that to go to the cinema was to “escape into another world; it was a celebration you got dressed up for, a magical moment.”5 The distributors responded to this escapist impulse with the same range of films as before, addressing audiences made up primarily of adolescents and young men through action and adventure films (including westerns, crime movies, and fantasy films) and comedies. Throughout the continent, they drew on the same pool of films. Sharing the same language as the world’s greatest producer, the United States, considerably facilitated the circulation of films in the British Empire; no dubbing was necessary, although the use of American slang was frowned upon. Arab and Indian entrepreneurs nonetheless broadened the spectrum of films available, while also satisfying the demand for the American films that the public loved watching over and over again. Despite a slight increase in school enrollment, more complex films and narratives raised the problem of audiences’ variable proficiency in

Odile Goerg / The Independence Generation

139

the colonial language. Only a small sector of the population demanded such films. However, the images that did play in cinemas, if often limited, created the impression of contact with the wider world and access to a global culture, some of whose gestural and linguistic codes or clothing were appropriated. On the whole, films had little overlap with audiences’ daily lives; following the plot thus required complex mental gymnastics, or a vivid imagination. The postwar years saw an influx of American films, with increasing quantities of old pictures imported for reasons of profitability, but also because a large stock was needed to ensure the rapid rotation of films. Some cinema owners in Ghana boasted a stock of over two hundred films; collections of this size were made impossible in the French colonies by their centralized distribution system.6 What criteria determined the distributors’ choices? Did they select films in terms of their own prejudices, or did they refuse to risk censorship? We can, at any rate, safely imagine that the quest for profits was a key criterion. Distributors thus screened the same films across their cinema chains, with no choice on the part of local cinema managers—a cause for protest. Crates of films were, for example, sent from Leopoldville to tour the entire Belgian Congo, and even Ruanda-Urundi (today’s Rwanda and Burundi).7 The same was true of French West Africa. Film importers reserved first-release films for the prestigious cinemas in a bid to draw European and elite African spectators, but were less attentive when it came to working-class audiences. In small towns with a single cinema, screenings of more unusual films were rare, due to both the distributors’ lack of effort and the composition of the audience. As one distributor stressed: how many spectators in Niamey could understand and appreciate Jean Cocteau’s film Orpheus, which did show in Dakar? … It was experimental, addressing a limited audience, even in the Metropolis. How could one hope to recoup the costs of such a film in Zinder or Niamey?8

American films with a focus on pure entertainment thus predominated in both British and French colonies. Georges Balandier summarized the program of Brazzaville’s working-class cinemas in the early 1950s: 45% of films were westerns and epics, some of which dated back to the 1930s, 23% were comic films (Laurel and Hardy, Fernandel, and the like), 19% were romantic comedies, and the remaining 13% was made up of diverse works, including crime films.9 The proportions reported in this analysis reflect the general situation across West Africa. Westerns, which were already popular in the interwar years, found an extremely enthusiastic audience in the new postwar cinemas, particularly among adolescents. Indeed, westerns remain present in everyone’s memories; witnesses cite the names of actors such as John Wayne and Gary Cooper

140

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

and the titles of films such as The Lone Ranger (dir. William Witney and John English, 1938, United States), watched many times in the 1950s by one inhabitant of Saint-Louis at the Sor district cinema.10 Even though the young Nigerian migrants in Abidjan who feature in Jean Rouch’s 1959 docudrama Moi, un noir / I, A Negro (France) took the nicknames Eddie Constantine (aka Lemmy Caution), Edward G. Robinson, and Dorothy Lamour in reference to film noir, their environment was above all marked by westerns: including posters on walls, clothing styles, and catchphrases. These references circulated smoothly between different cultural environments. During a goumbé in Rouch’s film—a festivity that brought together the Nigerian community—acrobatic tricks are executed on a bicycle symbolizing a horse, by men dressed as cowboys.11 Although they were by this point being targeted by the administrative and moral authorities—based on critique that was circulating well beyond the African continent—westerns were popular for their simple narratives and clear-cut moral messages.12 Their visual elements made it possible to rapidly situation the action and identify “goodies” and “baddies” through their clothing (such as cowboy outfits, dark suits, and the stern dresses worn by the pioneer women), their attitudes, or their clearly hierarchical modes of transportation (horse, mule, and foot). The narration left space for personal and culturally localized interpretations: the dialogue, for example, was not essential, which was useful given spectators’ often imperfect understanding of the film’s foreign language, and the ambient noise that often permeated the soundtrack due to poor film quality. However, this did not stop spectators from imitating the cowboys’ accents and expressions. Teenagers mimicked the heroes’ blatant virility. In the two Congos, “Bills’ strutted about, in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) they called themselves the “Copperbelt cowboys.”13 Cowboiadas (cowboy films) were a huge hit in Angola, as they were in West Africa.14 Their eventful adventure narratives, easily identifiable heroes, and draconian systems of justice echoes the narrative codes of local oral tales. This favored the identification process and facilitated the appropriation of specific elements into daily, local existence thousands of kilometers away from the places represented on the screen. A real culture of the western emerged, with a corpus of references shared by an entire generation. Young people appropriated this culture in a manner that related both to their passage to adulthood and their environment of colonial contestation. Westerns met their need to assert themselves as individuals or as members of groups. The nicknames of their leaders, the tunes they whistled, their passwords, subjects of conversation, and modes of group initiation: all revolved around the westerns. Adolescents imagined themselves as valiant cowboys with boots, hats, chaps, and guns; they adopted an easily assimilated model of manhood, parallel to the masculinity portrayed

Odile Goerg / The Independence Generation

141

in peplum films, and soon to be accessible through Kung Fu films as well. The paraphernalia of a recreated Far West allowed youths to carve out a place for themselves in towns and to stand out from other adolescents— most notably those who attended school—but also to position themselves in relation to adults. Westerns and crime films became ways of contesting elders’ authority, as suggested by McFeely: “…the core issue was not always the content of films but rather the threat that cinema-going, with its boisterous, even disrespectful, local tradition of talking back to the screen in some venues, might represent to existing authority.”15 The popularity of westerns may seem surprising given that the cowboy/ Indian divide metaphorically mirrored the dominant/dominated paradigm clearly found in the colonial context. However, young Africans manifestly identified with the brave cowboys. Only a political awareness that was rare, or unlikely, given the age of the group concerned, made it possible to surpass the alienation induced by a context of colonial domination. In accordance with classic psychological reactions to narrative, young spectators identified with the powerful. Various witnesses presented this anti-Indian stance as self-evident: “We didn’t understand.”16 It would take the politicization of the 1950s to challenge this identification. The same process was at play regarding the Tarzan films, which were big hits in the working-class cinemas, despite their perpetuation of racist clichés. In addition to westerns, other Hollywood films circulated, conveying negative representations of black people. French films were just as full of racist content. As the evolution of censorship demonstrates, the public increasingly reacted negatively to the images put before them. Other genres began to appear more often on screens, alongside the films from the West that were favored by the distributors. Dynamic players in the film minaret, Egypt and India both saw their productions take off after the introduction of sound cinema and musicals. These films revolved around song and dance but also foregrounded epic plot lines, whose recourse to heroism and magic opened spectators up to new cinematic horizons which were culturally and sociologically closer to home. While Indian films spread along the east coast early thanks to Indian traders who initially imported them for their own communities, they met with certain success over more or less the entire continent.17 In Ghana, their popularity was cemented in the second half of the 1950s, and some cinemas— such as the Dunia in the Nima district, which was home to migrants from the north—specialized in Indian films. The Nankani family played a key role in importing them. Female audiences enjoyed not only these films’ gestures, clothing, and music, but also their treatment of emotions and relationships, while young men often scorned their sentimentality:

142

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

—Are you telling me that Bahut Din Huwe or Mother India are rubbish films? … —Not at all! It’s because there’s too much music and weeping in Hindi films, while in cowboy films…! Have you seen Warlock?18

The most famous Indian films were consistently billed and constantly rescreened: Aan / The Savage Princess (dir. Mehboob Khan, 1952) was shown in Dakar throughout the whole of 1955. It was also billed at the Lomé Rex in 1959, along with the equally famous Mother India (dir. Mehboob Khan, 1957).19 These films’ images and songs left their mark on spectators’ memories. They were mostly screened in working-class cinemas, but also circulated in the countryside. Arab films were another popular import, particularly in Dakar where the approximately eight thousand-strong Syrian-Lebanese community guaranteed them visibility in the prestigious cinemas. They were more widely distributed in the French colonies, particularly those with larger Muslim populations, than in Ghana, Nigeria, or British and Belgian Central Africa, where they were rare. Their success reflected the growth in Egyptian production, which rose from nine films a year between 1927 and 1945 to fifty-one a year between 1945 and 1963.20 Lebanon contributed marginally to this production. Arouss Lubnan / The Bride of Lebanon (dir. Husain Fawzi, 1951), the first Lebanese film, was screened by the Dakar Vox in 1953 at a gala event. Audiences loved Arab films, and the distributors—most notably the Lebanese who operated in Dakar, but also the two dominant companies—met this demand. The COMACICO put up the posters with the following text in Arabic and French: “COMACICO is proud to present Bellal to Black Africa’s Muslims, the most grandiose film production about the birth, triumph, and the glory of Islam.”21 Nafissatou Diallo’s account of audiences singing along to them testifies to the popularity of the films’ songs.22 This singing along suggests that the film in question had been seen many times, but also implies at least phonetic familiarity with Arabic, the language of Quranic schools. From 1953 to 1954, Arab films made up 13% of the 767 films screened in Dakar.23 A comparable percentage was found in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) with strong variations depending on the cinema: they represented about 10% of films shown at the Rex in Bobo-Dioulasso but very few of the films at the Normandie, a cinema adjacent to a hotel frequented by a mainly European audience. In Gao (French Sudan), “Arabic films from Egypt” made up between a third and a quarter of the 1957 summer program of the Askia, the only cinema in this little town.24 Their sentimental plots, the familiar sonorities of their music, and their sociocultural familiarity, in some instances reinforced by a shared religion,

Odile Goerg / The Independence Generation

143

explain why these films touched African spectators while meeting with incomprehension, or even contempt, among the Europeans and parts of the local elite. Women were particularly receptive to this genre, as one female Dakar resident demonstrates. “I only like Arab films, as they are close to my religion and always include song and dance. I particularly liked The Thief of Bagdad, Leïla, Zuhur El Islam, etc.”25 Men were not absent from audiences for these films, however, either because they were accompanying their wives, or because they openly enjoyed the genre. The films evoking Islam were a big hit. In 1953, Zuhur El Islam / The Dawn of Islam, the first historical film about the birth of the religion, drew a total of 24,000 spectators in Dakar over the nine days that it was screened in five cinemas. Shot in 1951 by Ibrahim Ezz Eddine, the film was regularly prescreened, particularly during Muslim festivals or Ramadan. During screenings, some spectators would show their enthusiasm by chanting “Allah Akbar,” provoking the wrath of the colonizers. Already strictly censored in Egypt, the films nevertheless did not give the colonial censors much cause to intervene. As one administrator remarked: “They are generally of a high moral standard and stigmatize vices such as debauchery or drunkenness which, it must be said, are rightly or wrongly considered by the Islamized populations to be European importations.”26 Arab films thus did not arouse particular suspicion on the part of the authorities, who saw them as innocent entertainment. This view changed after Nasser took power and film production became a vehicle for nationalism and Pan-Arabism. A note by the Intelligence Services specified this in 1954: Very popular with the Africans, these films generally include music, song, and dance scenes, interspersed with dialogues, and it is not unusual, at a certain point, to hear an actor slip in a few lines to smear colonization and, for example, to express Muslims’ interest in grouping together to constitute a confederation of Arab states in the future.27

The authorities thus sought to ban Egyptian films by applying the 1953 French film quota decree and demanding a full translation of their texts, including their song lyrics, in 1956. A battle of cinematic images was thus initiated at a crucial historical moment, when the colonized were seeking political models. Previously authorized films, such as Zuhur El Islam, were censored on the grounds that: The political context has changed our point of view … the eulogy of Egypt is currently inopportune. As for the essentially religious action, it can be seen as a glorification of holy war. The battle scene between the people of Mecca and Medina may be censored due to its violence.28

144

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Opting for bans, which elicited protests from distributors who had already imported the films, was nonetheless a swan song for the waning empire. It was certainly undermined by France’s weakened position after the Suez Crisis.29 Although Egyptian films were made in and set on the same continent, they were no substitute for the ‘African films’ that many spectators called for: “I impatiently await the birth of an African cinema, not to see people dance the waltz in it, or to see African cowboys, but to learn the true history of my country, the history radically denied by the majority of historians.”30 Contrary to these wishes, which were also reflected by official enquiries such as one carried out in Nigeria in 1951, the desire for films that spoke to the lives and experiences of African viewers had no impact on the film industry or the colonial authorities. With its distorted image of African societies and its condescending, even racist messaging, colonial cinema did not meet this demand. It mainly targeted metropolitan audiences and was, in reality, rarely screened in Africa’s commercial cinemas.31 Occasionally, some colonial film units made films with local technicians. However, these films represented ambiguous progress; although their stories featured Africans, the films were conceived of and supervised by Europeans. Nevertheless, the first feature fiction shot in Ghana, director Sean Graham’s The Boy Kumasenu (1952), was a hit, as spectators were happy to see people who resembled them onscreen.32 In the Belgian Congo, films were shot by the missionaries, most notably Father Cornil, using Congolese actors but conveying overriding prejudices, to the point that it was inconceivable to screen some of them in Belgium as “they would be likely to accredit the tenacious legend of the congenital stupidity and dishonesty of the Congolese race,” and would shock “evolving or evolved [populations] who [would see] them as an attack on the entire black race.”33 At the other extreme, the Belgian-Congolese Cultural Group, which founded the Leopoldville cinema club in 1950, aimed to make “original Congolese works,” but its means were limited.34 In the French colonies, initiatives of this kind were exception. The expectations of the Fifth Amateur Film from Overseas France national Competition in 1958 confirmed the abyss between the vitality of the independence movement and the vision of the French Overseas Ministry: It would be preferable for competitors to choose subjects showing the evolution of the material and moral living conditions of indigenous populations under the influence and help of France, whose efforts and sacrifices made in favor of the said populations are too often unknown abroad and even in our country.35

Colonial propaganda was thus still the focus for the administration, even at this late date. There was very strong resistance to giving the colonized the

Odile Goerg / The Independence Generation

145

Figure 1. Groupe africain de cinéma: Jacques Mélo Kane, Robert Caristan, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, and Mamadou Sarr. Image courtesy of the author.

technical and financial means to make their own films. Nevertheless, Afriquesur-Seine, considered the “first sub-Saharan African fiction film,” was shot in Paris in 1955 by the Groupe african de cinéma, which included the Beninese filmmaker Paulin Vieyra—the first African student to attend L’Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC), the French national film school—Mamadou Sarr, Robert Caristan, and Jacques Mélo Kane.36 Barely distributed at the time, it sought to give Africans an alternative perspective to the one conveyed by colonial discourse. Yet the group struggled to obtain even a tiny grant in 1957, despite being “the only organization bringing together Africans who had truly studied cinema and who knew their trade, the organization was backed by neither the authorities nor private funders.”37 In 1958, Mamadou Sarr, author of the above remarks, wrote a memorandum entitled Première history du cinéma et du théâtre africains (First History of African Cinema and Theater) advocating the birth of African cinema and requesting the backing of the authorities.38 The question was

146

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

discussed during the International Meeting on Sub-Saharan African Cinema, held in Brussels in July 1958. Vieyra spoke, clearly expressing the need for Africans to take matters in hand: “Each time Africans have been able to give their view on their destiny, they have always done it in a very different way to that imagined by the Europeans.”39 At the same conference, David Acquah, the Head Welfare Officer of the by then independent Ghana, denounced “the prevalent idea that an illiterate person had the mentality of a child.”40 Even though this position was supported by figures such as Jean Rouch, other retrograde voices continued to speak out. William Sellers, former Head of the Colonial Film Unit, “thought that Africans could play a larger part in African film production, especially in those films destined for African audiences. At the same time, he thought that films made for overseas audiences were best left to Europeans.”41 This obstinately tone-deaf view is strange considering that Independence was approaching. At the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Rome in 1959, Vieyra insisted on the political dimension of the prospective African cinema: “This cinema must obviously be African, otherwise how can it contribute to forging national consciousness in Africa?”42 Film content was indeed a key issue in the 1950s, both for African militants and for the authors. However, African cinema would only truly emerge after Independence.

Censorship in the period of anticolonial struggle Audiences did not only express their pleasure at images on the screen; their interjections also sometimes challenged colonial dominance at a time when freedom of speech in public spaces was still muzzled after the war. Spectators felt protected in cinemas. The audience at the Rex in Dakar thus reacted strongly to the line “It makes you ashamed to be French” in André Berthomieu’s Peloton d’exécution / Resistance (1945, France): “These words were vigorously applauded by the majority of the African audience. Orders were given for the passage in question to be cut from future screenings.”43 The censors had clearly not anticipated this reaction, but the police were never far away. Informers gave daily reports, describing the atmosphere and audience comments. The darkness and relative anonymity of these vast spaces with their several hundred seats—or even a thousand at the Rex— facilitated individual and collective expression: comments, rowdiness, shouts of joy, whistling, the scraping of chairs, and the throwing of objects. The surveillance of cinemas did not diminish the prevailing sentiment of impunity. Informers kept watch for material that provoked a reaction: usually nudity, romantic scenes, political discourse, racist behavior and dialogue. These reactions were not specific to the colonies alone, but the restrictions

Odile Goerg / The Independence Generation

147

Figure 2. Old Vox Cinema in Kindia, Guinea. 2005. Image courtesy of the author.

on freedom of expression, the contempt shown to the colonized, and the scarcity of other meeting places made the cinema an ideal space for exuberance, joy, and critique. Surveillance was all the more intense given that the first political meetings were held in cinemas. Reported to have taken place everywhere, this practice blurred the line between entertainment and militancy. Connections between progressive parties and working-class cinemas were evident: in Conakry, the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO, French Section of the Workers’ International) and the Rassamblement Démocratique Africain (RDA, African Democratic Rally) held meetings in the Vox and the Rialto as of 1946, while the more upmarket Triumph hosted the Gaullist Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF, Rally of the French People) in 1951. Cinema owners’ personalities played a role; in the interwar years in Dakar, Maurice Jacquin, founded of the COMACICO and an active member of the SFIO from 1936 to 1939, lent the Rialto to his party. Similarly, in Guinea, RDA sympathizer Jacques Demarchelier lent the party his cinema in Labé as of 1947.44 In Gagnoa, Ivory Coast, rivals used concerns about cinema owners’ political partisanship to attack Yacouba Sylla in 1950, as he supported the RDA. McFeely also notes this use of cinemas as meeting places in Ghana.45 To avoid having to ban films already in circulation, censorship boards attempted to spot elements of the films that had made it past the metropolitan

148

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

censors which might provoke an audience reaction in a West African political context. It must be remembered that the distributors already restricted the choice of films coming into Africa, and that censorship measures in West Africa affected everyone, whether African or European, literate or nonliterate, male or female. The only distinction between groups came with the introduction of an age classification. The political activity of the 1940s and the 1950s necessitated a rethinking of censorship. Faced with films whose images contradicted the model of the ideal citizen, the authorities became conscious of their inability to control the screen: they also became aware of the need to adopt a particularly careful approach as the cinema reached an increasingly broad range of demographic groups, some of whom were considered more susceptible to the power of images. The gaps between the legal texts, the objectives of censorship boards, and the practical application of regulations remained significant. Censorship was often applied a posteriori in response to audience reactions, which demonstrates the lack of anticipation also shown by the examples of La Bataille du rail and Peloton d’exécution (see above). Censorship exerted once a film was already billed was politically more dangerous, because it was more visible; it revealed precisely what it sought to hide from the eyes of the colonized, and exposed the arbitrary power of the authorities and their attempts to prevent access to certain images. The centralized approach adopted in French West Africa contrasted with the autonomy given to the censors in each British colony from 1931 onwards. An early advocate of film regulation in the 1920s, the Gold Coast (now Ghana) was also at the forefront of the contrasting movement away from censorship.46 After a brief attempt at firmness in 1947 when eight films were banned, and before the explosion of anti-colonial political activism in the Gold Coast— represented most notably by Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP)—the Cinemtograph Exhibitions Board of Control soon became aware of the counterproductive nature of a repressive approach. It was not possible to negotiate the transition towards self-government while at the same time treating Ghanaians as childlike, in accordance with the rhetoric of the time.47 The logic of censorship reflected this infantilizing mindset, through which “each colony fell on a spectrum of views regarding the intellectual capacity of the local audience to process what was depicted onscreen and to (self-) regulate its behavior in ways that were acceptable to the colonial rulers.”48 Moreover, given the considerable time that cinema had been active on the continent, the old argument about audiences’ inability to distinguish images from reality no longer applied, as spectators had by now acquired a genuine cinematographic culture that equipped them to understand film. The Gold Coast’s new policy emerged after the 1951 legislative elections, which confirmed the elected representatives’ direct participation in government.

Odile Goerg / The Independence Generation

149

The Board of Control thus adopted a more moderate attitude, and in 1955 only sixteen out of 869 films were banned.49 As elsewhere, however, the elite remained concerned about the impact of films on young people and the working classes, attributing to both groups a more limited critical capacity. Different audience demands and different programming according to cinema and neighborhood made it possible in part to remedy such concerns. The social conservatism inherent in this approach was accentuated after Independence, in the name of national morals. Censorship became stricter again, except when political tensions necessitated the reduction of pressure in at least one domain, that of leisure. In French West Africa, too, the censors were forced to reconsider their original firmness. The Laval Decree remained the legal basis for both the screening and the shooting of films. It was reactivated by the Vichy government from 1940 to 1942. High Commissioner Pierre Boisson reaffirmed the need to preserve the image of white people: Cinematic films that portray conflict between races must, in general, be excluded from the screens in French West Africa. The problems that they evoke, albeit sometimes with a generous intention, but one which almost always risks being misunderstood, are a dangerous source of misinterpretation among natives and the mixed race that it is better to avoid.50

Predictably, certain elements were targeted by the Vichy government, such as critiques of the clergy or mentions of the Marseillaise or the Republic, which were cut from films. If Nazi films such as Jud Süß / Süß the Jew (dir. Veit Harlan, 1940, Germany) were banned, however, it was not in condemnation of their anti-Semitism, but so as not to show the conflicts which were tearing white people apart.51 Overwhelmed by the influx of films, the Provisional Government (1944– 1946), and later the Fourth Republic, fumbled ahead.52 Their approach was indecisive, granting primacy alternately to a single federal censorship board in Dakar and to local boards, which were often overwhelmed but knew the specificities of “their” populations better (including cultural and religious factors and political contexts). These fluctuating policies also applied to the mandated territory of Togo.53 Both pragmatic considerations—such as the impossibility of viewing films given their rapid turnover—and more theoretical concerns—unity of the Empire, equality between film spectators— explain this indecision, which endured until 1956. At this point, the loi-cadre (framework law) transferred jurisdiction to the local assemblies.54 Before this, the lieutenant-governors were entitled to ban films themselves, but they did not appreciate not knowing the reasons for, and thus not being able to justify, federal censorship. The governor of Ivory Coast thus wrote in 1949: “It

150

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

would be opportune if the decisions of the Senegalese Cinematic Censorship Board that are regularly communicated to me indicated the motives for cutting or banning a film.”55 Similarly, the Guinean authorities protested in 1952: “Very recently, a film screened in Conakry (Massacre in Lace) had had so many cuts and mutilations that it was incomprehensible and its screening provoked the justified protest of the audience.”56 Irrespective of distribution certificates awarded by the metropolis, cinema was still subjected to control and censorship at the colonial level. Formalized in French West Africa by the general decree of December 15, 1948, this practice was hotly contested by the African deputes; they denounced their differential treatment and the restriction of their freedom of expression, which went against the 1946 reforms that had given them political rights. Represented by Nigerian Boubou Hama, the Grand Council of French West Africa demanded the decree’s abrogation.57 Hackneyed stereotypes were employed to justify this double censorship. It was still common to draw parallels between African spectators and children who needed to protected. This belief was firmly expressed in the Belgian Congo in 1954, for example: Several members showed their approval for the impetus behind the project: the tightening of regulation on representations destined for natives and nonadults.… Films that are suitable for adults in the metropolis can have a regrettable influence on the uneducated natives, who are incapable of measuring the part of fiction in them.58

What attitudes and objectives were prevalent in these final days of Empire? Studies have shown how film sought to shape spectators’ behavior, and have analyzed the impact of historic films on self-representation and protest— notably in India, where foreign and national productions were screened side-by-side.59 Interviewees rarely have strong memories of censorship. This is not as unlikely as it may at first seem, given, as already stated, that selections were made before films even arrived in the colonies, which meant that few potentially subversive images ever reached audiences.60 Moreover, screenings were often interrupted due to the poor quality of the reels; in these circumstances, it was difficult to tell the difference between the jump cuts that resulted from the cutting of censors and the many technical hiccoughs. In such conditions, only spectators who had already seen the film, on release in the metropolis or further afield, could have been aware of local censorship. It is rare, then, that this subject comes up, although one Senegalese witness mentioned the censorship of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s 1953 film Les Statues meurent aussi / Statues Also Die (France). The film was indeed banned in both the colonies and France, as was the 1950 film Afrique 50 by René Vautier.

Odile Goerg / The Independence Generation

151

The censors equivocated between the habitual rhetoric which affirmed the supposed naivety of the public, and an increasing awareness that racist lines or certain scenes now provoked angry reactions. Instruction nonetheless remained imprecise: “We haven’t a yardstick to go by,” affirmed K. W. Blackburne, Director of the Colonial Office Information Service, in 1948.61 As in the early years, attention was focused on potential incitements to crime and violence, and sexual morals were scrutinized. These were the priorities in the Gold Coast, in contrast to settler colonies such as Kenya, which were above all concerned by racial tensions. Films that legitimated revolt were also targeted. Among the films censored in French West Africa, then, were: Bengal Brigade (dir. Laslo Benedek, 1954, United States), about the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Riot in Cell Block 11 (dir. Don Siegel, (1954, United States) We Were Strangers (dir. John Huston, (1949, United States), Rififi (dir. Jules Dassin, (1955, France), and Wings of the Hawk (dir. Budd Boetticher, 1953, United States). The last of these was about “an insurrection against the established order and risks giving ‘fans’ a whole host of ideas and ‘technical’ advice on how to triumph in an insurrectional movement.”62 This was also the verdict on 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1932), an old American film that was banned in 1950 as “prisoners sentenced to death are portrayed in it as kinds of heroes.”63 Some films nonetheless slipped through the censors’ net. In 1950, therefore, The Mystery of the Black Jungle (dir. Gian Paolo Callegari and Ralph Murphy, Italy), a film about a revolt that overthrows a white rule, met with the enthusiasm of the spectators at the Bouake Vox in Ivory Coast and with the concern of the military: If this film of mediocre quality is without danger for broad, informed minds, the same cannot be said of the local indigenous populations. By their reactions during the screening, the natives of Bouaké clearly demonstrated how much they appreciated the scenes in which European soldiers were massacred, and were delighted at the final victory of the rebels.64

The atmosphere was indeed tense, as the army had just repressed demonstrations in favor of the RDA. In 1955, a warning of the same order was issued concerning Tarzan’s Savage Fury (dir. Cy Endfield, 1952, United States), despite the fact that the film had been authorized: “I draw your attention to the fact that this film, which initially is as naive and improbable as the rest in its series, portrays Europeans in an African country, in contact with a primitive population, in an unfavorable light.”65 Central to the colonial situation, the question of gender relations also became eminently sensitive. Any immoral behavior on the part of a white man or woman, and any image of violence against “native” women—especially if

152

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

committed by Europeans—tarnished the representation of the colonizers.66 In 1951, then, the Guinean censorship board demanded that a scene from Méfiezvous des blondes / Beware of Blondes (dir. André Hunebelle, 1950, France), be cut: “a very short passage (at the start, when the gangster removes his belt to hit the blond woman) … provoked some murmuring in the cinema.”67 In the colonial context, this was less a question of morality than one of potential destabilization. Nothing was deemed more pernicious in this context than the portrayal of interracial relationships. The governor of Niger therefore denounced the authorization given in Dakar to Plages éternelles / Lifelong Beach, which included “Paris nightclub scenes between Blacks and Whites.” Forced to make concessions to audiences, the authorities attempted to eliminate racist dialogue. In 1957, the governor of French Sudan stated: “It quite often happens, in French Sudanese cinemas, that unfortunate reflections in films provoke protest and diverse movements among the spectators.” He gave two examples: “Auberge rouge [The Red Inn, 1951] (remarks about “savages”) and Rumeur publique [Public Opinion, 1954] in which it is said in defense of the accused: “at least it’s not a Negro who raped one of your girls.”68 Such lines provoked an angry uproar. While normal by the standards of the colonizers, they had become unacceptable by the 1950s. The same went for criticism of Islam, but reactions varied depending on the colony. As modes of circulation diversified, fears of uncensored films reaching screens increased. The administrator of Kankan, the second largest town in Guinea, thus worried that the American film Home of the Brave (dir. Mark Robson, 1949)—which showed the racism suffered by a black soldier during the Pacific war and was banned in Senegal—might be screened in his town, after entering the country via French Sudan.69 Similarly, in Niger, films reached Zinder via Niamey, and the administrators and the local police did not have the means to control them. Ultimately, while exerting a certain control, the authorities were conscious of cinema’s role as a safety valve: it would have been unwise to deprive spectators, and especially young spectators, of this form of escapist entertainment, which, in a colonial setting, was an outlet for their pent-up energy. Yet we can try to evaluate the weight of censorship, despite the paucity of sources. As in the Gold Coast, the number of films banned was ultimately marginal: in Togo, in the space of over a year, “the exploration of 545 films was authorized and twenty-two [approximately 4%] were banned. A certain number of cuts were prescribed.”70 Likewise, in French West Africa over a period of fifteen months (1955–1956), the federal Board banned approximately four percent of the films that were put before it. In the Belgian Congo, from 1949 to 1958, the Léopoldville Censorship Board censored approximately 13% of the films destined for the Congolese public, 5% were cut, and 8% were banned outright.71

Odile Goerg / The Independence Generation

153

The issue is not so much the actual number of films banned, as the widespread belief that the colonial authorities implemented an arbitrary policy, in this domain as elsewhere, and restricted colonized populations’ access to films. In all cases, cinema censorship had to account for the differing objectives of a range of local actors, not to mention pressure from importers. At the same time, cinematic images were increasingly a basis for protest, and revealed the underlying tension of societies.

Forging the nation, shaping the youth Beyond its continual reference to the supposedly childlike nature of African audiences, discourse on cinema voiced a concern, shared by the African political elites, about cinema’s impact on young people, and particularly young males, who made up a significant proportion of the audience. Scholar Manthia Diawara, saxophonist Manu Dibango, and many others evoke the cinema of their youth with enthusiasm, as did one ordinary spectator in Bouaké: “We just followed the vibe; we didn’t know we would be questioned about it.”72 Without knowing it, they were part of the new ‘youth’ category that was appearing in sociological surveys and demographic data. A specific policy was formulated for this young demographic, notably with the instigation of an age category in film classification, generally situated at sixteen

Figure 3. An outdoor theater in Sikasso, Mali, April 1956. Image courtesy of Jean-Paul Sivadier.

154

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

years old—a measure not unique to the colonies. This became official in the Gold Coast in 1952; in Britain, the ‘Universal’ and ‘Adult’ ratings had been operational since the 1920s.73 In France and its colonies, the ban on undersixteens was inherited from the Vichy regime. This blanket age requirement did not suffice to define the category of ‘youth’ with its highly diverse sociocultural bearings, nor to control practices of cinema-going. While colonial authorities worried about control, dignitaries, and the new political elite thought in terms of forging the new nation. The cinema was accused of fueling rising violence and delinquency. In 1948, Amadou Doucouré, senator of the French Sudan, complained of the harmful influence on young Africans of the screening in the Overseas Territories, and in particular in French West Africa, of numerous French or foreign adventure films.74 In 1950, the Ouagadougou Youth Movements in Upper Volta echoes the discourse of the politicians: Considering that too many films screened introduce the country’s youth to scenes of banditry, murder, rebellion, or even adultery and lead it to believe that it is only capable of criminal acts and murky sentiments … Anxious to preserve a sound, patriotic and strong youth in the country, who will be needed tomorrow … [we] thank the Government for all the complete or partial bans that it has pronounced against certain demoralizing films in the territory of Upper Volta.75

Politicized young people thus requested further film censorship, showing themselves eager to participate in the building of the nation to come. Colonial authorities in Ghana displayed similar concerns. In 1954, the Department of Social Welfare carried out a survey in Accra and Kumasi entitled “Children and the Cinema,” which denounced the negative influence certain films, going so far as to recommend prohibitions on cinema-going as a punitive measure within the criminal justice system.76 The same year, the High Commission of French West Africa went further still: Public opinion has indeed rightly expressed concern about the potentially harmful effects on the African public in general, and on youth in particular, of the screening of certain films, whose subjects are too often inspired by the world of crime and prostitution, or which portray characters whose example can only be pernicious (westerns and gangster films, notably).77

Westerns in particular were consistently singled out in these denunciations. It was rumored in the Belgian Congo that youths had tried to derail a train after seeing a similar deed in a film.78 Depriving this irrepressible audience of its favorite leisure activity was risky, however, and attacks on cinema remained largely verbal. It was unusual that westerns actually got banned—Apache

Odile Goerg / The Independence Generation

155

(United States, 1954), directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Burt Lancaster, was one rare example, banned in 1955 for its overly Manichean opposition between the Apache and the Americans.79 At the center of these struggles for influence, young people were seen as a hope for the future but also as a driving force for social and political protest. They were caught between the attentions of the colonizers, who made them the prime target of their cultural policy, and the strategies of the nationalists, who worked to mobilize them but worried about their frivolity, in a fashion not dissimilar to the various deputies who were anxious to preserve their morality. In spring 1954, French West Africa’s territorial assemblies coordinated their efforts to demand a tightening of censorship, given the damage that the screening of dramatic films inflicts on the minds of the African youth; given the fact that sequences in certain films are contrary to the moral principles prescribed by the traditions of this country,” to cite Fily Dabo Sissoko representative of French Sudan.80 The reform of the Dakar Censorship Board in July 1954 was a response to the demand of the territorial assemblies. The Board now comprised representatives of the College of Physicians, culture centers, and family associations.81 It also demanded that bans on underage spectators be clearly posted in front of cinemas and enforced by their owners. This nonetheless appeared insufficient, and the distributors returned the responsibility to the authorities: The ban on certain films for juveniles (under-sixteens) should suffice as a restrictive measure for the protection and morality of young people. Its application is the responsibility of the police offers in control of each cinema, the box office cashiers cannot know if tickets sold to an adult are intended for juveniles. Moreover, it is not possible for us to ask every spectator’s civil status, which, for the matter, does not exist in Africa.82

In responding thus, distributors highlighted the impossibility of monitoring spectators’ ages in colonies where no official papers existed. Activists also spoke out on behalf of Christian associations. In Sierra Leone, the youth section of the United Christian Council of Freetown, founded in 1947 and made up almost exclusively of Africans, attacked the selection of films for screening and demanded a change.83 This contributed ten years later to an amendment to the Cinemotograph Ordinance which increased the Board’s powers in order, notably, to better protect children.84 In Dakar, Cyrille Aguessy, a doctor from Dahomey and President of the Catholic Film Committee in Senegal, announced the creation of an African Catholic Film Committee in 1954. The idea was to guide fellow worshippers in their choice of films, acknowledging both “the civilizational heath that cinema can offer Africa’s advancement, and the dangers that it also presents to its human

156

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

ascension.”85 Even if their work was more discreet some Muslim groups engaged in similar projects. In Dakar, Majhmout M’Bengue, President of the Dahiratoul Islam (Muslim Circle), thus alerted the governor, also in 1954, that “Our association wishes to promote efforts to sanitize young Muslim milieus by fighting against certain films harmful to their education, which are very often screened in the Medina.”86 Dignitaries, the first elected representatives, the educated, and militants all shared these moral concerns with the colonial authorities, even if their objectives were not the same. Each had their own motivations: public order and controlling the youth for the colonial authorities, the vision of a new society and, often, social conservatism on the part of the new political elites; a desire to broaden horizons for intellectuals and the educated. Their platforms were nonetheless limited: elected assemblies, associations with relatively autonomous statues, trade unions, political organizations, the press, and sometimes the meetings of censorship boards. Whether in the name of religious values or political struggle (both reformist and progressive), controls on cinema were considered essential as a means of banning indecent or violent spectacles, stopping films from dumbing down young audiences and spectators in general, or choosing and promoting films of educational value. There were dissident voices, of course; these similarly reflected positions across the political spectrum, from the allies of the colonial administration to its detractors, many of whom were intellectuals, anti-colonial activists, educated youth, and students. The latter, some of whom had studied in Europe, criticized the mediocrity of the films on offer, arguing that they distracted youth from the urgency of political action. Defying the attitudes of their often socially conservative elders, they demanded unrestricted access to images, notably contesting the 1954 policy on cultural centers in French West Africa, which were developed and strictly controlled by the authorities. To attract young people, who had by and large received a limited education, these cultural centers screened documentaries, but they also showed fictions conforming to the local moral and religious codes and magnifying the colonial enterprise, such as Baroncelli’s L’Homme du Niger / The Man from Niger (France), a 1939 film that was still in circulation in the 1950s.87 The Senegalese youth called for a boycott; some proposed the creation of cine-clubs in order to develop a critical approach and a film culture. Submitted in 1954, the statutes of the Dakar Cine-club worried the authorities; the club “aim[ed] to show classics, noncommercial films, and those whose public screening is banned by the censors” (original italics).88 Suspicions of the arbitrary application of censorship by the authorities were deeply entrenched. The attitude of these students mirrored that of the elites in general: from Senegal to Ghana and beyond, they accused films of poisoning the youth and masses but demanded unbridled access to all

Odile Goerg / The Independence Generation

157

films. This combat was particularly pronounced in the Belgian Congo, where cinemas remained segregated and the implementation of censorship differed according to audience. The tiny elite sought to prove its loyalty to the administration and to stand above the rest of the population, while at the same time claiming to protect it. Nevertheless, the government did not trust this elite class, and considered the ‘evolved’ Congolese less qualified than the Europeans to judge the film scenarios created for Congolese villagers.89 Elsewhere, the existence of a wide range of cinemas, which targeted different audiences and thus adapted their programs accordingly, tempered challenges to censorship. Ultimately, even if the spread of cinema was far from ubiquitous, cinema halls and films highlighted pressing dilemmas within the emerging postcolonial societies, negotiating both local dynamics and globalized demands, and reflecting a background of urban expansion and multifaceted modernity. Censorship and the debates around spectatorship did not represent a coherent, rational policy, but instead revealed constant improvisation and adaptation to circumstances under the pressure of both audiences and political actors. The authorities were wary of disorder, while audiences reacted negatively to their surveillance. Not every film show turned into an anti-colonial demonstration, of course, but tensions could rapidly flare. Some moments of intense friction punctuated this period both in the immediate postwar years, whose mood of hope was inspired by promises of a better future and the foundation of political parties, and in the mid-1950s, which were marked by the emergence of protest movements, Arab nationalism, and the first independent African nations. Confronted with the forces

Figure 4. A cinema screening in Niono, Mali in March 1957. Image courtesy of Jean-Paul Sivadier.

158

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

of change in society, the authorities attempted to slow down this progress towards ‘modernity,’ and sought local allies. This situation transcended the African colonies, also affecting other countries such as India.90 Everywhere, short-term alliances between the colonial authorities and local elites were formed, but they were based on a misunderstanding because the protest that expressed itself through cinema was social as it was political. The building of a nation certainly required the advent of sovereign institutions, but it also involved changes in the society role and character of age relations, gender relations, and relations between various other statutory categories. As Independence loomed on the horizon, certain voices spoke out to radically challenge the dominant colonial discourse on cinema: if Africans were truly incapable of grasping the language and significance of film, how to explain their flocking to watch westerns and other commercial films rather than the simplified fictions produced specially for them by ad hoc bodies? Rather than the purported inexperience and naivety of Africans, was it not the producers and distributors’ total ignorance of African societies and their desires that was astonishing? This argument was put forward by Nigerian writer and critic J. Koyinde Vaughan in a section of work by intellectuals and artists published in Présence Africaine: “Besides the preoccupations with this false exotic, there is the other attitude to Africa, an attitude that has greater currency in Britain. It is that Africans should be patronized, uplifted, and governed.”91 Similarly, filmmaker Paulin Vieyra ironically remarked: A lot of clichés have been spoken of Africans… It has also been said that cinema needed to be adapted to Africans’ level of understanding. I find the concern shown to us very touching. But I will simply recall that when cinema began in Europe, no one worried whether or not people understood its technique.92

Such reflections would nourish the African cinema that was born soon after Independence, both on an institutional level and in terms of the often highly militant and educational approaches of emerging filmmakers. Odile Goerg is Professor Emeritus of History of Contemporary Africa at Paris Diderot University. Her research focuses on the economic, cultural, and social history of cinema in colonial and postcolonial contexts. In 2019, Goerg published a book-length history of colonial West African cinema titled Tropical Dream Palaces.

Notes Originally published as Odile Goerg, “The Independence Generation: Film Culture and the Anti-Colonial Struggle in the 1950s,” in Tropical Dream Palaces: Cinema in Colonial Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020): 131–152.

Odile Goerg / The Independence Generation

159

1. Archives Nationales du Sénégal (ANS) 21G 193, SECRET, Gustave BorgnisDesbordes to the High Commissioner, November 29, 1949; object “damaging/dangerous propaganda by the cinema.” 2. Ibid. 3. ANS 21G 193, letter to the president of the Federal Censorship Board, May 9, 1958. 4. Tierno Monénembo, “Western à l’Africaine,” interview with Taina Tervonen, Africultures no. 9, 1998. 5. (interview with Diakité Conakry 2005). 6. Gareth McFeely, “‘Gone are the days’: A Social and Business History of Cinemagoing in Gold Coast/Ghana, 1910–1982,” PhD dissertation, Boston University 2015; 13, 284, 295. 7. Guido Convents, Images et démocratie. Les Congolais face au cinéma et à l’audiovisuel. Une histoire politico-culturelle du Congo des Belges jusqu’à la république démocratique du Congo (1896–2006), Kessel-Lo: Afrika Filmfestival, 2006. 8. ANS 21G 192, Dakar, March 7, 1956. 9. Georges Balandier, Sociologie des Brazzavilles noires (Paris: presses de la FNSP, 1985), 256. 10. (interview with Diane, Paris 2006). 11. See Rouch’s Moi, un Noir (1959); among many books, see Jean-Paul Colleyn (ed.), Jean Rouch, cinéma et anthropologie (Paris: INA, 2009). 12. Before being stigmatized in Africa, westerns were first criticized in the United States. See Hortense Powdermaker, Copper Town: Changing Africa; the Human Situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt (New York: Harper & Row, 1962); Emmanuel Akyeampong and Charles Ambler, “Leisure in African History; an Introduction,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies vol. 35, no. 1 (2002): 1–16; Charles Ambler, “Cowboy Modern: African Audiences, Hollywood Films, and Visions of the West,” Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of the Cinema, ed. Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes, and Robert C. Allen (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2007): 348–363; James Burns, “John Wayne on the Zambezi: Cinema, Empire, and the American Western in British Central Africa,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 35, no. 1 (2002), 103; James E. Genova, Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity, and the Limitations of Mimicry in French-Ruled West Africa, 1914–1956 (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). 13. Burns, “John Wayne”; Convents, Images et démocratie, 16; Ch. Didier Gondola, Tropical Cowboys: Westerns, Violence, and Masculinity in Kinshasa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016); Ch. Didier Gondola, “Tropical Cowboys: Westerns, Violence, and Masculinity Among the Young Bills of Kinshasa,” Histoire & Afrique no. 7 (2009): 76–98. 14. Marissa Moorman, “Of Westerns, Women, and War: Re-Situating Angolan Cinema and the Nation,” Research in African Literatures, vol. 32, no. 3 (2001): 103–122; Odile Goerg, “Des cowboys dans la savane. Cinéma et hybridation culturelle en contexte colonial.” Afrika Zamani nos 20 & 21 (2012–13): 69–94. 15. McFeely, “Gone are the days,” 296. 16. (interview Dieng, Dakar 2005). 17. Laura Fair, “Hollywood Hegemony? Hardly: Audience Preferences in Zanzibar, 1950s–1970s,” ZIFF Journal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004): 52–58; Laura Fair, “Making Love in the Indian Ocean: Hindi Films, Zanzibari Audiences, and the Construction of Romance in the 1950s and 1960s,” Love in Africa, ed. Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 58–82; Laura Fair, “‘They stole the show!’: Indian films in costal Tanzania, 1950s–1980s,” Journal of African Media Studies, vol. 2, no. 1 (2010): 91–106; Laura Fair, Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in

160

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Twentieth-Century Urban Tanzania (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018); Brigitte Reinwald, “Tonight at the Empire: Cinema and Urbanity in Zanzibar, 1920s to 1960s,” Afrique & Histoire no. 5 (2006): 81–109. 18. Tierno Monénembo, Cinéma (Paris: Seuil, 1997): 137. 19. Sophie Zimmermann, “Le Développement du cinéma comme loisir et lieu de sociabilité au Togo (années 1910–2007),” Master’s dissertation, University Paris-Diderot, 2008: 111. 20. Georges Sadoul (ed.), Les Cinémas des pays arabes (Beyrouth: Centre Interarabe du Cinéma et de la Télévision, 1966): 283; Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (Le Caire: The American University in Cairo Press, 2007); Magda Wassef (ed.), Egypte: 100 ans de cinéma (Paris: Plume-Institut du Monde Arabe, 1995). 21. ANS 21G 190. The poster referred to the film Bilal mou’adhdhin al-rasoul (Bilal, the Prophet’s Muezzin) by Ahmed al-Toukhi, 1953, but was later banned due to FrancoEgyptian tensions. 22. Odile Goerg, Tropical Dream Palaces: Cinema in Colonial West Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), see chapter 5. 23. Djibril Seck, “le loisir cinématographique à Dakar, 1926–1974,” PhD dissertation, UCAD, Dakar, 2008, 162. 24. ANS 21G 192, note from the intelligence services, Gao (French Sudan), August 27, 1957. 25. “Pourquoi allons-nous au cinéma?,” Bingo, August 1960, no. 91, pp. 34–35. 26. ANS 21G 192, Gao, 1957. 27. ANS216 190; Seck, “le loisir,” 153, 172. 28. ANS 21G 199, circa 1958. 29. Odile Goerg, “Les films arabes, une menace pour l’Empire? La politique des films arabes à la veille des indépendances en Afrique Occidentale Française,” Outre Mers, nos. 380–381 (2013): 287–312. 30. Amadou Sow, 24 years old, accountant, in “Pourquoi allons-nous au cinéma?,” Bingo, 1960. 31. Peter J. Bloom, French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); James Burns, Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002); Glenn Reynolds, Colonial Cinema in Africa: Origins, Images, Audiences (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2015). 32. McFeely, “Gone are the days,” 48. 33. A report written by Roger Bagage, director of the Belgian Congo and RwandaUrundi Information and Documentation Center (CID) in Brussels, to the governor general of Léopoldville on February 19, 1951. Cited in Convents, Images et démocratie, 95. 34. Convents Images et démocratie, 156. 35. Archives Nationales de Guinée (ANG) 2G2 IFAN dossier, Jean Brérault, Head of the Film Service, July 11, 1958. 36. Pierre Haffner, “Comment Dakar fonda le cinéma d’Afrique noire. Développement urbain, développement cinématographique et démocratie,” Grossstadtliteratur, ed. Daus Ronald (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert Verlag, 1992): 189; Paulin Vieyra, Le Cinéma africain des origines à 1973 (Paris: Présence africaine, 1975). 37. ANS 18G 215 (versement 60), dossier 614 GAC, letter from Sarr, January 22, 1957. 38. ANS VP (Vice-Presidency), 00461, 19-page document.

Odile Goerg / The Independence Generation

161

39. Paulin Vieyra, “Discussion” and “Suggestions pour le développement du cinéma en A.O.F.,” rencontres internationales: le cinéma et l’Afrique au sud du Sahara, General Report, Brussels, Exposition Universelle et Internationale, 1958, 15. 40. Luc De Heusch, Rencontres internationales: le cinéma et l’Afrique au sud du Sahara, General Report, Brussels, Exposition Universelle et Internationale, July 24–26, 1958, 11. 41. Ibid., 17. 42. Paulin Vieyra, “Responsabilités du cinéma dans la formation d’une conscience nationale africaine,” Présence Africaine nos. 27–28 (1959): 307. 43. ANS 21G 193, Direction de la sûreté générale de l’AOF, July 29, 1947; “Objet: État d’esprit de la population africaine” (Object: State of Mind of the African Population). 44. Interview with Moussa Kemoko Diakité, filmmaker (born 1940), Conakry, October 21, 2003, provided by political scientist Bernard Charles. 45. McFeely, “Gone are the days.” 46. Goerg, Tropical Dream Palaces, see chapter 2. 47. McFeely, “Gone are the days,” 126; Odile Goerg, “Entre infantilisation et répression coloniale. Censure cinématographique en AOF. ‘Grands enfants’ et protection de la jeunesse,” Cahier d’Etudes Africaines, no. 205 (2012): 165–198. 48. McFeely, “Gone are the days,” 70. 49. Ibid., 130. 50. ANS 21G 109, letter dated February 28, 1941. 51. Ibid.; Ruth Ginio, “La politique antijuive de Vichy en Afrique occidentale française,” Archives Juives no. 1 (2003): 109–118. 52. ANS 21G 193, (undated, circa 1948) note concerning the “legality of the Federal Cinematographic Censorship Board.” 53. Zimmermann, “Le Développement du cinéma,” 87. 54. General decrees dated November 6, 1946, December 15, 1948, June 20, 1949, and July 21, 1954. 55. ANS 21G 193, p. 4, letter dated April 30, 1949. 56. ANS 21G 193, letter dated September 27, 1952. 57. ANS 21G 193, Grand Council of French West Africa, Dakar, June 9, 1949. 58. Report by the Colonial Council on a planned decree on the control of cinematographic representations, March 19, 1954; cited in Convents, Images et démocratie, 181. 59. Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds.) Empire and Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan/BFI, 2011); Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds.) Film at the End of Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan/BFI, 2011). 60. “We eliminate certain productions ourselves that are incompatible with the African clientele’s level of mental maturity and ability to judge.” ANS 21G 192, Head of the SECMA to the governor of Senegal, February 23, 1955. 61. The Film in Colonial Development: A Report of a Conference, (London: British Film Institute, 1948), 33. 62. The reason for the censorship of Bengal Brigade was clear: “The theme of revolt against Colonial Power constitutes the essence of this film.” ANS 21G 199, Minutes of the Censorship Board, Dakar, April 12, 1957. 63. ANS 21G 195, Minutes of the Censorship Board, Dakar, July 31, 1956. 64. ANG 2G 17. 65. ANS 21G 193, Division of General Astier de Villates to the High Commissioner, April 8, 1950.

162

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

66. ANS 2G 12, High Commissioner to the governors, March 1, 1955. 67. At the same time, the authorities attempted to regulate the colonizers’ sexual morality and to present an ideal model of matrimony. See Amandine Lauro, Coloniaux, ménagères et prostituées au Congo belge 1885–1930 (Loverval: Labor, 2005); Ann L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Pace and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 68. ANG 2G 17, letter dated March 1, 1951. 69. ANS 21G 193, letter dated January 31, 1957. 70. ANG 2G 16, list of films screened (undated, circa 1950). 71. Convents, Images et démocratie, 40. 72. (interview with Coulibaly, Bouaké 2017). 73. Rachael Low, The History of British Film, Vol. 4, 1918–1929 (London: Routledge, 1997): 57. 74. ANS 21G 193, Official gazette of parliamentary debates, August 10, 1948 (March 9 session). 75. ANS 21G 193, petition dated November 19, 1950, forwarded by the governor of Upper Volta to the governor general by post, December 16, 1950. 76. James Burns, Cinema and Society in the British Empire, 1895–1940 (Britain and the World) (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 210; McFeely, “Gone are the days,” 299, 302. 77. ANS 21G 193, speech before the Grand Council of French West Africa, letter dated May 17, 1954. For Dar es Salaam, see Burton 2001. 78. Francis Ramirez and Christian Rolot, Histoire du cinéma au Zaire, au Rwanda, et au Burundi, (Bruxelles-Tervuren: Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale de Tervuren, 1985): 274. 79. ANS 21G 195, Dakar, “Banned films 1995” file. 80. ANS 21G 193, motion dated March 25, 1954. Ibid. for the other colonies. 81. ANS 21G 193, July 21, 1954 decree, article 2. 82. ANS 21G 192, letter from the SECMA, 1955. 83. Mentioned by Colin Beale, Secretary of the Mission Society Organization, during the BFI conference, 1948. 84. PRO CO1027/102, Film Censorship Legislation Sierra Leone, law 10, 1958. 85. ANS 21G 193, letter dated May 12, 1954. 86. ANS 21G 193, letter dated October 16, 1954. 87. Bancel 2009, p. 199. ANS O 655, Maisons de jeunes 1954–56; ANS O 657, Centres culturels, 1956–57; ANS O 658, Centres culturels, 1954. The number of cultural centers rose from twenty-eight in 1954 to 157 by the end of 1956, with an additional seven mobile cinema vans. 88. ANS 21G 193, letter dated May 10, 1954; ANS 18G 215 dossier 241. 89. Convents, Images et démocratie, 97. 90. Priya Jaikumar, “Hollywood and the Multiple Constituencies of Colonial India,” in Hollywood Abroad: Audiences and Cultural Exchange, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (London: BFI Publishing, 2004): 78–97. 91. J. Koyinde Vaughan, “Africa South of the Sahara and the Cinema,” Présence africaine, vol. 3, nos. 14–15 (1957): 211. 92. Vieyra, “Discussion” and “Suggestions,” 95.

II. CONSTITUTING AFRICAN CINEMA

Figure B. Ousmane Sembène (left) and Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (right) on the set of En résidence surveillée / On House Arrest (dir. Vieyra, 1981, Senegal). Image courtesy of Stéphane Vieyra and PSV Films.

What Is Cinema for Us? Med Hondo (Abid Mohamed Medoun Hondo)

T

hroughout the world when people use the term cinema, they all refer more or less consciously to a single cinema, which for more than half a century has been created, produced, industrialized, programmed, and then shown on the world’s screens: Euro-American cinema. This cinema has gradually imposed itself on a set of dominated peoples. With no means of protecting their own cultures, these peoples have been systematically invaded by diverse, cleverly articulated, cinematographic products. The ideologies of these products never “represent” their personality, their collective or private way of life, their cultural codes, and never reflect even minimally on their specific “art,” way of thinking, or communicating—in a word, their own history and civilization. The images this cinema offers systematically exclude the African and the Arab. It would be dangerous (and impossible) for us to reject this cinema simply as alien—the damage is done. We must get to know it, the better to analyze it. We’ll see that this cinema has never really concerned African and Arab peoples. This seems paradoxical, since it fills all the theaters and dominates the screens of all African and Arab cities and towns. But do the masses have any other choice? “Consuming” at least a reflection of one’s own people’s life and history—past, present, and future? Lawrence of Arabia (dir. David Lean, 1962, England) disseminates an image of Lawrence, not the Arabs. Man From Cocody (dir. Christian-Jaque, 1965, France) has a European as the gentleman hero, and not an Ivory Coast African. Do we have a single image of the experiences of our forefathers and the heroes of African and Arab history? Do we see a single film showing the new reality of cooperation, communication, support, and solidarity among Africans and Arabs? This may seem exaggerated. Some critics will say that at least one African country, Egypt, produces some relatively important films each year and that since independence a number of cineastes have made a future for themselves in African countries. Yet, in the whole continent of Africa, Egypt is only one country, one cultural source, one sector of the market. Few African countries

166

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

buy Egyptian films and they themselves produce too few films. Furthermore, the market within Egypt itself is still dominated by foreign films. African and Arab filmmakers have decided to produce their own films. But despite the films’ undoubted quality, they have no chance of being distributed normally, at home or in the dominant countries, except in marginalized circuits—the dead-end art cinemas. Even a few dozen more filmmakers would only achieve a ratio of one to ten thousand films. An everyday creative dynamic is necessary. We need to make a radical change in the relation between the dominant Euro-American production and distribution networks and African and Arab production and distribution, which we must control. Only in a spirit of creative and stimulating competition among African and Arab filmmakers, can we make artistic progress and become “competitive” on the world market. We must first control our own markets, satisfy our own people’s desires to liberate their screens, and then establish respectful relations with other peoples, and balanced exchange.

We Must Change the Humiliating Relation Between Dominating and Dominated, Between Masters and Slaves Some critics flee this catastrophic state of affairs, thinking cinema is restricted for Western, Christian, and capitalist elites or they throw a cloak of fraternal paternalism over our filmmakers, ignoring and discrediting our works, blaming us, in the short term forcing us to a formal and ethical “mimesis”— to imitate precisely those cinemas we denounce—in order to become known and be admitted into international cinema; in the end, forcing us into submission, renouncing our own lives, creativity, and militancy. Since our independence many of our filmmakers have proved their abilities as auteurs. They encounter increasing difficulties in surviving and continuing to work, because their films are seldom distributed and no aid is available. Due to the total lack of a global cultural policy, African and Arab cinema becomes relegated to an exotic and episodic sub-product, limited to aesthetic reviews at festivals, which, although not negligible, are insufficient. Multinational film companies earn fifty percent of their profits from Third World screens. Each year millions of dollars are “harvested” from our continents, taken back to the original countries, and then used to produce new films which again come to our screens. Thus, each of our countries unknowingly contributes a lot of money to the production of films in Paris, New York, London, Rome, or Hong Kong. We have no control over them and reap no financial or moral benefit, being involved in neither production nor distribution. In reality, however, we

Med Hondo / What Is Cinema for Us?

167

are coerced into being “coproducers” while our resources are plundered. The United States allows less than thirteen percent foreign films to enter its market—and most of these are produced by European subsidiaries controlled by the US majors, which exercise an absolute protectionism. Film plays a major role in building peoples’ consciousness. Cinema is the mechanism par excellence for penetrating the minds of our peoples, influencing their everyday social behavior, directing them, and diverting them from their historic national responsibilities. It imposes alien and insidious models and references, and without apparent constraint encourages our people to adopt modes of behavior and communication based on the dominant ideologies. This damages our own cultural development and blocks true communication between Africans and Arabs, brothers and friends who have been historically united for thousands of years. This alienation disseminated through the image becomes all the more dangerous for being insidious, uncontroversial, “accepted,” and seemingly inoffensive and neutral. It needs no armed forces and no permanent educational program from those who seek to maintain the division between African and Arab peoples—our weakness, submission, servitude, and ignorance of each other and of our own history. We forget our positive heritage, united through our foremothers with all humanity. Above all we have no say in the progress of world history. Dominant imperialism seeks to prevent portraying African and Arab values to other nations. Were they to appreciate our values and behavior they might respond positively to us. They believe themselves “superior” to us, to our peoples’ roles in world history. We are not proposing isolation, closing our frontiers to all Western film, nor any protectionism separating us from the rest of the world. We wish to survive, develop, and participate as sovereign peoples in our own specific cultural fields and to fulfill our responsibilities in a world from which we are now excluded. The night of colonialism caused many quarrels among us. We have yet to assess the full consequences. It poisoned our potential communications with other peoples since we have been forced into relations of colonial domination. We often have preconceived and false ideas of each other imprinted by racism. Having been colonized and then subjected to even more pernicious imperialist domination, we are not entirely responsible for this state of affairs. Yet some intellectuals, writers, filmmakers, thinkers, and our cultural leaders and policy makers are also responsible for perpetuating this insatiable domination. It has never been enough simply to denounce our domination, for the imperialists dictate the rules of the game to their own advantage. Some African and Arab filmmakers realize that the cinema alone cannot change our disadvantaged position, but they know that it is the best means

168

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Figure 1. A young Med Hondo. Image in the public domain.

of education and information and, thus, of solidarity. We must organize our forces, reassert our different creative potentialities, and fill the void in our national, regional, and continental cinemas. We must establish cultural relations of communication and cooperation between our peoples in a spirit of equality, dignity, and justice. We have the will, means, and talent to undertake this great enterprise. Without organizing our resources, we cannot flourish at home. Dozens of African and Arab intellectuals, filmmakers, technicians, writers, journalists, and leaders have had to leave our own countries, often despite ourselves and end up contributing to the development and overdevelopment of countries that don’t need us, and that use their excesses to dominate us. This will continue until we grasp the crucial importance of cultural and economic strategy and create our own networks of film production and distribution, liberating ourselves from all foreign monopolies. Med Hondo was one of the founding fathers of African cinema. His work often focused on colonialism and postcolonialism, earning him numerous awards. Unfortunately, Hondo passed away in March of 2019; but his legacy still lives on.

Note Reprinted from Jump Cut, no. 31 (March 1986): 47–48, https://www.ejumpcut.org /archive/onlinessays/JC31folder/WhatisCinemaForus.html. Translation by Greg Kahn.

A Cinema Fighting for its Liberation Férid Boughedir

T

he African cinema at the time of the Organization of African Unity (OAU): it was in effect in 1963 that for the first time a film entirely conceived and produced by an African made its appearance on the international scene, was seen by a paying audience, and received a prize. That happened at the International Festival of Tours (France), and the prizewinning film Borom Sarret by Ousmane Sembène (1963, Senegal) was established as the first film demonstrating great talent made by an African, opening the way to a cinema of fiction which would develop mainly in the Frenchspeaking countries of the continent (their English-speaking or Portuguesespeaking neighbors favoring, on the whole, the documentary). The anecdote of Borom Sarret was simple but significant: a poor carter saw the tools of his trade confiscated by the police because he had dared to cross the frontier between the Dakar of the poor and the Dakar of the rich. The emotional nature of this tale, the restrained anger of the author compared with the kind experienced by the more humble, the use of monologue which makes us inwardly experience the plight of the carter, and moreover an open end which appeals to humanity and to the indignation of the onlooker, made this film a premature masterpiece by which, straight away, the African cinema seemed to establish the tone of what was going to become one of its major directions. The application of picture and sound to the service of works of enlightenment arouses a consciousness of the realities of an Africa hardly out of colonialism and living the contradictions of freshly acquired independence. All the subsequent works of Ousmane Sembène, autodidact of the camera— who was a fisherman, a mason, a docker, then a writer before exchanging the pen for the camera “in order to speak even to the illiterate”—confirmed the vocation of the African cinema to inscribe itself as “awakener of the people,” in total opposition to the cinema which had preceded it on the continent: that western cinema of “escapism” which the African producers accused of literally drugging the African public with its byproducts and of imparting values of foreign domination.

170

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Domination by Foreign Companies It is, however, in terms of the rivalry with this foreign cinematographic distribution that the (short) history of the African cinema will be written from beginning to end. For foreign films (often the worst rubbish of worldwide production) were distributed by the big western companies which controlled the cinematographic market of the African countries, and looked unfavorably upon the appearance of a young African cinema which was going to compete with their films and damage their profitability and their influence. Several African countries such as Tunisia or Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), having tried to create a national monopoly on the importation of films to control their market and reserve a “screen time’’ for their newborn production, were punished by boycotts as regards their supply of films. The big companies, who regrouped in joint responsibility trusts, obliged the states concerned to backpedal by imposing restrictions on their profit. Deprived of screens and of a paying audience, the African film would never be able to recover the cost of returning and giving birth to a second film—the African cinema was condemned to be stillborn.

First Success of the African Cinema In view of this situation, and above all in view of the inertia of their governments as regards the future of the cinema kept for minor and simple “amusement,” the African film producers were quite naturally led to regroup their efforts in order to attempt a unity on the scale of the continent. A first opportunity to meet was offered to them with the creation, in 1966 by the Tunisian Minister of Culture, of the Pan-African festival of the “Cinematographic Days of Carthage” (which acclaimed the first full-length film by Ousmane Sembène La Noire de... / Black Girl), soon followed in 1969 by the “PanAfrican Festival of the Cinema of Ouagadougou” (Burkina Faso). The following year saw the creation of the Federation Panafricaine des Cineastes (FEPACI) which united thirty-three countries of the continent and whose creed, like that of the two festivals, was to be a voice of incitation directed at the African governments in order that they might take protectionist measures which were necessary for the survival of their new-born cinema—a cinema which confirmed its promise with first attempts that were as good as the works of masters. The Cannes Film Festival in 1967 awarded a prize to the very beautiful Vent des Aures / The Winds of the Aures by the Algerian Lakhdar Hamina, which shows a lyrical and unforgettable sight: the sufferings of a mother during the

Férid Boughedir / A Cinema Fighting for Its Liberation

171

war. The following years brought two new competent African film producers: Desire Ecare from the Ivory Coast with Concerto for an Exile, a bittersweet chronicle about the African immigrants in Europe; and the Nigerian Oumarou Ganda with Cabascabo, which shows the difficulties of the reintegration into his society of an African who is an ex-serviceman with the colonial troops. Finally the Venice Film Festival of 1968 sanctioned conclusively the African cinema by giving an award to the first full-length color film by Ousmane Sembène, Le Mandat, which recounts in the tragi-comic mode the confrontation of the common man with the bureaucracy that arose from independence. It is a film which, for a long time, remained the masterpiece of its author, and which has done the most for raising the knowledge of the African cinema throughout the world. After this film, five great artistic tendencies were henceforth to divide the destiny of the African cinema, whether it be in the north or in the south of the Sahara. The colonial fate of yesterday and the necessities of development today have in effect created among all these works an astonishing continuity of themes, and of preoccupations which go beyond the existing frontiers. One rediscovers in the Maugrabin films, as in those of Black Africa, the struggle against colonialism and neocolonialism, criticism of retrograde traditions (notably maraboutism), rejection of western influence and its servile imitation, the division between town and countryside and its consequences, the rural exodus, demystification of the golden dream of emigration in Europe, and the denunciation of the lot of African women. This cinema seems to have made itself, in many respects, the worthy heir of the old tales of oral tradition which teaches us that the pursuit of money doesn’t bring happiness and that fidelity to the given word determines the meaning of life. The next stage in the history of the African cinema was marked in a significant way, by Algeria, the first country of the continent to prove that it was possible to break the stranglehold of the western distribution companies on the African market. Having made ample provision of films before decreeing a national monopoly on the importation of film in 1971, Algeria resisted for five years the boycott of the all-powerful Motion Pictures Export Association of America (MPEAA), which ended up coming to an agreement; by finally “granting” to this independent country its natural right to choose the films that it imported, and to free screen time for its local productions. It soon became one of the most well-provided of the continent.

Nationalistic Awakenings The success achieved by the Algerian cinema was to give rise to a series of cinematographic nationalizations in several African countries which took control of their screens. Senegal decreed a national monopoly on the importation

172

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

of films in January 1974. It was soon followed by Benin, then in 1975 by Madagascar. The Congo followed suit in 1979. As Senegalese production expanded, Benin made its first full-length film, and Burkina Faso was already on its second. October 1974 saw the climax of these initiatives during the fifth session of the “Cinematographic Days of Carthage,” the first “conference on the distribution and production of African and Arabian films,” uniting the leaders of the new national cinema societies. They concluded that it was necessary to regroup the African cinematographic market in order to create a necessary profitability from local films: profitability that had been impossible in each isolated territory. At the subsequent conferences which took place again at Carthage and at Ouagadougou, at Mapulo, Mozambique and at Mogadishu, Somalia, the film producers managed to work out a three-point strategy for the liberation and viability of the national cinemas in Africa—a strategy depending entirely on intervention by the state.

The Success at Cannes The year 1975, which saw the triumph of African cinema on a worldwide scale: the palme d’or of the Cannes Film Festival was awarded to the Algerian film Chronique des Annees de Braise / Chronicle of the Years of Fire by Lakhdar Hamina, thus carrying off the supreme prize of the greatest festival in the world. The same year, a veritable school of Senegalese cinema was born with several films produced by the Jeune Societe National de Cinema. Most notably were N’Diangane and Garga M’Bosse, by the prolific Mahama Traore (about lost childhood and the dramas of drought), and Xala by Ousmane Sembène, a vitriolic parody on the congenital impotence of the new African bourgeoisie who wanted to imitate the west. The Mauritanian Med Hondo carried off the main prize of the “Days of Carthage” festival with Les Bicots Negres Vos Voisins, in which he deepened his reflections on immigration that he explored in the preceding film Soleil Ô (1970). Abhellatif Ben Ammar (Tunisia) presented Sejnane, a film on the foundation of the struggle for national liberation. The Cameroonian Jean Pierre Dikongue-Pipa and the Senegalese Safi Faye, Africa’s first producer, created a sensation by the originality of their films Muna-Moto and Lettre Paysanne. All these films are of an international style, and bear witness to a maturity and an astonishing artistic quality, especially in light of their derisory financial means and their lack of future outlets. The African cinema seemed to have attained its “golden age”: it was to be short-lived.

Férid Boughedir / A Cinema Fighting for Its Liberation

173

The Response of the Foreign Companies The conference of Tunisia in October 1974, had been attended by, among others, two guests as “observers”: they were, in fact, the representative of the MPEAA who reigned over the Maghreb and English-speaking Africa, and the representative of the Union General Cinematographique, (PDG of L’UGC), the French group whose subsidiary company, Societe de Participation Cinematographique Africaine (SPACIA) dominated the cinemagraphic market of the whole of French speaking Western Africa, having repurchased the circuits of the former colonial companies SECMA and COMACICO. From then on, the foreign companies radically changed their approach to the problem—the Algerian example having proved that the time of direct confrontation was gone. Instead there had come the time of “amicable” agreements designed to safeguard national sovereignty, which had become a sensitive issue, whilst at the same time preserving the presence of the same number of Western films on African screens. The result was a boom in foreign films threatened for a moment . . . and a clear regression of the number of African films produced. Continuing its policy of apparent Africanization of its cinematographic market. SPACIA transformed itself into Union Africaine de Cinema (UAC) and started to sell its cinema houses to African individuals, to try and preserve the most important thing: the importation and distribution of the greatest possible number of foreign films, bought at low cost on the world markets (with, at the top of the list, Indian films and Chinese karate films), and making an excessive profit on African soil.

The Birth of the CIDC Then a new African partner made its appearance: the Consortium Interafricain de Distribution Cinematographique (CIDC), one of the regional consolidations that the film producers had formed by their votes, and whose general principles had been voted by several African states of the French-speaking west. It was finally set on its feet in 1979, with a film producer at its head, the Nigerian Inousa Ousseini. A “common market” of cinematographic distribution was born stretching over fourteen countries— Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Niger, Togo, Benin, Cameroon, Gabon, Congo, Chad, and Central Africa. In view of the will of the states, the UAC at the end of 1980 agreed to resell its portfolio of films to the CIDC on such conditions that France would remain one of the privileged suppliers of this market of French-speaking

174

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

countries: nevertheless, for the first time, a common market of film distribution in Africa was really controlled by Africans, who could finally introduce African films there in the normal fashion. This is what the CIDC is committed to. It has distributed since its first year some fifty African films. By trying to introduce this paradoxically new product into the market on its own soil, it regularly comes up against the unwillingness of the owners of cinema houses who prefer to put on what they know: Italian westerns, Italian melodramas, or karate films. However, the African film has slowly begun to take its place, and the public is helping to conquer the oppositions to the system. It triumphed with the two films that carried off the main prizes of the seventh and eighth FESPACOs, Djeli (1981) by Fadika Kramo-Lanciné from the Ivory Coast and Finye / The Wind from Souleymane Cissé of Mali. The two films, although considered “cultural” and not commercial enough for the owners of the cinema houses, have nevertheless beaten all box office records in their respective countries.

1982: The Manifesto of Niamey Assembled in conference at Niamey, Niger in March 1982, African film producers drew up a manifesto in which they readjusted their earlier stance. The experience of the last ten years had, in fact, shown the shortcomings of total nationalization. (Too many governments considered the “seventh art” as an instrument of propaganda and have only financed films which glorify the government.) The film producers now called for a balance between state-controlled and private enterprise. The state would have control of the distribution market and voting of protectionist laws in favor of national production— above all the “cultural type.” The private producers (that is to say more often than not, the film producers themselves) would have the freedom of choice of subjects, in a system which would guarantee their financial downfall. Now that the governments have begun to curb the appetites of the suppliers of foreign films, the film producers would like to break away from a state protection that would be too omnipresent. Their new creed is as follows: the cinema must be financed not by state budgets but by money from the cinema. What money from the cinema? That which is spent everyday by millions of cinemagoers to see often very bad foreign films, and of which a part—the taxes—must rightfully return to local film production. While waiting for this to come about in all the countries concerned, there will certainly follow yet many more conferences, many seminars, many manifestos. The (too long) march of the African film producers towards economic

Férid Boughedir / A Cinema Fighting for Its Liberation

175

Figure 1. Férid Boughedir (fourth from left) and others in between sessions at FESPACO, 1972. Image courtesy of FESPACO.

viability of their films continues, even if artistically and culturally, the African films have become an undeniable reality. Férid Boughedir is a director, critic, and film historian who began by making documentaries about the new cinema coming out in Caméra d’Afrique and Caméra arabe, both of which were presented in the Official Selection at Cannes. His first fictional work, Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces, was shown at Cannes in 1990 to acclaim from critics and audiences alike and remains to this day the biggest success in Tunisian film. A Summer in La Goulette, in competition in Berlin (1996), also won many prizes. A passionate lover of film, he became Delegate, then Director, of the oldest Pan-African festival, the Carthage Film Festival. He finished Villa Jasmin in 2008, coproduced by France 3 and Arte. His 2016 comedy, The Sweet Smell of Spring, won Best Arabic Film at the 2016 Cairo International Film Festival.

Note Originally published as Férid Boughedir, “A Cinema Fighting For Its Liberation,” in Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence, and Oppositionality, ed. Michael T. Martin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996): 111–117.

Where Are the African Women Filmmakers? Haile Gerima

F

or most of you who are wondering about the title of my piece, “Where Are the African Women Filmmakers?” don’t feel alone, join me. I myself to this very minute have continued to wonder about this dangerous assignment. My only excuse is that I was assigned by a long-distance telephone call despite my several attempts to disqualify myself for several reasons including health. After pondering to myself aloud for days, I finally decided to take the assignment as a challenge and examine the topic not from an academic perspective but from a personal examination using my own life as a point of departure. I felt the only honest course that I could take would be to ask and explore why I wanted to aspire to become a filmmaker, and not my sisters who are, after all, better storytellers than I. The introduction of cinema in Africa is in the midst of two contradictory social systems—feudalism and neocolonialism. Both of these two social systems have brought with them their own versions of the role of women in society. In the field of communications, feudalism, for its own advantage, had women participate as storytellers in order to transmit a given value. Women were, by and large, guardians and storage houses of stories that transmitted the basic and fundamental philosophical values to attentive younger generations, teaching them a value system involving such universals as good and evil, love and hate, mythical heroes and heroines, funerals, weddings, births, and so on . . . of the social order. When neocolonialism arose, it brought with it cinema to be used as a tool and agent of neocolonial cultural domination. It overthrew women as storytellers and recruited colonial and neocolonial men as their replacements, as agents of neocolonialism. Cinema as a medium of storytelling is by nature powerfully domineering. We can say it brought on an era of dictatorship of the cinema in mass communications. When cinema emerged in Africa it devastated and eliminated all other institutional storytelling media and empowered itself as the sole transmitter of stories and values. The nature of cinema with its

Haile Gerima / African Women Filmmakers

177

magical aura shrinking and elongating time and space added to the dark theatre full of blinking subjugated eyes, renders the audience vulnerable to its overwhelming control. This in turn puts the film storyteller in a position of a dictator, a dictator that in the end helps neocolonialism to succeed in colonizing masses of people. It is a new colonial communication weapon that effectively subjugates people culturally as well as politically in most parts of Africa. Whenever a local person is recruited to be a film storyteller, automatically the assignment goes to a male member of the colonial society while in the same situation women are made to be the only objects of its deformed exploitative values. In using women as exotic sex objects, doorways to evil rather than good, such movies basically transmit the feudal and neocolonial value systems. The very profession or occupation of film then becomes a male oriented institution setting in motion a standard and stereotyped tradition of male domination in the making of films. This leaves the so-called African filmmakers half feudal and half neocolonial in their outlook and espoused vision. Men have always been the easy targets of being agents for foreign interests, even during primitive colonialism. The coming of the cinema effectively nurtured that role. Neocolonial cinema brings with it its own traditional bias against women. It also imposes these values as standards for all of its local agents. Be it in the theater where movies are shown, mediocre national film schools or scholarships across the ocean, the very tradition of cinema effectively cultivates demented values as to the roles and images of women in the cinema. The depiction and portrayal of women in African cinema is, by and large, a deformed one. Nevertheless, it has three different trends. The first one is a school of thought whereby the very idea of motion picture, being commercial, uses as a primary ingredient, women portrayed as sexual objects. By so doing, further devastating the image and role of women to the larger society. In most cases, in the eyes of this type of filmmaker, women characters are shallow. Their only use is as sexual and violent targets, for the sexual desires and fantasies of men. In the final analysis, these films are from a school of filmmaking that daily oppresses women by propagating all the evils of the feudal and neocolonial social order by depicting numerous deformed women characters in its films. The second trend of African filmmakers is that of men who have taken the road of being advocates of national salvation. They are patriotic in themes dealing with subject matters that are basically saying that everything about Africa is great, its past glorious, and that the only problem is for Africans to inherit their own continent. All issues of gender, the oppression of national minorities, and class are European transported evils that will evaporate with

178

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

the departure of the white race. Africans then will live in harmony. In this school of thought African women are supposed to be good housewives to be symbols of a pure Africa. In urban Africa this neocolonial prescription for women is for them to aspire only to be nurses and secretaries. And, if by chance a given country has bought an aeroplane, women can be depicted as stewardesses. In a very sophisticated way, the subtext this group of filmmakers perpetuates is the inequality of women in all endeavors of humanity. In both categories consciously or unconsciously, African filmmakers use the medium of cinema to advance this demented view as a normal, accepted human value to the masses of people. A third trend of African filmmakers is that of the progressive filmmakers, filmmakers who attempt to depict liberated men and women with some kind of social, political, and economic vision. Although in these types of films, African women still are the conception of men filmmakers and do not address the crux of the issue. Nevertheless, with only a few African women filmmakers around, these films are, by and large, taken as constructive roads towards improving, at least, the portrayal of women in film by men. None of the three trends addresses the issue of the absence of African women filmmakers. Existing in the background of the above categories are a small number of women filmmakers with profound contribution to the African filmmaking scene. Safi Faye’s Letters from My Village (1975, Senegal) and Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972, Angola) are milestone contributions in the development of African film history. Nevertheless, they are underrepresented in the larger proportion of the filmmaking community. A more critical analysis of their work from an ideological to an aesthetic perspective, I prefer to leave to the appropriate people. All I can say is that the African filmmakers cannot go on with business as usual without a constant and critical concern for the underrepresentation of women. ln my own lifetime, around the fire, I grew up hearing stories that told of heroines and heroes of my past. Stories that were imbued with the punishment and rewards of good and evil. Certainly this was a school whose magnitude was that of a philosophy class. Every night, before the electricity came to our house, I was sitting around the fire engrossed, looking at that wrinkled Grandmother of mine who transmitted so much of our past to my sisters and brothers. Unlike in my father’s time, when he had to contend with the dictates of feudalism only, I was propelled into the two most backwards social systems man has ever created—neocolonialism and feudalism. In the introduction of film, radio, and television, this contradiction was intensified. In Gondar, a small town in the middle of Ethiopia, I have witnessed the tug of war that was waged between the traditional value system and

Haile Gerima / African Women Filmmakers

179

Figure 1. African women filmmakers Sarah Maldoror (top) and Safi Faye (bottom). Images in the public domain.

the neocolonial value system. Forty-four parishes of traditional orthodox churches, two mosques, and communal storyteller grandmothers and grandfathers in every house all stood proud though defeated against one powerful adversary: one solitary cinema house built during the war by the Italians. The most underestimated cultural booby-trap left as a legacy of the defeat the Italians suffered in the hands of the Ethiopian patriots. This was one cinema, a napalm bomb of ideas that could effectively subjugate its target, especially that of the younger generation, my generation. The cinema subliminally carried the rally baton of colonial traditions that had historically entered the community in the past through seemingly harmless vessels

180

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

such as missionaries, aides, teachers, peace corps workers, Kennedys, GIs, bubblegum, etc. The cinema unleashed potential cultural emissaries in the images of Charlie Chaplin, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Greta Garbo, and John Wayne . . . What an armed force for my Grandmother to contend with. For most young men of my age in the town, the cinema was the place to go. However, the cinema house was no place for my sisters to go; only bubble gum chewing prostitutes went to the movies. After cheering for John Wayne and Shirley Temple, and Tarzan destroying an entire race of people, exhausted and hungry, I would return to reality—my house. Upon entering the premises of my home, I would be confronted with what I had abandoned. My outmoded Grandmother sitting around the fire surrounded by my sisters, the little brothers, listening to her stories. As I ate the dinner that had been waiting for me for hours, under the fading soundtrack of my Grandmother’s stories, with my new movie house consciousness and outlook I began to judge my Grandmother’s stories. Her stories have no special effects, no explosions, and certainly no violent killings, no spectacular fire and last, but not least, her stories did not have my newly discovered heroes and heroines. It did not seem to have the White people. As I collapsed to a sleeping position, still under her roaring voice I hear her comment to my sisters, telling them that I have been possessed by the devil, by the devil in that big Italian house, that I am no good, that I have turned into ashes. She mutters “Good Lord, a son of a fire turned to ashes.” Of course, the fire being my father, and I, according to her, have turned to ashes. I fade into a deep sleep that becomes a nightmare in the middle of the night. I see myself on the side of the Euro-American hero, carrying his loads, warning him of evil people coming to harm him, people that most of the time looked like me. And I was gratified to fight side by side with my new master, gaining his approval for being such a good henchman, a good lackey. The next morning when I wake up from my sleep of my newly adopted world, I go to the mountains and join my friends recreating my make-believe world, imitating and reenacting the movies in the most unlikely places that even movies were not made from. In the afternoon, we go back to the cinema house and start all over again with our routine. My Grandmother now is my new adversary for daring to remind me to return to my soul. I am no more in her crowd, no more her listener. I am now an agent of corruption to the other children within our house by bringing alien, foreign values and infecting my sisters: a war of two storytellers in one house. On one hand, was my Grandmother and her stories of her ancestors; on the other hand was myself, a new agent of neocolonial stories, corrupting the souls of my younger sisters and brothers by telling them stories straight from the movie house, reenacting with great enthusiasm of loyalty and imagination.

Haile Gerima / African Women Filmmakers

181

While I was at the movies, day and night, nurtured by neocolonialism, aspiring and entertaining alien thoughts, expanding my subjugated boundaries, at the same time I was contracting and limiting my historic castes and taking a baton that would legitimize me as a storyteller, a responsibility to be inherited from my Grandmother. I denied myself the logical historic transaction. To make a long story short, finally I became a filmmaker, through years of transformation and self-examination, in search of my identity and lost soul, I began to tell stories. Stories that at best could say, “don’t be like me, learn from my mistakes.” And that’s why I am obsessed by my stolen history. In order to apprehend the lost eye and ear, I had to at least mentally travel to the fireplace where I left my Grandmother, a long time ago. I racked my brain and tried to flashback into my past, to search for the echo, the echo of my Grandmother, the true storyteller. For my own salvation, peace, and harmony, I have to dig deep into my brain to hear her faint voice in order to rehabilitate myself. I have come to grips with my past. In fact, every utterance, every story that I try to tell is of my Grandmother. At times I feel like a fraud, a story stealer, a false messenger of stories of women in my life such as my mother, my sisters who have never had the opportunity to tell their stories. Sometimes, I impersonate myself as a medium in order to reverberate the stories of women in my life. I emerge in the middle of the overthrowing of women as storytellers in my town as an agent of neocolonialism. In my years of experience as a filmmaker, after seeing so many works of my colleagues, male filmmakers, I sometimes think that a larger portion of our stories are appropriated from women. Of course, some use it to repent, and others to discover, explore, and find themselves. However, whatever kind of rationalization, one thing remains clear, that our film stories remain half and incomplete in motion pictures. As long as women in equal and fair numbers remain nonparticipants in motion picture endeavors we cannot continue to declare the existence of an African cinema. In the final analysis, to have a balanced, democratic world, the other half have to speak for themselves. As long as women are excluded from this most powerful medium of expression, everything that is expressed will be half true and lopsided. If there is anything that we can learn from the hundred years of Western cinema, it is the exclusion of women. It is the overthrow of women from the role of storytellers. For everything that is wrong, for everything that is deficient in the Western society, for all the demented expression of men in the Western world, the fundamental cause could be literally traced to the absence of women as a role of storytellers. The experience and point of view of women is an inseparable view for any world that attempts to develop a more harmonious democratic social system. The view of women in cinema is the missing chapter. African cinema

182

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

still has a chance to correct this unequal access. It is for all filmmakers, especially to learn from the lessons of Europe, and create conditions to unleash the full participation of all women. It is a fact to this day that there is not a single African film industry. It is also a fact that most of the ideas that have been put into motion pictures are financed by outside capital, and it is also a fact that African filmmakers are powerless and in most cases don’t even do the films that they want to do. Neocolonialism selectively finances those ideas that it considers important to be made. A great number of African filmmakers today write ideas for films for the approval of Europeans and Americans. The very creative process that is important in the making of movies is prematurely intercepted by outside considerations. One can say that we are surrogate storytellers for neocolonial financial establishments. Under these realities and conditions, African filmmakers might feel helpless and even desperate for their own interest, rather than for the collective transformation of African cinema. The emergence of women filmmakers is crucial. There are at least over two hundred selfdeclared neocolonially sanctioned male neocolonials. While there are only less than ten African women filmmakers. It is a tragic commentary on all so-called intellectuals and liberation warriors of Africa. In festival after festival, ninety-nine percent African male filmmakers congregate, parade, discuss, and pass resolutions. At no time, to my knowledge, has there been an agenda that included the absence of African women filmmakers. This is a testimony to the lopsided journey that African cinema has taken. What about our grandmothers, our mothers, and our sisters? Although, judging from our own expression, these women have played a great deal in the formative years of these male filmmakers, in fact, most of our stories are appropriated, stolen, snatched, and plagiarized from the many faceless women that we have come across in our lifetime. We have been certainly nurtured by the true storytellers of Africa; our grandmothers, our grandfathers too. In traditional Africa my Grandmother possessed the power to nurture and mold my views. Those of us who happened to grow up in the most interesting period whereby the traditional mode of communication was being replaced by the industrial mode, that converted stories and made them as part of neocolonial manufactured goods in order to normalize and uphold the cultural, economic domination of the African continent. We have witnessed the overthrow of a tradition that had existed for generations, transmitting a history and social values of a people, our true storytellers, our grandfathers and our grandmothers. When I look at Safi Faye’s films, and contemplate their stories from the angle of view that they take, this clearly testified to the silenced views of many more women that will pass this time without sharing their story. Their temperament, their melody, their experience that would be so crucial for us to

Haile Gerima / African Women Filmmakers

183

share will be nonexistent. Until our sisters in equal number express themselves in motion picture, we cannot say or speak of the existence of African cinema in general. True, male or female, one thing is certain—to be a filmmaker in Africa is oppressive. The basic elements are not in place. All of us are nomadic. We have to travel the breadth and width of Europe and America begging for money. Whatever these conditions are, they are historic heritages. Nevertheless, women have to be part and parcel of this bitter experience and through organizations, associations, and festivals we can confront each other on the issue of the absence of African women filmmakers. Whenever any one of us is fortunate enough in winning the lottery that enables one to make a film, we should create the conditions for women to fully participate in our modest productions. We have a responsibility to demystify cinema to people who are denied the very possibilities of film expression. The participation of women in cinema will also develop, transform, and challenge all filmmakers for quality and responsible expression through this medium. We can speak of a serious and progressive African cinema. We should lobby governments and film agencies to recruit and employ African women filmmakers, organize workshops, and establish laboratories in order to encourage and recruit aspiring African women filmmakers to collectively organize alternative funding approaches to filmmaking that include women filmmakers. Haile Gerima is an independent filmmaker and professor of film at Howard University in Washington, DC. Born and raised in Ethiopia, he emigrated to the United States in 1967. He studied acting in Chicago before entering the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, where his exposure to Latin American films inspired him to mine his own cultural legacy. After completing his thesis film,  Bush Mama  (1975), he received international acclaim with Harvest: 3000 Years (1976), an Ethiopian drama that won the Grand Prize at the Locarno Film Festival. After the award-winning  Ashes & Embers  (1982) and the documentaries Wilmington 10—U.S.A. 10,000 (1978) and After Winter: Sterling Brown (1985), Gerima filmed his epic Sankofa (1993).

Note Originally published as Haile Gerima, “Where Are the African Women Film-makers?,” in Africa at the Pictures, ed. Keith Shiri (London: National Film Theatre, 1993), 64–72.

The FEPACI and Its Artistic Legacies Sada Niang

T

he presentation, criticism, and contextualization of African cinema have traditionally started with the African experience of modernity. In his 1992 African Cinema: Politics and Culture, Manthia Diawara located the emergence of African cinema, its liberation narratives, and realist aesthetics in a desire to rebut the reductions of the colonial past, Frank Ukadike in his most comprehensive Black African Cinema unveils the inventive imagery of colonial cinema and film.1 In subsequent chapters, drawing on the writings of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Frantz Fanon, and various other theoreticians of the colonial experience, Ukadike devises an analytical grid for films made by Africans from various regions of the continent. Both Joseph Gugler and Melissa Thackway insist on the need for African filmmakers of the 1960s– 1970s, to renew the identity constructions of their peoples.2 Lastly in his Francophone African Cinema: History, Culture, Politics and Theory, K. Martial Frindéthié revamps the dominant features of this historical approach before thematically analyzing the films of Sembène.3 Almost inevitably, the theoretical framework of these studies rests on one of the single most important historical experiences of the continent: its domination by the West starting in the early twentieth century. Whereas Nationalist African Cinema duly acknowledges the validity and the contribution of such studies, it also proposes to widen the context of the emergence of African cinema by highlighting its connection with Latin American filmmakers and its situational solidarity with World cinema at large.4 For as much as the first generation of African filmmakers crafted “a cinema of revolt against colonialism, and then against neocolonialism, dependency and eurocentrism” they also inscribed their creation within a vast movement of contestation against colonial domination in Africa, dictatorial regimes in Europe, Latin America, and conservative politics in Canada and the United States.5 At the same time and as Roy Armes points out, most of these filmmakers were part of an emerging African elite, were trained overseas in some of the most prestigious film schools in the West and, as such, displayed particular sociological traits which will influence their creative tendencies:

Sada Niang / African Women Filmmakers

185

The elites that emerged under colonialism at virtually all the key points of interaction between traditional societies and the West are historically unique in terms of their Westernization. They owe their power neither to initial wealth . . . nor to direct involvement in production or even ownership of the means of production. . . . These elites are also the stratum through which “the ideological, moral and philosophical traditions of Western civilization have been transferred, at least superficially to non-Western societies.6

The vast protest movement that galvanized most filmmakers of the continent started in the 1950s. Early in his Postcolonial African Cinema, Ken Harrow captures perfectly the mood and the series of events that framed the period: The time was the late 1950s and early 1960s, the time of the struggle of the end of colonialism and for independence. It was a time that defined its values around the works of Fanon, Memmi, Cabral; around the war of Algeria, which accounted for the great importance that came to be attached to the Battle of Algiers (1965) as a signature piece of revolutionary filmmaking; around Marxist analyses of class struggle and imperialism; around the solidarity of the black struggle. It was a period that laid the foundation for the battle against neocolonialism that saw the onset of the compromised new leadership that introduced one party states, corruption and rule by force, thus betraying the struggle. After Senghor ascended to the presidency of Senegal, other African leaders espoused the rhetoric of Negritude, black independence or authenticity. . . . The project of the filmmakers was to expose the failures of their abusive authoritarianism. . . . The general feeling of the time was that we could not afford to indulge in sentimental, subjective explorations of individual sensibilities and personal relations, as in European New Wave cinema, while the larger questions of life or death import for the African community were at stake.7

The picture painted by Harrow here in broad brushstrokes is further completed by Roy Armes who identifies the 1959 “overthrow of the corrupt dictator Batista by guerillas under Fidel Castro” culminating into the Cuban Revolution as one of the overarching factors which stimulated the elites of the 1960s, filmmakers included.8 At the First Festival of Negro Arts that took place in Dakar in 1966, a fruitful follow-up to the meeting of Negro writers in Rome in 1958, the craze for Cuban music by African populations was further strengthened by the performance of Cuban poets such as Nicolás Guillén broadcast throughout the country.9 My contention is that of all the changes that inspired African filmmakers of the first generation on the African continent, the two most decisive ones for the group were the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the Algerian War of Independence. The Cuban

186

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Revolution energized filmmakers like Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas into regrouping around the idea of a cinema that distinguished itself not by the locations it features, the languages it spoke, or the depth of portrayal of the psychology of the characters. As Nicolas Marzano suggests, these films set themselves apart by the “ideology [they] espoused and the consciousness [they] displayed.”10 Solanas, Getino and later, Fernando Birri, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and Julio García Espinosa converged around the project of Third Cinema. Their discourse and theoretical insights framed nationalist African cinema and helped define its aesthetics. In 1958 Guinea, under the leadership of trade unionist Sékou Touré, claimed its independence from France. De Gaulle’s dream of a “Francophone Commonwealth” was dealt a first blow and a few months later, “freedom” was celebrated in the streets of Conakry. In the rest of the continent, various negotiations for independence were underway, spurred by a deep sense of renewal at the end of the Second World War. A similar mood prevailed among filmmakers engaged in countering the clichéd views enshrined in the colonial archive. Several meetings were held, all them grounded in similar activities in the southern Atlantic, in a different geographical space, and with different histories. In 1965, the Brazilian Glauber Rocha provided a radical view of cinema with his manifesto The Aesthetics of Hunger. In it, he argued along Fanonian lines that violence was the “noblest” reaction to the overwhelming hunger placating the majority of Brazil’s poor. Cinema, he argued, should not provide spectators with Technicolor cloaks for their misery, but put their condition face to face with their inability to recognize and bring a radical solution to their own plight.11 Deus e o diabo na terra do sol / Black God, White Devil (dir. Glauber Rocha, 1964, Brazil), a film whose plot deals with issues similar to the plots of Borom Sarret (dir. Ousmane Sembène, 1963, Senegal), Xala (dir. Ousmane Sembène, 1973, Senegal), Pour ceux qui savent (dir. Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1971, Senegal) depicts the consequences of indecision for the poor and hungry. In 1967, Brazil experienced a bloody coup état. Rocha produced a much-acclaimed film (Terra em transe, 1967) dramatizing the even greater perils of indecisiveness in such politically troubled times. Rocha’s aesthetic statements and achievements provided the foundations for cinema novo. Its proponents held that beauty was a means, not an end in itself and advocated for images that would rouse, inspire, and spur its spectators into acting for political change. For Rocha, neutrality and cinema could not coexist. Just like popular music and literature, this relatively new art form had to descend into the streets, feature simple but eloquent situations and profess an unlimited trust in “things, facts, people.”12 Both Deus e o diabo na terra do sol and Terra em transe feature characters saddled with the daily tasks of survival and binding

Sada Niang / African Women Filmmakers

187

their poverty to the comfort of the ruling bourgeoisie. The same year (1967), a medical doctor and filmmaker from Chile organized the first meeting of Latin American filmmakers at Viña del Mar (Chile). The objective was to break the isolation of filmmakers from different countries, but the meeting also offered an opportunity to discuss the production and writings of Rocha. In 1968, as students and workers rebelled throughout the western world, Latin American filmmakers met again in Merida (Venezuela) and, buoyed by the numbers and the success of the Cuban Revolution, resolved to create films that would lift the “web of lies and confusion that arise from dependence.” In 1969, Solanas and Getino published the manifesto of the Third Cinema which defined not only Third Cinema, but also the critical apparatus that should go along with it. This document and the films which later articulated its proposals have framed the debates leading to the formation of the FEPACI and the adoption of several of its manifestos. Thus, of all the possible external influences that spurred the rebirth of cinema on the African continent, none was so predominant as the Latin American. It provided the theoretical language, the political discourse, the aesthetic framework and a possible distribution model. Such an influence paved the way for organizing against the proliferation of B-movies in cities, the increasing popularity of “dissident” filmmakers such as Alphonse Béni and the dire state of distribution opportunities. Mariano Mestman, an Argentinean film historian, was the first to point out the linkage. Towards the late 1960s, there was a gradual consolidation of a cinematic political project whose main principles were very similar to the “Third Cinema” proposed by Solanas and Getino or to García Espinosa’s “imperfect cinema,” but also included claims in other Asian or African manifestos, that is an aesthetic-political identity—built around an opposition to the Hollywood mainstream model rather than a distinct aesthetic prescription— which did not encompass all the films made in the Third World, but only those perceived as an expression of national liberation or cultural decolonization processes, although it must be borne that limits varies according to the different interpretations involved.13 In Africa, the creation of the FEPACI (Federation of African Filmmakers) at the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage in 1969 was the first step towards such a consolidation. At first, the newly minted FEPACI only “made a commitment to use films for the liberation of colonized countries as a step towards African unity under the sign of Pan-Africanism.” It hosted a meeting of Third World filmmakers in Algiers (1973), and sent delegations to a second one in Buenos Aires (May 1974) and a third one in June 1974 in Montreal, Quebec. Most scholars of African cinema know the Algiers meeting but not so the Buenos Aires and the Montreal ones. In Algiers, Committee One of the Third World filmmakers’ meeting included members

188

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

from Latin America (Fernando Birri, Rios Perez, Silva, and Cedron), Moussa Diakité came from Guinea, Mohamed Abdelwahab from Morocco, six from Algeria (El Hachimi Cherif, Lamine Merbah, Mache Kaled, Fettar Sidi Ali, Bensalah Mohamed, and Meziani Abdelhakim); and one from GuineaBissau, a Portuguese colony still at war with the Salazar government for its independence. 14 There were also three observers, one from each of the following countries: Sweden, Guinea-Bissau, and Italy. None of the members of this committee came from the former African or Caribbean British or Dutch colonies, South, East, or even central Africa. Nonetheless its recommendations would forever stamp the films of the continent for the better part of the second half of the twentieth century. They would also provide a now much contested critical grid for the evaluation of these films, well into the twentieth century. The two largest contingents in Committee One came from Latin America and the host country Algeria. Of the Latin American group, the most influential member was Fernando Birri. He had studied film in Italy, at the Rome Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia15 before returning to his native Argentina in 1956, just a year after Perón had been overthrown by General Pedro Aramburu. Birri was driven by the necessity to document and spur to action millions of marginalized fellow countrymen. He set out to portray the drastic living conditions of the urban and rural poor in Argentina. Early in his career (1950s), he founded the Film Institute of the National University of the Littoral in Argentina, the first film school in Latin America. With his students he produced the first of a long series of influential documentaries, Tire dié (1960), showing the daily ritual of children “running across the railroad trestle begging for coins from passengers of the passing trains.”16 Film for him, was not “synonymous with entertainment or spectacle”17 but a tool to investigate and expose the cause of social injustice, poverty, and denounce the excesses of bourgeois values. It was, above all, “the most valuable tool of communication of our times.” As his combined career as filmmaker and educator progressed, his involvement in local politics grew. In 1961, as the democratic government of President Frondizi was pushed out of power by a military coup, Birri went into political exile and traveled widely throughout Latin America. In all likelihood, he was living in Rome in December 1973. He had spent the few years previous to his coming to Algeria living in Cuba. Birri’s Tire dié (1960) was produced three years before Sembène’s Borom sarret and earned him the status of pioneer in the new Latin American cinema. Drawing from his neorealist training, Birri opted for a narrative “shorn of anything but the barest elements,”18 deeply engaged in the burning issues of the “barrios” and featuring non-professional actors for scenes closer to daily human experiences. Its documentary quality was unmistakable. To

Sada Niang / African Women Filmmakers

189

film critics, Tire dié is known as the first socially committed film of international standing in the new Latin American cinema. That Birri’s banner film displayed an important documentary aspect is hardly surprising. His training at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia de Roma encouraged students “to shoot everything on location [so as] to express life in its most convincing manner and with the harshness of documentaries.”19 Tire dié broke the “prison of images” left by centuries of colonial domination by creating images mirroring the “objective conditions of the urban and rural poor” much in the tradition of Italian neorealism. Birri sought to “erase the line between the artist and the public,” and looked for ways of “dissolving aesthetics into the life of society.” A contemporary of Ousmane Sembène, his goal was to reinvent the history of the Latin American poor by boldly “taking over the creation and fashioning of their images.” His characters spoke in their own languages, inhabited their open spaces, articulated their own emotions, suffered the same frustrations, and experienced similar joys and pains as the many rural and urban poor in Argentina. In short, realist and “populist” aesthetics framed his creations. In addition he displayed and made extensive use of the values and cultural artifacts of the marginalized in society. The locations of his shooting, the costumes of his characters, the plot of Tire dié, and indeed the accent of the dialogues integrate none of the features usually associated with elite culture, and in this sense add to the novelty of his images. Birri’s Bolivian counterpart at the Algiers meeting, Humberto Rios was also a known filmmaker. By 1973, he had already produced several shorts: Faeno (1960), Pequeno illusion (1961), Argentina Mayo 1969 (1969), Eloy (1969) and one feature-length film Al Grito de este pueblo (1972). Bolivian cinema was undergoing a complete, albeit controversial, revival under the leadership of Jorge Sanjinés20 who, on his return from Chile in 1960 had joined with Oscar Soria21 and Ricardo Rada to create the Kollasuyo group.22 In 1961, Sanjinés and Soria created a film society, a film magazine, and the first national cinema school, La Escuela Fílmica Boliviana. However, “the government closed the film school when Soria and Sanjinés declined the suggestion to make it an official entity.”23 The experience lasted no more than six months. Nonetheless, the group did not disband. It raised funds and film stocks through a series of commissioned documentaries and in 1963 produced its first film Revolución (1963). The feat would be repeated three years later with the production of Ukamau (1966) directed by none other than Jorge Sanjinés.24 Ukamau, Julianne Burton argues, belongs to a series of films which “served no other purpose than to remind bourgeois and petit bourgeois audiences that another class of peoples existed—in the city itself, in the mines, in the countryside—who constantly fought against

190

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

the incredible misery in a quiet and stoic manner.”25 At first enthusiastically receptive to it, the Bolivian government later disapproved of it, arguing that the film was made “to incite the Indians.” Subsequently “all existing prints of the film were ordered destroyed.”26 Sanjinés would be sacked from the Instituto de Cinematográphico Bolivian,27 but the film would be awarded the prize of the Great Young Filmmaker’s Award at the 1967 Film festival.28 Energized by their international success, Sanjinés and his collaborators later adopted the title of the film as the name of a production company that had a prolific “period from 1968 through 1971.”29 In 1979, Sanjinés returned from a three-year exile in Ecuador and published the principles which guided his film practice and eventually helped define Bolivian national cinema of the 1960s and 1970s including the films of Humberto Rios: Teoría y práctica de un cine junto al pueblo. This manifesto argued against leisurely cinema and, for a radical, militant art with images forceful enough to motivate and “inflict . . . blows upon its enemy.”30 Sanjinés and the members of the Ukamau suggested that cinema could not forfeit its political destiny by adopting a neutral, non-committal stance. “Film,” they wrote, “sides either with the people or with those who seek the peoples’ corruption and annihilation.”31 It is a tool meant to mirror the objective economic conditions of the masses, an instrument for lifting them away from the century old lies and mystifications of the past. Such a cinema uses a language that is the same as the people’s, reflects the daily imagery of the masses, features a creativity embedded in the daily cultural practices of the masses, and highlights modes of resistance devised by the latter under precarious conditions. Understandably, the filmmaker is defined as an active member of the masses, constantly in contact with them and forever shying away from the temptation of acting as a lone artist. The new Bolivian cinema, the authors of Teoría y práctica de un cine junto al pueblo further argued, avoids “escapism and does not seek to distract the spectator now seeking the truth. It proposes to inform that spectator, to move him, to stimulate him into action, and to give him confidence in his own strength.”32 In short, this cinema delivers ideas, shapes the political consciousness, guides, and teaches its spectators. By its very nature, it is didactic. Through its films, the spectator discards his or her former lethargy, develops a social responsibility, and charts his/her own future. She or he becomes aware of his destiny as an agent of social change. Art—in this context—is art for a cause, created, shared, and acted upon collectively. The world it describes, the scenery it adopts, and the characters it puts on the screen fit “a representation not so much in a mimetic but a political sense, as a delegation of voice.”33 In their costumes, living conditions, and dialogues, these actors are made to stand for other similarly positioned persons in society. Their speech, desires, frustrations, and joys are constructed according to the real-life experience

Sada Niang / African Women Filmmakers

191

of voiceless persons in society. The fictional world of the films mirrors the real one with a twist. For here, a transformative moment buttressed by new heights in social consciousness turns the alienating features of everyday life into a world “characterized by internal coherence, plausible causality, psychological realism, and the appearance of a seamless spatial and temporal reality.”34 Finally, the narratives of these films are, more often than not, linear. Elements of the plot are made to follow a logical pattern, temporally ordered and leading to a political transformation. These ideas permeated the Algiers conference of December 1973, eventually helping to produce a manifesto advocating a cinema “for and by the people,” a conception of filmmakers as “spears of change” and foremost teachers. Also present in Committee One of the Algiers meeting was the Italian neorealist filmmaker Salvatore Piscicelli. Piscicelli was a filmmaker with roots in the South, an artist who “signaled his affinity with . . . lower-class, southern setting, and simultaneously claimed his place within a tradition of regional cinema.”35 His 1979 Immacolata e Concetta shuns nostalgia in favor of the here and now of postwar Italy. It deliberately articulated the need for greater authenticity in postwar Italy by featuring local stories and “local actors familiar with the Neapolitan dialect,” thus aligning himself with Visconti’s and de Sica’s approach. O’Healy argues, in Immacolata e Concetta, [Piscicelli] adopts a critical approach toward various aspects of life in southern Italy—a critique that is usually, though not always, articulated by an outsider. His examples of this tradition include Visconti’s La terra trema and the work of Francesco Rossi. Piscicelli’s own aim as a filmmaker was neither to denounce nor to romanticize conditions in the South, but simply to demonstrate existing realities. . . . He thus aligns himself with a tradition of regional filmmaking that purportedly takes an “affirmative” approach to life in southern Italy, acknowledging its difficulties without exaggeration or condemnation.36

As the official host of the conference, Algeria sent a delegation which totaled half of all the participants to this committee. Several of these delegates had already produced a film which, in the spirit of the times, recounted the “years of embers,” by retelling the history of resistance of the Algerian masses. Algerian cinema, Mestman writes, was the big engine of Maghrebi cinema and the new Arab cinema, as well as one of the highest manifestations of the emergence of the new African cinemas. . . . By 1973, it had a solid structure with agencies such as the ONCIC (office national pour le commerce et l’industrie cinématographique) in charge of the filmmaking and distribution sectors which had summoned the meeting.37

192

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Algerian filmmakers of the postwar independence shared three prominent characteristics with their counterparts of the first generation of filmmakers in Africa south of the Sahara: first, all of them are linked to the war of liberation or various forms of nationalist militancy,38 second, most of them were born between 1925 and 1930, just as the first wave of African filmmakers, thirdly, several of them lacked formal film school training. Lakhdar Hamina, for example, “a graduate of Algeria’s own short-lived film school Institut national de cinéma” rapidly abandoned his studies at the Prague film school, FAMU, for trainee work in the Barrandov film studios in Czechoslovakia.39 Mohamed Slim Riad and Badie trained in French television, at ORTF (Office de la radio et télévision françaises). Mustapha Kateb was a professional actor on stage and screen who had directed El Ghoula, “a film on rural corruption,”40 Farès had collaborated on short films and wrote scripts, Ahmed Rachedi had participated in the various collectives formed by Vautier.41 In more ways than one, Algerian cinema of the 1970s represented an ideal for African filmmakers. It was born in a country that became a settlement colony as early as 1830, and which won a war of independence against the colonial occupiers, almost a century and a half later. Local religions, cultural practices, and modes of ownership of the land were extolled to stoke the fire of the bravery among freedom fighters. Throughout the Third World, in particular the colonized Third World, narratives of its liberation struggle were retold by local nationalist militants. After it gained independence from the French in 1962, Algeria became one of the few countries on the continent where, it seemed, the visual arts were raised into true partners in the process of nation building that followed. In 1965, the Centre national du cinéma algérien (CNCA) was founded. It started producing films on the memories of the independence war shortly afterwards. The Office des actualités algériennes (OAA) was created in 1963 and directed by Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina, the only Arab director to win a Palme d’Or.42 Screenings were organized throughout the country.43 The new Algerian government “played a major part in the organization of all aspects of cinema,” including production, distribution, and exhibition. In 1967, the OAA were fused into the Office national du cinema et de l’industrie cinématoraphique (ONCIC). Roy Armes points out that the 1970s were “the only decade in which Algerian film production was not disrupted by administrative changes,” thus greatly boosting the number of feature films produced during this period.44 The decade witnessed two of Lahkdar Hamina’s films Décembre (1972) and Chronique des années de braise (1975). Most films of this decade feature the war of independence. But the creation of ONCIC also showed the limitations of government involvement into filmmaking, and had African filmmakers looked more carefully at the Algerian situation, they might have been able

Sada Niang / African Women Filmmakers

193

to foresee and forestall failures of the Fodic in Cameroon, and the Bureau du cinéma in Senegal. The ONCIC initially granted just the monopoly of distribution of films, steadily absorbed all other functions to become a total state monopoly. From this point on it was obvious that Algerian cinema was not to have a revolutionary role but instead would serve as a propagandistic tool in support of government policies.45

Political priorities dictate that, after the departure of the French settlers, land that had been confiscated is redistributed so as to maintain the level of agricultural production. Films fostering the agrarian reform were encouraged. In 1972, Mohamed Bouamari produced The Charcoal Burner and Abdel Aziz Tolbi produced Nua. In 1974, Bouamari produced a second feature film on rural themes: The Inheritance. Nonetheless, popular memory and the history of the nationalist struggle for independence remained prominent throughout the years. Lamine Merbah, the Chair of Committee One of the Third World Filmmakers produced two feature films within a four year interval: The Plunderers (1972) and The Uprooted (1976). These were experiences and achievements valued by most African filmmakers present at the Algiers conference. At the 1973 Algiers conference the delegates produced a set of resolutions very critical of “the development of capitalism on a world scale.” Echoing the analyses of Walter Rodney, Eric Williams, Césaire and Fanon, they maintained that colonialism was not a humanitarian enterprise but a military and commercial venture whose long term goal was permanent domination and exploitation of various parts of the Third World. They claimed that a search for markets and cheap manpower determined the nature of such a conquest, and that inherent in the latter was an indiscriminate intent to subjugate “indigenous peoples” through violence of various kinds. For the conference delegates, Fanon’s thesis that forceful subjugation of entire continents is further perpetuated through “mystifying” discourses on the local population, “normalized” by the imposition of colonial languages and made “ordinary” by the promotion of “half digested” Western middle class values held sway. The delegate filmmakers argued that in order to foster their own economic interest, Europeans colonialists set up “economic and social infrastructures” in these colonies “which [did] not correspond to the real needs of the [subjugated] peoples.”46 Echoing the analyses of Albert Memmi and later Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, they denounced the pervasive practice on the African continent of “granting,” “negotiating,” or “evolving into” independence. The final version of their resolutions state that these were nothing but “pretenses of autonomy” fraudulently established so as to preserve the “exclusive interests of the metropolitan

194

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

countries.”47 Under such circumstances they further suggested, the future of African and Latin American countries was all too predictable: the “systematic plundering of their resources” would leave them “impoverished,” “underdeveloped,” and under constant “influence and pressures” from their former colonial dominators. In short, what characterized all the countries represented in this committee, what justified the adoption of the label “Third World” was a complete domination and dependency by countries in Africa and Latin America on their former colonial powers and their allies. The resolution document goes on to spell out the economic and social consequences of this state of affairs, but for brevity’s sake, we will limit ourselves to the cultural effects of this situation. One of the first evils the filmmakers identified and attempted to address was what they perceived as a threat to authenticity. Domination and dependency, Marbah and the members of his committee argued, breed “deculturation,” and pave the way for “acculturation” by imposing a cultural vacuum where fully-fledged human subjects practiced and renewed once vibrant cultures: That deculturation consists of depersonalizing the peoples, of discrediting their culture by presenting it as inferior and inoperative, of blocking their specific development and of disfiguring their history. . . In other words, creating an actual vacuum favorable to a simultaneous process of acculturation through which the dominator endeavors to make his domination legitimate by introducing his own moral values, his life and thought patterns, his explanation of history: in a word his culture.48

The filmmakers suggested that it was cinema’s duty, in fact Third World artists’ duty, to counter these foreign-bred ills. Films had to be created which promoted the knowledge of the local people, and their long-standing cultural values rather than those imposed by the “barrel of the gun.” Narratives had to be crafted that highlighted the “internal cohesion of the societies described,” spaces shown as the natural context for these cultures, characters exhibited as products of these cultures. Above all, film had to be didactic: The role of cinema in this process consists of manufacturing films reflecting the objective conditions in which the struggling peoples are developing, that is to say, films which bring about disalienation of the colonized peoples at the same time as they contribute sound and objective information for the peoples of the entire world, including the oppressed classes of the colonizing countries.49

In this perspective, the filmmaker becomes an artistic creator/teacher who uses the cultural resources of his or her group to foster the shedding off

Sada Niang / African Women Filmmakers

195

of political and cultural alienation. She or he is first and foremost a member of that community but one endowed with historical knowledge, analytical skills, and a vision for the future of his or her fellow citizens. Here, just like in the case of Fernando Birri, Sanjinés and the members of the Ukamau School, film is first and foremost a communication device. It is a pedagogical instrument marshaled for the political and economic uplifting of “alienated,” “dispossessed,” and “reified” men and women in the filmmaker’s community. His or her work must portray life in all its facets, feature credible characters, mirror the daily conditions of living of the poor and dispossessed, as well as display a persuasiveness that will usher unsuspecting men and women into the social. In fact, filmmakers become “facilitators,” political educators and artists whose overriding concern was the rewriting of social history of the community. The ideal FEPACI filmmaker made history by enhancing, through his creations, the agency of men and women of his audience: The task of the Third World filmmaker thereby becomes even more important and implies that the struggle waged by cinema for independence, freedom and progress must go hand in hand with the struggle within and outside of cinema, but always in alliance with the popular masses for the triumph of the ideas of freedom and progress.50

The intertextuality between the FEPACI Charter, Solanas and Getino’s “Towards a Third Cinema” and Sanjinés’s Teoría y práctica de un cine junto al pueblo published six years later is striking: it denotes a common project shared across the Atlantic by African and Latin American filmmakers set against a history of defeat, and the cinema of the victors. Solanas and Getino advocated a similar agenda for the Third World filmmaker: The man of the Third Cinema . . . above all counters the film industry of a cinema of characters with one of themes, that of individuals with that of masses, that of the author with that of the operative group, one of neocolonial misinformation with one of information, one of escape with one that recaptures the truth, that of passivity with that of aggression. To an institutionalized cinema, it counterposes a guerilla cinema; to movies as show, it opposes a film act or action; to a cinema of destruction, one that is both destructive and constructive; to a cinema made of the old kind of human being, for them, it opposes a cinema fit for a new kind of human being, for what each one of us has the possibility of becoming.51 (emphasis in original)

In a tone that recalls the work of Wittgenstein or Paulo Freire, it was argued that film was and should remain a teaching tool. Its practice only made a meaningful impact on its spectators if it allowed for a critical look at

196

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

the daily lives and struggles of its spectators. Film language and film narrative, dialogues, music, and costume should be reflective of the situation outside the film. These all provide a bridge, an argument holding the possibility of acting on persons, social processes, and social conditions. These tenets would find their way into the FEPACI Charter adopted in 1975, at the outset of a meeting held in Algiers. Yet, by the time FEPACI came into existence in 1970, all the major pioneering African films had already been made. The decolonization of the continent was well underway and a film language specifically geared towards an African spectatorship already attempted. Three experimental films appeared between 1954 and 1955. Of these, Mamadi Touré’s Mouramani was the betterknown one, but as early as 1954, the Senegalese-Beninese film director Paulin Soumanou Vieyra had produced two films set in France, C’était il y a quatre ans (1954) and Afrique sur Seine (1955). Both films recounted with lyrical undertones and a new wave style the independence years. The latter film focuses on the Paris of the racialized others (Blacks, Africans, West Indians, Asians) in the 1950s. Shot mainly in the wide Parisian avenues, Afrique sur Seine timidly argues for an appropriation of the metropolitan spaces by the subaltern African, Black, Asian, and White dandies. Its narration is in Parisian French; the spaces described are those of the “city of lights,” with its monuments, its boulevards, its cafés, its nightclubs and restaurants. Seven years would pass52 before a new film appeared when in 1962 Mustapha Alassane produced Aouré, a love story between a man (Garba) and a woman (Mariam). Their union becomes a pretext for an exhibition of the strength of traditional customs and the meaning of marriage in African societies. In 1963, Ousmane Sembène broke new grounds with his pioneering Borom Sarret. The film is a short description of the tribulations of a cart driver riding the streets of a new-fangled capital city to eke out a meager living for himself, his wife, and baby. Borom Sarret defined not only the spaces in which most of the narratives of the first generation of African filmmakers will be set, the character types they feature (former peasants, newly raised to the status of citizens), but the world view and the didacticism undergirding them. Set in postcolonial Africa, the film delineates the ideological boundaries of space in former French and British African colonies. Last but not least, Borom Sarret is, as numerous critics have already remarked, the first African film in which a black African man is shown as a main character charting his own, albeit, uncertain destiny against the exclusionary practices, corruption, and repressive nature of the neocolonial state. Today, films, plays, and political debates are being waged on the role of the Senegalese infantrymen during the Second World War. But the memory of the Second World War has informed the creation of African filmmakers as early as the 1960s. One remembers that in Borom Sarret the confiscation

Sada Niang / African Women Filmmakers

197

of Modou’s cart by a policeman is all the more painful as he is also stripped of his WWII veteran decoration. Caught between the official amnesia of the old metropolis and the betrayals of the nationalist promises, Modou ends his day’s work a dejected, angry, and powerless man. His plight turns into despair when, on entering his compound, his wife hands him the baby and, in a manner which suggests the discarding of all traditional female restraint, walks out promising to be back with food for the family. In the same year, Momar Thiam took over the theme of the Senegalese infantryman. His Sarzan (1963) focuses on the social and psychological effects of war on a man known only as Sarzan (Sergent, Sargent). The protagonist falls victim to mental illness, and is left walking the streets of his former village. He speaks angrily of the old racist colonial discourses on the “nègres,” hurls stones at imaginary enemies, aims to shoot at imaginary targets, writes long philosophical and literary quotes on the walls of buildings, and distresses more than one passerby. In fact by the close of 1963, Sembène and Thiam had delineated the semiotic boundaries of this character. Their portrayals of his postwar experiences, their rendering of his linguistic performance in French, of his costumes, down to his much agitated gait, will inform films on this issue for years to come. Daniel Kollo Sanou’s Tasuma (2004), for example, could be read as a revised version of Borom Sarret or a much more mature and socialized Sarzan. In 1964, Sembène further refined the character in the onscreen adaptation of his short story Vehi Ciosane. Here, mental illness53is still the lot of the Senegalese infantryman, buffoonery plagues him, but he remains sensitive to the plight of a mother overwhelmed by shame and unable to “right the calabash.”54 The years 1965 to 1968 are crucial in the definition of nationalist African cinema aesthetics, they will also be instrumental in the resolutions further adopted as the FEPACI Charter six years later. In 1968, the year when students and workers were showing signs of disillusionment and demonstrating widely against the nation-state, two filmmakers presented two different and competing readings of the colonial experience. In Sembène’s Mandabi colonialism appears as an era of exclusion, deception, and usurpation. At the same time, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Contras’City described colonialism as an opportunity to discover the other, to enrich oneself with bits of his know-how, his “strange habits,” the playful intonations of his language and his suppressed mannerisms. For the latter, the presence of the other provided a space to construct one’s dreams, to explore one’s imaginary and creative possibilities beyond the narrow confines of one’s group. Contras’City rejected all manicheistic attitudes and instead featured a voice-over in French imitating the “titi parisien” to guide a female French tourist through the streets and other sites of Dakar. Mandabi, on the other hand locates its action in the sandy alleys of the medina, with men and women conversing, parrying,

198

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

fighting, and greeting each other in Wolof. Costumes are well studied, interiors made to reflect the precarious living conditions of the dwellers of this area of Dakar, and the narrative simple and linear. Its characters are prototypes: none among the protagonists living in the medina works in town. Their days are spent basking in the sun, nervously set, half leisurely looking for a benefactor to provide for their meals and other needs. Those who keep afloat are swamped with requests and vehemently criticized when they cannot or will not help. Finally, through these two films also came clashing two main approaches of filming the continent. Mambéty’s Contras’City is devoid of characters, it is a work which parodies the African situation, almost indifferent to issues of representation. It features streets, buildings, spaces which suggest the Orient, the West, and the African tradition. It features men and women whose speeches are hardly audible. At best, Contras’City could be described as allegorical. It is a poetic skimming through of the urban landscape, an ode to the linkages between differences coexisting in the same space. Mandabi is a social realist film which sets the old against the new sound patterns, French and Wolof, educated and illiterate persons, men and women. Sembène and Mambéty represent the two poles of African filmmaking that have bounded filmmaking on the continent for the last forty years. In the first twenty-five years, the Sembène option has prevailed, adulated, imitated, and inefficiently imposed on the following generations. However in the postcolonial era, Mambéty’s alternative is increasingly reaching canon status. That such an alternative spurred filmmakers into formalizing their discussions of the most influential filmmakers into a charter that could be applicable throughout the whole continent is still an unresolved issue. What is certain is that the challenge represented by Mambéty paled in comparison with the more assertive transgressions of another “nonchartered” filmmaker: the Cameroonian Alphonse Beni.

Alphonse Beni Most filmmakers in the 1970s relied on external funding to produce their films. Through the “fonds de la cooperation” set up by the Ministry of Cooperation, their projects could be funded, provided a copy of the film be deposited at the Ministry upon completion. Apart from the case of Algeria described earlier, the local governmental agencies set up to help the filmmakers were all experiencing financial and organizational difficulties. Filmmakers were discovering that, without the distribution and production infrastructure, their creations had little or no chance of being profitable, that their future projects were put on hold indefinitely. Yet in Cameroon, one actor/film producer was turning out to be the exception.

Sada Niang / African Women Filmmakers

199

His name was Alphonse Beni, and in the words of the creators of the FEPACI, his brand of cinema had to be combatted inside and outside of the FEPACI. Alphonse Béni was a Cameroonian actor, very active in the 1970s who excelled in thrillers, kung fu, and erotic films. As early as 1971, he began producing short films: Fureur au poing; Un enfant noir. In 1974, Béni produced his first feature film: Les Mecs, les flics et les putains followed a year later (1975) by an erotic film shot in Cameroon, Les Filles au soleil. In fact, from the mid-1970s onwards, Béni alternated between acting contracts in France and shooting erotica-pornographic films in his native Cameroon. Béni’s films were funded through coproduction agreements with European companies and shown throughout West Africa. They were well-distributed in Nigeria, Ghana, and other newly independent Anglophone countries. In the early to mid-1970s, Béni is among the few—if any—of Cameroonian filmmakers able to reimburse to the FODIC (Fonds d’aide à l’industrie cinématographique/National Endowment for the Film Industry) loans advanced to him for the production of his films. Yet his brand of filmmaking upset many emerging African filmmakers in the 1970s. His was a cinema that was neither didactic, nor committed to the improvement of the social condition of the masses: entertainment was his main drive. In the films he directed and acted, he sought to entertain by appealing to the sexual impulses of mostly urban Cameroonian populations. His film language was imitative of the western or Asian B-movies. In Black Love (1974) for example, Béni acts as the lover of the daughter of a leader of the Black Panther Party. Through his connections, his character acquires funds belonging to this organization, breaks up with his lover and goes carousing throughout Paris. He eludes two hired guns only to succumb to the stabbing of his forlorn lover. In his 1974 Les Mecs, les flics, et les putains, irony, quid pro quo, and sex appeal combine to provide the spectator with the perfect escape from his daily reality. Béni plays a relentless inspector (Dubois) pursuing a gang of bearded men. In the end, as he catches them he discovers that one of the suspects, a white man, is his brother. Béni’s filmmaking freed him from the funding grips of the Ministry of Cooperation. He openly advocated for a popular and independent cinema, free from the overbearing patronage of the former colonial power. In fact, Béni rallied Nollywood long before it became fashionable to do so. His creative turf were the urban underworlds of the continent. He explored narratives, genres, and characters which, today, make up the film and the good fortunes of filmmakers such as Ibrahim Olukunga or Boubakar Diallo.55 In the Maghreb, Tazi Ben Abdelouahed Mohamed advocated for a film aesthetic similar to Béni’s. A University graduate, Mohamed had specialized in the use of audiovisual equipment in the classroom. He later joined the

200

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

IDHEC (Institut des hautes Etudes Cinématographiques) before taking a position with the Centre du Cinéma Marocain. His Vaincre pour vivre (1968) was hailed as the film that would usher in a new aesthetics for African cinema; yet it only ended up alienating African filmmakers at the Carthage Film Festival in 1970. In more ways than one, the film functioned on a master narrative counter model reversing the country to city journey of films such as Borom sarret. It incorporated aspects of the gangster and thriller genre, and provided its audience with delightful songs interpreted by the main character: Abdelwahab Doukkali. The film was dismissed as escapist, shallow, exploiting the senses of the urban masses rather than enlightening them, yet again. The Latin American connection, the development of films on the continent from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s, the negative impact of the Béni factor in Cameroon, and perhaps the fear of a creeping commercialism as illustrated by Tazi’s Vaincre pour Vivre: all these factors combined to radicalize the positions of the new members of the FEPACI and lead in 1975 to the adoption of a Charter which, in many ways, is an ideological statement. Echoing the declaration of the Third World filmmakers in Algiers, the FEPACI charter takes a more nationalist, but also a more subjective stance. Throughout the document, the pronoun of solidarity (we) and its grammatical variants are used to signify necessary membership of the filmmaker in the local community.56 As in the declaration of their predecessors, colonialism, and colonial image making are the background against which the new African cinema must define itself. Césaire, Fanon and Memmi, Marx, the Chinese and Cuban revolutions provide discursive and real historical examples. Thus, the Charter boldly argues that colonialism is not a humanist enterprise but a conquest, dictated by Western economic imperatives, which subjugated, devalorized, and maintained in poverty peoples of various races, languages, and customs: colonization is not humanism, but brutal violent invasion in which entire groups of people are killed, maimed, imprisoned and tortured. The perennization of such a system is based on measures and decisions founded in deception.57

In certain parts of the continent, just like in Asia and Latin America, poverty was further entrenched by systematic confiscation of fertile lands, rich crops, and even labor. The Charter highlights two types of colonization, one consisting of the occupation, compartmentalization of the “indigenous” space through violence, silencing and deception, another—more insidious and damaging—seeking to diminish local cultures through a reductive discourse. Here as in the writings of Fanon and Césaire, violence, deception, and dispossession stand as the most prominent features of both kinds of

Sada Niang / African Women Filmmakers

201

colonial domination. Such incursions, the Charter further states, are usually followed by a “massive injection of cultural byproducts thrust on African markets for passive consumption.”58 In short, the preamble of the Charter clearly argues that colonialism and neocolonialism are mainly achieved through the agency of images and that it is by countering such images that the liberation of African masses should be equally effected. The role of cinema in this project is to act as a tool against “deracination and deculturation,” and for the filmmaker to function as a therapist, a teacher, regardless of all economic considerations. She or he is a creator amongst other creators on whom she or he depends for his or her film language. She or he is summoned to use the functional cultural values of the group, its semiotic codes, and modes against resistance to domination in order to create images fostering a critical look at one’s own political situation. Like the Third World filmmaker, she or he is first and foremost a teacher endowed with the ability to analyze, creative enough to weave an argumentation into the cultural fabric of his or her community, and sensitive enough to embed such argumentation in the multiple layers of a composite film language. Ideally she or he teaches through empathy in order to set the stage for social change. Med Hondo, Sembène and Souleymane Cisse have embraced this approach throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In Caméra d’Afrique59 for example, Hondo eloquently argues that a people who cannot see their own images reflected in the creative products of their artists, who cannot see their artifacts, costumes, and dwellings or hear their languages on stage or screen might lose confidence in their creativity and self-worth. In a discussion with Jean Rouch, Sembène famously complained that the anthropological tendency of colonial cinema was to portray Africans as “insects.” In fact, the cinema of nationalist African filmmakers will have as its major goals: character development, the creation of a “specific” film language, and efforts to define African identities.60 Be that as it may, the FEPACI Charter was a flawed document from the very beginning. It was flawed because, similar to the resolution of Third World Filmmakers signed two years earlier, it assumed that people under colonial domination ingurgitated passively the metropolitan cultural artifacts that were imposed upon them. It assumed that the imposition of the Bible for example was readily accepted by Africans, that schooling and the imposition of the French language was willingly and unconsciously accepted by the “indigenes.” In fact, Achille Mbembe in La naissance du maquis dans le Sud Cameroun 1920–1960 (1996) has argued that, in the case of the Cameroons, the adoption of the Christian faith could be read as a way of negotiating one’s social status in colonial society, that the apparently ready adoption of French mannerism and diacritic signs by some members of the African business class could also be reinterpreted as an argument for survival in a

202

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

context that was violently Manichean. Clarisse Zimra’s criticism of Fanon’s retelling of Mayotte Capecia’s story, Homi Bhabha’s rereading of Fanon, all converge to point out that whatever the colonizers imposed, the colonized renegotiated and adopted on their own terms. One could even suggest that the mechanisms of resistance and self-definition thus elicited in the 1980s by the scholars cited above could also be found in Louis Sala-Molins’s criticism of the Code Noir. In his landmark Postnationalist African Cinema (2011), Alexie Tcheuyap further argues that the Charter fails aesthetically because it reduces cinematic practice on the continent to a teaching tool, in stark denial of its entertainment function. The FEPACI Charter also failed in its ablation of cinema in Africa from its economic context. Whereas the Charter declared in 1975 that “the question of commercial profit can be no yardstick for African filmmakers,” a dissident group of African filmmakers meeting seven years later in Niamey, stated that: The viability of cinema production is closely tied to the complementary viability of the other four main sectors of cinema namely the exploitation of cinema theatres, importation of films, distribution of films, technical infrastructure, and training.61

Similarly, the group addressed the outburst of technological tools available in the market at a time when African cinema was still in its developing stage: At the present stage of development of the audiovisual facilities, in the world and particularly in Africa, television should be complementary to cinema.62

Hope for radical political change was still alive on the continent by 1982, but its perspective had been much dampened by successive coups d’état, further impoverishment of the population, and widespread corruption. The Niamey group, unlike its Algiers predecessor, decided to call on local government for support of a form of art whose political boundaries were being redefined by filmmakers less inclined to ideological statements. Their recommendations focused on the infrastructure of the industry. They suggested that each state “organize, support, safeguard and develop its movie theater market,”63 that “national ticket agencies . . . monitor receipts of cinemas for the benefit of the exchequer, cinema owners and film producers,” that “national distribution corporations” be set up, that “film finance corporations funded by revenues from cinema” be created, and that training of local film technicians be facilitated. Very few of these recommendations would be implemented and maintained by local governments, but their existence signals a more comprehensive conception of the craft by its practitioners. By the 1980s, filmmaking had outgrown its initial oppositional stage on the

Sada Niang / African Women Filmmakers

203

continent to become a “calling” for many young people. No longer exclusively a political argument, African cinema was confronted with production, infrastructure issues, and dwindling funds. The second wave of filmmakers, including Gaston Kaboré, watching the sorry state of their films granted limited exhibition in local cinema theaters, lamented that some of the most popular venues were being transformed into “souks,” that technical support had to be either improvised or imported from the former colonial powers, that very few African entrepreneurs were willing to invest in filmmaking, and that state agencies set up to foster the industry were suffering from poor management. The “Final Communiqué of the First Frontline Film Festival and Workshop” held in 1990 in Harare (Zimbabwe) largely confirmed these facts. To a large extent, this document confirms the failure of its predecessors in fostering their political objectives and convincing local governments to cater to the needs of filmmakers on the continent. It acknowledges that fifteen years after the 1975 FEPACI Charter, the intended infrastructure cooperation among African states had not been put in place, that a lack of local technical support was still plaguing most filmmakers, that colonial distribution structures hampered the exhibition of African films, that aesthetic development which could foster African identities was still very hesitant, and that in most regions a professional association of filmmakers was still lacking. A final document should be considered: The “Statement of African Women Professionals of Cinema, Television and Video” adopted at the twelfth FESPACO held in 1991 in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso). It is a direct gendered criticism not only of the nationalist orientation of the 1975 Charter but also of its 1990 nemesis. It is an invitation for a reconsideration of the image of women in African cinema, an argument for greater participation of women, and a greater presence of women’s perspectives in various parts of filmmaking.

Artistic Legacy of the FEPACI Nationalist filmmaking of the 1960s and 1970s usually structured itself around rebutting the reductionist colonial discourse of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Films were created which set out to debunk the “overt misrepresentation” of the continent, root out the ingrained image of “the threatening Black native,” or eradicate the equally pervasive image of the “brutal,” “vicious,” and “superstitious” African.64 These misrepresentations stunned not only Africans but Blacks all over the world. In Joseph Zobel’s Black Shack Alley (1974), a dejected José wonders:

204

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Who was it who created for the cinema and the theater, that type of black man, houseboy, driver, footman, truant, a pretext for words from simple minds, always rolling their eyes in amazement, always with a silly irrepressible smile plastered on their faces, provoker of mockery? That black man with his grotesque behavior under the kick in his backside proudly administered by the white man, or when the latter had him hoodwinked with an ease that is explained by the theory of the “black man being a big child.” Who was it who invented for the blacks portrayed in the cinema and in the theater that language the blacks could never speak and in which, I am sure, no black man will manage to express himself? Who was it who, for the black man, agreed, once and for all, on those plaid suits that no black man ever made or wore on his own choice? And those disguises in shoes worn down at the heels, old clothes, bowler hats and umbrellas with holes in them, weren’t they above all the sordid apanage of a section of the society that, in the civilized countries, misery and poverty made the sad beneficiary of the offscourings of the upper classes?65

Zobel’s novel was published in the 1950s, but these musings still resonate in Maryse Condé’s Moi Tituba sorcière noire de Salem (1986). Consequently, from the 1960s onwards, African filmmakers armed themselves with a “political ferment” and argued that “what you did to movies and movie making was also expected to have its impact on changing the world.”66 Images were created which departed from the “selectively photographed or fictionally created exotica of Africa”67 to portray its lands and peoples and tell its stories in their voices. Melissa Thackway identifies this first series of African films as “the first wave”68 or the “colonial confrontational genre.”69 Their plots seek to “reappropriate African history as a counter history.”70 The early Sembène films, for example, retell the history of the continent using the popular memories of everyday and exceptional resistances to domination. Emitai, (1971), in particular, recalls the “dehumanizing effect”71 of forced labor, forced conscription, unfair taxation, and predatory contributions to the European war effort. Conversely it foregrounds the “freedom and integrity of the African population” by portraying their stable, albeit vain, religious and social structures. The films of this first wave heeded the tenets of cinema novo and, as Thackway argues, the “liberation Theorists’ call for the reinterpretation of the world.” Ukadike further suggests that this period was dominated and shaped by two filmmakers, both of whom are savvy ideologues and consummate artists: Sembène and Hondo: Their endeavors include the exploration of cultural imperatives and the infusion of African oral narratives patterns into Western, technologically inspired cinematic narrative, thus establishing an African cinematographic language with which to analyze traditional and modern cultures. This unique combination,

Sada Niang / African Women Filmmakers

205

both filmmakers maintain, stresses the African cultural forms and ancient African representational patterns, but it also dilutes the potency of the dominant representational forms that have not and cannot be completely eliminated from their films.72

Moustapha Alassane’s first feature feature film, Aouré (1962), is in many ways, an onscreen replica of Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir (1953). It portrays the hence conquered and “pacified” spaces of African villages where lives are made and improved, alliances negotiated, and social roles defined according to African values. Amid pans of the African flora, inside mud huts built to fit climate, a group of men visits a family in order to contract a marriage between two lovers. The exchange of the bride price and the subsequent formal announcement made by the father to the bride delimit gender roles; the spatial positioning of each character according to age and rank suggests a delicate hierarchy of status in this society. The donning of special costumes, the praise songs of griots, the grouping of the participants according to gender and generation, all point to long established traditions. The resulting sense of order stands in stark contrast to the nihilistic discourses of colonial travel literature. Similarly, Alassane’s La Bague du roi Koda (1962) produced the same year as Aouré (1962) retells a traditional story of power and greed, of treason and forgiveness which still resonates in recent African productions. Angered by the refusal of a fisherman to sell his daily catch at a reduced price, a king plots with the poor man’s wife to have him killed. After much despair, the fisherman uncovers the plot and survives the king’s deadly threat only to discover that the monarch was also planning to marry his own wife after his “projected” execution. La Bague du roi Koda announces films like Laafi (1991) and Guimba, the Tyrant (1995), perhaps even Sembène’s Mandabi (1968) and Jean Marie Téno’s Chef (1997). In both Alassane’s films, African spaces, languages, and customs are highlighted. Also, African characters are featured, heralding the much celebrated Borom sarret (1963) a year later. Urbain Makhouri Dia’s La Fleur de sang (1966) and Daniel Kamwa’s Boubou Cravate (1972) explore similar themes with similar aesthetic features. Both deal with what in 1970s film and literary criticism was usually referred to as “identity crisis.” The African character they depict, a man in both cases, is unable to reconcile the dual, apparently conflicting aspects of his identity. The crisis reaches a boiling stage in Dia’s film, but in both creations Fanon’s influence mixed with liberation theory and strands of the new Latin American cinema can also be discerned. The dilemma facing the characters in both films is further dramatized in Hondo’s celebrated Les Bicots noirs, vos voisins (1973). The musical score of Desire Ecaré’s A nous deux France (1970) highlights the links between transatlantic slavery and the migrant experience in France. Some fifteen years later, Sembène would echo this

206

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

practice in Ceddo (1977) and Camp de Thiaroye (1988). Ecaré’s A nous deux France (1970) is set in the Paris of the 1970s, in an atmosphere reminiscent of Vieyra’s Afrique sur Seine (1955). But here, race and power function in tandem to determine gender roles. Rich white men use their economic status to lure struggling migrant black women into sexual relationships or “convince” husbands to pimp their wives. Taking after Paulin Vieyra’s Afrique sur Seine (1955), A nous deux France (1970) is a melodramatic film which bemoans the plight of the sons and daughters of the continent in dry and drab white land. Senghor’s “Femme noire, femme nue” is recited midway through the film, highlighting the solitude not only of black and white women but of their partners as well. The film is many things at once: Fanon’s classic two chapters from Black Skin, White Masks, “The White Man and the Black Woman” and “The Black Man and the White Woman,” a slightly edited version of Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s narrative of white overseers’ plantation tours in seventeenth and eighteenth century Jamaica and a mundane version of Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’Aventure ambigue. What is important—beyond the mere characterization of nationalist cinema—is the fact that a review of these “African classics” shows that these filmmakers have built on the narratives and styles of their predecessors, have at times woven an intertextuality within literary texts; that the evolution of African cinema has not been achieved in one fell swoop, but has progressed along a continuum. Dominant moments have shaped the nature, content, and aesthetic along that continuum, yet such moments have also tended to obstruct the truly creative attempts of artists who did not fit the mold, whose intent was to create outside the narrow nationalist and realist modes, whose works remained marginal in an already marginalized field. Among these are Djibril Diop Mambéty, Momar Thiam, and Moustapha Alassane. All three located their films in the city and tapped into the wellspring of popular genres such as gangster, westerns, thrillers, and drew inspiration from French new wave films as well. These films entertained as much as they instructed and condemned corrupt societies with large sections of its new citizen left to fend for themselves and mired in abject poverty. Playfulness, parody, and irony frame these narratives. The following chapters73 argue that the vitriolic pronouncements against Western cinema notwithstanding, African film practice has never located itself outside the major genres and schools of modern filmmaking. The films of the nationalist era starting with those of Sembène and of the dissident or pariah filmmakers such as Mambéty and Alassane have adopted a realism which is very much in sync with the creative principles of the neorealismo in Italy, the French new wave, Italian/American western and crime films and finally Euro-American animation films. Nationalist though they were, driven by ideology as they may have been, the filmmakers of the “colonial

Sada Niang / African Women Filmmakers

207

confrontational genre” coasted the stylistic features of the much-decried B-movies in order to articulate their narratives. We begin this exploration by charting the affinities of nationalist African cinema within the vast movement of aesthetic contestation that took place in Italy towards the end of the Second World war: neorealism. Sada Niang is Professor of French and Francophone Studies. He holds a PhD from York University (Downsview, Ontario). His recent work focuses on postcolonial cinema, the cinema of Francophone sub-Saharan Africa, Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) and Francophone women’s films.

Notes Originally published as Sada Niang, “The FEPACI and Its Artistic Legacies,” in Nationalist African Cinema: Legacy and Transformations (Lanham: Lexington Press, 2014), 1–26. 1. Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike,  Black African Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 2. Melissa, Thackway, Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Josef Gugler, African Film: Reimagining a Continent (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). 3. K. Martial Frindéthié, Francophone African Cinema: History, Culture, Politics and Theory (Jefferson: McFarland, 2014). 4. Sada Niang, Nationalist African Cinema: Legacy and Transformations (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014). 5. Kenneth W. Harrow, Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 2. 6. Roy Armes,  Third World Filmmaking and the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 21. 7. Harrow, Postcolonial African Cinema, 22. 8. Armes, Third World, 74. 9. Lizbeth Malkmus and Roy Armes, Arab and African Filmmaking (London: Zed Books, 1991). 10. Nicola Marzano, “Third Cinema Theory: New Perspectives,” Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media (2009). 11. Michael T. Martin,  New Latin American Cinema: Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 59–61. 12. Peter E. Bondanella,  Italian Cinema: from Neorealism to the Present (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001). 13. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” http:// documentaryisneverneutral.com/words/camasgun.html, accessed on April 13, 2013. 14. Amílcar Cabral would be assassinated a month later in Conakry on January 20, 1974. Portuguese agents were immediately suspected but in May 1974 the late President Senghor declared to Colonel Carlos Fabião and to Ambassador Nunes Barata that Sékou

208

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Touré had been the instigator of Amílcar Cabral’s murder. See http://www.nathanielturner .com/amilcarcabral.htm. 15. The years 1925–1934 had been marked by tight control of cinema by the fascist regime in Italy. The Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia was founded in 1935 under the direction of Luigi Chiarini, an anti-fascist. Filmmakers such as Roberto Rossellini, Luigi Zampa, Luciano Emmer, Pietro Germi, Giuseppe De Santis and Michelangelo Antonioni. Birri joined the centre after a much disappointing attempt in Argentina to start a filmmaking career: “Along with Mexico and Brazil, Argentina has traditionally been one of the great film centers in Latin America. During the early fifties when I decided to become a filmmaker, the regime of Gen. Juan Perón had dismissed and debased the national film industry. Despite this, I decided to leave my native Santa Fe and Journey to Buenos Aires to learn to make movies. I began looking for work as an assistant producer, but I soon learned to lower my sights until, finally, I offered myself to Argentina Sono Films Studios as a janitor. Nothing doing. It seems that all the jobs in the film industry were controlled by a kind of mafia. For the likes of me, all the doors were closed. I decided I would learn filmmaking wherever it was taught and found out about two leading European film schools—L’IDHEC in Paris and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome”; Fernando Birri, “The Roots of Documentary Realism,” in Cinema and Social Change in Latin America, ed. Julianne Burton, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), See also Roy Armes, Patterns of Realism (London: Tantivy Books, 1971), 34. 16. Burton, Cinema and Social Change in Latin America, 6. 17. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino “Towards a Third Cinema” http:// documentaryisneverneutral.com/words/camasgun.html, accessed on April 13, 2013. 18. Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present (New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001), 34. 19. Roy Armes, Patterns of Realism (London: Tantivy Books, 1971), 67. 20. Veronica Cordoba, “The New and the Old Bolivian Cinema,” Jump Cut 54 (Fall 2012) http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/tibbits-cordova/index.html#p1, accessed April 14, 2013. 21. Initially a writer, Oscar Soria turned to writing for film and filmmaking from 1950 to 1988. Sanchez writes that “throughout his literary career, Soria wrote about the world of the Bolivian miner, the altiplano and the city of La Paz. . . . From the literary world he left behind come Mis caminos, mis cielos, mi gente (1966); Sangre en San Juan (1969); and Sepan de este Andar (1991)”; José Sánchez-H. The Art and Politics of Bolivian Cinema. (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 1999), 61–62. 22. José Sánchez-H. The Art and Politics of Bolivian Cinema (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 1999), 64, 78. 23. Ibid., 65; Jorge Sanjinés, “Teoría y práctica de un cine junto al pueblo ” 1972, http:// www.virnayernesto.com.ar/VYEART61.htm, accessed on June 1, 2007. 24. Sanchez, Bolivian Cinema, 82–83. 25. Burton, (ed). Cinema and Social Change in Latin America, 38. 26. Ibid., 39. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 82–83. 29. Sánchez-H. Bolivian Cinema, 65.

Sada Niang / African Women Filmmakers

209

30. Zuzana Pick, Latin American Filmmakers and the Third Cinema (Ottawa: Carleton University Film Studies Program, 1978), 78. 31. Ibid., 73. 32. Ibid., 74. 33. Robert Stam, Film Theory (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2000), 259. 34. Ibid., 259. 35. Aine O’Healy, “Violence and the Erotic in Salvatore Piscicelli’s Immacolata e Concetta” in http://tell.fll.purdue.edu/RLA-Archive/1999/Italian/OHEALY.HTM, accessed on June 27, 2011. 36. Ibid. 37. Mariano Mestman, “From Algiers to Buenos Aires: The Third World Cinema Committee (1973/74),” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 1, no. 1 (2003): 40–53. 38. See Ahmed Rachidi, L’Aube des damnés (1965); Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina, Le Vent des Aures (1970), Décembre (1972), Chronique des années de braise (1975); Amar Laskri, Patrouille à l’est (1972); Ahmed Lallem, Zone interdite (1972); Ahmed Rachidi, L’opium et le bâton (1972). 39. Roy Armes, Post Colonial Images: Studies in North African Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 36. 40. Ibid., 24. 41. “Algerian cinema” in http://ahds.ac.uk/ahdscollections/docroot/nafrica /algeriadetails.html accessed on July 17, 2006. 42. Lakhdar Hamina filmed the progress of the revolution in Algeria but, with no laboratory, could not develop his rushes. Thanks to his friendship with Renzo Rosselini, Roberto Rosselini’s son he would smuggle his material into Tunisia, then Italy where Renzo Rosselini would arrange for them to be developed. Then, in a manner similar to the French Actualités sénégalaises or ivoriennes, the films would be “smuggled back into Algeria by the same route to inform the public about the progress of the liberation movement.” Rosselini (the son) later remarked that “this signaled the beginning of a process whereby the machinery of cinema became a militant tool” for him. Mohamed El Assouti, “A Family business: Italian film producer Renzo Rosselini, Cairo Film Festival, Jury tells Mohamed El Assouti about Art and Politics,” Al Ahram Weekly October 23–29, 2003, Issue No. 661. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/661/cu2.htm. Accessed on July 18, 2006. 43. In 1971, Mezrak Allouache (Omar Gatlato, 1976; Bab El Oued City, 1993) was employed by the Centre National du Cinéma. Between 1971 and 1972 he was in charge of an itinerant film show (ciné bus) throughout Algeria. Out of this experience his first documentary was born: Nous et la revolution agraire. 44. Armes, Post Colonial Images, 24. 45. Roy Armes, African Filmmaking North and South of the Sahara (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985), 39. 46. Imruh Bakari and Mbye B. Cham, African Experiences of Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1996). 47. Ibid., 17. 48. Ibid., 18. 49. Ibid., 20. 50. Ibid., 21. 51. Michael T. Martin (ed) New Latin American Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 56.

210

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

52. See Sada Niang’s analysis on this period in Djibril Diop Mambéty: un cinéaste à contre courant (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002). 53. In 1969, Oumarou Ganda’s Cabascabo will put an end to the syndrome of mental illness associated with this character even though signs of buffoonery and social unease remain. It is only with Camp de Thiaroye (1988) and Tasuma (2004) that this character will regain his full social and mental status. 54. The expression is taken from, Clarisse Zimra’s “Righting the Calabash” in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, ed. Carole Boyd Davis & Elaine Savory Fido, (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990). 55. See for example Diallo’s 2007 Le Mogo Puissant http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=02fvw9pNv. 56. The document does in fact state that “the stereotyped image of the solitary and marginal creator which is widespread in Western capitalist society must be rejected by African filmmakers who must, on the contrary see themselves as creative artisans at the service of their peoples.” See Imruh Bakari and Mbye B. Cham African Experiences of Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 25. 57. Bakari and Cham, African Experiences of Cinema, 25. 58. Ibid., 25. 59. Férid Boughedir, Caméra d’Afrique, 1983. 60. See Joseph Gugler, African Film: Re-Imagining a Continent, (Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 2003); Melissa Thackway, Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), and Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Black African Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 61. Bakari and Cham, African Experiences of Cinema, 27. 62. Ibid., 27. 63. Ibid., 28. 64. Ukadike, Black African Cinema, 37. 65. Joseph Zobel, Black Shack Alley (Washington, DC: Three Continent Press, 1974), 168–169. 66. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 187. 67. Ukadike, Black African Cinema, 36. 68. Thackway, Africa Shoots Back, 94–95. 69. Ibid., 94. 70. Ibid., 95. 71. Ibid., 94–95. 72. Ukadike, Black African Cinema, 92. 73. This work originally published as the introductory chapter in a larger edited collection.

New Avenues for FEPACI: Interview with Seipati Bulane-Hopa* Monique Mbeka Phoba

S

eipati Bulane-Hopa was secretary-general of FEPACI, the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers, from 2006 to 2013. This interview by BelgianCongolese filmmaker, writer, and activist, Monique Mbeka Phoba, was conducted during FESPACO in February 2009 in Ouagadougou. MMP: Since the Tshwane Congress [of 2006], do you have any thoughts about your two years [so far] as general secretary?

Seipati Bulane-Hopa: Yes, in fact I have drawn a number of lessons from this. I have the impression that, when making the choice of the people to be appointed, we had not established a type of statement of requirements, as is done everywhere when we want to fill a position, namely, to describe the profile needed: president or/and secretary-general, regional secretary, and advisor at the level of the general secretariat. Even though it was followed through by the goodwill of the people who were there and who had to be persuaded to undertake the posts, it was decided a bit arbitrarily. I myself was not a candidate; neither was Charles Mensah. We were both persuaded to present our candidacy. I myself refused three times before finally accepting. We, who form the current team, we do our job in good faith, with the competence that we bring, but this does not prevent the need for a call for candidates, prior to the elections, which gives people time to prepare and declare their candidacies, and then, to analyze their skills and their motivations. The call for candidates allows them an overview of what they can really bring to FEPACI in terms of financial means, available materials, strategic projects. The call for candidates allows them time to consult their government or their professional environment about their possible candidacy, which quite simply allows them to campaign—as with any election—before the election. For me it would have been a better procedure, preventing some of the inconveniences that we had to face. Our goal is to ensure that this list of criteria is established for the next FEPACI elections in 2011.

212

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

MMP: What were the difficulties that you and your entire team faced at the start of your tenure?

SB-H: I can summarize them in three main categories: 1. Time lost in settling in. When the secretariat was assigned to South Africa, as a result of my election as secretary-general, there was no kind of planning for this migration from the Burkina secretariat to South Africa. Our government was committed to organizing and funding the African Film Summit and supporting its recommendations. But it was not prepared to welcome the general secretariat. At the Ministry of Culture, there was no budget for a FEPACI secretariat. However, all expenses are planned there. It took a long time to negotiate with the Ministry of Culture to have an operating budget. And the first year, we were quite simply deprived of basic necessities and therefore found it difficult to start our activities.  2. Psychological setbacks. On the side of Burkina Faso, which hosted the general secretariat, even when the general secretary was from Benin, as with the case of Jacques Béhanzin, there was also confusion regarding the change of location. It was something that, psychologically, should have been better prepared. And the new administration has paid the price for this state of unpreparedness and these psychological impediments. I will not hide it from you. I have often said it to my entourage.  3. The problem regarding the location of the general secretariat. Moreover, I think that the issue of relocating the secretariat is not minor. A nomadic secretariat can break the FEPACI. If we move it every four years, at each election we will have a major problem with government support. Governments will ask themselves, why invest in an institution that will move again tomorrow? This is a question I ask. Not that I am invested in the secretariat staying in South Africa, but for the sake of institutional logic. Burkina Faso can legitimately feel a certain amount of bitterness, after all the support it has given to the FEPACI secretariat, to see it now elsewhere. Furthermore, one of the consequences, psychologically, is that it has hindered a greater coordination between FEPACI and FESPACO, which I deeply regret. And this acrimony other countries may experience under the same circumstances and, in anticipation, will temper their support. Yet, this support is essential. The secretariat must be able to obtain from the host country, the HQ, an operating budget, and the salaries for its team. These needs are fundamental and essential. Therefore, I reiterate the importance of seriously considering this question of the location of the general secretariat.

Monique Mbeka Phoba / New Avenues for FEPACI

213

MMP: In terms of the organization of the general secretariat itself, do you have any suggestions for a new way of operating?

SB-H: You know, it seems to me that in terms of the resource persons at the secretariat level, there are professional profiles that are absolutely necessary to move forward and which we are lacking for the moment: •

•

•

• •

A fundraiser, someone whose sole function would be to search for funding, who has a perfect mastery of the financial resources available for a cultural organization such as FEPACI. Fundraising has become a profession in its own right, very technical, and it is clear that the current search for funding has nothing to do with the way it was envisioned at the creation of FEPACI. A specialist in new audiovisual technologies. This is one of the most important parameters of audiovisual development in Africa. We are no longer just talking about production but about distribution. We have gone from analog to digital, we need to have a clear picture across Africa of this new frontier. And, to understand the stakes involved of this economy of new technologies and new media, it seems to me that FEPACI cannot do without an expert on these issues. A specialist in marketing and advertising. It is a fact that FEPACI has an image to be made or (re-)made. I know that many filmmakers reject these aspects, but they are necessary to give more impact in the search for funding. A broadcasting specialist [who knows] how to broadcast by satellite, by internet, by GSM. Developments in this area are extremely rapid. You have to be very specialized on this issue. A copyright specialist. Even if this area is a no-man’s-land in many African countries, the more we move towards the professionalization of the audiovisual market, the more urgent it is to resolve the issues around copyright. These specialists should be found not only at the executive secretariat level but also at the level of each regional secretariat. We would then have an extraordinary force.

These are the kinds of developments that I hold dear and that seem to open up new avenues for FEPACI. And then, I also dream of a FEPACI TV, which serves to promote the works of African filmmakers, which allows us to react to highly topical issues, such as, for example, the death of the great Ousmane Sembène. Even if only on the internet, I believe it would be an essential tool for FEPACI! I will not hide the fact that this whole program is still difficult to implement. I often hear, “But, we have not done it before.” And then I answer, “All the more reason!” Because why would I be here, if I have nothing to offer!

214

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

MMP: What is your assessment of these first two years of operation?

SB-H: Regarding the outcomes of these first two years of operation, here is how I could present it. In 2006–2007: • Following South African legal procedures, we progressed with the registration of FEPACI. It was essential to be able to be supported by the ministry. We have the statutes of a nonprofit organization. We would have liked to be registered as a pan-African association, but, even if it were possible, it would have taken us too long. Eventually, this could be considered. • At Sithengi 2006, we organized the first regional meeting, during a colloquium to discuss FEPACI’s strategy and a business plan. • We also held a symposium on intellectual property, where we brought in people working in this field. • In 2006, we also set up the FEPACI website. • We were able to create an email address linked to the website, for all the regional secretariats: they are not actually used yet, but it is important for the visibility, the identification of the organization. • We visited the African Union in Addis Ababa, to meet the Commissioner in charge of Cultural Affairs, Madame Gawana, but during this visit a very painful event occurred for her, the death of her father, and we were not able to achieve all the objectives of this visit. • However, we were able to establish a kind of memorandum of understanding, which is a protocol that establishes the details of the relations between FEPACI and the African Union. One of the first steps to take, as recommended by the FEPACI Congress in Tshwane, is to conduct a study on cinema and the audiovisual across the African continent. In 2008: • •

We organized a symposium on audiovisual training in Namibia with the subregional secretariat for southern Africa. It was a pilot symposium, to be replicated for every region of Africa. We have started our monthly newsletters. The issue number 6 will be released soon.

Note “De nouvelles pistes pour la FEPACI,” originally published July 7, 2009, in Africultures, http://africultures.com/de-nouvelles-pistes-pour-la-fepaci-8743/. Translation from French by Beti Ellerson.

The Six Decades of African Film Olivier Barlet We never write just one thing, we write what keeps us awake at night: how to relate history today? KOSSI EFOUI1

The 1960s: Mandatory Commitment O brothers, if our syntax is not a cog of freedom if our books still weigh on the docker’s shoulder if our voice is not a guiding star to railway workers or shepherds if our poems are not the arms of justice in the hands of our people; O let us remain silent! —Jean Sénac2

On May 7, 1954, after eight years of combat in Vietnam, the French army was defeated at Dien Bien Phu. After Ethiopia, Liberia, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Morocco, Tunisia, Ghana, and Guinea, the francophone African states gained independence in 1960, followed by Algeria and the remaining English-speaking states up until 1965. The Portuguese-speaking countries only gained Independence in 1974–1975, after armed struggle against the Salazar regime. Independence was not generously granted, but laboriously conquered through the determination of combative colonial subjects and anti-colonialists, in a combination of unrest, revolt, trade unionism, and the development of nationalist ideas. Writers had prepared the ground as they depicted the African continent’s cultural wealth and denounced the colonial system. In 1921, Guianese René Maran denounced the wrongdoings of colonialism in Batouala, but still won the prestigious French Goncourt Literary Award. He did, however, lose his job as administrator in Oubangui-Chari. The 1930s negritude movement led by Senghor, Césaire, and Damas overtly asserted its demands in committed and proselytizing works and in a discourse that sought to extricate the continent

216

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

from the margins of history by exalting so-called “negro” values that drew on a spiritual and poetic approach to the world. In the 1950s, Camara Laye (L’Enfant noir / The African Child) introduced autobiographical fiction, while Mongo Beti (Ville cruelle / Cruel City) perpetuated the virulence of his predecessors. A discourse emerged that considered the exaltation of a precolonial Africa, monolithic in its unanimism, as a trap destined to perpetuate the heirs of colonial power. After Independence, Yambo Ouologem (Le Devoir de violence / Bound to Violence) thus opted for a spirit of insolence and highlighted African responsibility, while Ahmadou Kourouma (Les Soleils des indépendances / The Suns of Independence) probed the confrontation between traditional societies and the model of civilization imposed by the West. Until the 1960s, the 1934 decree introduced by Laval, the then Minister of the Colonies, made it obligatory for anyone wanting to shoot images in sub-Saharan francophone Africa to obtain authorization from the authorities. Africans only had access to ideologically loaded images of themselves produced by colonial filmmakers, ethnologists, and missionaries. The first African filmmakers thus had to fight the negation of their selves that these colonial images represented, in which Africans were the backdrop to stories that took place in spite of them, or were the “insects” that Ousmane Sembène and Med Hondo denounced. Their films were militant, but not banner-waving, as they were aware of the need to reach a public not taken in by slogans. Denouncing both obsolete customs and corrupt elites, their aim was to replace “civilization” with “progress,” or in other words, to resist manipulation and backwardness. Their cinema aimed to decolonize the gaze and mentalities, reconquer its own space and images, but was also a cultural affirmation. Seeking to reappropriate and transmit the founding values of their new societies, their fictions readily adopted a documentary gaze. The same was the case in North Africa, which sought to eschew cinema’s pre-independence Orientalist visions and restore its own sociology and culture. As the protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco had, relatively speaking, respected Arab and traditional socio-educative systems, the pioneers’ films there were less focused on ending assimilation than films in the former French department that had become Algeria. They all, however, shared the burden of rectifying the general amnesia surrounding colonial history and the liberation struggles. Omar Khlifi thus portrayed the insurrectionist events that led to Tunisian independence in Al Fajr / The Dawn (1966), and Algerian cinema focused on the liberation struggle with Patrouille à l’Est (dir. Amar Laskri, 1971), Le Vent des Aurès / The Winds of the Aures (dir. Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina, 1967), and later Chronique des années de braise / Chronicle of the Years of Fire, a film about the trials of colonial life before the war, and winner of the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival in 1975. From its very first film, L’Enfant maudit / The Cursed Child

Olivier Barlet / Six Decades of African Film

217

Figure 1. Nigerian Oumarou Ganda starring in Jean Rouch’s 1957 film Moi, un Noir / I, A Negro. Image in the public domain.

(dir. Mohamed Ousfour, 1958), Morocco’s filmmakers, like the Tunisians, favored a postcolonial social vision in the fight against obscurantism. The French colonial authorities left no filmmaking structures in place, and the Film Units left by the British were not maintained by states confronted with other urgencies: the first filmmakers were unknown quantities with no backing. They could only hope for coproductions, or success tied to popular theater forms in the case of the first Nigerian filmmakers, or overseas aid available only to filmmakers from the French-speaking countries. In 1957, the Nigerien docker Oumarou Ganda was the main actor in Jean Rouch’s Moi, un Noir / I, A Negro, celebrated by Godard as a “cinematic revolution.” Denouncing what he saw as a distortion of his reality, Ganda took up the camera and shot Cabascabo (1968), an autobiographical film about a war veteran’s tragic return from Indochina. Mustapha Alassane had just shot Le Retour de l’aventurier / The Return of an Adventurer in 1967, a brilliant parody of the influence of westerns on young people. But the first to shoot in Africa was Ousmane Sembène, who, with Borom Sarret (1963), established the objectives of film in a neorealist mirroring mode: the self-journey that this Dakar cart driver incarnates clashes with the power of elites who imitate the West. As in literature, the victimized subject gradually gave way to an affirmation of cultural uniqueness. Anticolonial nationalism found its extension in progressive and radical ideologies, the nascent cinema taking off in the

218

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

context of the fight against Western imperialism. Anticolonial nationalism, Marxist readings, and Pan-Africanism were the three paradigms that long structured intellectual and political discourse in Africa. In the same way that Chinua Achebe presented the writer as a teacher, African film was necessarily committed, as was film criticism. Under Sembène’s influence, militant cinema opposed the rare stirrings of commercial cinema. As Kenneth Harrow has pointed out, the narrative structure of Sembène’s films eliminates all divergence from the director’s discourse. The predicament is introduced and the main protagonist subjected to oppositions; the solution found is not the right one until the most just solution conveys the film’s message.3 In this context of reconstructing markers and references, the aim was to incite the population to take their collective destiny in hand. This cinema was openly inspired by Brecht. In other words, it combined creativity and civic commitment, while creating ties with the social sciences (hence, throughout his career, Sembène participated in numerous university seminars on his work). Here, realism reflected the desire to redefine the self; one of its dogmas was the belief that art could change society, which remained a predominant concept in the 1970s.

The 1970s: Mirroring Society Our new nobility is not to dominate our people, but to be its rhythm and heart / Not to graze the earth, but, like the millet seed, to rot in the soil / Not to be the head of the people, but its trumpet and mouth. —Léopold Sédar Senghor, Hosties noires (1948)

In echo of the Carthage Film Festival (JCC) created by Tahar Cheriaa in 1966, an African Film Week was held in Ouagadougou in 1969. The government of Upper Volta’s (now Burkina Faso) policy to back cinema led the filmmakers who had united together in the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) in 1970 to fix what in 1972 would become the FESPACO (the Ouagadougou Pan-African Film Festival) in the country’s capital. Under the leadership of the irrepressible Ababacar Samb-Makharam (Senegal), the FEPACI’s discourse was both militant and Pan-African. Film was to be a tool of liberation for the colonized countries and a step toward complete African unity. But when Samb made the magnificent Kodou in 1971, it was anything but a slogan. Rejected by her village community for not having stood the pain during the initiatory gum tattooing ceremony, Kodou is firstly sent to the white man’s psychiatric hospital, before a traditional exorcism ritual reintegrates her into the group. “The meaning of my film,” said Samb, “is that we

Olivier Barlet / Six Decades of African Film

219

Africans need to surpass our culture while at the same time taking it as our foundation.”4 Similarly, when Samb made the link between denouncing oppression and African cultural values in Jom / Dignity (1981), it was to insist on African jom, or honor, dignity, courage, and respect. So, even though the FEPACI met in Algiers in 1975 and refused any form of commercial cinema, calling for unity with progressive filmmakers from other countries against neocolonialism and imperialism, the films first and foremost proposed to find the self. Senegalese Safi Faye’s gentle panoramic visions of rural Africa in Kaddu Beykat / Letter from My Village (1975) and Fad’jal (1979) both close on the laboring villagers; Africa is no longer a setting; it is a place of human activity. The risk would be to take refuge in a fixed identity, behind the barrier of authenticity. But these Negritudinist overtones did not lead to isolation from the world. Trained, like Sembène, at the Moscow Film School (VGIK), Malian Souleymane Cissé follows a young engineer in Baara (1979), who attempts to improve conditions in the factory he works in, but ends up being assassinated. It is not the character’s subjectivity that interests Cissé, but how he questions economic and political collusion. Social commitment comes before the sentimental; the world is the center of gravity. The same trend was manifest in North African cinema, in which characters are the expression of a social force rather than contradictory personalities. While Algerian cinema on the whole exalted nationalism, during “the years of lead,” Moroccan cinema placed the accent on the weight of traditions, making confinement a central figure, like in the violent silence of Aïcha’s house in El Chergui (dir. Moumen Smihi, 1975). As for Tunisian

Figure 2. Film still from Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1973 film Touki Bouki.

220

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

cinema, it contrasted official discourse with reality in the “national disillusionment” vein, to coin Hélé Béji’s expression,5 for example in Ridha Behi’s Soleil des hyènes / The Hyena’s Sun (1976), which focused on the country’s uncontrolled opening up to overseas tourism, or Néjia Ben Mabrouk’s La Trace / The Trace (1982), which analyzes the disillusion of a woman who wants to go to university. One Senegalese director framed the question of society’s founding values as a quest for imagination. To him, nonconformism was what allowed a reflection on one’s origins. The surrealist and prophetic filmic manifesto Touki Bouki (dir. Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973, Senegal) marked all African filmmakers. Anta and Mory are both tempted by the adventure of the West (“Paris, Paris, a touch of paradise,” repeats the song), but one finally takes the boat while the other returns to his roots. The film does not say which is the right choice, but captures the rending of a society whose people are torn between their own country and elsewhere. Cited by all as a reference, Mambéty’s brilliant films nonetheless never constituted a school. Sembenian realism alone was considered a factor of social change. It was not until the 1980s that an evolution came thanks to the disillusions of independence.

The 1980s: Autofiction People say that In us beats a music That we can never hear Unless we silence our inner selves. —Koffi Kwahulé, Jaz6

Convening in Niamey in 1982, a group of filmmakers wrote a manifesto that called for the creation of a film industry, rather than anti-imperialist struggle. The notion of “economic operator” appeared. The CIDC—the first InterAfrican Film Distribution Consortium—had been created in 1980 under the auspices of Inoussa Ousseini, and had bought distribution circuits from a branch of the French company UGC, which had a monopoly on film distribution in almost all of sub-Saharan francophone Africa. But the effort was short-lived, as the CIDC went bankrupt in 1984. Yet African films were a clear success: Djeli (dir. Fadika Kramo-Lanciné, 1981, Ivory Coast) and Finye / The Wind (dir. Souleymane Cissé, 1982, Mali) beat the box-office records in their countries and drew crowds elsewhere. Kwaw Ansah’s comedy Love Brewed in the African Pot, (1991, Ghana) was a hit throughout English-speaking Africa. Essaïda (dir. Mohamed Zran, 1996)

Figure 3. Poster for the film Yam Daabo / The Choice (1986) by Burkinabe Idrissa Ouédraogo. The film portrays the trials and tribulations of a Sahelian family looking for a better life further south. Image in the public domain.

222

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

was a hit too, focusing on life in a working-class district. In Morocco, the comedy A la recherche du mari de ma femme / Looking for My Wife’s Husband (dir. Mohamed Abderrahman Tazi, 1993) was a huge popular hit, as were Nabil Ayouch’s Mektoub in 1997 and Ali Zaoua in 2000. In demanding that their states nationalize the sector, the FEPACI filmmakers had entered the lion’s den. Nationalization engendered more bureaucracy and, in many countries, a state control that no longer let troublesome films through. The Niamey Manifesto sought to escape state tutelage by asking states to back national production, leaving the choice of the subjects to private producers. The CIDC’s liquidation was a reflection of Africa in the 1980s. Disillusion was bitter after the collapse of the dreams of independence, and criticizing the colonizer was replaced by denunciations of the “fathers of the nation.” But the subversiveness that had characterized African cinema from the outset could not be expressed as freely as in literature, for example in the works of Sony Labou Tansi, who introduced the figure of dictator in his 1979 novel La Vie et demi, along with his bête noire, the immortal rebel. A new generation of filmmakers continued to mirror reality, but chose the subjectivity of fiction to apprehend it with emotion and sensuality. In Yam Daabo / The Choice (1986) Burkinabe Idrissa Ouédraogo thus portrayed the trials and tribulations of a Sahelian family looking for a better life further south. The image suggests more than it shows, such as the offscreen death of young Ali, the family’s son, run over by a car in the big city. “All my films address people’s humiliation, how they are broken. They are wounded characters,” stated Tunisian Nouri Bouzid. Since Man of Ashes, his first feature film in 1986, he has deconstructed what he calls “the myth of the Arab man.” So too did Algeria’s Merzak Allouache in Omar Gatlato in 1976, in which a young man cannot muster the courage to initiate a romantic encounter. The spectator is trapped into identifying with ungratifying characters. Without abandoning the neorealist vein or social cinema, North African film also veered toward greater subjective complexity. Trauma leaves the child in Wend Kuuni (Gaston Kaboré, 1982, Burkina Faso) unable to speak. The child’s gestures, eyes, and finally refound speech are all the more meaningful for it. By basing the film on the narrative structure and tempo of the tale, Kaboré explores the reasons behind acts, rather than simply showing them, and in the process asserts self-affirmation. The film calls for a different social order, but strives to place this in the order of things. It was when films began to follow this path of stories rooted in myth that this filmmaking, which was up until then restricted to a small circle of initiates, gained international recognition. The West’s enthusiasm was

Olivier Barlet / Six Decades of African Film

223

Figure 4. Film still from Gaston Kaboré’s film Wend Kuuni (1982, Burkina Faso). Image in the public domain.

overwhelming, and Cannes lauded this newly discovered cinema, attributing Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen / The Light the Jury Award in 1987. The film went on to attract 340,000 spectators in France.

The 1990s: The Individual versus the World How to speak the beauty of the world when life expectancy crumbles likes pastry? —Tanella Boni7

In the 1980s, African film brought a breath of fresh air and serenity to an increasingly bogged down European cinema that, at a time of communications dogma, doubted in its future. Seeking seduction rather than to really understand these films, the 1980s were a time of exotic projection, a folklorization that went hand in hand with an accentuation of difference. In defending cultural authenticity, the 1980s saw a reinforcement of the inauthenticity of relations to the Other. But the lines were definitively blurred: the growing unrest in the French banlieues, the loss of bearings, and the rise of the far right painfully echoed the crises affecting the torn continent. Expectations had changed; the 1990s saw a decline in the success of African films, with the exception of those that addressed the issue of women in the Arab countries, such as Halfaouine (dir. Férid Boughedir, 1990, Tunisia), or The Silences of the Palace (dir. Moufida Tlatli, 1994, Tunisia).

Figure 5. Poster for the film Tilaï (dir. Idrissa Ouédraogo, 1990, Burkina Faso). Tilaï received the Cannes Jury Award in 1990. Image in the public domain.

Olivier Barlet / Six Decades of African Film

225

Idrissa Ouédraogo’s Tilaï, winner of the Cannes Jury Award in 1990, was the last film to garner real international acclaim. Beyond its critique of customs in the name of the very values that govern them, the film carries the pathos of an existential cry: that of a being in crisis. Although Cannes selected Franco-Algerian Rachid Bouchareb’s films Indigènes / Days of Glory in 2006 (whose actors Sami Bouajila, Jamel Debbouze, Samy Naceri, Roschdy Zem, and Bernard Blancan won a joint Best Actor Award) and Hors-la-loi / Outside the Law in 2010, twelve years passed before a sub-Saharan African film found itself in competition again in 2010: Chadian Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Un Homme qui crie / A Screaming Man, winner of the Jury Award. Yet, up until 1997, Cannes did select a number of sub-Saharan African films. In 1992, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyenas magnificently captured people’s hyena-like cupidity. In 1993, South African Elaine Proctor painted the portrait of three radically different women in Friends: a black teacher, a white activist, and an Afrikaner archeologist. In 1995, Souleymane Cissé’s Waati combined initiatory quest and cultural memory to seek a route to African unity and solidarity. In 1996, Po di sangui, by Guinea-Bissauan Flora Gomes celebrated the coming together of cultures, recalling that it is necessary to sacrifice part of oneself to embrace what is worthwhile in the Other, and called to stop undermining the environment and humankind. In 1997, Kini & Adams, by Idrissa Ouédraogo, explored the barriers between people in a torn society, between what it was and what it is becoming. These films’ characters expressed their quest for individuality in a refusal of individualism, and it is in this respect that this cinema continued to be subversive. The same year, Youssef Chahine’s Destiny (Egypt), a lyrical epic against intolerance and fundamentalism, won Cannes’s 50th Anniversary Award. Reinforcing the bitter disillusionment that the African continent had already experienced when it was nothing but a pawn in the Cold War, the democratic hopes that the National Conferences raised in the early 1990s led to yet another disillusionment, exacerbated by the tragedy of child soldiers and the Rwandan genocide. Cinema indeed explored beings in crisis, but free of all illusions to do with identity. Refusing to be trapped in their cultural difference, young filmmakers vigorously refused the label “African filmmaker.” They discreetly applied Nigerian Wole Soyinka’s famous expression: “A tiger does not proclaim its tigritude, it pounces.” A new cinema appeared at the turn of the century, borne by a new generation and announced by films such as Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako’s La Vie sur terre / Life on Earth (1998), or Chadian Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Bye Bye Africa (1999), which were emblematic of a new style capable of taking risks in terms of both form and content, to ask questions with no ready answers, and to explore humankind with no concessions.

226

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

The 2000s: Toward Humanity And in this century, we, Winterbottom & Winterbottom, Creators of emotions, We are coming!!! —Kossi Efoui, Concessions

To escape being relegated to one’s difference and to challenge definitions of identity, this new cinema undertook a real return to the roots; it delved into its cultural foundations to create an aesthetic to suit the contemporary needs of its discourse. In the same vein as oraliture, or “orature,” which Ahmadou Kourouma developed in literature, films also drew on the mechanisms of orality: the voluntary approximations in narration that connote a desired uncertainty; digressive parentheses that reflect on the narrative; direct camera address; creating the illusion of an audience’s presence; and so forth. The resulting rhythm was bluesy, in keeping with the themes of errantry. Already, from Souleymane Cissé to Idrissa Ouédraogo or Djibril Diop Mambéty, films had adopted movement and permanent delocalization as key elements of their mise-en-scène. Films in the 2000s often use journeys across the world as a form of questioning. Their nomadism is a philosophy, that of understanding that the Other is enriching. In L’Afrance (2001), Franco-Senegalese Alain Gomis subverts the message of L’Aventure ambiguë / Ambiguous Adventure, Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s famous novel taught in all Senegalese schools and which suggests that hybridity is deadly. Gomis, on the other hand, asserts that you do not die from encountering the West. Similarly to Alain Mabanckou’s award-winning novel Verre cassé / Broken Glass, filmmakers have developed intertextual references to world cinema. To explore escaping the vicious circle of violence, Chadian Mahamat-Saleh Haroun developed a tense, minimalist aesthetic in Daratt (2006) that would have done Hitchcock proud. In Bamako, also made in 2006, Sissako put globalization on trial in an African compound. In 2007, in Rome plutôt que vous / Rome Rather Than You, Tariq Teguia returned to the desert that the war on terrorism created in Algeria, and in 2008 sought new lifelines in Inland. This cinema is convinced that the solutions to the continent’s crises cannot be separated from a more humane running of the world, and from a lucid vision of humanity. The program is hope, at all costs. It is based on a heightened awareness of the state of Africa to re-pose the question of its place in the world, rather than trying to exalt the force of its origins. Its marginality is no longer de rigueur, the contemporaneity of its cinema no longer needs to be proved, and its films vibrate with the complex and violent relationship

Olivier Barlet / Six Decades of African Film

227

with the West. Citing Césaire, La Vie sur terre denounces the way in which Westerners view Africa as a spectacle. The Sokolo villagers’ tribulations as they try to telephone show that what matters is not the efficiency of the service, but the desire to communicate. Capturing people’s desire means being receptive to the poetry, which translates, when shooting, in the openness of the screenplay that may be changed according to chance encounters or questionings. The viewer is mobilized, not as an African identifying with a shared discourse, but as a human being waiting for happiness. This cinema no longer constructs a truth, but invites us to reinvent it.

The 2010s: A Tribute to Concern It is a terrible thing, simply, to be trapped in one’s history, and attempt, in the same motion . . . to accept, deny, reject, and redeem it—and, also, on whatever level, to profit from it. —James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work8

These are troubled times. The start of this century has confirmed the rise in inequality, populism, and dictatorships. With her 3D representation of a skyscraper under construction in the Dakar suburbs, in Atlantique (2019, France-Senegal), Mati Diop denounces the relentless capitalism that sacrifices people and general interest in favor of profit. Sacrificed by exploitation, the men also sacrifice themselves when they desperately set out on pirogues to try their luck in Europe. Death is omniscient, haunting the living. Diop radically represents these phantoms who possess their lovers to demand justice, but also to enable them, like Ada, to follow their own paths. The characters that Arie and Chuko Esiri follow in the chaos of Lagos in Eyimofe / This Is My Desire (2019, Nigeria) also dream less of an elsewhere than wish for a better life there where they are: a struggling Africa that aspires to define its own future, there where its two feet are planted. This requires attempting the impossible, driven by desperate energy, like the courageous mother who tries to save her son from amputation in Félicité, by Alain Gomis (2015, Senegal). But how to escape despair? This will only be possible by accepting love and knowing oneself to be worthy of it. In a Kinshasa where the forces appear to combine to crush people, an amateur symphonic orchestra and choir perform Arvo Pärt. How to live harmoniously in the chaos of the world? By framing the faces of the choir one by one in the finale, does not Gomis tell us that it is both individually and together, in our inner selves and our collective lives, in a song

228

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

that is both personal and shared that we shall find the strength to face the unknown? On a le temps pour nous / Time Is on Our Side: The title of rapper Didier Awadi’s song, which Senegal’s Katy Lena Ndiaye adopts for the title of her documentary on the rapper Smokey’s involvement in the Burkinabe revolution in October 2014, recalls the certitude that there is no such thing as a lost combat, that all attempts at struggle construct the future. The women in Le Loup d’or de Balolé / Balolé, the Golden Wolf, which Burkina Faso’s Aïcha Boro shot in a stone quarry right in the center of Ouagadougou in 2018, learned during this same revolution that the disadvantaged can exist by organizing. It is not just the working women’s abnegation that Boro films; it is their astounding resilience. This is a humanity that concerns us all, for to not witness it would question our own belonging to humanity. The concerns the films of the 2010s have about the future renders this manifest. “There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers.” By citing Victor Hugo and entitling his film about the French banlieues Les Misérables, Malian-born French Ladj Ly, like other 2010s films, also suggests that the solution is both human and political. Lucid about the world we face, we have no choice but to resist. That is what the ageing filmmakers who never gave up the fight in pre-revolutionary Sudan demonstrate, filmed by Suhaib Gasmelbari in Talking about Trees (2018). And, above all, to not give up one’s dreams. In Noura rêve / Noura’s Dream (2019), Tunisia’s Hinde Boujemaa portrays a woman who holds on to the possibility of love in a film in which each person has their ambiguities, lies, weaknesses, and beauty. While the political is present, it is not at the service of a program. The vision is social, but not banner-waving. In Air Conditioner, by the Angolan Fradique (2019), magical realism offers a dreamlike journey into the daily life of Luanda. Air conditioners drop off walls as it becomes hard to breathe in this asphyxiated city. The people’s troubled memory needs to be restored to open new vistas. Risking a return to brutality when fear and exhaustion loom and markers are lost, like in Terminal Sud / South Terminal, by Algerian Rabah Ameur-Zaïmèche, what matters is what is to come. Cinema is not about unravelling the threads, but about expanding the possibilities of sensibility. Tlamess / Sortilège / Spell, by Ala Eddine Slim (2019, Tunisia), also allows connections with one’s own concerns before an agonizing world and opens the imagination, which remains the condition of emancipation and thought. The spectator is not given a preestablished discourse to swallow, but is invited to appropriate the errantry and mutation of a man who only communicates with a woman with his eyes, as is also the case in Eyimofe. This radical experiment of a liberated cinema strives to strip away identity in order to escape fixations and to open up the possible. Concern founds

Olivier Barlet / Six Decades of African Film

229

Figure 6. Film still from Terminal Sud / South Terminal (dir. Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2019, Algeria), starring actor Ramzy Bedia. Image in the public domain.

this cinema and constitutes its texture, with ellipses leading to the unpredictable. Concern is not to be confused with anguish. On the contrary, it is programmatic. It is the thread spun by many films in these inconsistent times, accepting uncertainty, seeing it as a source of courage rather than a weakness. That is what the Imam Tierno does when faced with the rise of jihadist obscurantism in Senegalese Mamadou Dia’s Baamum Nafi / Nafi’s Father (2019). His protective paternity extends not only to his daughter Nafi, but to the future of his community. The film questions the impact of familial structures, which it promotes without idealizing them, while also shedding light on the social roots behind the rise in fundamentalism. With the ambiguities Baldwin refers to, Tierno is at a loss before the violence and stupidity until he manages to restructure himself through tolerance and ruse. On the subject of jihadism, Sissako’s Timbuktu has remained since 2014 a reference in subtility, using irony not pathos to reveal the hypocrisy of the invaders and their ridiculous contradictions. While the jihadis’ fragility is the object of derision, the film also includes them in the community of human beings. Merzak Allouache highlights the incoherencies of fundamentalism in Algeria too, notably in Enquête au paradis / Investigating Paradise (2017), which takes the form of a documentary inquiry into the extravagant promises of certain Salafist preachers. In Rih rabani / Divine Wind (2018), Nour is fanatical, but not a monster. Allouache is thus able to trace the evolution of the relationship between the two young terrorists humanely, right up to the final tragedy.

230

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Before the danger of losing one’s integrity, ruse is unquestionably better than war, notably for women confronting the violence of patriarchy. In the 2010s, they appear more contradictory, the films continuing to develop the complexity that appeared in the films of the 2000’s, such as those by Tunisian Raja Amari (Satin rouge/ Red Satin; Les Secrets/ Buried Secrets), who in 2016 made Corps étranger / Foreign Body, in which Samia imposes her presence uninvited. The screenplays focus on negotiation and ruse, deflection and transgression, struggling women’s strategies for their emancipation, without denying the necessary compromises notwithstanding. It is thus that Sofia, by Meryem Benm’Barek (2018, Morocco), who must rapidly declare a father for her child, develops a profoundly ambiguous position, not out of choice but out of necessity, given women’s limited margins of maneuver. Amal (2017, Egypt), whom Mohamed Siam follows for five years, develops her incredible transgressive energy during the Egyptian revolution, but ends up conforming to find her place in an increasingly rigid society. While homosexuality is considered the ultimate transgression, more and more films are addressing this theme in order to fight intolerance. Its selection at Cannes in 2018 did not stop Wanuri Kahiu’s Rafiki from being banned in Kenya. The film is not about advocacy; it is centered on the purity of a loving relationship. South African Johan Trengove’s 2016 film The Wound evokes the pain of an impossible integration when one must deny one’s intimacy, and the wound of the contempt for difference. Ruse is also deployed by migrants who wish to discover the world in an attempt to find a place of peace or to support their families. Europe has grown afraid and withdrawn into itself, provoking nightmarish situations, such as in Une Saison en France / A Season in France, by Mahamat Saleh Haroun (2017), in which the spectator intimately feels what the characters experience. With Avec Vent du nord / Northern Wind (2017), it is the common destiny of the left-behind on both sides of the sea, but also their vitality that Tunisian Walid Mattar foregrounds. Is solidarity possible in the era of globalization? Filmmakers can only but locate it in the sharing of values and people’s dignity, in an attempt to overcome their invisibility. The migrant crisis has intensified in the 2010s, without people seeing the historic continuity with fugitive maroons. To run away is not to flee. The maroons too used camouflage to escape the bloodhounds, but also developed unique ways of living, practicing creative indocility. In 2013, Franco-Senegalese Diana Gaye made Des étoiles / Under the Starry Sky, a hymn to circulations and encounters. People travel, are forced to confront one another, but it is a ballet that takes form, not a clash, a polyphonic song in which each has their voice, their path, their desire in a common adventure; one that is commonly embraced. Dyana Gaye’s characters nonetheless never

Olivier Barlet / Six Decades of African Film

231

connect; journeying takes them far from one another. Yet, in not connecting, opportunities to evolve or to come into their own open for them. The films that center these maroon bodies defy territorial attachments and clichés, inventing a space and a relation to the world in which people are there where no one expects them to be and where they can only count on themselves. At a time when George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis triggered an international reaction to the systemic racism of former slave or colonial states, the stake for African and African diaspora cinema is to represent bodies that are both invention and memory. Bodies that, like in the contortions of Krump, refuse alienation, while at the same time representing the violence inflicted on them to better escape it. Bodies that transfigure concern. Like in Gomis’s Félicité, they develop a poetics, that of the blues, the collective chant of a culture of resistance rooted in the real. Félicité possesses the dignity of those unperturbed by the ugliness of the world, but who know how to turn it into the bedrock of the possible. Olivier Barlet is a French journalist, film critic, and scholar of African cinema. He is the author of Contemporary African Cinema and African Cinemas: Decolonizing the Gaze, among other texts.

Notes This article is an updated version of Olivier Barlet, “The Five Decades of African Cinemas,” trans. Thibaud Faguer-Redig, Africultures, July 16, 2008, http://africultures .com/the-five-decades-of-african-cinemas-7954/. 1. In Sylvie Chalaye (ed.), “Afrique noire : écritures contemporaines,” Théâtre/Public, no. 158, 96. 2. Lettre-poème, “Salut aux écrivains et artistes noirs,” sent on the occasion of the Paris Congress, September 22, 1956. 3. Kenneth W. Harrow, Postcolonial African Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 1. 4. Interview of Ababacar Samb-Makharam by Guy Hennebelle, Africultures 47 (April 2002): 59 (reprinted from Les Lettres françaises, 1971). 5. Hélé Béji, Désenchantement national (Essai sur la décolonisation) (Paris: Editions François Maspero, 1982). 6. Koffi Kwahulé, Jaz (Montreuil-sous-Bois, France: Editions Théâtrales, 1998), 86. 7. L’Avenir a rendez-vous avec l’aube (La Roque d’Anthéron, France: Vents d’ailleurs, 2011), 86. 8. James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (New York: Vintage, 2011), 59. First published in 1976.

Africa, The Last Cinema Clyde Taylor

O

f the more than ninety nations that gained independence after World War II, most of the African nations among them date their independence from 1960. The furling of the flags of European nations coincides with the exposure of the first films made by black African nations. In the decades since, the African cinema has painfully stretched away from the cramped restrictions of the past and the persisting mechanics of domination—and undertaken the tense examination of decolonization. The meaning of cinema for pre-independence Africans and moviegoers today is captured in a character sketched by Ousmane Sembène: “She lived in a kind of separate world; the reading she did, the films she saw, made her part of a universe in which her own people had no place, and by the same token, she no longer had a place in theirs.” Commercial narrative fantasies had intimated the “lack of civilization” of her own people. “When N’Deye came out of a theater where she had seen visions of mountain chalets deep in snow, of beaches where the great of the world lay in the sun, of cities where the nights flashed with many-colored lights, and walked from this world back into her own, she would be seized with a kind of nausea, a mixture of hate and shame.” Through the education of colonial schools and such movie theaters, she “knew far more about Europe than she did about Africa.” Africa’s experience with motion pictures for six decades had been one of existential distress. The relation of blacks in Africa to this magical instrument was one of a people locked into colonial silence, for a term far longer than any comparable population. They were forced to watch in fascination worlds severely different than the ones they knew, even when the films were putatively about their homeland: in which successions of Trader Horns and Tarzans cavorted among them with glamorized animation, all the more to signify their own irreality. African intellectuals were pained to watch Paul Robeson, whom they ultimately knew as a champion of liberated art and liberated Africa, betrayed by devious direction into the ignominy of Sanders of the River (1935). As Bosambo (son of Samba), the camera frames Robeson shuffling and grinning obsequiously to “Sandi,” the representative of the

Clyde Taylor / Africa, The Last Cinema

233

English crown, who alone is able to restore order out of chaotic rebellion and install him as king of the river people. Today’s African filmmakers—who watched Sanders and the like as youths—have evolved in a steadily shifting cinematic environment. This has mainly been a shift from colonialism to neocolonialism, or from direct domination by Europe to indirect domination by Europe and the United States. For at the same time, America has become a superpower in the world of film, as well as in global politics. Africa stands today at the other end of the spectrum from Hollywood. If Americans view cinema from the center of profitable, monopolistic production and distribution, Africa is a laboratory for the study of film’s relation to society from the vantage point of the exploited. Because postwar Hollywood began to depend on foreign distribution for more than half its profits, it muted the gross caricatures of foreign people that were routine in earlier times. In the 1950s, the Motion Picture Producers Association (MPPA) began to systematically preview scripts in order to filter out the most offensive materials. Thus, the most recent television episodes of Tarzan now transpire in some anonymous, tropical native land, populated by vaguely equatorial people. But the results of these modulations have been limited. According to a 1968 study cited in Africa on Film and Videotape 1960–1981, More twelfth graders (percentage in parentheses) than seventh graders assigned the following stereotypical terms to Africa: witch doctors (93%), wild animals (91%), drums (91%), spears (90%), savages (88%), tribe (88%), natives (86%), cannibals (85%), pygmies (84%), poison darts (82%), naked (78%), huts (69%), superstition (69%), primitive (69%), missionaries (52%), strange (44%), backward (43%), illiterate (42%), no history (38%).1

A reasonable explanation of the variance between seventh and twelfth grades is the cumulative impact of television and movie-watching. Far more important to African filmmakers were the shifts in the control of production and distribution that provided little relief for their aspirations. It is the realization that political and cinematic independence are closely linked that gives emerging African cinema a highly charged political ambience. The number of films produced by colonized nations all over the world has been negligible (Hong Kong being a special exception). But those who set out to frame authentic African images after the flag-lowering ceremonies that signified independence, soon found that the necessary material resources were almost entirely out of African hands, and were organized to resist the growth of indigenous film industries. The importation of foreign films is controlled by American distribution cartels. The French example is a good illustration of their power. When

234

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

independence came, two French companies, SECMA and COMACIO, dominated francophone distribution through a dual monopoly. They dealt with African theater owners on an all-or-nothing basis, allowing them no choice in selecting films. These have been traditionally the trashiest of movies— failed films seldom seen in the metropolitan countries. Consequently, African film production is discouraged because monopolistic distributors can “dump” films made elsewhere at rentals far lower than domestic films could afford to charge. Burkina Faso moved against this one-sided situation in 1970 by nationalizing its cinemas. The French conglomerate immediately imposed a boycott, closing down its theaters. A valiant effort to secure films from other sources did not fill the gap and a compromise was struck leaving film selection effectively still in the hands of the French companies. Other efforts to nationalize distribution have met with similar results, with the exception of Guinea which, under a Marxist-Leninist government, was able to successfully withstand the monopolies. The lopsided film picture in sub-Saharan Africa today is evident in the production of less than a dozen African features per year, while in 1976 Tanzania imported 160 features, Kenya 219, Senegal 248, and Uganda 936. In 1979, according to the United Nations Statistical Yearbook, Nigeria imported 105 features, all of them from the United States.2 The African film market is small by Western standards, which is not the same as saying it is unimportant. In societies where literacy rates are low and where several languages coexist within national borders, the communications potential of cinema, for informational and intellectual development, are compelling. Ousmane Sembène sees cinema as “the night school of my people.” The role that films could play in developing a sense of national identity—where such identity is now fragile—equals the place once held by epics in the oral tradition. And while this is a secondary consideration to most African directors, the production and worldwide distribution of African films promises a needed enrichment of human culture. “Cinema is a conversation I hold with my people,” says Sembène. Many African film artists see film as such a conversation through which fundamental questions may be settled. Some recent feature films obviously bid for commercial success, but the overwhelming preoccupations of African cineastes are marked by a sincerity, dedication, and commitment that draws their works into the considerations of art and social thought, and away from the entertainment-for-profit that is the dominant concern of the major film powers. Moreover, the communal role of art in traditional Africa—combined with the critical pressure of the public’s realities, socioeconomic and political—means that the space usually occupied by artistic and intellectual cinema is dominated by films invested with cultural and political awareness.

Clyde Taylor / Africa, The Last Cinema

235

Figure 1. Magaya Niang and Mareme Niang in Touki Bouki. Image in the public domain.

To be both African and a filmmaker is to be cut off from the usual grounds of complacency. The dialogue that is wanted with an African audience—which might begin with the question, What does it mean to be an African in these times?—is crudely interrupted by the clanking machinery of imported white male adventure thrillers, kung fu operas from Hong Kong, and convoluted Indian melodramas which hold African audiences in prolonged captivity. Thus, Africa’s has been a “cinema of hunger”—an accurate enough description of its poverty of material resources. Some American film school departments have more available technical equipment than most African countries. Film stock has been rare, unselected, and often defective. Most West African films are processed and finished in European laboratories. By the time the director is able to view the developed footage, the production team can seldom be reassembled for retakes. The ratio of footage exposed to footage used in the final print often approaches 1:1. There are few trained African actors or technicians. Electricity is not always available. Thus, the environment for making films with any accountability to local reality is severely constrained. Though African filmmakers, for the most part, understand the pressures ranged against them, it must often seem as though nobody wants the truths that their films would willingly bring. Leaders of African governments are wary of the kind of critical inquiry into national conditions that is likely to be stimulated by the filmmaker. The economic weaknesses of the continent—problems of drought, famine, disease, ignorance, wars, and inter-ethnic conflicts make the filmmakers’ bid for scanty resources seem impudent. To this position, the filmmaker can make two cogent replies. First, that the resources needed are already present in the sums Africans spend to see

236

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

mind-wasting imported films. And second, that the perspectives brought by his or her film can have an impact on drought, famine, disease, ignorance, and the rest by clarifying their causes and solutions. But an African elite that mainly sees its salvation in its ties to the economic and political systems of the West, is largely indifferent to these arguments. The cognitive grid of internationalized, Hollywood stereotypes, in which Africans are doomed to dependence or failure, continually reinforces the inertia that keeps African audiences, elites, Western societies, in short, “the world,” skeptical about an independent-thinking and independently creative African cinema. The environment for African cinema remains one, then, that embodies a conflict surrounding both material and mental resources. Equally clear is that the exacting evolution of African cinema is inseparable from the contexts of African political, economic, and psychological realities—from movements for change as well as complexes of subordination, underdevelopment, and inertia. The remarkable achievement of African cinema—a body of films defying in scope and talents its material “handicaps”—is no isolated “miracle,” but a concrete reflection of energies bent towards decolonization and repossession in all areas of African life. A beginning of sorts for African cinema occurred in 1955 when a group of African students, Paulin Vieyra, Mamadou Saar, Robert Cristan, and Jacques Melo Kame, completed a short film in Paris, Afrique sur Seine / Africa on the Seine.3 It is characterized by long takes of young African men walking thoughtfully along the boulevards of Paris in scenes suggesting existentialist alienation and a cinema technique influenced by Italian neorealism. A deeper grip on a foundation for the future was felt in 1963 when Borom Sarret, by Ousmane Sembène of Senegal, was noted on the international film scene and won a prize at the International Festival of Tours in France. This short film, which follows a poor driver whose cart is confiscated when he crosses the boundary into the European quarter of Dakar, has many marks of the African cinema to follow. Also touched by neorealism, Borom Sarret carries a smoldering reflection on life and death as the driver transports a dead child to a cemetery, and later a pregnant woman to a hospital. Its open-endedness and barely-contained anger prefigure the particular power Sembène would continue to draw out of the most ordinary African spectacles. When he completed his next film, La Noire de . . . / Black Girl (1966), the cinema of black Africa had been incontrovertibly launched. It was the first feature-length film completed south of the Sahara. “South of the Sahara” is an important but problematic distinction. Most references here and otherwise to “African cinema” are directed towards subSaharan or black African films. The term is also made to relate to films whose intentions are essentially African in spirit, which opens the definition to

Clyde Taylor / Africa, The Last Cinema

237

certain films and movements of North Africa and Egypt. Egyptian director Youseff Chahine considers himself emphatically an African filmmaker. “African” in this context resembles the term “Third World cinema.” But technically, all films made by natives of the continent qualify as African, which includes the forty-odd films produced each year. In Egypt, films noted for their employment of fabulously glamorous stars, sensational plots faced with musical interludes, and a decidedly commercial orientation. So yet other beginnings must be accounted for. A precedent that went unheeded was the 1924 Gazelle’s Eyes / Ain El Ghazel, shot in Tunisia by Shemama Chicly—a film described by Tahar Cheriaa as having “no success and no sequel,’’ since three decades would pass before the production of another Tunisian feature. Laila (1927), on the other hand, generally regarded as the first Egyptian feature, was quickly followed by several others. To place the major themes, directors and films of African cinema, it is good to recall a schema proposed by Frantz Fanon at the dawn of African independence. Fanon viewed the “native intellectual” as transversing three phases: (1) an assimilationist phase, during which the intellectual remains a passive pet of the colonizers; (2) a phase of remembrance, where the intellectual makes a rather abstract and synthetic rediscovery of his roots in national culture; and (3) a combative phase wholly immersed in liberationist struggle, where literature becomes the song of the battle. Adapting these three phases to African cinema, film theorist Teshome Gabriel identifies the first with the imitation of Hollywood film style and substance; the second with a struggle over cultural identity; and the third with a cinema in which films and other art forms are explicitly acknowledged as ideology. The second phase dominates our attention here, as it is within the realm of the postindependence, neocolonial circumstances that most noted African films are made. It is a central, pivotal zone that contains elements of the other two phases in a tense, uneasy equilibrium, where contradictions and frustrations are most apparent. Appropriately, this center phase provides the scenario for the dominating theme of African cinema: the conflict between old and new. This is never a conflict between symmetrical opposites, but rather the choice from among the modern, individualistic, and industrialized; Marxist socialism; and some form of African socialism. How does one separate those older African values of solid worth from regressive elements in African tradition—and both from the cultural destabilizations of colonialism? The collision between old and new shows up frequently in films that follow the protagonist’s journey from rural village to urban tangle, or from Africa to Europe. In both journeys, the physical intimates a spiritual passage.

238

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

The role of traditional versus modern medicine poses another conflict between new and old. This theme is notably addressed in Ababacar SambMakharam’s Koudou (1970, Senegal), which focuses on a young woman— emotionally troubled over the ordeal of ritual scarification—who is treated without success by Western psychotherapists, and finally receives solace through traditional healing practices. Frequently in African films, women who respect the old ways are juxtaposed beside those attracted to Western aesthetics, morals, and consumerism. But this paradigm coexists with films that provide a new examination of old social attitudes, as when chauvinist males limit women’s freedom, or when old caste and class barriers stand in the way of young lovers and wider social harmony. Not surprisingly, these themes percolate in the work of Ousmane Sembène, perhaps the best known African film director; who is legitimately considered one of the century’s major artists. Sembène was a dock worker in France when he taught himself to write fiction. God’s Bits of Wood, his second novel, is a masterpiece of African and world literature. Yet he turned almost immediately from this success toward film, realizing that the political awakening of his people—his chosen vocation—would be better served by film than fiction in Senegal where the majority are unlettered. While all of Sembène’s films have been warmly received in Senegal and abroad (except Ceddo, which is banned in his own country), admirers are evenly divided over their favorites. The power of his filmic art was somewhat muted in his first three features to accommodate Western viewers—for whom his subtle Marxist dialectic and layered significances are lost to the restraint of his cinematic style, stationary camera, infrequent close-ups, long silences, and deliberate, ritualistic pacing. Like his literary style, Sembène’s film technique builds on an immanent realism, where the surface of everyday, prosaic reality is simultaneously the scene of less obvious resonances, metaphors, and symbols. Teshome Gabriel likens it to the lost wax method of making African gold sculpture.4 The same evidence at immanent symbolic riches as it breaks through the unsuspecting plane of surface reality, holds true for Sembène’s work as a whole. Sembène’s conviction that African women remain unacknowledged as keepers of African tradition and the more progressive force towards African liberation is more boldly voiced in each succesive film. For these reasons, Ceddo forms a kind of paradigm of the definitive elements of Sembène’s work in cinema. The path of Med Hondo (Mohamed Abid Hondo of Mauritania) into cinema has some parallels to Sembène’s. Like Sembène, he discovered his creative vocation in France. After working as a jack of all trades, including docker. Hondo became an actor. In 1966 he formed his own group called Shango, in Paris to present plays of the black diaspora. Moved by the French

Clyde Taylor / Africa, The Last Cinema

239

indifference to his theater productions as well as the small chance of reaching black audiences, he widened his scope to include films. But unlike Sembène, Hondo remained an expatriate in France. The deep sense of estrangement and alienation that Hondo experienced in France has been the driving energy behind his films. Through his Marxist dialectic, he describes that estrangement as merely the flip side to the severance of Africa from its own values under imperialism. Hondo considers that the expression of this theme demands the search for an undominated African film language, and he has carried this search into a style more disruptive and nonlinear than Sembène’s. Hondo’s first feature, Soleil Ô / O Sun (1970), named after a lament from a song of Africans transported to the West Indies, uses estrangement as both theme and technique. Its protagonist, an accountant living in France, is nameless, like the central character of Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. The opening— a cartoon underneath the titles shows an African who is placed in power through foreign military intervention, only to have that power reneged. This ambivalent hero—a composite of personal experiences, including some of Hondo’s movies through a succession of episodes more modular and metaphoric than sequential and representational. The many frameworks of his appearances: with the broom of a Parisian street sweeper, in a classroom, conversing with an executive about capitalism, all stress his essential alienation and ambiguous identity. He is traumatically and climactically shocked by a French family’s waste of food while lunching at their country villa. Fleeing into the forest, he falls at the gnarled roots of a tree, his mind spinning with images of Third World revolutionaries, Patrice Lumumba, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and his ears echoing machine gun fire. According to critic Françoise Pfaff, Hondo’s film style reveals the influence of the disruptive literary technique (and values) of Frantz Fanon, Leon Damas, and Aimé Césaire, the militant anti-classicism of Godard and avant-garde theater—as well as African oral tradition—the precedent that Hondo most emphatically cites. These influences penetrate the documentaries he made after Soleil Ô. Les Bicots-negres, vos voisins / Dirty Arabs, Dirty Niggers, Your Neighbors (1973), exhorts at length the abusive use of North African and black African workers in France. Nous aurons toute la mort pour dormir / We’ll Have All Death To Sleep (1977) follows, with sympathy, the freedom lighters of the Polisario liberation movement. Hondo’s West Indies (1979) is an extraordinary African film, first for its cost ($1.35 million); and then for its pictorial and dramatic spectacle. Based on a play by Daniel Boukman, a Martinican, it is a magnum opus: a cinematic opera set on a gigantic slave ship, said to have been staged in a huge, abandoned Citroen factory. This colorful music/dance epic links the past and present oppression of West Africans from their endurance first

240

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

of venal African kings who sold their countrymen into slavery, and then of their modern counterpart, the elite African collaborators with French neocolonialism. Haile Gerima, another expatriate African, repatriated the alienation and outrage of his sojourn in America in a remarkable film, Harvest: 3000 Years, made in his native Ethiopia. Gerima considers himself self-taught, despite several years as a film student at the University of California in Los Angeles. Unlike Med Hondo, the films Gerima made outside Africa are usually not considered to be African cinema, but rather a part of the independent black American film movement. These include Bush Mama, Child of Resistance, Wilmington Ten: USA 10,000, and Ashes and Embers. Harvest, which has won many festival prizes, was shot in Ethiopia in a few weeks at a cost of $20,000, and had a shooting ratio of nearly one to one. Using nonactors—including members of his own family—Gerima captures, as in a timeless documentary, the unchanging reality of feudal oppression. A peasant family suffers an overbearing landlord while a canny, deranged veteran declaims the injustice of the social order. The veteran finally kills the landlord who has confiscated his land while he was at war. The commentary of Ahmed el Maanouni is worth quoting: The peasant is doubly enslaved—by the earth and by the landowner . . . the yoke of serfdom is clearly represented by the death of the young peasant girl, carried away by the torrent while trying to save the landowner’s cow from drowning . . . While the peasants go out to work the land, the landowner goes to church. The religion is from outside and an image of power like western clothing worn over traditional dress. Foreign domination is also indicated by the frequent passing of lorries along the road-technology at the same time present and yet out of reach…

Gerima’s slow-paced, black and white staging transports his spectacle beyond neorealism into a timeless collective memory. The grace and elegance of the peasants’ movements, unalienated, unsentimental firmness of their love for each other the eloquent testimony of their faces in nearly silent film, the spirituality of their daily culture, impart to their story an antiquity of Biblical resonance. In one scene the peasant father makes a long trek up the hill to bow to the rebukes of the landlord who is seated atop with a view of his domain. In a dream sequence, a young woman and her parents are driven through the fields, yoked like oxen to a plow, a whip cracking overhead. These images are unforgettable. Such moments make Harvest more convincing than fact or fiction. Yet another sort of expatriate film is Sambizanga (1972), made by Sarah Maldoror, who was born in Paris of Guadaloupian parents. Drawn from

Clyde Taylor / Africa, The Last Cinema

241

Figure 2. Med Hondo, director. Image in the public domain.

The Real Life of Domingos Xavier, by Angolan novelist Luandino Vieira, it frames the beginning stages of the Angolan revolution (although actually shot in Guinea-Bissau). Maria does not know that her husband is a member of the Popular Movement For The Liberation of Angola, and when he is arrested and imprisoned by the Portuguese, she sets out on the road with her baby to find where he is, hoping her inquiries will protect him from official indifference. Important lessons are unobtrusively conveyed along the way: her husband dies of torture rather than betray his white comrade, while she is aided on her pilgrimage by a network of party members. The storming of the prison where her husband Domingos died, not shown in the film, is said to have moved the revolution to the open level of combat that led to success. The films of Souleymane Cissé of Mali, trained in Moscow (like Sembène and Sarah Maldoror), have found a form that lies somewhere between the extended parables of Sembène and the disrupting strategies of Med Hondo and Haile Gerima. His two most recent and popular films, Baara / The Porter (1979) and Finye / The Wind, (1982) are altogether free of the cliched devices of Western cinema. The stories wind naturally—and therefore

242

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

surprisingly—through many lives, but sparked by idealistic young people trying to bring change to a society where inequality of wealth and poverty is protected by powerful elders. Baara follows an itinerant worker, much like the driver in Borom Sarret, through the diverse daily rounds of Bamako. He is befriended by a fellow countryman, a young engineer who gives him a job in his factory. The owner of the factory simultaneously murders his wife for infidelity, and has the young engineer assassinated for his attempts to unionize the plant. In Finye, two young students disturb their elders and the general peace, not only because their love crosses class lines but also because of a common fight with other students, against inequality. Their love and commitment are only strengthened by their imprisonment. The search for a genuinely African film language remains a common pursuit of Africa’s leading filmmakers. This search has already successfully borne fruit by creating films that distinctively resemble those of no other culture. It has also turned most the these filmmakers, including those already discussed, to African oral tradition as a creative matrix. This foundation has upheld films that focus on pastoral settings, village to city transitions, and explorations, however caustic, of the old ways. Safi Faye (Senegal) opens her most recent film Fad Jal (1979) with the now famous words, “in Africa, an old man who dies is a library burned to the ground.’’ As the narrator relates the history of his village to the young boys of his family, the events are reinacted, Simultaneously, questions arise as to the village’s relation to the state in terms of land ownership and control. Similar questions preoccupy the village elders in Faye’s first feature, Kaddu-Beykat / Letter from a Village (1976), the story of two lovers who are separated when the young man ventures to find work in the city. “While studying African rites and customs,” Faye notes, “apart from their problems of religion, people always ended up talking to me about their current problems which were, rather, ones of economics.” Thus, social relevance enters her films, which have otherwise been characterized as documentary and ethnographic in form. The particular mix of elements in her films, their peaceful movement, the sensitive incorporation of ritual, make a distinctive contribution to African film grammar by the first black African woman film director. Sey Seyeti / One Man, Many Women (1980) by Ben Diogaye Beye, ties the loose interconnections of oral narrative to the problems of polygamy. Some of these befall Nder, a muslim with two wives, the younger of who is misled by a marabout and suspects the other of causing the illness of her child. In another scramble of relationships, Fatou, who promises her lover that she will divorce the husband forced on her by her parents, announces a new day after her lover marries another and invites her to become his second wife.

Clyde Taylor / Africa, The Last Cinema

243

Figure 3. Magou Seck in Mossane (dir. Safi Faye, 1996, Senegal). Image in the public domain.

Ben Beye’s is a witting, diverting, and thought-provoking film, regardless of how much controversy it has aroused over the treatment of a subject that demands sensitivity. More in the nature of an expose is N’Diangine (1975, Senegal) perhaps the best known film of Mahama Johnson Traore. The title refers to a Koranic schoolboy who is subjected to abuse by a corrupt marabout. The marabout profits from his students’ labor while only teaching them to recite verses of scripture that they cannot read. This moving and well-coordinated study ends in the anguish of the boy’s flight to the city, where he is killed by the auto of an indifferent bureaucrat. Future discussions of oral tradition in African cinema will have to give special attention to Jom (1981, Senegal), Ababacar Samb-Makharam’s second major film after Koudou. Mahkaram brings oral tradition into the foreground with a griot—narrator who articulates, sometimes directly to the cameraaudience, the virtues of jom—a Wolof concept loosely translated as the dignity, respect, and courage without which a man is not a man. Declaiming to a group of fellow striking workers fractured by dissidence, the griot makes vivid and relevant the issue of jom as it is illustrated by two stories reenacted through flashbacks to the 1900s and the 1930s. A different contribution to African film language through oral tradition is made by Wend Kuuni / The Gift of God (1982, Burkina Faso), by Gaston Kaboré. Beautiful cinematography of pastoral village scenes provides the setting for a story of a young boy who wanders out of the forest, unable

244

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

to speak as the result of a traumatic experience. The boy, Wend Kuuni, is taken in by a family whose young daughter patiently helps him to recover his memories. Set in a time before European presence, Wend Kuuni is remarkable for its simple originality and filmic poetry. Like Jom and other works of the 1980s, it shows what an African film can be, Just barely submerged beneath these explorations of the oral tradition as a foundation for cinema, is an implicit contestation with the ethnographic visualization of Africa that is most particularly identified with the work of Jean Rouch. A major pioneer in both cinema verité and ethnographic filmmaking, Rouch’s films about Africa are free of the enthusiastic racism of earlier treatments. But, according to René Vautier, another French filmmaker and one of the founders of Algerian cinema, Rouch’s brand of filmmaking remains propaganda against a colonized people.5 Rouch’s ethnographies, in fact, do little to disturb the stereotypic thinking that is reflected in the study of twelfth and seventh grade American schoolchildren cited earlier. The heart of the difficulty lies with the basis of anthropological study itself—that is, the preservation of a single view of Africa as the Africa of the past. Moreover, Rouch has difficulty explaining why the Africans in his films never speak for themselves. To his credit, Rouch makes a point of training African technicians, and several African directors have worked with him, including Mustapha Alassane and Oumarou Ganda of Niger, Desire Ecare of the Ivory Coast, and Safi Faye of Senegal. Vautier likens ethnographic films about Africa to an amateur film made by his aunt, featuring Britons circling a mountain on their knees. In fact, African filmmakers have occasionally chosen to reverse roles to study the ethnography of the Occidentals. In this frame of mind, lnoussa Ouseini of Niger follows a naive itinerant African worker to the outskirts of Paris where he is victimized by the tricksterism of both blacks and whites, particularly a French prostitute whose friendliness he mistakes for friendship. Poorer but wiser he sends home a postcard whose message gives this short film its ironic title—Paris, c’est Joli (1975). Kwate Nee-Owoo of Ghana filmed the African art treasures in the British Museum, then descending to the basement where, amid surprised museum officials, he trained his camera on other African religious artifacts heaped about like junk. You Hide Me is a rough, cinema verité, expression of a culture outraged. The point is that a truer, more complete ethnography is recorded by the ninety-one African film directors treated in Guy Hennebelle’s Cineastes d’Afrique Noir, than in the special curio films of anthropologists.6 It is a more valid ethnography, not only because Africans speak for themselves from both sides of the camera—a circumstance that Jean Rouch applauds—but also because these films do not delete the pressing considerations of politics

Clyde Taylor / Africa, The Last Cinema

245

and economics, the lack of which makes portrayals of Africa mere souvenirgathering. It is a more accurate ethnography because these films delineate Africa’s transit among the Fanonian stages towards decolonization. Southern Africa is not surprisingly the source of the most repressed and the most militantly liberationist films of black Africa. In Azania, South Africa, the majority black population is denied the training and opportunity to make films that reflect their lives, embattled by the system of apartheid. According to Molefe Pheto, exploitative gangster and adventure movies are made for black audiences by white film groups, using black actors to front as directors. He reports the playwright Gibson Kente was put into solitary confinement for six months as the producer of an innocuous film that was to be made from his play How Long. At the same time, aware of the importance of visual media, black South Africans continue to prepare scripts and train themselves as best they can, both inside the nation and in exile. Many features and documentaries have been made about the South African situation, naturally, but these are not by South Africans. An important exception is Last Grave at Dimbaza, shot clandestinely and codirected by Nana Mahomo, a South African exile living in England. The graves of infants who died from malnutrition in the barren “homelands”—where many South Africans have been dumped by apartheid policies—is the moral launching point for Last Grave. It makes an impressive indictment of South Africa’s totalitarian scheme of white domination. Angola and Mozambique offer revolutionary views from the other side of fallen Portuguese colonialism. Said to be the better equipped and more productive of the two, Angola has shown little interest in displaying its films outside its borders. The Angolan revolution thus remains best known on film through Sambizanga. Mozambique formed a modest but determined film institute shortly after independence, which has produced several short documentaries and two features, Estas Sao as armas / These Are the Weapons and Mueda: Memorial and Massacre. The first is a compilation documentary about the overthrow of colonialism. It exposes fascinating stock footage of colonized Mozambique and footage of the revolution in action, secured from Robert Van Lierop, the black American director who made A Luta continua / The Struggle Continues and O Pavo organizado / The People Organized about the revolution, among others. Estas Sao as armas is a moving recovery of contemporary history that is singular as a depiction made by black Africans about their successful liberation. Mueda is an unusual film of special significance. Ruy Guerra, Brazilian veteran of cinema nova, directed the filming of a folk play that is staged annually in the village of Mueda. Just before the armed revolution broke out,

246

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

politicized Mozambiquans entered this village near the border of recently independent Tanzania. They demanded their own independence, only to be jailed by the local Portuguese colonial administrators. Nevertheless, they kept coming, raising the consciousness of the villagers who finally rose up against the colonizers, only to be massacred. But their rebellion added a spark to the liberating eruption to come. Mueda offers a provocative vision of what a people’s cinema, or a revolutionary folk cinema can be, freed entirely of the pandering styles of entertainment-for-profit. Humble in production values (it has been described as more gray and white than black and white), it captures stunning distanciation effects lodged in the folk play. Interviews with participants of the original events, laced among the reenactments, help achieve an unheralded model of the demystifying cinema that progressive Western filmmakers have stumbled desperately to discover. The fate of African Cinema hangs in the balance as filmmakers persistently organize to find remedies for the problems of economics, an underdeveloped infrastructure, and distribution. This organizing was highly strategized With the Naimey resolutions of 1983, which stresses regional cooperation in production, postproduction, and distribution that will demand a new level of enlightened self-interest among national governments. But whatever the fate of future production and distribution—which could also get worse—from the view of the awakened, active student of films, Africa is no longer the cinematic desert George Sadoul saw twenty-five years ago.7 The problems and resilient solutions African films have posed are more apposite to other societies than intellectual fashion allows us to recognize. Even if they were not, African films make an invaluable addition to human culture conveyed through motion pictures. Still another question is whether African filmmakers can reconcile the perennial public desire for fascinating spectacle. When given a fair hearing, the films of Sembène, Hondo, Gerima, and Cissé have won large and enthusiastic audiences. Whether films of this sort or their successors can win sustaining followings in competition with (or to the exclusion of) exploitation films, the battle lines are so clearly drawn, the alternatives so sharply marked, and the space for growth, experimentation and the human-spirited use of films is so vast that Africa may be the last hope for achieving the uplifting and enlightening role that the inventors of cinema first had in mind. Clyde Taylor is an American writer and Professor Emeritus at New York University. While Taylor’s scholarship is wide-ranging and exemplifies a decades-long interest in black film and aesthetics, he is possibly most famous for coining the term ‘L.A. Rebellion’ to refer to the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers. Taylor is the author of The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract–Film and Literature.

Clyde Taylor / Africa, The Last Cinema

247

Notes Originally published as Clyde Taylor, “Africa, The Last Cinema,” in Journey Across Three Continents (New York: Third World Newsreel, 1985), 50–58. 1. Africa on Film and Videotape, 1960–1981: A Compendium of Reviews, (African Studies Center, Michigan State University, 1982). 2. Angela Marting ed. African Films, the Context of Production. No. 6. British Film Institute, 1982. 3. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Le Cinema Africain: des Origines a 1973, (Paris: Presence Africain, 1975). 4. Teshome Habte Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation. No. 21. (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1982) 5. Hala Salmane, Simon Hartog, and David Wilson, eds. Algerian Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1976). 6. Guy Hennebelle and Catherine Ruelle, “Cinéastes d’Afrique noire,” special edition of CinemAction 49 (1999). 7. Georges Sadoul, The Cinema in the Arab Countries. (Interarab Centre of Cinema & Television, 1966).

The Pan-African Cinema Movement: Achievements, Misfortunes, and Failures (1969–2020) Férid Boughedir Survival of Intercultural Dialogue, Failure of Economic Strategy, and Solidarity Action

I

s it a coincidence that in the past decade in Africa, the two revolutions against the injustice of a prolonged dictatorial power—two spontaneous popular uprisings, without political guidance or leadership, eventually forcing both heads of state into exile—have a common point that has never been mentioned for the occasion? These two countries, Burkina Faso and Tunisia, are the only countries on the continent to have regularly organized Pan-African film festivals since the 1960s, soon after their political independence from French colonialism: the Carthage Film Festival (CFF, Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage) born in 1966 in Tunisia, and the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (Festival panafricain du cinema et de la télévision de Ouagadougou, FESPACO) born in 1969 in Burkina Faso. Both Festivals are a tremendous popular success with a record audience. They have been creating for more than half a century a new type of African viewer, aware and eager to see their own image finally filmed by Africans, after more than a century of colonial denial of their cultures and identities! Could the cinematographic Pan-Africanism initiated by these two countries represent a vehicle for regular cultural dialogue between the two shores of the Sahara and between the different language areas of Africa, as well as a vector of social and political awareness through the power of the seventh art image? In other words, the famous role of “evening class,” meaningful even to the illiterate, attributed from the outset by the doyen of Senegalese filmmakers, Ousmane Sembène, to African cinemas. This question is definitely worth asking for me, some years after the 50th anniversary of both the FESPACO and the Carthage Film Festival. It seemed useful to me to offer a point of view of their history, subjective of

Férid Boughedir / The Pan-African Cinema Movement

249

course, since I was one of the actors. I want to help to trace, without complacency, part of the adventure and evolution of this unitary movement led mainly by artists and referred to as “the Pan-African Cinema movement” or “Cinematographic Pan-Africanism” through the successes and failures of these institutions.

I. Birth of Cinematographic Pan-Africanism Historically, the concept of cinematographic Pan-Africanism was born in 1969, with the first (non-competitive) edition of the FESPACO in Ouagadougou and the first Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers. A year earlier, the 1968 Carthage Film Festival (CFF, born in Tunisia in 1966, the same year as the Festival of Black Arts in Dakar) officially integrated this concept because of the geographical and cultural situation of Tunisia which made the competition both Pan-African and Pan-Arab. As a result, the nonAfrican Arab countries of the Middle East joined the Arab speaking countries of North Africa in the competition. Cinematographic Pan-Africanism as a movement of intercultural dialogue through festivals—launched by the Carthage Film Festival in 1969 and the FESPACO in 1969—has experienced a constant expansion, as evidenced by the emergence of many other festivals in all regions of Africa:

1. East Africa • • •

In 1981, the MOGPAFIS (Mogadishu Film Symposium) was launched in Somalia. I took part in its implementation with the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI). The MOGPAFIS survived until 1987, near the end of Siad Barre’s regime. Zanzibar International Film Festival in Zanzibar.

2. Southern Africa • • •

Zimbabwe International Film Festival in Harare, Zimbabwe. The DOCKANEMA in Maputo, Mozambique. Sithengi Cinema Festival in Cape Town and Durban International Film Festival in South Africa.

3. West Africa •

The RECIDAK (Dakar Film Meetings), launched by Annette Mbaye d’Erneville in Senegal.

250

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

•

The Quintessence or International Film Festival of Ouidah, launched by Jean Odoutan in Benin.

4. Central Africa •

The Black Screens Festival, launched by Bassek Ba Kobhio in Cameroon.

5. North Africa • • •

The African Film Festival in Khouribga, founded by Nour-Eddine Saïl, one of the undisputed “fathers” of Moroccan cinema, who died from the coronavirus at the end of 2020. Cinematographic Framework of Hergla founded by Mohamed Challouf, spiritual son of Tahar Cheriaa and of FESPACO to whom he devoted several films. The Luxor African Film Festival (LAFF) in Egypt.

This movement was also developed outside the continent with the Views of Africa festival in Montreal initiated by Gérard Le Chêne; the festival of the Italian Missionary Center COE (Centro Orientamento Educativo) in Milan initiated by Annamaria Gallone and Alessandra Speciale (who have published Screens of Africa magazine in bilingual edition in partnership with FEPACI); those of London initiated by Zimbabwean Keith Shiri and Caribbean June Givanni; the Festivals of Nantes and Amiens in France (directed by JeanPierre Garcia who created Le Film Africain & du Sud magazine!) which has even been paired with the FESPACO and the African Film Festival, Inc. in New York, organized by Sierra Leonean Mahen Bonetti; the Los Angeles Pan-African Film & Arts Festival funded by African American actor Danny Glover and led by Ayuko Babu (the festival is also open to African American films); the Washington DC Black Film Festival; the African Movie Festival in Manitoba in Canada initiated by Ben Akoh; the African Film Festival of Tarifa (Cordoba). Fortunately, these festivals as well as so many others around the world, especially throughout Europe, perpetuate this indispensable function of showcase and intercultural dialogue in favor of African films, not to mention the publications and websites. Since the end of the African Film, the best-known today are the websites Africultures by Olivier Barlet and Africiné; and as for the younger generation, Awotele magazine was initiated among others by Franco-Burkinabe Claire Diao. Pan-African festivals on and off the continent have become, mostly thanks to the beneficial phenomenon of international cinephilia, a springboard to access major international events and for several directors in sub-Saharan Africa to achieve the status of “art film stars.” For instance, Souleymane Cissé,

Férid Boughedir / The Pan-African Cinema Movement

251

Idrissa Ouédraogo, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, or Abderrahmane Sissako, are some of those who received an award from the Cannes Film Festival, still a staple of world cinema. These four directors participated in the prestigious official competition, in addition to the numerous African filmmakers selected in the parallel sections such as Directors’ Fortnight, the International Critics’ week, or Un Certain Regard. Many of them later became jury members of these sections, along with Gaston Kaboré whose films received awards not in Cannes, but in the Venice International Film Festival. These great directors have thus been legitimately praised to the skies thanks to the existence of the particular “cult” of world cinephilia, which is fortunately always very democratic. But there is a major distinctive feature, which does not in any way call into question the talent of these authors: their films are mostly produced not in Africa, but in France!

II. Birth of FEPACI Festivals have therefore proven to be a good basis for the permanent promotion of African cinemas in terms of international renown but not in terms of economic growth, especially regarding the development of production and distribution in Africa itself. However, from the outset, the question arose: in parallel with cultural promotion, how to make concrete progress in terms of development and economic supervision of African films produced and distributed on a dripfeed basis and often deprived of the minimum necessary to their existence and viability on the continent? Cinematographic Pan-Africanism as an operational tool, imagined by both Tahar Cheriaa (founder in 1966 of the first Pan-African Film Festival on the continent: CFF, Carthage Film Festival) and by his friend Ousmane Sembène, one of the historical “fathers” of FESPACO, came to fruition with the creation of the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers, FEPACI. FEPACI was legally created in 1970 during the CFF, by the only two African associations of filmmakers then existing, the Senegalese one and the Tunisian one, created that year for the occasion, thanks to Ousmane Sembène and Tahar Cheriaa’s dual sponsorship.2 FEPACI’s original priority, which unfortunately seems to be more and more forgotten these days, was to convince African governments to decolonize African screens and their income—which at the time were monopolized by Western film suppliers—and then, once this essential distribution market was recovered, to introduce a tax and a legal framework to make the production of African films economically viable, thanks to national and

252

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

regional resources coming from the African audiovisual market. This was done to end their dependence especially on French and other European financial support that had often made it possible for them to exist on the international cultural scene. Over the years, we even saw the creation of European “branches” of FEPACI, created by filmmakers living in Paris, such as the African Committee of Filmmakers (CAC) created by Mauritanian Med Hondo and Burkinabe Mamadou Djim Kola, followed by the Guild of African Directors and Producers originally chaired by Congolese filmmaker Balufu BakupaKanyinda. In Africa, Souleymane Cissé created the UCECAO in Mali in 1995, whose members, while defending their specific interests, continued to be members of FEPACI.

III. Birth and Death of the First Common Market of African Cinema: The CIDC After the successful development of inter-African cultural dialogue set by the festivals, FEPACI strived to support cinematographic Pan-Africanism in the economic struggle, notably through lobbying for the implementation of structures allowing the self-financing of films at national and regional levels. This self-financing would be based on common markets of film distribution, designed to expand national markets that often have too few movie theaters to ensure the viability of a film on their own. Decolonizing movie theaters and their distribution channels was to be the first fight of the first secretary general of FEPACI, Senegalese Ababacar Samb-Makharam. He also had FEPACI admitted as an observer member of the OAU (Organization of African Unity, forerunner of the current African Union). In 1973, he led a FEPACI official delegation to the USA in order to get the support of African Americans (for whom FESPACO subsequently opened the African Diaspora section and the Paul Robeson Prize) and this through the African American institute. Ababacar Samb-Makharam was reelected secretary general of FEPACI during the second Federation Congress held in Algiers in 1974 and continued his patient lobbying to gain state support for the continent’s young movie theaters. I was living at the time in Paris for the preparation of my PhD on young African cinemas and my full-length documentary, Twenty Years of African Cinema (Caméra d’Afrique). I had the chance to write regularly as a film critic in Jeune Afrique, the most widely read weekly news magazine in Frenchspeaking Africa, especially by senior officials and heads of states. I conducted a really long press campaign aimed at the African authorities. I kept repeating

Férid Boughedir / The Pan-African Cinema Movement

253

in each article the need to decolonize movie theater screens and the distribution channels that fed them, still monopolized by French companies, heirs of the previous colonial companies. I repeated over and over that the goal was to put the profit of these distribution channels, once recovered, in the service of future national films of the whole region, which, without distribution markets, would not exist economically! Ten years from the first FESPACO and thirteen years from the first CFF, this program finally started to win back the highly profitable film distribution markets in Africa. The countries of former OCAM (African and Malagasy Union) created a common film distribution market covering the movie theaters of fourteen French-speaking countries in West and Central Africa. This was made possible at the instigation of FEPACI when these African countries collectively bought the French channels that previously monopolized this market. The acquisition of this French-organized distribution network allowed two complementary organizations to be created in Ouagadougou. The CIDC (Inter-African Film Distribution Consortium) and the CIPROFILM (Inter-African Film Production Centre). The first one was meant to generate profits from the distribution of films from all origins in order to offer financial support to the African films under the supervision of the latter, both organizations being led by Niger citizen filmmaker and academic, the late Inoussa Ousseini. The CIDC was active between 1979 and 1984. Although it had previously been impossible to do so, it succeeded in allowing the common distribution of several African films (such as Finye / The Wind [1982, Mali] by Souleymane Cissé and Wend Kuuni / God’s Gift [1982, Burkina Faso] by Gaston Kaboré) in all fourteen countries. It also generated benefits that were used, among other things, to support several films including—as I recall—Jom by Ababacar Samb-Makharam, who went back to directing after his long commitment to leading FEPACI, whose financial goal seemed to have finally begun to be achieved in one region. But this perspective did not consider the significant political and ideological differences between the concerned African countries. Since foreign films imported to generate revenue in the French-speaking common market, all used to be dubbed in French in Paris, it is in the French capital, that the CIDC set up a purchasing office in order to sustain and expand the mode of operation of this film distribution channel. A network of film reels passed from one capital to another among the fourteen countries in a well-established system, with the crucial difference that African films could now be placed alongside foreign films. Until then, foreign films were this market’s only source of revenue. The fact that this purchasing office was located in Paris became, as we heard, the apple of discord: this Africanized structure section installed in the French capital had allegedly been accused of being a “neocolonial structure” by some countries belonging to so-called

254

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

“progressive” or “revolutionary” regimes, according to the terminology of the time. This was one of the reasons that ultimately led in 1984 to the breaking up of this common market created in 1979, which carried all our hopes. The disappearance of the CIDC unfortunately resulted in a situation much worse than the previous one because of the powerful Hollywood suppliers (which the French colonial companies had managed to keep away from their exclusive distribution network, before selling it to the Africans) entering the market, and the dislocation of a market infested with piracy, leaving no more economic benefits to the African film production. That is why we think that the ideological presupposition and its avatar, dogmatism, for lack of a better word, could unfortunately succeed in killing a practical economic approach, considering existing contradictions, and maintaining a purpose that could be useful to the African film sector.

IV. The Scandal of the Failed Congress of FEPACI This misfortune, which constituted a painful failure of the economic emancipation and self-sufficiency strategy outlined by the original FEPACI, was followed by another one. We didn’t want to talk about it at the time, but fifty years after the birth of cinematographic Pan-Africanism, its protagonists having now disappeared, it can be recalled, as a cautionary tale and possible safeguard for future generations against legal or moral excess. For example, when a meeting with a head of state for the collective interest of African filmmakers was actually aimed at obtaining personal financing instead of the setup of legal and financial self-financing structures for the benefit of national cinema. This episode was known only to the elders. In the early 1980s, when the post of secretary general of FEPACI remained vacant for a period, the new interim position holder obtained to be received by the president of a relatively prosperous oil-producing small African state, along with the president of the national association of filmmakers, to request funding for an upcoming congress of FEPACI in the said country, in particular, for a large-budget organization that involved the transportation and accommodation costs of filmmakers and managers from across the continent. The head of state agreed to finance it, but this congress never took place. It was during a FESPACO session, on an evening with perhaps a little too much to drink, that our colleague who was president of the said national association (which no longer exists today), revealed the truth: they could not resist the temptation to share the contents of the cash briefcase given to them by the head of the president’s cabinet, who allegedly, according to our colleague, used to support the good causes directly in cash. This congress

Férid Boughedir / The Pan-African Cinema Movement

255

never took place because these two men in charge at the African and at the national level succumbed to temptation . . . I remember one of our elders, outraged and shocked by this revelation, telling our colleague “But then, both of you have eaten up the whole subsidy!” To which the former replied: “But, everyone eats up in Africa!” I am only here to recount as a witness this scene that happened before my eyes. But, as a historian who must bear witness to the good and the bad and having no way of verifying the veracity of this possible misfortune of Pan-Africanism, which spread like a rumor, lasted long, and was never denied, it seemed useful to me to mention it in the present historical review. For me, it also justifies the mistrust and the great precautions that have been my own (when it comes to money) regarding my involvement in the exciting and booming adventure called cinematographic Pan-Africanism. I was cautious as well during my participation in the negotiations with the European Union in 1984 in Brussels so that ACP countries (sub-Saharan Africa, Caribbean, and Pacific) might be allowed to add to the existing grant agreements with the EU a new line concerning “support and subsidies for cultural industries,” provided that at least three African countries made that claim. Gaston Kaboré, the new secretary general of FEPACI, then based in Burkina Faso, had with a rigor and integrity known to all, managed to obtain this addition. I remained mistrustful of money matters during my long time as regional secretary of FEPACI, in charge of the northern region of the continent. After the 1997 congress in Ouagadougou, FEPACI entered a period of transition and reform of its constitution, focusing more on an economic rather than political orientation. FEPACI’s “Charter of Algiers” was adopted during the Congress of Algiers in 1975 and was considered too politicized, as it was devoted to “the fight against imperialism and neocolonialism.” This transition period led to a new constitution, then allowing individual memberships outside of the national associations and of filmmakers of the African diaspora, with the election during the 2001 congress of Beninese Jacques Béhanzin as the new secretary general. We will discuss later his action, notably in favor of the creation by the African Union of a financial support fund for African cinemas, among other proposals.

V. The Launch by Abdou Diouf of the FPCA (The Pan-African Film and Television Fund) Project The misfortune experienced by cinematographic Pan-Africanism when dogmatism overcame economic pragmatism and ended in the CIDC’s shutdown, was unfortunately reproduced with the attempt to set up the

256

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

FPCA (Pan-African Film and Television Fund) with the help of the OIF (International Organisation of La Francophonie). Having been one of the main activists of this project, suspended just a few months after the election of the last bureau of FEPACI in 2013, I owe it to the history of Pan-African film to tell for the first time—for whoever will take the time to read it and perhaps to draw useful lessons—the detailed history of the development of this promising Pan-African cinema project. Gaston Kaboré’s successor in FEPACI’s administration, Beninese Jacques Béhanzin, is credited with launching the first project of a Pan-African film fund (which would primarily support the estimated costs for the installation of national cinema sustainability structures in all African countries). He managed to convince the President of Benin, Mathieu Kérékou, to present during the 2003 African Union political summit an official request for the creation of a Pan-African film fund and an African Audiovisual and Cinema Commission. The latter would be responsible, among other things, for producing general documentation on African cinemas. As the African Union was late to respond, we seized the opportunity of the 2006 FEPACI congress, with the African Film Summit in Tshwane, South Africa, to repeat the call. FEPACI’s Congress culminated in the election of Gabonese Charles Mensah as president, and South African film director Mrs. Seipati Bulane-Hopa as secretary general. The decision was also made to transfer FEPACI’s secretariat to South Africa. The call was launched from one of the congressional commissions of which I was the president, but that new request to the African Union went unheeded once again; they responded only after this second request. This explains why, in the absence of a response from the African Union, the filmmakers turned to another organization that already supported their cinemas, the OIF (International Organisation of La Francophonie), then led by a great African, the former president of Senegal, Abdou Diouf.

VI. The Steps of Setting up the FPCA as a Stand-Alone Financial Fund in Favor of African Cinemas February 2007: OIF Secretary General Abdou Diouf, visiting FESPACO, is asked by African filmmakers to involve the OIF in the creation of a PanAfrican film support fund covering the entire continent. May 2010: Abdou Diouf makes the decision to go beyond the language and geographical “French-speaking” boundaries of his organization and supports the creation of the FPCA (Pan-African Film and Television Fund). The FPCA project was announced at the Cannes Film Festival in the presence of OIF representatives, the new secretary general of FEPACI and European

Férid Boughedir / The Pan-African Cinema Movement

257

Union representatives, the latter as the financer of sub-Saharan films through the ACP fund. November 2010: A feasibility study of the FPCA is presented by the OIF to the African filmmakers present at the CFF in Tunisia. A letter is sent by the OIF administration to all African Heads of State requesting them to support the creation of this fund. February 2011: During FESPACO and in the absence of FEPACI’s secretary general and president, who had declined the invitation to the event for reasons of their own (according to what we have been told, the inability of the festival to provide them with first-class air tickets!), the OIF Director of Culture cordially told the filmmakers present that in the absence of answers from the solicited African Heads of State, the OIF was likely to bury the FPCA project. I was then honored to see—being the eldest of the Pan-African activists present at FESPACO—African filmmakers gathered in the room of Senegalese filmmaker Cheikh Ngaïdo Bâ, regional secretary of FEPACI; in the presence of Congolese filmmaker Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda, founder of the Paris-based Guild of African Directors and Producers, and Djiboutian Souad Houssein, OIF’s head of the cinema department and a fervent supporter of the project. They asked me to coordinate the resumption of the FPCA project. This started with the draft by former Senegalese President H.E. Abdou Diouf of a new personal request to all African Heads of State— his ex-colleagues—to request that the project be restarted. That request was read in public at the OIF press conference at FESPACO. I agreed to continue to coordinate the advancement of the FPCA project as requested by the filmmakers present at FESPACO, on a voluntary basis. I started by synthesizing and writing useful texts for the FPCA project, as I had done so many times in the past at the expense of all my personal filmmaking projects. I wrote summary reports and resolutions for many seminars in the service of African cinema, for example in 1982 with the African filmmakers’ Niamey Manifesto. So much so that since the disappearance of my “more-thanbrother,” my fellow Senegalese historian and filmmaker Paulin Vieyra, our doyen Ousmane Sembène was in the habit of calling me “Our Scribe!” May 2011: Gabonese filmmaker and president of FEPACI Charles Mensah, and I were received on May 26, 2011 by Abdou Diouf, who agreed to personally call on all African Heads of State in favor of the FPCA project. In the interest of pragmatism and to facilitate the task for future donors, FEPACI president Charles Mensah wrote an official letter to Abdou Diouf asking him, in order to avoid any conflict of interest, not to locate the future FPCA headquarters in an African country right away—none of them having a tax exemption for donors to cinema at that time—but first in a non-African “neutral” country granting tax exemptions to donations in support of culture,

258

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

such as Switzerland. The project was to relocate the headquarters in Africa as soon as a country supporting cinema—the best example at the time was Burkina Faso—finally adopted a tax-free law for donations in favor of African cinema. May 2012: Following Abdou Diouf ’s commitment, the OIF organized a meeting of film directors from many African countries during the Cannes Film Festival, with two African ministers of culture, from Côte d’Ivoire and Tunisia. The Tunisian minister offered to host the headquarters of a transitional orientation council (TOC), a “wise people committee” that would be responsible for setting up the FPCA. Following the unfortunate and untimely death of President Charles Mensah and once more “paralyzed” by a crisis of confidence between the secretary general and the treasurer, FEPACI was absent due to the circumstances. This did not prevent activists in the FPCA project from moving forward. October 2012: A TOC implementation meeting is organized by the OIF during the Carthage Film Festival in the presence of representatives of film authorities coming from a large number of African countries, (French, English and Portuguese-speaking), as well as representatives of UNESCO and the African Union, all of them invited for the occasion. The secretary general of FEPACI, still at an impasse, is not present. As coordinator, I was proud to see a number of personalities known for their honorability and selflessness respond positively to our call to form the TOC. These include Alimata Salembéré, founder of FESPACO and former minister of culture of Burkina Faso; Congolese Professor Elikia M’Bokolo, director of the General History of Africa project at UNESCO; Bassori Timité, doyen of Ivorian filmmakers. There were also lifelong African cinema activists including Zimbabwean Keith Shiri, creator of the Zimbabwe International Film Festival and the London Film Festival; Caribbean June Givanni, creator of the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive (JGPACA) in London; Algerian film expert Ahmed Bedjaoui, who became president of the FESPACO Jury in 2019; Sierra Leonean Mahen Bonetti, creator of the New York African Film Festival; Senegalese Baba Diop, president of the Senegalese Association of Film Critics, later joined by Mozambican Pedro Pimenta, director of the DOCKANEMA documentary Festival in Maputo; South African film critic and film historian Keyan Tomaselli; Ethiopian Abraham Haile Biru, director of the Colors of the Nile International Film Festival in Addis Ababa (who later became FEPACI’s regional secretary for East Africa). They all agreed to be voluntary members of the TOC board, indeed as a veritable wise people committee where all the geographical and linguistic regions of Africa were scrupulously represented. The TOC composition was approved by all the African officials and filmmakers present. The personalities who made up the TOC (who have agreed to never benefit from

Férid Boughedir / The Pan-African Cinema Movement

259

the financial support granted by the FPCA), did me the honor of electing me to chair this Council in keeping with my mission as project coordinator since 2011. Two legal experts, one from Africa (Tunisian Youssef Ben Brahim, head of the legal department of the Ministry of Culture) and the other international (Swiss Lawyer Benoit Muller, a regular collaborator of the OIF), were chosen to prepare the statutes of the future FPCA, in the general interest of the development of African cinemas with the approval of all the officials responsible for the African cinema and filmmakers present at this collective launch meeting. February 2013: The first official TOC meeting takes place during FESPACO (which at the same time paid tribute to one of our renowned members, Mrs.  Alimata Salambéré, for all her actions in the service of African cinema) to discuss the future drafts of the FPCA’s statutes. March 2013: After years of lethargy, FEPACI tried to rise from its ashes during the Johannesburg congress. This was an opportunity for me as coordinator of the TOC to present this Pan-African fund project, which would be built under the sponsorship of the OIF and FEPACI. In order to avoid any conflict of interest, the fund needed to be a complementary body, independent from the direction of FEPACI. The FPCA, which was conceived as a financial body, could not, ethically, be integrated into FEPACI which is a union body with a lobbying mission. In our view, a federation of associations defending the interests of filmmakers and whose primary purpose would be to lobby African governments for the installation of film development structures, cannot ethically run a fund distribution channel, with all the risks of abuse and nepotism that this could entail. As coordinator and chairman of the TOC, I presented to the congress the list of willing honorary members making up the TOC. The FEPACI congress asked us to continue our volunteer work for the establishment of the independent FPCA under the supervision of FEPACI, which would remain the sponsor of the project, as well as the OIF. As coordinator and chairman of the TOC, I explained that the fund would not finance film production projects at first, but the expertise for the establishment in African countries of tax and legal structures that would allow the future self-financing of production projects, notably through taxes on the benefits of the whole audiovisual market, such as taxes on mobile telephony and internet providers. The end of the congress saw FEPACI’s general secretariat return to the French-speaking side, with the election of Malian filmmaker (and former minister of culture) Cheick Oumar Sissoko as the new secretary general of FEPACI, and the relocation of the general secretariat to Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, with an executive office based in Kenya, which offered to finance FEPACI’s activities for five years.

260

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

VII. How a Secretary General of FEPACI, Despite Good Intentions, Buried the Pan-African Cinema Movement’s Spirit and Progress! The Ministry of Culture of Tunisia, birthplace of FEPACI, agreed to host in June 2013 the FPCA’s statutes approval meeting, to which were invited all members of the TOC, as well as the two sponsors of the project, OIF and FEPACI, through Mrs. Youma Fall, head of the OIF’s department of culture, and Malian filmmaker Cheick Oumar Sissoko, new secretary general of FEPACI (elected during the March 2013 congress in Johannesburg). During the congress, the latter had put his trust in the TOC to set up the FPCA and keep FEPACI informed. Unfortunately, despite having received his plane ticket, Cheick Oumar Sissoko decided not to come to the Tunis FPCA meeting at the last moment for personal reasons. He was supposed to come as an observer to this approval meeting of the statutes which came under the TOC. He asked FEPACI’s representative and regional secretary of the eastern region, Ethiopian Abraham Haile Biru, to follow my advice as chairman of the TOC and recently elected member of the FEPACI wise people committee for all the proposals that would be made. Just as planned, the statutes were approved in the form of an association of activists in favor of African cinemas. The statutes provided for the permanent presence of FEPACI in the executive committee of the FPCA; made it impossible, rightly so, for the executive committee members to benefit from donations from the fund; chose to establish its headquarters in an extra-African neutral capital, with a tax-free law for future donors. Geneva, Switzerland was chosen to become the first provisional headquarters, as requested to the OIF by late President Charles Mensah in his official letter to Abdou Diouf. However, there was a turn of events: the head of the department of culture of the OIF (the financial sponsor of the project), Senegalese Youma Fall, declared that the OIF could no longer continue to finance costly meetings of a provisional committee whose members were scattered across the continent. She said that the OIF needed quickly as a partner, not a provisional body, but a definitive legal executive committee, in order to be able to sign agreements and make things move! She then proposed officially, as it was difficult to find more honorable and disinterested people than the members of the present TOC, that the current provisional committee become the first executive committee. She demanded that the FPCA be legally created on the spot, and the provisional committee members became, by an internal majority vote, the first FPCA executive committee. This was done to move things forward pragmatically, and it would certainly have been accepted by Cheick Oumar Sissoko, (representative of FEPACI, a

Férid Boughedir / The Pan-African Cinema Movement

261

non-financial sponsor which gave its approval to the TOC to set the FPCA project), if he had been there. Unfortunately, this political party leader and former minister of culture, probably used to fear “political low blows,” believed in good faith and because of a misunderstanding, that this was a “putsch,” a “coup” against his authority, made in his absence. This was a complete misunderstanding! (As if Mrs. Salambéré, Professor Elikia M’Bokolo, or I, professor at the University of Tunis, and our colleagues had putschist profiles!). Cheick Oumar Sissoko then absurdly declared that the FPCA (which was neither an association nor a federation of filmmakers, but a fundraising structure in favor of their cinema), was a “rival association of FEPACI,” which was to be the only group of filmmakers in Africa, under his unrivalled authority! Thus, FEPACI should block and sabotage the FPCA project! At the Johannesburg 2013 FEPACI congress, I had already noticed that no one remembered what FEPACI’s original mission was. It should be repeated here: it was chiefly a mission of solidarity between filmmakers to support the development of African cinemas. This stemmed from the fact that it was easier for a continental organization representative such as FEPACI (after consultation with its regional representatives), to meet with an African head of state in order to convince him to implement the recommended measures or support structures for national and regional cinema. Obviously, a mere president of a national association of filmmakers would not have the same influence on a head of state as a representative of a collective body covering the whole continent for the same cause. I found out in Johannesburg that being elected regional secretary no longer meant serving the cause, but rather to have a title and local recognition, possibly an office with a civil servant’s salary, a vehicle, and power at the national level. That is why in the past decades, elected regional secretaries of FEPACI did not even make the minimum effort to contact the national associations of their region and ask them about the situation of cinema in their specific area, in order to inform the secretary general so that he might help if necessary! Indeed, FEPACI’s last elected secretary general, Cheick Oumar Sissoko, complained to me after his election that no elected regional secretary of FEPACI ever responded to his letters! Seeing that the control of this future independent financial fund, conceived as complementary to the action of FEPACI, but independent from it, risked getting out of his hands, Cheick Oumar Sissoko, unfortunately decided to sabotage this new body that would have been useful to all. He asked FEPACI’s partner, the OIF (the only financial sponsor of the FPCA, except for the occasional contribution of Tunisia), to stop funding the FPCA! The next step of this deliberate sabotage was to bring together

262

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

at great expense in Nairobi all the regional secretaries of FEPACI, to make them condemn the FPCA. He presented the FPCA as a dissident structure that chose for no reason to set its provisional headquarters in Switzerland, as a rival of FEPACI (which was absolutely not the case, because there weren’t any filmmaker members of the FPCA, whose purpose was to financially support their action!) This special Nairobi FEPACI meeting was held in the presence of a minority of only two English-speaking members and representatives of the TOC: June Givanni (FPCA secretary general), and Keith Shiri (FPCA vice-president). FEPACI secretary General absurdly requested and obtained “by democratic vote” of the delegates present the condemnation of the FPCA project, a structure of “goodwill” which would have been useful to all, but whose negative point was to escape his personal power. For instance, he wrote just as absurdly: “There can be only one association of African filmmakers, it is called FEPACI!”, in relation to this imagined rivalry! Thus, for the three years following the generous decision of Abdou Diouf, a lot of money was spent (at a time when FEPACI was completely “paralyzed” by an internal conflict) to manage to bring together, several times, African Union and UNESCO representatives, film  executives from several linguistic areas of Africa involving two ministers of culture. Above all and aside from the costs incurred, the intent was to realize the vibrant hope in the Pan-African ideal materialized by the sincere voluntary commitment of respectable and recognized activists! All this hope was destroyed by an ill-advised Cheick Oumar Sissoko who did not admit the independence of this structure to come, although it was not in competition with his own! Thus, it is sad to say that the one and only concrete action of the last secretary general’s mandate, which has now lasted for more than seven years, has been to destroy rather than build, and to ruin, by choice of an absolute power, the human and financial efforts of three years of meetings—during the CFF, FESPACO, and Cannes—to build a financial support body, complementary to his own organization, and placed statutorily in its continuity as a tool of the ideals of cinematographic Pan-Africanism! “When will we be able to build?”, Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo commented, disappointed by this baseless polemic. Cheick Oumar Sissoko, whom we naturally continued to invite to the Carthage Film Festival, where he persisted in repeating that the FPCA’s provisional committee, the TOC, (nonetheless collectively approved at the level of Pan-African officials and FEPACI’s congress before his election) had “overstepped his orders” by becoming an executive committee. He seemed to forget that FEPACI was not like the OIF: not boss, but “godfather” of the FPCA. The latter was conceived as an independent organization, set up in agreement between FEPACI and the OIF by longtime, impeccably

Férid Boughedir / The Pan-African Cinema Movement

263

honorable volunteer activists! I asked myself: how could a collective work accomplished on a voluntary basis, carried by the sincere faith in the future of African cinemas—how many years of efforts, how much sponsoring money together to gather people coming from within and outside the continent?—be stopped by a single man who apparently did not want to share his short-lived power with any new organization, even though its aim was to build and help in the same field? Why choose to destroy, instead of supporting and promoting any initiative in favor of African cinemas, although he was elected for this high-responsibility mission by filmmakers coming from an entire continent? One of the answers to these questions probably lies in the centralized bureaucratic system chosen to settle FEPACI, which allowed such negative developments! At the Carthage Film Festival, where he repeated that our constructive initiative to give a concrete existence to the fund “overstepped his orders,” I even told him, as a joke, that it was a paradox to see the progressist filmmaker who criticized absolute power in his historical film “Guimba the Tyrant” acting like the protagonist of his film in real life! Seeming to think that he has done well to destroy an imaginary “rival,” he now seems to give up his duty to organize the next elective congress of FEPACI and declares that he is distancing himself from it (while retaining his position), and not running for a second term, deciding to go back to devoting himself to political action in Mali. He has become one of the voices of the M5-RFP, the political movement at the origin of the protest which led very recently to the fall of Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta. Here is how—by reproducing the eternal conflict between the pragmatism of practical action that makes things happen and a certain ideological dogmatism—one can unintentionally become, by sabotaging any new structure seen as a rival, the executioner of the cinematographic Pan-Africanism ideal! The same had already caused the downfall of this magnificent tool of regional collective support to African cinemas that was the African common film market’s achievement in favor of African cinemas, the CIDC. I understood from that moment, that as elsewhere, the power games had taken the place of sincere militancy in the service of a continental cause. I realized, not without bitterness, that out of loyalty to the memory of Tahar Cheriaa and Ousmane Sembène, and to what Ababacar Samb-Makharam, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, and Gaston Kaboré had initiated, I had worked day and night—on a voluntary basis for three years, with a selfless innocence surely—to serve something that in fact no longer existed, except for within the film showcases presented on (CFF, FESPACO) and outside the continent, which bears the name of this exciting dream called cinematographic Pan-Africanism.

264

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

VIII. The Necessary Reform of FEPACI to Become Once Again a Relevant and Effective Tool for Cinematographic Pan-Africanism If FEPACI is no longer able to function at the continental level as is the case, it must be reorganized as a union of new regional entities based on the economic consolidations of possible future common markets for the distribution of our films by all new audiovisual means. These entities should logically be based on both geographical and linguistic criteria,

as stated by the late Idrissa Ouédraogo (Burkina Faso’s most well-known film director) during the Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia in November 2017. Today, we must conclude from more than fifty years of cinematographic Pan-Africanism that the intercultural dialogue that we managed to establish has been able to survive thanks to the festivals, whose commitment and longevity must be recognized. Thus, it is remarkable to note that there is evidence of the success of the permanent cultural dialogue between “Arab” North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa following the action of these festivals and the awareness created for half a century among their audiences (which we mentioned at the beginning of this text). Indeed, there is today a “Djibril Diop Mambéty Cine-Club” in Tunis (in tribute to the great Senegalese film director); and a “Tahar Cheriaa Cine-Club” in Ouagadougou (in tribute to the Tunisian film critic, founder of the Carthage Film Festival and FEPACI). These two symbolic places of dialogue on each side of the Sahara pay tribute to the work of both these visionaries, the brilliant avant-gardist Senegalese director, and the great Tunisian activist of liberation through cinema, in a magnificent Pan-African “act of faith.” In addition to the natural barrier of the Sahara, overcome by the seventh art, there was also the language barrier, which festivals helped to overcome quite naturally. For instance, to speak only of FESPACO, the Stallion of Yennenga was awarded to Ghana in 1989, South Africa in 2005, Nigeria in 2007, and Ethiopia in 2009. Not to mention the awards given to films from Portuguese-speaking Africa, such as GuineaBissau, Mozambique, and Angola. Through cinema, these countries show other facets of Africa than those expressed by the French-speaking majority from the beginning of the Seventh African Art. Cinematographic Pan-Africanism has thus managed to survive until the present day, as a sustained intercultural dialogue. The mutual knowledge of peoples through cinema helped to break down prejudices, stereotypes, popular beliefs, and factors of exclusion and division. This never-ending fight is more vital than ever today, with the rise of populism on a global scale and the rejection of “The Other.”

Férid Boughedir / The Pan-African Cinema Movement

265

However, we must unfortunately recognize the failure of the Pan-African Cinema Movement in terms of inter-African self-sufficient economic strategy, as the initial goal was to produce and distribute African films only using resources coming from the continent’s audiovisual market. Many of the most internationally recognized African art films of today are still born thanks to a providential European support. Concerning FEPACI, the organization created by filmmakers to achieve this economic self-sufficiency, we have seen it on several occasions be paralyzed, then reborn, then paralyzed again. There is currently an urgent need to adapt it to the changing times and the digital era, which has replaced the old movie theater era (whose devastated network in Africa is beginning to be sporadically reborn, here and there) and is the only possible source of subsidies to efficiently face the half century to come. We must, together with all African filmmaker colleagues, contribute to a common reflection to organize FEPACI’s rehabilitation. We must also remind the new generation of its initial objectives because they seem, in good faith, very often forgotten. It is distressing that FEPACI has become absolutely dysfunctional with regard to its primary vocation for at least the past fifteen years. During the last FEPACI congress in Johannesburg in 2013, many of the newly elected regional secretaries often asked me, as one of the pioneers: “What is the purpose of FEPACI? What should be its priority action?” As if half a century later, the original goals had been more or less forgotten! It is now different than in Ouagadougou under Gaston Kaboré’s mandate (when we were all involved in concrete actions such as successful negotiations with the European Union), or after the praiseworthy initiative of his successor Jacques Béhanzin towards the African Union in 2003. FEPACI’s action has now too often become the work of a single person responsible for all the initiatives, who gets his own decisions approved when there is a new congress (which take years, the time to find an African country willing to finance a costly congress with guests coming from across the continent). FEPACI’s possible actions may become impossible, with a risk of deadlock like the one when the South African secretary general and treasurer were in conflict, which brought FEPACI into one of the worst periods of lethargy in its history. What is FEPACI’s primary objective? I think it needs to get back to the basics. In short, I would say that Item 7 of FEPACI’s statutes regarding the organization’s duties should now be placed in first position. It should be made a top priority to convince African governments by all types of lobbying (the famous Item 7) to set up the tax and legal structures (as a frame for artistic film production, supported by the state for cultural reasons) that would allow the self-financing of cinema on a national and then regional basis. Indeed, as already said, a president of a national association of filmmakers does not

266

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

have easy access to a head of state or government to convince them of this. However, the secretary general of a continental organization recognized by the African Union such as FEPACI can more easily obtain a meeting to advocate for national cinema and for the interest for the region and the continent to develop cinema in general. FEPACI, despite being devoid of financial resources, is a moral authority that can constantly lobby politicians and media. Implementation by the states of simple tax and organizational measures, through taxes on the benefits of the audiovisual market, would release the necessary resources to finance artistic cinema as well as relieve the treasury from the burden of subsidies. The funding thus obtained outside the state coffers would be used to support the film and audiovisual industry, especially their cultural sectors, including training and film schools. Money is crucial to cinema as a form of African “cultural expression,” which remains the most expensive of all arts but also the most effective in terms of communication because it is accessible to all! These financial resources need the states’ supervision and organizational support to survive, confronted with foreign entertainment cinema. Exceptionally, entertainment cinema can come from within Africa, such as the “Nollywood” phenomenon in Nigeria, based on a whole commercial video industry devoted to entertainment, rather than expression through an artistic universal form of the present and past realities of Africa, whether political, social, or cultural, among other moving realities. Fortunately, success stories of African states encouraging their artistic national cinema exist, such as Morocco or, to a lesser extent, Chad. FEPACI representatives could diplomatically put forward these examples for heads of state or government. It is known that since 1997, Morocco has increased the national production of films tenfold by having them financed by a five percent tax on the advertising profits of public and private television and a small tax on the television license collected with the electricity bill. On the other hand, Chad has, even more progressively, created a fund to support national cinema by taxing the profits of mobile telephony. For the time being, this fund has only been used for the production of a few films and not yet as part of a general structure for the benefit of all film producers and directors such as in Morocco—but hopefully soon enough. A modernized and reformed FEPACI, which must chart the future for the younger generations, should also intervene with countries that have already tried to structure their cinema (including the countries where the organization is regularly present thanks to Pan-African film festivals, such as Burkina Faso and Tunisia) and to explain to them that their pioneering measures of taxing the revenues of cinemas alone are now outdated because of the rise of digital technology. New measures must therefore be

Férid Boughedir / The Pan-African Cinema Movement

267

implemented that consider the benefits of the whole audiovisual market. Tax breaks should also be created, exempting investments in the cinema sector from taxes, or any other measures that could improve the development and dissemination of African filmmaking. In short, by distancing itself from bureaucratic centralism, FEPACI can regain a permanent role of expertise and support, of listening and expressing the needs and expectations of the young generation of filmmakers from each African country. FEPACI’s top priority should always be to convey the necessity of setting up structures for the supervision and regulation of all audiovisual sectors in each African country and region. These structures should always be updated, provide economic support for cultural expression through cinema, and enable every filmmaker (young or old) to produce their creations in a way that is at least financially viable. Apart from any other consideration, FEPACI should bring back to life the foundations of cinematographic Pan-Africanism and its noble objectives since the 1970s in the past century, as well as revitalize the motivation of all those, members or not, who have sometimes lost it. Time has passed for us “pioneers of the second generation,” who carried vibrant hopes, disappointments, and pitfalls. But it is always time for the new generations to take into their hands, at the national, regional, and continental levels, this tool of cinematographic Pan-Africanism called FEPACI; to reform it and adapt it to the new global audiovisual context, in order to fulfill the dream of independent African films. These films would not have to choose the easy, commercial way: quality film productions could, with structural and tax supervision, continue to express for African (and nonAfrican) audiences the countless realities of Africa, through the singular point of view of countless different authors. A supervision that could keep alive these African expressions by the art of cinema by keeping production and distribution economically viable. Férid Boughedir is an African film historian and critic, Tunisian film director, founding member of FEPACI (the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers), university professor, author of books and films on African cinemas, and director of festivals and symposiums devoted to African cinemas.

Notes 1. This dual identity was intended by the founder of the CFF, Tahar Cheriaa, because he wanted to encourage the emergence of young cinemas of the Middle East in response to the Egyptian quasi-monopoly on the whole region. After including Middle Eastern

268

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

cinemas, the CFF was often subject to the same criticism: in popular debates, did not the Pan-Arab identity take precedence over the Pan-African identity because of the local demand? Although, in fact, a real balance was achieved between sub-Saharan and Arab films: Carthage has awarded seven main prizes to sub-Saharan films (three times to Senegal, one time each to Mali, Gabon, Ethiopia, Mozambique), tied with FESPACO which awarded seven main prizes to films from the Arab speaking countries of the Maghreb (one time to Algeria in 1985, twice to Mauritania in 1987 and 2003, and four times to Morocco in 1973, 2001, 2011, and 2015). In my view, this trend is entirely justifiable in relation to the cultural expectations of the respective local audiences. The relative dominance in the rankings is in fact secondary as long as the flow of intercultural dialogue through cinema remains the cornerstone of both competitions. 2. And not in 1969 during the Pan-African Festival in Algiers as some still mistakenly write, for if the suggestion of creating the federation was indeed made in Algiers on this occasion by Ousmane Sembène and Paulin Vieyra, there was only one association existing at that time, that of Senegal, which could not create a federation alone.

III. THEORIZING AFRICAN CINEMA

Figure C. Artwork by Carole Ouedraogo. Image courtesy of the artist.

African Cinema(s): Definitions, Identity, and Theoretical Considerations Alexie Tcheuyap

T

his essay re-examines the various cultural, historical, as well as numerous political considerations that have prevailed in film scholarship since the inception of African cinema. These paradigms deserve full reconsideration in light of the completely transformed postnational landscape where goods, cultures, and individuals tend to circulate with greater ease between and around national borders. In addition, contemporary directors, many of whom have not experienced traumatic colonial experiences, do not feel compelled to “film back” or to be politically committed. Not only are they exploring completely new genres, languages, forms, and systems, but they also omit traditional conceptualizations of nationhood, race, the continent, and political contestations which appear at times to be almost completely lacking from their films. In such a context, the conception of “African cinema” as essentially political, or rendered “authentic” because of essentialist racial, geographical, or cultural considerations, becomes problematic, if not controversial. In his latest book, African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics, Manthia Diawara asks some pointed questions about the interest, or rather lack thereof, vis-à-vis certain African films by its spectators: Why are we still drawn to films like Borom sarret and La Noire de … and less interested in Afrique sur Seine (Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, 1955), which is made in the language of classical cinema and stars a professional actress like Marpesa Dawn? Why are [Ousmane] Sembène’s images of Africa considered richer and more authentic than those of his countryman Vieyra, who seems to have mastered film language? The same question could be asked when comparing Sembène’s earlier films to Jean Rouch’s Moi un noir (1958) and Les Maîtres fous (1955). Why are Sembène’s considered more authentically African than Rouch’s films, which were also shot in Africa and, in other respects, upheld as groundbreaking in visual anthropology and the French New Wave?1

272

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

This line of questioning which seeks to problematize “authentic” versus “inauthentic” representations of African cinema may apply equally to Sarah Maldoror, a filmmaker of West Indian origin, married to an Angolan citizen, but whose major work was about Africa. Although her film Sambizanga (1972) has established her as a major filmmaker who best represented the Angolan liberation, nationalist aesthetics, and has been systematically discussed in studies on African cinema, she was excluded from the meeting of female film professionals at FESPACO in 1991.2 What, then, makes Sarah Maldoror an “African” filmmaker or inversely denies her of this appellation? While there also seems to be little doubt about Safi Faye’s “Africanness,” quite possibly because she is black and from Senegal, one is also entitled to wonder how “African” for example, her Ambassadrices nourrières (1984) is as a film about Chinese, Indian, Hungarian, and other “ethnic” restaurants in Paris. In addition to Diawara’s and my own questioning, Olivier Barlet, in reaction to the increase of films on African immigration in Europe, has asked this key question: “Are the new films of Africa African?”3 It is a question he does not explicitly answer but which is central to this essay’s understanding of “African” cinema or, rather, cinemas. What is at stake in Diawara’s and Barlet’s concerns is the very definition and identity, or plurality of identities, of what is meant by African cinema in its singular form. What exactly is African cinema? Or, rather, should we talk of African cinemas? How “African” are films directed by African directors in comparison to those by Europeans whose work have chosen Africa as a category of representation? Is a cinematographic or cultural citizenship feasible, and can one define it in comparison to civil nationality? Is a cultural identity conceivable, and could one define it in relation to a specific national, continental, or racial framework? Is it possible to unequivocally determine, in a way that is coherent and acceptable, the fundamental constituents of an “African cinema?” Should the plurality of the cinemas, as Samuel Lelièvre suggests, be examined on the basis of the external (versus inexistent internal) sources of financing available to African filmmakers?4 To complicate things further, one may also consider the location of filmmakers, the global production of many “African” films, and the multiple publics that are the audience for these films. For example, how do we come to consider Haile Gerima, Jean-Marie Téno, and Jean-Pierre Bekolo, all of whom have been based in the west for years, as “African” directors? Furthermore, which spectators do they (successfully) target? Where and how are these films distributed? What is the most effective parameter to determine and conceptualize “African” films? According to George Sadoul, for example,5 a film is only “African” if it is produced, directed, cast, and edited by Africans and involving African actors who speak African languages.6 Such a definition would exclude many films, which, like those discussed by Diawara, may well be considered

Alexie Tcheuyap / African Cinema(s)

273

“African:” Bronx Barbès (2000, France) by Éliane De Latour; Lumumba (2001) by Raoul Peck; or Chocolat (1987, France and Cameroon) by Claire Denis. Saddoul’s and Lelièvre’s economic criteria would equally imply that no film produced by African directors in the last fifty years can be considered “African” at all, since they were all funded primarily by external European agencies. The problem with this definition, like the racial constituent implied in Diawara’s inquiry, is that it is difficult to have a rigorous theorization of the concept of “African cinema;” the concepts available look flawed and problematic, as critical configurations range from essentialism to racial or geographic considerations. The earliest conceptualization of “African” cinema is probably from Paulin Soumanou Vieyra who links cinema to citizenship when he contends, albeit rather simplistically, that for a film to be “African” it should be directed by an African: For a film to be African, is it enough for it to be directed by an African? Certainly, because when a film distinguishes itself with its relationship to African civilization, it can be called African. That means a film directed by an African about Europe is African as long as it reveals a Black way of thinking.7

Vieyra further complicates this assertion by adding, in a footnote, that whatever the merits of a film directed by a non-African about Africa, he calls it “of African inspiration/film d’inspiration africaine,” a premise which would automatically disqualify directors like Sarah Maldoror or Raoul Peck who are too often, almost intuitively, considered “African.”8 His significantly exclusivist definition is based on cultural manifestations of African life brought to the screen in generally realist modes and, in any case, which involve only narratives about black culture and art. Vieyra’s culturalist hypothesis is emphasized by at least one contemporary critic. For example, Visages de femmes / Faces of Women (dir. Désiré Écaré, 1984, Ivory Coast), the first African narrative with active athletic sexuality and frontal nudity, and which was also a major commercial success in France, was labelled “half-Western, half-African” by Nwachuckwu Frank Ukadike.9 However, it has become clear, with global transformations and cultural circulations, that ontological deliberations are no more adequate to take on the task of examining postcolonial identities. The concept of “Africa(nness)” is far from being homogeneous, and several directors resolutely distance themselves from it. Burkinabe filmmaker Idrissa Ouédraogo is extremely critical of the very label of “African” cinema which, to him, is nothing less than a sort of theoretical ghetto, indeed a kind of metaphorical straitjacket. Although such a qualifier is necessary for the construction of identity, the term “African” has become a trap, because it reflects exclusions:

274

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

The problem of African films is that they are always homogenized by the perception of the other, the West that ends up thinking that we work neither on the same data, nor on the same values as theirs. In spite of its unique philosophy and distinctive originality, every film produced in Africa by an African is lumped in advance in the box ‘African cinema.’10

Gabonese director Imunga Ivanga equally rejects the uniform “African box” into which all films by African directors are relegated. For him, such gross simplifications are unacceptable given the continuing expansion of a borderless, mobile, and diversified world, where “authenticity” has revealed itself to be a theory fraught with confusion and exclusion: What can be said about films from the south which by far outpace their “undocumented” (sans-papier) authors in portraying the national character of the north? As a matter of fact, initial definitions [relating to authenticity or Africanness] quickly become inoperative because these creators’ desires and status cannot be yoked into an iron shackle. The so-called filmmakers from the south define themselves according to the same terms as Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol, all authors of the New Wave.11

Cameroonian director Jean-Pierre Bekolo is almost disdainful of the designation because according to him there is no such thing as “African cinema.” In his interview with Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, he is even more adamant in his dismissal of any generalized idea of “African cinema,” a notion that he rigorously refutes. After openly acknowledging what he calls his “inclination for Hollywood” as well as the weight of Western influence and rationalities on his work, he emphatically states: “I don’t know about African cinema. I never studied it, and it’s not my field.”12 Furthermore, he adds that “having clearly examined what cinema is, I feel there is no cinema. There are African films, but I do not know if there is cinema in it.”13 Therefore, historically speaking, there seems to have been several assumptions of what “African cinema” is, where issues of authenticity, race, nation, territory, funding, identity, language, and many others ultimately converge in order to define the cinema of a continent. I, for one, contend that these concepts are no longer adequate and they will therefore be fully scrutinized and re-evaluated throughout this essay. One of the points to be established is that in spite of an apparent impression of uniformity that has been collectively developed by both critics and filmmakers, African films have tended, from the very outset, to be diverse in their discursive and aesthetic formations. This phenomenon has become more marked in recent decades with films by Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Moussa Sene Absa, or Henri Duparc, where novel formal experimentations now seem to be determined by both local and

Alexie Tcheuyap / African Cinema(s)

275

more global concerns. I will first explore the influence of nationalism in the construction of film scholarship. Then, I will examine new trends developed by filmmakers since the 1990s in order to challenge what they perceive as a mummified perception of “African cinema” and, finally, I shall attempt to provide an alternative theorization.

Cultural Nationalism as Foundational Discourse It is not possible to examine the role of nationalism as a foundational basis for the inception of African cinemas without establishing the link between cinema and colonialism. It is a troubling coincidence that cinema was born at a time when Europe was at the peak of its industrial revolution all the while building various hegemonic discourses used to justify a need to “naturally” subject peoples that were considered inferior and, therefore, desperate to be “civilized.” The encounter between Africa and cinema was therefore heavily influenced by this context. The fact remains that European white male colonists arrogated political power to themselves, and this power was consequently associated with the power of narration and representation. This is how the most vicious and lasting clichés about “lazy Mexicans, shifty Arabs, savage Africans, and exotic Asiatics,” have developed into filmic depictions of Third World peoples.14 The specific case of Africa is persuasively analyzed in Nwachuku Frank Ukadike’s Black African Cinema, where the author contends that colonial films “inverted African values by imposing the language and culture of the colonizer on the colonized. They also served to justify ‘military escapades’ and white man’s ‘civilizing mission.’ [They provided] a false perspective through which the continent was to be viewed.”15 Given such a contentious historical and ideological context, the emergence of any film production by Africans could only necessarily consist in challenging triumphant abhorrent representations of black peoples. With the spate of violence and alienation that colonialism imposed, Blacks were compelled, as Frantz Fanon observed, to reconsider the role of culture and its representation. For him, culture ought to become “national” and contribute to political liberation. This is how cinema in Africa, or rather, “African” cinema came to be viewed as essentially and only militant. In other words, cinema could only be associated with nation formation. In the wake of independence and with the newly acquired power of representation conferred by the camera, culture needed to be part of nation building. That is why inherent in the very concept of national cinema is imbedded the concept of nation, founded upon the ruins of colonialism. In several countries, cinema played a part in the political strategy for liberation.

276

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Cinema as a tool for social transformation and political praxis in Africa was originally the result of an institutional construction. The revisionist stance of foundational African films was determined by the various manifestos that were put into place by filmmakers and their sole association, the Federation Panafricaine des Cineastes (FEPACI) which published a set of manifestos among which “The Resolution of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting” in Algiers (1973), “The Algiers Charter on African Cinema” (1975), and “The Niamey Manifesto of African Filmmakers” (1982), all documented in Imruh Bakari and Mbye Cham’s African Experiences of Cinema. In general, these manifestoes set African films apart as having a strictly political agenda, as is illustrated by the following statement where injunctions are numerous: To assume a genuinely active role in the process of development, African culture must be popular, democratic, and progressive in character, inspired by its own realities and responding to its own needs. It must also be in solidarity with cultural struggles all over the world. The issue is [. . .] to allow the masses to take control of their own means of development, giving them back the cultural initiative by drawing on the resources of a fully liberated popular creativity. Within this perspective the cinema has a vital part to play because it is a means of education, information, and consciousness raising[. . . .] The stereotyped image of the solitary and marginal creator which is widespread in Western capitalist society must be rejected by African filmmakers, who must, on the contrary, see themselves as creative artisans at the service of their people. It also demands great vigilance on their part with regard to imperialism’s attempts at ideological recuperation as it redoubles its efforts to maintain, renew, and increase its cultural ascendancy.16

Such nationalism is echoed by at least two scholars, mainly Nwachuku Frank Ukadike and Férid Boughedir. Boughedir, for example, provides a remarkably simplistic typology that defines African cinema in opposition to “Western” cinema, which is deemed the escapist cinema, the evasive cinema that functions outside of real life and real life problems. It is the opium cinema; it is the cinema that lulls the audience to sleep. Ninety percent of commercial cinemas operate in this way, and this explains why cinema is universally considered as entertainment. Entertaining also means diverting or moving the audience away from reality, granting them a momentary escape which delays the conscientization process.17

It is highly likely that this debatable perception of cinema has singled out some films as not really falling within the canon of “African” cinema. Henri Duparc’s Bal Poussière / Dancing in the Dust (1988, Ivory Coast), a popular

Alexie Tcheuyap / African Cinema(s)

277

comedy, is known to have been a spectacular success since it was released. However, it is severely criticized by Ukadike in the following terms: “On the surface, Bal Poussière is a social comedy focusing on polygamy, making references to corruption, contradictions of tradition and culture, but cannot be taken seriously as the issues are treated with only one thing in mind—amusement.”18 Ukadike’s opinion is based on the inference, probably inherited from FEPACI’s rules, that cinema’s role in Africa is certainly not to amuse spectators. More importantly, but also a point of contention, is the conjecture that every film has a “superficial” and “deeper” function that is the result of the intentions of the filmmaker. We can therefore presume that if the “deeper” function is amusement, then any alternative and coexistent functions are to be invalidated. Similarly, Boughedir repudiates the genre of comedy, which, in his view, is incompatible with any African film project, because “[t]he implicit ideology of these comedies [. . .] is primarily a conservative one,” in that it is always man rather than the institution, which is at fault.19 The question to be asked is whether in Africa and elsewhere, institutions can be fully separated from human beings. For too long it was difficult to differentiate, in the specific case of postcolonial settings, between corrupt “fathers of the nation” and postcolonial institutions. It is therefore evident that foundational African films determined their “Africanness” essentially by way of political praxis. Cinematic production and discourse were defined from above, by political institutions, which, in fact, dictated what needed to be produced. Fighting colonialism and its aftermath was hence considered the unique raison d’être, the necessary characteristic of films that were paradoxically funded by the same colonial powers they challenged. In any case, African films differed from, say, European films because of specific historical and political circumstances. In such a context, not to be politically engaged for an African director was a sort of cultural heresy, a clear lack of “Africanness.” It is almost certainly with this mind-set that Ukadike criticizes Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga as “deficient” for its host of love or emotional scenes which uselessly “romanticiz[e] what could have constituted a forceful delineation of a liberationist uprising.”20 In such a context, a “true” African film could only be nationalist in the Fanonian perspective, that is, only when it is openly political. As Kenneth Harrow astutely observes, “The terms of resistance were so powerfully set by [Ousmane] Sembène and his generation, it became almost impossible for any filmmaker or novelist not to take a politically engaged position.”21 By being compelled to “film” or “shoot back” as formulated in Melissa Thackway’s book, specific political and historical circumstances positioned African directors within what was later to be defined as the main characteristic of postcolonial productions, that is, that which challenges all imperial formal and discursive representations.22

278

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

It is in this context that the aggressively nationalist films of Ousmane Sembène, herein called “the demigod of African cinema” by Manthia Diawara, or those of Med Hondo, to name just two directors, may be positioned. All their films have a singular objective and this is to challenge (post) colonial domination.23 As Diawara puts it, “it is a cinema of good and evil where the camera is turned against the colonial and neocolonial forces in Africa.”24 Whether we consider Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (1966, Senegal), Emitaï (1971, Senegal), or Camp de Thiaroye (1988, Senegal), Med Hondo’s Sarraounia (1987), Kwaw Ansah’s Heritage Africa (1988, Ghana), Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972), or even Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina’s Chronique des années de braise / Chronicle of the Years of Fire (1975, Algeria), all these narratives are concerned with revisionist strategies aimed at contributing to the emancipation of ex-colonies. Unfortunately, it did not take long to realize that nation building and struggles for political freedom were far from being entirely successful. As Neil Lazarus asserts, national liberation movements were not what they were expected or claimed to be, namely organizations that aimed at empowering dominated people.25 Instead, in the words of Frantz Fanon, the main project of the local bourgeois nationalists was “quite simply [. . .] [to] transfer into native hands those unfair advantages which are the legacy of the colonial period.”26 A film like Xala (dir. Ousmane Sembène, 1975, Senegal) best illustrates the postcolonial failures that followed the ascension of African elites to political power, namely the much anticipated transformative results of euphoric nationalism. This is why postindependence films and literature remained as militant as they were during colonialism. In other words, the perception of “African” cinema as an ideological praxis remained unchanged, but for different reasons. As argued above, according to nationalist filmmakers, cinema in the West is used to distract, in the Pascalian sense of the word. It is important in Africa, colonial terror notwithstanding, to use cinema to “convert” the masses to political action. The cinematographic experiment at its outset is ideological before being artistic. Because independence generated unexpected disillusionment, filmmakers who were used to challenging colonialism found themselves denouncing postindependence leaders. In doing so, some based their social function on the reproduction of a traditional figure, that of the griot or bard. For filmmakers like Ousmane Sembène, filmic production is a political action inspired by the role of the griot, which essentially consists in denouncing the vices of (neo)colonial society. Cinema is first and foremost a venture in uncovering. This is why Françoise Pfaff writes that Sembène is “a griot of modern times.”27 The Senegalese director clearly associates his role with African oral traditions: The artist must in many ways be the mouth and the ears of his people. In the modern sense, this corresponds to the role of the griot in traditional African

Alexie Tcheuyap / African Cinema(s)

279

culture. The artist is like a mirror. His work reflects and synthesizes the problems, the hopes, and the struggles of his people.28

In addition to the discursive and ideological determinants of African films, there are also formal characteristics that have tended to be associated with “African” cinema. The griot or storyteller is first and foremost a master of the spoken word. However, there is ample evidence in films like Wend Kuuni (dir. Gaston Kaboré, 1981, Burkina Faso), Keïta! l’Héritage du griot / Keita! Voice of the Griot (dir. Dani Kouyaté, 1995, Burkina Faso), Genesis (dir. Cheick Oumar Sissoko, 1999, Mali and France), Africa I will Fleece You (dir. Jean-Marie Téno, 1991), or Ndeysaan, The Price of Forgiveness (dir. Mansour Sora Wade, 2001, France and Senegal), to mention just a few titles, that African oral performance and aesthetics has significantly influenced the formal construction of several films. As studies by Mbye Cham, Manthia Diawara, Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, and myself amply show, African oral traditions have abundantly determined the aesthetic language of cinema in sub-Saharan Africa. For example, Ukadike’s convincing examination of Xala illustrates that Sembène’s narrative is “a comedy told in the typical African storytelling tradition to illustrate a simple moral tale.”29 As for Manthia Diawara, he shows how formal patterns are inspired by oral traditions. It appears, then, that identity and culture have been (and remain) useful in reading several African films. However, in spite of its usefulness, using oral traditions as a principal (and unique?) basis for reading African cinema—especially today—can also be highly controversial. For example, is it quite appropriate to argue, as does Ukadike, that films from the 1970s and 1980s are rooted in traditional storytelling strategies “towards which almost all filmmakers now lean and to which the level of [their] maturity is attributed?”30 Is there such an “African” hermeneutics in “black” postcolonial narratives that are said to be built around “African traditions” and forms that utilize cultural associations “in a unique fashion no foreigner is capable of providing?”31 As indicated above, it is useful to consider the role of the griot in formal constructions of narratives, as Diawara does very efficiently. However, his contribution can equally be questionable, as illustrated below: [T]o analyze African cinema, one must first understand that twenty-five years of film production has necessarily created an aesthetic tradition which African filmmakers use as a point of reference which they follow or contest. An African aesthetic does not come merely from European cinema. To avoid making African cinema into an imperfect appendix to European cinema, one must question Africa itself, and African traditions, to discover the originality of its films.32

Although relevant, these views also appear limited, if not essentialist. Such a perception of “specificity,” one ought to indicate, is only true of a certain

280

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

number of films, especially those addressed in Diawara’s typology. The “quest for social and economic justice” is mostly illustrated in social realist films; the search for identity appears in films that fit the “return to the source” category and seek to reject colonial oppression.33 Along with nationalism, this idea of “specificity” is reductionist in at least two ways. The first, as indicated by Eileen Julien, is that there is something fundamentally “oral” about the African narrative praxis.34 The second, is another kind of essentialism that would imply that African filmmakers, like the novelists analyzed by Mohamadou Kane in his study “Sur les formes traditionnelles du roman africain,” have probably only been exposed to African tales, and that the evening story sessions are the only cultural experiences available to them. Such an argument implies that these traditional narratives are the sole influences on African productions, cinematic or otherwise. Finally, we note the persistence of an oppositional scholarship. Why must postcolonial directors always refer to canons or norms that they “follow or contest?”35 Can African films only be “original” when echoing indigenous “traditions?” Is it not possible to come to terms with the fact that, to borrow from Tommie Shelby, various forces create an artistic dynamism and hybridity and thus foreclose the possibility of a homogeneous cultural identity?36 Is Africa one such isolated continent, even after colonial traumas? Must African subjectivities be situated only at one or the other end of a cultural spectrum? Is there not on the contrary a point of intersection, of mutual (and perhaps even of a beneficial) cultural gain? However, in another essay, Diawara clearly indicates that it is difficult to establish the constituents of a mythical “authentic” or “African” film language. As he puts it, […] I do not believe that here is such a thing as an authentic African film language, whether it is defined in terms of commonalities arising from liberation struggles against colonialism and imperialism, or identity politics or Afrocentricity. […] there are variations, and even contradictions, among film languages and ideologies, which are attributable to the prevailing political cultures in each region, the differences in the modes of production and distribution, and the particularities of regional cultures.37

This is particularly true of the post-1990 films, which have almost completely moved away from the dogmatic stands and the nationalist rhetoric of early narratives. These narratives, together with the scholarship that examined them, created the illusion of an “African” cinema, that is, a cinema of assertive nationalism or of cultural anthropology, which was excellent for exotic western television programs. Contrary to what journalists and critics have tended to believe, in spite of the commitment of most directors

Alexie Tcheuyap / African Cinema(s)

281

to political struggles, there were also many African films and directors with nonpolitical agendas. They developed genres that were essentially aimed at entertaining viewers desperate for amusement. For example, why is it that a country like Ivory Coast never developed a cinema of systematic (and systemic) contestation, as did other countries? Why has most of the scholarship on African cinema been relegated to the shadows of militant narrative directors like Moustapha Alassane or Oumarou Ganda who clearly never shot the kind of nationalist films à la mode since colonialism? Another interesting case is that of Cameroon, where directors like Daniel Kamwa and Jean-Pierre Dikongue Pipa concentrated on soporific issues like forced marriage and dowry at a time when the country was being heavily ruled by one of Africa’s most ugly dictatorships. Clearly, they did not fit within the nationalist definition of truly “African” cinema as outlined by the FEPACI norms. In fact, the question of “authenticity,” of “African” cinema is overtly historical, controversial, and unstable. Speaking precisely about “authenticity,” David Murphy pointed to the difficulty of grasping the apprehension of the true African. According to him, “the reality of Africans filming has not produced a unified ‘authentic’ African cinema. Rather, it has produced a series of complex and often contradictory visions of a continent.”38 That is why the notion of “African” cinema has recently been subject to several attacks by directors whose perception of cinema does not fit into fifty years of dated liberationist imperatives.

New African Cinemas It is perhaps due to Ousmane Sembène’s lasting influence on African cinema that Manthia Diawara also asks, in African Film, what a “post-Sembène” African cinema will look like.39 Will it be populist as is the case with Cheick Fantamady Camara, Moussa Sène Absa, and in the Nigerian Nollywood? Will it shift towards the postcolonial art cinema of Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Abderrahmane Sissako or rather towards the still Pan-Africanist cinema of Jean-Marie Téno, Ramadan Suleman, and John Akomfrah? Diawara’s questions are based on the fact that the cinematic landscape is undergoing major, if not radical transformations. It is now obvious that liberationist aesthetics have become somehow obsolete. In fact, in many respects, political African cinemas happened to have been a relative failure and a “cinema of the elite” in several respects. This cinema has helped to develop auteur films, which, although useful, appear to have systematically alienated African filmgoers. Such is the extremely critical view of Congolese director Mewze Ngangura, according to whom any public, including African, go to the cinema for enjoyment and not for ideological subjugation. For Ngangura, it is this perception

282

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

of “African” cinema which has led to the absence of any “genre” in African cinema and, especially, the absence of comedy: [. . .] in Africa, for many years now almost all African filmmakers have regarded themselves as authors, as people with a mission, charged with carrying a mission to their people. [. . .] In fact, the infatuation with a “cinema of authors,” because it did not emanate from a broad, mainstream cinematographic current (which did not exist anyway) addressed to the bulk of audiences, has only succeeded in alienating the African audience from its own cinema, which even today it tends to regard as too “cultural” in the pejorative sense and too didactic rather than a spectacle. It is revealing, for instance, that comedies, a popular genre, if there ever was one, in Africa just as much as elsewhere, have only been rarely attempted in African cinema.40

In the same perspective, Idrissa Ouédraogo fustigates militant cinema notorious for its confidential distribution and its lack of viewers: In no way do I claim to represent my people or African values. One easily becomes pretentious when one claims to be an instructor or teacher . . . ‘The evening school’ by Sembène, is not fictional cinema! Why speak about an African cinema that perverts itself at fashion’s will? When one decides to make fiction, one shoulders the responsibility and one says that one is making it for oneself, that it is not necessarily a luxury, that it can usher in a possibility for the African youth to dream!41

Jean-Pierre Bekolo is also clear about this issue: Why do we make films if people would not go to see them? Most of [my students feel] that most African films are like tools for teaching and that is why I started having problems with that definition. Film is a medium of expression and an art form. [. . .] I do not know if African filmmakers can use the film medium to teach [. . .], or if they have the right background. I think it is wrong for us to teach, even if we feel we have learned something. Film could be a good medium for a type of education that is different from teaching. I do not pretend to be a teacher. I do not know how to do that very well.42

In an interview with Michael T. Martin, Senegalese director Joseph Gaï Ramaka is far from being enthusiastic or laudatory about a cinema that is only mindful of a politically motivated agenda. He is very skeptical about nationalist claims that have become uncertain in a world of transnational circulations:

Alexie Tcheuyap / African Cinema(s)

283

I belong to no cinema organization, or structure, African or non-African. I view myself as a global human being and not in relation to a nation. I am interested in things that are made by an individual. My concerns are not as a filmmaker, but rather as a citizen who happens to be a filmmaker [. . .] I do not conceive my commitment to social justice as a filmmaker. I am not a filmmaker engagé. I am an ordinary citizen engagé. I want the rank and file, the policeman, the filmmaker, administrator, and judge to be engagé as self-conscious citizens.43

The above statements from Ramaka, Bekolo, Ngangura, and Ouedraogo indicate that there is shift in the paradigm and contemporary postcolonial film praxis. Filmmakers now view themselves as citizens of the world, and do not feel compelled to be ambassadors of specific “African” values or cultures. Like several others, especially since the 1990s, these directors have abandoned the ideologically oriented aesthetics of the pioneer African filmmakers, which they severely criticize. They have come up with innovative aesthetic and narrative strategies best suited to communicating increasingly complicated socio-political cultural contexts. Whereas pioneer filmmakers obsessively focused on a critique of (post)colonial Africa or on the rehabilitation of a mutilated identity and distorted history, post-1990 directors resolutely go beyond nationalism and situate their discourses in the turbulent flows of globalization. As Teresa Hoefert de Turégano points out about the specific case of Burkina Faso, contemporary films are not only technically superior, but also significantly “less moralizing, less didactic, less concerned with legitimizing the nation,” than previous ones.44 In Burkina Faso and in other countries, narratives that have “[left] the nation behind” fully participate in a transnational experience and move beyond the realism characteristic of early “traditional” African fiction.45 In any case, these directors have realized that “in this world of genders, ethnicities, and classes, of families, religions, and nations, it is as well to remember that there are times when Africa is not the banner we need.”46 In such a context, a stable or monolithic conception of “African” cinema becomes not only less desirable, but more challenging because of the ways in which filmmakers succeed in positioning their work within a global framework and even in regards to a certain spectatorship. In the past two or three decades, “African” cinema has therefore become a cinema that is either concerned with projects different from open nationalism, or which address the same issues differently. Although films like Bamako (dir. Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006) or The Colonial Misunderstanding (dir. Jean-Marie Téno, 2004) make it seriously contentious to categorically state, as Achille Mbembe does, that “the thematics of anti-imperialism is exhausted,”47 it is nevertheless evident that for directors like Mahamed Camara, Mansour Sora Wade, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Daniel Kamwa, Safi Faye, Henri Duparc, Desiré Ecaré, Henri-Joseph Koubi Bididi, Dani Kouyaté, and

284

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Mwezé Ngangura, to name just a few, “the nation” is a less important, if not a totally absent signifier. The need for nation building has been somewhat overshadowed by a shift in focus to more quotidian priorities. This does not, it must be stressed, imply that directors are no longer interested in the nation. Far from abandoning it, they have simply shifted their priorities to different components of national and social identities that have little to do with militant discourse. Nevertheless, their respective oeuvres put into practice Paul Gilroy’s arguments about black expression by deconstructing the myth of a unitary or “pure” culture. Motivated by conscious and unconscious influences, these directors, like several others, illustrate Arjun Appadurai’s argument that [w]e need to think ourselves beyond the nation. This is not to suggest that thought alone will carry us beyond the nation or that the nation is largely a thought or an imagined thing. Rather, it is to suggest that the role of intellectual practices is to identify the current crisis of the nation and in identifying it, to provide part of the apparatus of recognition for postnational social forms. Although the idea that we are entering a postnational world seems to have received its first airing in literary studies, it is now a recurrent (if not unconscious) theme in studies of postcolonialism, global politics, and international welfare policy. But most writers who have asserted or implied that we need to think postnationally have not asked exactly what emergent forms compel us to do so [. . .].48

Given this transformed context due to the change in demographics, cultural dispersion and appropriation, migrations, as well as global economics, African films have become less fraught with nationalist heroes. In fact, most protagonists are not only ordinary men and women; they also appear to be mostly young people as in Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Quartier Mozart (1992, Cameroon and France) or even Sembène’s Faat Kine (2000, Senegal). In lieu of freedom fighters and radical social critics, we now have drunkards and other comic characters as in Henri Duparc’s Bal Poussière. Dakan / Destiny (dir. Mohamed Camara, 1997, Guinea and France) for example, is a simple narrative about two young African gays who are unable to fully experience and enjoy their sexuality in a hostile “conservative” environment. The same may be said about Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Karmen Gei (2001), which is also the story of a lesbian/bisexual Karmen, a femme fatale who generates chaos around her. Mossane (dir. Safi Faye, 1996, Senegal), Ndeysaan, the Price of Forgiveness, and Idrissa Ouédraogo’s Tilaï / The Law (1990, Burkina Faso) depict tragic love stories where Africa is used to portray human emotion. Mwezé Ngangura’s La Vie est belle / Life is Rosy (1987, Democratic Republic of the Congo) is strictly about popular enjoyment of what life has best to offer—music and dance—in a devastated Zaire where citizens expect nothing

Alexie Tcheuyap / African Cinema(s)

285

from a corrupt government. In the same vein, Quartier Mozart is about life in a neighborhood where sexual politics is embedded with witchcraft in the most hilarious of ways. When a character summarizes all African films in Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Aristotle’s Plot (1996) as being “shit,” it is certainly because they are often realist, linear, Manichean, and of rudimentary technical standard. After Djibril Diop Mambéty’s aesthetic “dissidence” in all of his films since the late 1970s, JeanPierre Bekolo demonstrated with Quartier Mozart and more recently with Les Saignantes / Those Who Bleed (2005, France and Cameroon) that African directors could both be exceptionally creative in formal constructions and take advantage of possibilities now available to cinema with technological transformations. Fast editing, jump cuts, sophisticated lighting, complex narrative construction, complete transformation of character psychology, intertextuality, visual and special effects, as well as noise manipulation are now essential features of several of his films. Narratives are now shot away from the “bush” or dry villages where half naked old women, domestic and wild animals, or dry landscape are used to constitute the sole and unique decor. One other way in which contemporary directors have redirected and redefined “African” cinema has been through the experimentation and proliferation of new genres. David Murphy and Patrick Williams indicated that African film scholarship is dominated by what they call a form of exceptionalism, a term they use to indicate that African cinema is too often evaluated in very different terms from those generally seen in film studies; productions are regarded as significantly separate from other forms of cinematic expression, emphasizing their specificity.49 While such a paradigm may be valid, such “exceptionalism” is, among other categories, characterized by the lack of genre study in African cinema. Most African films are first of all “African” but rarely comedies, crime films, melodrama, tragedies, westerns, or musicals, for example. It is significant that the post-1990 directors seem to experiment more with new genre cinema. Although Les Saignantes is full of captions delineating the impossibility of developing genre-specific films in chaotic and corrupt postcolonial Cameroon, this film certainly has features of crime, sci-fi, porn, and even horror movies. Sylvestre Amoussous’s Africa Paradis (2006, France and Benin) belongs to both sci-fi and comedy. Ndeysaan, Tilaï, and Mossane are classic tragedies. Karmen Gei and Madame Brouette are not only a musicals as illustrated by Sheila Petty, but also, together with films like Guelwaar (dir. Sembène, 1992, Senegal) and even Black Girl, can be interpreted as crime films. The rise and development of genre in African films signals a shift in artistic practice on the continent where for too long, the director felt compelled to “shoot back” as Melissa Thackway’s book suggests.50 It is important to note that what may be called “popular” African cinema seems to focus very much on genre-specific films, especially detective fiction, a genre popular

286

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

not only in the huge Nigerian video film industry, but also in francophone Africa, where crime is becoming a major plot driver. Mamady Sidibé’s Inspecteur Sory, le Mamba (2005) is organized around the investigations and heroism of a detective; Mahamat Saleh-Haroun’s Daratt (2006) traces the itinerary of a boy who is unable to fire his gun at his father’s murderer. Even Idrissa Ouédraogo’s Samba Traoré (1993, Burkina Faso), with its robbery and killings, is a classic thriller set in an African village. However, the most noticeable developer of crime plots is Boubacar Diallo, from Burkina Faso, whose films attract large crowds. Apart from the sentimental comedy Sofia (dir. Boubakar Diallo, 2004, Burkina Faso), his repertoire of films is comprised entirely of detective and western genres: Open Water (2005), Traque à Ouaga (2004), Dossier brulant (2005), Code Phoenix (2005), L’Or des Younga (2006), Série noire à Koumbi (2006), La Belle, la brute et le berger (2006), and Sam le Caid (2008). Clearly, the choice of genre is directed towards commercial and entertainment cinema, two options which were considered as almost heretical practices at the peak of nationalist filmmaking that systematically (and almost naïvely) rejected any “escapist” or “capitalist” notions of cinema. That well-known “African” cinema is on the verge of being buried by a generation of directors who not only did not experience colonialism as Sembène, but also do not feel obliged to “speak” for African people or “teach” them anything. Surprisingly, these discursive and formal transformations have, at times, been criticized by scholars who seem concerned with the loss of an “African ontology” or an “African” cinema that should remain immune to “alienation” all the while conserving its “purity” in spite of global circulations and cultural transformations. For example, Olivier Barlet contends that “the successes of African films have left that cinema vulnerable” to the forces of “Western pressures on the content of films,” and implies that filmmakers are forced to look towards “Western” aesthetics to respond to the urgency of raising external funds.51 Françoise Pfaff makes a very similar argument in her assertion that “the serious, didactic, political, social realist” films of the past have been dropped in favor of “more commercially attractive film products.”52 Ukadike also argues very strongly against formal experimentations and “proliferations” whereby the “new breed” of filmmakers desperately “exoticize” their work for export to foreign markets. Although several scholars praise the formal transformations in contemporary narratives, these aspirations to alternative language and discourse remain questionable because “some of the conventions used to attain these aspirations have, however, been misappropriated.”53 It has been argued above that Mwezé Ngangura and several other directors despise didacticism, “bush,” or “calabash” cinema with little or no elaborate aesthetic traits. However, for Manthia Diawara, formal experimentations are nothing but a mere “recourse to a Eurocentric formalism, which represses the contents of their lives and

Alexie Tcheuyap / African Cinema(s)

287

privileges the position of Western spectators in art cinema festivals.”54 The implication of the above view is that there is something inherently wrong with commercial cinema, European legitimization, and entertainment. It also implies that “African” cinema, basically, is perceived as containing no formal (i.e., European) construction, and any attempt to be aesthetically sophisticated is driven by the need to please foreign spectators. Notwithstanding the above “resistance” by these critics, likely motivated by what Paul Gilroy calls an “ontological essentialist view [that] has often been characterized by a brute Pan-Africanism,” contemporary directors offer ample evidence that the monolithic perception of “African cinema” which was bound to be militant is on the verge of extinction.55 That “African cinema” looks definitively dead can be noted in the works of Aboubacar Diallo and Mwezé Ngangura, and in light of the explosion of image productions in Nigeria, Ghana, and lately Cameroon. The need to challenge any ontology is best summarized by Essomba Toureur in Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Aristotle’s Plot: Is there anything in this cinema which is not African? Fantasy, myth, we got. Walt Disney, we got. Lion King, we got. Massacres, we got. Comedians, music, we got. Paul Simon, we got. Aristotle, catharsis, and kola nut, we got. What don’t we got?

In Africa for the Future, Jean-Pierre Bekolo asks an essential question the implied answer to which is negative: how can one possibly differentiate what is French or American from what belongs to his African world?56 In other words, is the African cinema of today ontologically different from other dominant cinematic productions? Essomba Toureur seems to have provided the answer, and scholars should further investigate these transformations. One final clarification that deserves to be stated is the need to be accustomed to speaking of African cinemas in lieu of a monolithic and somehow misleading African cinema. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra specified in the 1970s that he used the latter term because “the national cinemas of this continent are not yet so important [. . .] that we are led to divide them up and study them separately as Algerian, Senegalese, Nigerian, Moroccan, Guinean, Ivorian, or Nigerien cinema.”57 However, there are reasons to believe it is methodologically objectionable to continue using the singular when talking about films originating from Africa. Apart from Oliver Barlet, critics have invariably used the singular in defining films from the continent.58 Nigeria, Burkina Faso, South Africa, and Egypt, to mention only these countries, have separated and segregated unique film industries.59 Moreover, an excellent illustration of the need to rethink the blanket term “African cinema” is

288

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

proposed by Teresa Hoefert de Turégano, whose African Cinema and Europe skillfully illustrates the dynamics of Burkina Faso’s vibrant national cinema. As she points out, the generic label “African cinema” is not quite pertinent in that it masks the diversity of contexts, histories, genres, contexts, film languages, and narrative forms of production, which are extremely heterogeneous.60 However, as she also adds, theories of national cinema ought to challenge the conceptual limits of the nation, positioning it within transnational and international settings.61 Finally, one ought to mention a rather significant phenomenon, which has made the definition of “African cinema” even more complicated: the explosion of video productions in Nigeria, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, and now Cameroon. The Nollywood phenomenon, known as Collywood in Cameroon, has radically transformed the landscape of African productions, and scholars must theorize the paradigms according to which these narratives, of at times rudimentary quality and mostly genreoriented, may be included into the canon of (national) cinema. In light of the above discussion, how can we then define African cinema? There is likely no straightforward answer. What is clear, though, is that no single conceptualization is sufficient. Issues relating to production, distribution, or spectatorship, which would have provided other significant insights, could be fully addressed in this short essay. The existence of the category Sheila Petty calls “Black Diasporic Cinema” further complicates any theoretical investigation, as it confirms the fragility of any territorial or geographical classification.62 What is common between diasporic and post-1990 African films is that black directors abroad evolve in a transnational context where “arrival and departure, global and local, nation and (non)nation,” now determine cultural production and identity construction.63 It is now evident that entertainment, new genres, and innovative aesthetic experimentations have given way to a simplistic “African” cinema that results in reducing culture to nationalist, racial, and cultural parameters. Taking into consideration contemporary political, economic, and cultural transformations, the best manner in which to define African cinema would be to consider as African any film, which integrates Africa (or Africans) as a category of representation. This, however, is a potentially contentious view, as such general typology could also include Hollywood jungle films. Yet, when one considers directors like Jean Rouch, Claire Denis, Jacques Champreux, or Laurent Chevalier, there is certainly as much Africa in their films as there is in narratives by Oumarou Ganda, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, or even Ousmane Sembène. What matters most, I believe, is not territoriality, race, politics, or the “authenticity” of a particular culture, because issues of language, discourse, and form necessarily require us to look beyond any of these clear-cut concepts.

Alexie Tcheuyap / African Cinema(s)

289

Alexie Tcheuyap was educated in Cameroon, Scotland, and Canada, and is currently a Professor of French and Vice Dean at the University of Toronto. He has been Visiting Professor at various universities in Europe, Africa, and the United States. His research focuses on African literature, cinema, and media studies. He is the author of several articles, edited volumes, journal special issues, and books. His latest publication is Avoir peur. Insécurité et roman en Afrique francophone (Presses de l’Université Laval, 2019; with Hervé Tchumkam).

Notes Originally published as Alexie Tcheuyap, “African Cinema(s): Definitions, Identity, and Theoretical Considerations,” Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture 5, no. 1 (2011): 10–26. 1. Manthia Diawara, African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics (Munich: Prestel, 2010), 29–30. Emphasis added. 2. Assiatou Bah Diallo, “Les femmes à la recherche d’un nouveau souffle,” Amina 253 (1991): 8–9. 3. Olivier Barlet, African Cinemas: Decolonizing the Gaze, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Zed Books, 2000), 43–49. 4. Samuel Lelièvre, “Du cinéma africain . . . aux cinémas africains,” CinémAction 106 (2003): 10–13. 5. Diawara quotes George Sadoul. See Manthia Diawara, African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), vii. 6. It is interesting to see an institutional typology like the one of the recent FESPACO, which mentions, for films showcasing Africa as a category, classifications like “World feature films,” “Diaspora feature films,” and “Feature film panorama Africa, the Caribbean, and Pacific.” The question of identity and plurality thus remains fundamental and difficult to define. 7. French original: “Pour qu’un film soit africain. Suffit-il qu’il soit réalisé par un Africain? Sans doute, dans la sesure où le film est remarquable par ses rapports des valeurs de la civilisation africaine, il peut être désigné comme un film africain. Ce qui veut dire qu’on reconnaître comme africain un film un film réalisé par un Africain sur l’Europe, dès lors qu’on y sent une certaine façon de penser nègre.” See Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Le Cinéma africain de ses origines à 1973 (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1975), 244. 8. Ibid. 9. Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Black African Cinema (Berkley: University of California Press, 1994), 4. 10. French original: Le problème des films africains est qu’ils sont toujours homogénéisés par la perception de l’autre, l’Occident, qui finit par penser que nous ne travaillons ni sur les mêmes données, ni sur les mêmes valeurs que les siennes. En dépit d’une philosophie particulière et d’une originalité propre, chaque film réalisé en Afrique par un Africain est rangé par avance dans la case “cinéma africain.” See Idrissa Ouédraogo, “Le cinéma et nous,” in FEPACI, L’Afrique et le centenaire du cinéma (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1995), 336.

290

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

11. French original: “Que dire des films du sud arborant plus facilement que leurs auteurs ‘sans papiers’ la nationalité du nord? En réalité, les définitions initiales sont vite dépassées par les envies des créateurs, leurs statuts ne peuvent être enserrés dans un carcan. Les cinéastes dits du Sud sont des auteurs qui se définissent selon les mêmes termes que l’on fait Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol, tous les acteurs de la Nouvelle Vague. Ils ne recusant pas cette chaleur qui court le long de leurs films [. . .].” Imunga Ivanga, “Au sud, des cinémas,” in Afriques 50: Singularités d’un cinéma pluriel, ed. Catherine Ruelle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), 176. Emphasis added. 12. Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with African Filmmakers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 220. 13. Ukadike, Questioning African Cinema, 223. 14. Robert Stam and Louise Spence, “Colonialism, Racism and Representation,” Screen 24, no. 2 (1983): 6. 15. Ukadike, Black African Cinema, 35. 16. Imruh Bakari and Mbye Cham, eds, African Experiences of Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 25–26. Emphasis added. 17. Férid Boughedir, African Cinema from A to Z (Brussels: OCIC, 1992), 70. 18. Ukadike, Black African Cinema, 286. Emphasis added. 19. Férid Boughedir, “African Cinema and Ideology: Tendencies and Evolution,” in Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image, ed. June Givani (London: BFI Publishing, 2000), 117. 20. Ukadike, Black African Cinema, 234. 21. Kenneth Harrow, Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 19. 22. Melissa Thackway, Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 23. Diawara, African Film, 20. 24. Ibid., 23. 25. Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 78. 26. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 152. 27. Françoise Pfaff, The Cinema of Ousmane Sembène, A Pioneer of African Film (Wesport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984). 28. Cited by Pfaff. See Pffaf, The Cinema of Ousmane Sembène, 29. 29. Ukadike, Black African Cinema, 178–179. 30. Ibid., 166. Emphasis added. 31. Ibid., 202. Emphasis added. 32. Manthia Diawara, “Popular Culture and Oral Traditions in African Films,” in African Experiences of Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 209–10. Emphasis added. 33. Diawara, African Cinema, 164. 34. Eileen Julien, African Novels and the Question of Orality (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992). 35. Diawara, “Popular Culture and Oral Traditions.” 36. Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 176. 37. Manthia Diawara, “The Iconography of West African Cinema,” in Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image, ed. June Givanni (London: BFI Publishing, 2000), 81.

Alexie Tcheuyap / African Cinema(s)

291

38. David Murphy and Patrick Williams, “Africans Filming Africa: Questioning Theories of an Authentic African Cinema,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2000): 240. 39. Diawara, African Film, 45. 40. Mwezé Ngangura, “African Cinema: Militancy or Entertainment?” in African Experiences of Cinema, ed. Imruh Bakari and Mbye Cham (London: BFI Publishing, 1996), 61–62. 41. Idrissa Ouédraogo cited by Barlet. See Barlet, African Cinemas, 75. 42. Ukadike, Questioning African Cinema, 219. 43. Michael T. Martin, “I Am Not a Filmmaker Engagé, I Am an Ordinary Citizen Engagé: A Black Camera Interview with Joseph Gaï Ramaka,” Black Camera 22, no. 2 and 23, no. 1 (2008): 27–28. 44. Teresa Hoefert de Turégano, African Cinema and Europe: Close-up on Burkina Faso (Florence: European Press Academic Publishing, 2004), 195. 45. Hoefert de Turégano, African Cinema and Europe, 194. 46. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 180. 47. Achille Mbembe, “African Modes of Self Writing,” trans. Steven Rendall, Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 263. 48. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 158. 49. David Murphy and Patrick Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 19. 50. Melissa Thackway, Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives Sub-Saharan Francophone African Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). 51. Barlet, African Cinemas, 260. 52. Françoise Pfaff, Focus on African Films (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 6. 53. Ukadike, Black African Cinema, 288. 54. Diawara, African Film, 61. 55. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 31. Emphasis added. 56. Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Africa for the Future: Sortir un Nouveau Monde du Cinéma (Paris: Dagan & Medya, 2009), 49. 57. French original: “les cinémas nationaux de ce continent ne sont pas encore si importants (. . .) pour que nous soyons amenés à en séparer l’étude en la fractionnant en cinéma algérien, sénégalais, nigérian, marocain, guinéen, ivoirien ou nigérien.” See Vieyra, Le cinéma africain de dese origines à 1973, 7. 58. Barlet, African Cinemas. 59. It is interesting to note that in her latest book, 50 ans de cinéma maghrébin (Minerve, 2009), Denise Brahimi also uses the plural form in characterizing the cinemas of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. 60. Hoefert de Turégano, African Cinema and Europe, 13. 61. Ibid. 206. 62. Sheila Petty, Contact Zones: Memory, Origin, and Discourses in Black Diasporic Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008). 63. Petty, Contact Zones, 1.

Theorizing African Cinema: Contemporary African Cinematic Discourse and Its Discontents Esiaba Irobi

O

ne of the major criticisms leveled against contemporary scholarship of “African” cinema1 is that we place too much emphasis on the social, political, and economic difficulties faced by “African” filmmakers instead of engaging with theory, or, at least, establishing an indigenous theoretical framework within which we can redefine the aesthetic constructs and challenges that “African” filmmakers, film critics, and “Africanist’’ teachers of “African” cinema need to grapple with in the twenty-first century. To my way of thinking, a thorough re-examination of scholarly strategies, one which conflates theoretical, discursive criticism with pragmatic, creative, intervention, is necessary if “African” cinema must outdo the present commercial mediocrity of Hollywood and make lasting contributions to world cinema and its filmic language in the same way that filmmakers from other cultures, such as China: Farewell, My Concubine (dir. Chen Kaige, 1993); Japan: Dreams (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1990); New Zealand: Once Were Warriors (dir. Lee Tamahori, 1994); and Canada: Atanarjuat / The Fast Runner (dir. Zacharias Kunuk, 2000), have done from an unapologetically non-Western semiological perspective.2 In this article I want to examine some of the major “intellectual” problems faced by African cinema scholars, both on the continent and abroad, contextualize the enormity and complexity of any attempt to theorize African cinema, redefine the expression “theory” from an African semiological and epistemic perspective, and, most importantly, interrogate what the term “to theorize” means inside and outside the Western academy today. My primary intention in this whole undertaking is to reveal the political underpinnings of the term “to theorize,” even when it is used innocuously as academic parlance to encourage greater dialogue between the Western academy and African intellectuals negotiating new and complex discourses about hybrid cultural artforms, such as the cinema.

Esiaba Irobi / African Cinematic Discourse

293

The African Scholar Versus the Western Academy One of the major reasons why the bulk of academic discourse on African, and, indeed, African diasporic cinematic practices, have remained largely “untheorized,”3 in a problematic sense of the word, despite a steady output of distinguished scholarship by Mbye Cham, Manthia Diawara, N. Frank Ukadike, Teshome Gabriel, Keyan Tomaselli, Clyde Taylor, among others,4 can perhaps be examined and understood in the following light: there is an absence of a coherent theoretical construct or infrastructure generated by African scholars within which African cinema can be studied, criticized, taught, or appreciated. By “theoretical infrastructure” I do not mean the superimposition or insertion of the cultural ideas and artistic philosophies of Foucault, Lyotard, Kristeva, Lacan, Derrida, and other European theorists on or into the study and analysis of African art-forms ranging from oral poetry through painting and sculpture, to the new wave of video filmmaking in the continent.5 I mean the establishment of a theorized vocabulary of experiencing and creating, of seeing and understanding, of appreciation and teaching, of exegesis and evaluation, that is “African” in origin and sensibility, yet captures within its operative dynamic the complex, hybridized, or syncretic nature of African political, historical, and cultural experience. This indigenized theoretical vocabulary need not ostracize the contributions of Western intellectuals with respect to the history of the arts, ideas, and theory; in fact, the vocabulary should incorporate these ideas and, where possible, subvert or disembowel6 them; neither does it have to get rid of the English language or French, the primary languages of communication between Africa and the rest of the Western world. What this new discourse that I am arguing for should do is to bring into the currency of international cinematic discourse, concepts, terminologies, philosophies, theories of art, and art appreciation that are indigenously and linguistically African or Africanoriented. By this I mean that, we, African and “Africanist” scholars, should go forth and discover the precise vernacular vocabularies and registers in which specific African cultures have couched their theories of performance, the aesthetic concepts surrounding their artistic processes, and the creative philosophies that shape the production of their art-forms and deploy these, as full-bodied African expressions, in our academic discourse, whether we are writing in English, French, Portuguese, German, or Belgian languages.7 The reasons why we are not doing this yet, why in fact we are still discussing extremely complex African art-forms like the cinema (which in its own unique way incorporates almost all of the other arts) in largely descriptive, historical, generalized, and sometimes vague “globalized/postmodernist” terms, must be clearly understood:

294

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

The Western academy remains the unique source of validation for the African scholar . . . Our credentials depend in the first place on the initial foundation of our prior training, which is based upon materials that are exclusively Western . . . Nobody expects an American (or European scholar) to know anything about Africa . . . except perhaps as specialist knowledge. But an African scholar with only elementary grounding and familiarity with the Western content of his discipline has little hope of advancing in his profession. This observation holds true even in Africa today.8

Abiola Irele, the author of this quote, from the immensely significant essay “The African Scholar,’’ goes on to emphasize how the above situation leads to a seemingly “inauthentic” or “illegitimate” academic discourse about African cultural/intellectual productivity for both African scholars on the continent and those who are in economic exile in the West: The language and concepts that we use are foreign, so that we start with a marked disadvantage in our apprenticeship within the profession. And because this language, this body of concepts, has not been generated within our environment, we have no choice but to produce what is ultimately a derived discourse.9

African Cinema Versus Western Cinematic Theory/Discourse Perhaps in no other field of African arts is the theoretical dichotomy between practice and its discourse more pronounced as in cinema, a form whose primary instrument is technically European but whose African products are often hybridized narratives and semiological montages of our lived experiences both abroad and on the continent. These experiences mirror the mixed-up lives we have had to live since 1885, depicting phases of five hundred years of acculturation between Europe and Africa. This situation, at first glance, makes it daunting for any African scholar to even dare to say that we do have theories of cinema on the continent. Yet in reality we do because in virtually all African societies and cultures that I have researched there are clear indigenous theoretical terminologies for the visual, plastic, and performative arts.10 The examples include the Uri tradition of the Igbos, the Ijele of the Igbos, the Gelede or Oriki performance traditions of the Yorubas, the bronze masks of the Binis or Ekong of the Ibibios, the Kete choreography of the Ashanti, the Halo of Ewe, the Nnommo theatre of the Dogon of Mali, the Kora cultic metalanguages of the Bambara, the cosmic ritual diagrams of the Bakongo of Congo, and the Ki-Yi M’Bock art philosophy of the Bassa of Cameroon. A careful examination of these and other African artistic traditions and forms that the cinema in Africa increasingly draws from for its

Esiaba Irobi / African Cinematic Discourse

295

iconology reveals that these pre-modern sources embody, in their very completion and existence, the evidence of an indigenous, pre-colonial theoretical base on which communities and societies have built their negotiations of an African cultural modernity and postcoloniality with its attendant hybridity of experience, forms, and semiologies. We therefore need to ask ourselves: At what point does a theory become a theory? Is it when it is being thought out in the brain, a child of the mind? Or when it is being performed, the expressive process or product of the iconographic, proxemic, kinaesthetic, sonic, sartorial, olfactory, calligraphic intelligence/literacy of a culture? Or is it when it is written down in prose, print, or ink, the residue of a typographic and logocentric way of expression and mode of discourse? At what point does a theory become a theory? ls it not possible that theory may choose to make its appearance in non-Western cultures of the world differently in other words, in forms other than typographical writing as a result of the differences in ontology, teleology, semiology, narratological strategies for the visual, plastic, and performative arts? The tendency to deny indigenous and modern African cultures the capacity for theory has a historical antecedent. It stems from Europe’s and, indeed, the West’s cultural, economic, and intellectual desire to destroy, destabilize, minimize and, therefore, dominate other cultures whose theories, languages, and metalanguages the West does not and has never bothered to understand. Couched ironically in spurious theories of race and racial superiority, this Western conceit no longer fools anybody. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o refers to this predatory tendency in Western intellectual history and media discourse, this appetite to consume other peoples’ cultural intelligence, intellectual labor, and languages, as the cultural bomb!11 I call it the fangs of history. I am therefore writing with the twenty-first century assumption that all scholars in the humanities, the world over, know that there is no living culture that does not have theories of its own cultural processes and artistic labor. The nature and formal structure of a theory has a lot to do with the peculiar epistemological sensibility of its creators and the theory’s function within the given culture and its history. Baudrillard puts it this way: It is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it (theory) must itself be an event in the universe that it describes. In order to do this, theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of (Western) reality . . . which has separated many things from their nature and mythical origin in order to reverse them in time. Today they must be wrested from their history and their end to recapture their enigma, their reversible path, their destiny.12

296

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Foucault addresses the same question in a more subversive tenor: The role of theory today . . . [is] not to formulate the global systematic theory which holds everything in place, but to analyze the specificity of mechanisms of power, to locate the connections and extensions, to build little by little a strategic knowledge (savior) . . . theory is to be constructed as an instrument, a logic of the specificity of power relations and the struggles around them; . . . this investigation can only be carried out step by step on the basis of reflection (which will necessarily be historical in some of its aspects) on given situations.13

What is needed, then, in this age and point in time, in the context of the African situation, is to dare to include indigenous African theories of the visual, plastic, and performative arts in their very original, as African linguistic vernaculars, into the theoretical vocabulary for world cinematic discourse. To follow is what I mean here. Among the Ibibios of Nigeria, there is a body of visual and ideographic writing, distinct from Egyptian hieroglyphics, totally disconnected from European orthography or typography, indigenously and hermetically African in creation and functionality, which can be considered to be an exemplary trope or possible theoretical construct for filmmaking and the study of cinema on the continent. This unique form of coding knowledge and cultural discourse into symbols and metalingual iconology is called Nsibidi. It is made of picture symbols that represent key processes and structures through which the Ejegham/Ibibio society regulates itself politically and artistically. It requires a literate understanding of African semiotic signsystems in order to be decoded when used as part of the visual vocabulary of ritual, ceremony, painting, fashion design, body painting, drawing, theater, or cinema. Nsibidi symbolizes ideas on several levels of discourse. First there were signs most people knew, regardless of initiation or of rank in the Ngbe society, signs representing human relationships, communication, and household objects (which in themselves were in some instances used as material-ideographs). . . . Secondly there were the dark signs and these were often literally shaded. . . . Ritual fans bearing pyrograved nsibidi illustrate the point-fans called effrigi. . . . The concepts represented by this fan are not spelled out in treatise form but rendered through repetition, through “visual music.”14

Robert Farris Thompson, in his classic study of Africa and African diasporic performative and iconographic literacies, Flash of the Spirit, goes on to explain that:

Esiaba Irobi / African Cinematic Discourse

297

The syntax of nsibidi signs recalls some of the pleasures of music: repetition, call and response, and correspondence . . . Nsibidi signs represent the heart, the very depth of ancient Ejegham societies, showing the last stage, the final rites and only the core of the members can come out to view such signs. Poetic play and stylized valour, artistic battles of mime and “action writing” enliven, with pleasure and improvisation, the dark dimensions of nsibidi. Ejagham ideographic writing both exalts the power of privileged persons and points to a universe of aesthetic and intellectual potentialities (emphasis added).

In the light of Thompson’s analysis above, my Nsibidi theory of African cinema is, therefore, an argument for a more complex deployment of indigenous African symbolic forms in African films. It is a theory of semiological complexity that can deepen and make richer the narrative structure and visual grammar of films made by Africans. It postulates that iconology, the primary language of cinema is, first and foremost, culture-specific and, secondly, “cultic’’ and therefore operates principally through a hermeneutics of opacity that transcends the literal meanings and can exclude, but does not necessarily have to, the uninformed outsider or non-initiate operating within a given African culture. As Paul Stoller has argued, “the culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulder of those to whom they properly belong” (emphasis mine).16 By the word “cultic” I mean that these indigenous icons are, by their very nature, difficult to decipher. They are intellectually challenging and need to be researched in order to be fully understood. The forms in question predate typography and embody histories that, while unintelligible to the cursory viewer, yet provoke intense subliminal responses in people who come from these cultures. This same synaesthetic impact is made on other peoples from other cultures that are steeped in cultural and ritual processes where the human body is used as a site for the embodiment and expression of historical, creative, and religious discourse. These forms, therefore, fit perfectly into Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the cult value of a work of art in his book Illuminations.17 In Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen (1987, Mali), for example, we experience an extraordinary range of feelings from the challenge of decoding the Bambara metalanguages encoded in the film: What do the wings of the Kore mean? The cows? The ostrich’s egg? The ritual chants? The shrine? The little naked boy? The desert? The old woman who takes her ritual bath with milk? What do they mean? We are confronted with a vocabulary of cultural symbols that are older than cinema itself but beamed to us through its glittering screen as veritable evidence of the history and artistic sophistication of Bambara culture, whose indigenous semiological vocabulary may be older than that of most European cultures. The filmmaker powerfully succeeds because he

298

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

does not explain these symbols to us or use these metalanguages as ornaments. His triumph is that he deploys them as metaphors for the exploration of the larger political and historical discourse that he chooses to dramatize in the film. Will other filmmakers from other African cultures embark on the same archaeology and confront us with a sophisticated array of symbols metonymic of their own cultures’ artistic and intellectual history? I cannot say! All I know is that Souleymane Cissé excites us because he asks us to read the film and decode its wealth of complex signifiers ourselves. He does not make the task easy for us by disemboweling or cheapening his art. His work therefore interrogates our competence as connoisseurs of art in the same way that James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, Picasso’s Guernica, and Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring confront us with their modernist opacity. There lies the joy of viewing, re-viewing, and rereading Cissé’s film: in its Nsibidi integrity, which refracts to us the creative and critical intelligence of Bambara cultural symbology through a medium of modernity. Therefore, Nsibidi theory foregrounds that filmic iconography, when taken from a specific African indigenous culture, for example, the Akan doll (i.e., the Akan representation of fertility in Ghana), encapsulates the ontology, history, and creative intelligence of the culture in question. To decode the meaning and message of the Akan pendant when used in a film demands a knowledge of literacies, oral or written, and theories of creativity and performance that exist within the culture. The process of understanding what these signifiers mean constitutes an invaluable aspect of the experience of watching or reading an African film and thus cannot be equated with pistols and car chases in Hollywood films. These icons I am referring to are much more complex cultural and spiritual constructions and require a deeper level of analysis before their true meaning can be unraveled and understood. The fact that some icons are actual religious symbols invested with divine powers and meant to be worshipped means that filmmakers need to rethink their representation of belief, faith, and the occult in both Christian and nonChristian/indigenous contexts in their films. Statues, effigies, plinths, shrines carry with them associations that differ from culture to culture but all of which are complex aspects of any society’s semiology.20 Once again, Yeelen excels in this conflation of the secular, political, religious, and artistic dimensions of Bambara culture into a holistic and sophisticated world view, illustrating that world cinema is currently starving. Even though the cinema is a Western-devised, technological medium, it is presently impoverished by Hollywood and yawning desperately for rich, complex, African narratives to enrich and excite the hearts and minds of viewers all over the world. Thus, the Nsibidi approach to filmmaking on the continent posits that our filmmakers should, as their own unique contribution into the fabric of world cinema, quilt complex, cultic, iconography that requires an authentic and deep

Esiaba Irobi / African Cinematic Discourse

299

understanding of a given African culture’s art history. This becomes the infrastructure for negotiating an African modernity by attaching contemporary experiences/semiologies to the old. It therefore creates an implicit but complex hybridity which would then require an initiatory, deep involvement into the African cultural educational process in order to be decoded. Obviously, the more recent European-derived “modernist” images will be easy to understand by everybody but the real tooth-crackers will be the indigenous, pre-colonial images, cornerstones to the society’s ontological identity. Examples of these abound in the poetry of Okigbo, the novels of Chinua Achebe and Amos Tutuola, the theatre of Werewere Liking, the plays of Wole Soyinka, some aspects of the film grammar of Ousmane Sembène, Djibril Diop Mambéty, and the works of a few of the older filmmakers. Yet, it is disturbing to note that this sophistication of iconology is progressively lacking in the newer films from the African continent, of which there have been many. Thus, I agree that our filmmakers must find a way back to this discourse of complexity as illustrated by the Nsibidi theoretical paradigm. The attendant exegetic difficulty and narratological surprises involved in this creative process pose the challenge of forcing African scholars/Africanist film critics, or avatars of the world cinema, to read African films, not watch them. This will also compel them to take the pains to study the ontological, teleological, semiological, and narratological strategies of the given culture, as exemplified by Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen, whose complex, cultic Bambara symbolism epitomizes the quintessence of the Nsibidi theory as a functional and workable African cinematic theoretical framework.

The Nsibidi Theory and Filmic “Adaptations” of African Literary Classics Nsibidi, or the metalingual tendency to reveal and conceal information at the same time, permeates the most profound of all indigenous, pre-colonial African cultural processes and products, be they works of sculpture, music, poetry, painting, masks, dance, or storytelling. Interestingly enough, these art forms constitute the primary creative respective source for the interpretation of society by both African filmmakers and writers. Let us now take a look at how the Nsibidi ideal, as a theoretical construct, replicates itself in the best works of literature from the African continent. In addition, since there is a growing world interest today to adapt literary classics into films, as exemplified by the British film industry, it is important to foreground how not to compromise the Nsibidi strength in African literary works in future filmic re-adaptations of Ousmane Sembène’s Xala, God’s Bits of Wood, Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest and The Road, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,

300

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

and Arrow of God, Ama Ata Aidoo’s Anowa, and the linguistically symphonic and image-wise complexity of The Famished Road by Ben Okri. Let us start with Wole Soyinka’s The Road, a play that was originally conceived as a film script. This play is solidly hinged on a Yoruba worldview and best exemplifies what I mean by a composite understanding of the ontology, teleology, semiology, and respective narratological vocabulary of a given African culture. Though written in English and within a Western concept of playwriting, Soyinka subverts Western linear storytelling and deploys the indigenous myth of Ogun, the metalanguages from Ogun festivalmasks, dances, songs, costumes, whips, carcasses of cars, processions, cultic poetry, and theories of performance inherent in Yoruba indigenous ritual theatre and symbolisms, including processional characters who, to tell the story of an African society in transition from traditionalism to modernity, use a ritualized and stylized (not naturalistic) acting style. Central to the play is the professor’s half-psychic, half-intellectual quest for the meaning of life and the phenomenon of death. What challenges will this complex and extremely rewarding play, both with respect to a reading of it as well as a performance, face when translated into the filmic medium? How will the filmmaker capture Soyinka’s adroit suspension of linear plot and the introduction of an African concept of time in which chronological time is interrupted by primordial time at the moment when Ogun invades the proceedings of the play and possesses the characters, thereby giving the performance a uniquely Yoruba mythic and poetic integrity? How can cinema capture the cyclical nature of the narrative that is shaped like a snake eating its tail, a road coiled in waiting like a boa constrictor devouring lives even while it is contradictorily representative of progress? What insight does this play give us into the fact that African cinema, in order to stand out in World cinema, must move away from the prosaic and go toward the mythic and poetic? When I use the word “poetic” or “mythopoetic” as a cinematographic construct, I imply the connotative, resonant, and amplificatory power of symbols, that is the surreal, nonlinear narration made possible by the clever arrangements of film iconography as well as the density of the spoken word. In other words, a deeper understanding of an African language as an oral medium that transcends mere cognitive communication of information. This means that words can darken and deepen the mood of a play or film and intensify its occult power, as in the komo ritual scene in Yeelen or in a performance of Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. Words can also bring the actors/participants in a ritual to an immersion or subliminal experiencing of their mythic origins, such as in Ezeulu’s cultic speech in Arrow of God during the Festival of the Pumpkin Leaves in Umuaro when he reenacts the coming of Ulu. The fact that we may not understand the denotative meaning of the passage, characteristic though it is of most ritual speech in oral cultures with

Esiaba Irobi / African Cinematic Discourse

301

its obscure ontological and epistemological reference points, does not mean that we do not participate in its subliminal meaning, communal energy, and functionality. We are still swept away and drawn into its efficacious purpose by its entrancing, incantatory ritual logic and power. Yeelen, once again, helps us to find the connection between the demands that I am making of adaptations of the “best” African works of fiction into film. The following incident, which occurred during the filming of the Komo ritual for Yeelen, brings to light the interface between indigenous poetry, ritual aesthetics, and audience participation/reception in African cinema aesthetics. Apparently, during one of the shoots of Yeelen in Mali, as the chants by the initiate/priest of the Komo cult charged the atmosphere with an occult force that lies on the other side of language, one of the cameramen, a Bambara man, whose upbringing within the culture had made him overtly sensitive to the power of invocations, became nervous, had a fever, and was so disoriented that filming had to be cancelled for the day. We must note that his body, a “ritualized” and “educated” site of discourse, had the key to decode the unspoken range of meanings evoked by the incantations. Because he was a Bambara, he could unlock the “untranslatable” and “unspoken” metanarratives in the orature. The significance of this experience is that most Africans, as a result of their lifelong cultural participation in rituals, ceremonies, initiations, festivals, and theatrical performances, do not watch films from their lands as passive spectators. They read these films sensitively and are involved in the proceedings at a deeper spiritual level due to the psychic associations that they have with the symbols, music, images, and landscapes deployed in the visual and auditory grammar of the film. As a result, these “initiated” or “literate” members in the audience always tremble and develop goosebumps while watching a film that draws its dynamics and sign-systems from the indigenous ritual/cultural vocabulary of a given African society. Other viewers who lack the cognitive and phenomenological tools or literacy to decode the semiological configurations in the films may totally miss the “affect” that these potent scenes have on the indigenes who can understand the metalingual implications of the symbolic forms. The reaction I have described above, which I have repeatedly witnessed in class among African students, rarely occurs among my white students. Why? Cultural distance and the fact that the ritualized body is an educated one. Indeed, the human body has a memory that is more powerful than that of a mere egghead. And so the challenge remains: How can our filmmakers do with their own indigenous languages and metalanguages, what Souleymane Cissé has done in Yeelen? How can we embrace the Nsibidi paradigm in an age of rampant commercialization of art? We need but take just one look at filmmaking from Nigeria and begin to convulse in horror. How many films from

302

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Nigeria can anyone teach anywhere in the world without a sense of deepening embarrassment at the semiological incompetence of such cheap imitations of Western films? When will our filmmakers stop aping Hollywood-type dialogue and insipid superficial digital naturalistic speech when layers and layers of multilayered, Nsibidi-like, languages exist within these cultures? When will they understand that there are other ways of telling, other approaches to narrative structures, and other modes of signification available within their very own cultures? I firmly believe that cinema in Africa should reflect the pre-modern achievements of the most talented indigenous creative thinkers who fashioned the rituals, ceremonies, oral poetry, and dances with which Africa regulated itself before the European intrusion into that universe. My Nsibidi theory of African cinema therefore privileges and encourages the inclusion of the untranslatable in African filmic iconography. The sources of these obscure metalanguages, I must restate, are intentionally culture-specific! Part of the critical thinking that informs my Nsibidi theory is that the African plays, novels, poems, and films that will endure in the next one hundred years as classic examples of African imaginative art, will be those works studded with iconic, sonic, kinaesthetic, proxemic calligraphic, sartorial, linguistic, metalanguages that are indecipherable without intensive explanations or research, to the non-Africans, Africanists, and intellectually-alienatedor-exiled Africans. These indigenous cultural deposits that I am advocating will be the touchstones through which our children on the continent and the diaspora will come to an understanding of the sophistication of pre-slavery, pre-colonial African cultural intelligence as they read these films and literature even while globalization is doing its final havoc on the indigenous cultures of Africa and much of the world. Like Arrow of God, Path of Thunder, The Womb in the Heart, The Road, and Yeelen, they will be sources of entertainment and edification, as well as evidence of a distinct way of looking at the world, interpreting it and documenting its contradictions in print and/ or on celluloid. They will be the marks on our face and the markers on our fences—touchstones of difference—of what makes African and African diasporic spiritual, intellectual, and artistic creativity and identity unique and distinguishable from European (Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire [1987]) or Asian (Farewell My Concubine) identity. Art, by its very nature, is culturally and historically specific, and African cinema aesthetics should be as well. Olabiyi Babalola Yai supports this thesis. In his incisive essay entitled “In Praise of Metonymy: the Concepts of Tradition and Creativity in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space,” he states that the ability to reconcile opacity, difference, and openness in an unending movement of metonymic engagements may explain the success and popularity of Yoruba culture in the New World. For there, despite a social climate of intolerance

Esiaba Irobi / African Cinematic Discourse

303

and invitation to mimetics, it has greatly contributed to the cementing and creolization of African and non-African cultures. Significantly, he adds: We are all victims of the imperialism of writing, with its pejorative attitude toward oral cultures. As a consequence, most Africans conduct their research with an implicit assumption of a discursive and metalinguistic tabula rasa in the cultures being studied. The epistemological poverty of this attitude need not be elaborated.21 (emphasis mine)

My Nsibidi theory of cinema is based on this “metalingual innocence” that permeates a large portion of contemporary practice and scholarship with respect to African cinema. From a comparativist/diasporic perspective, it is worth observing that very few African filmmakers on the continent, where indigenous African ontologies, teleology, semiologies, and narratologies originated, have dared the kind of athletic engagement with teleology and cinematic narratology that Haile Gerima and Julie Dash have respectively attempted in Sankofa (1993, Ethiopia) and Daughters of the Dust (1991, United States). Indeed, many of our filmmakers on the continent still luxuriate in their ignorance of the rich indigenous ontological and semiological/ narratological resources available in their own cultures to profoundly enrich their films as texts that need to be read differently from films from Europe, Canada, the United States, and so forth. Factors militating against such an understanding include the desperation for a consumerist market and an audience that must consume the African films with the same ease as they consume a Hollywood film. There is also the problem of such slight communication between film scholarship and filmmaking in Africa. FESPACO film festivals and conferences on African cinema in London, Paris, and New York are interesting attempts to provide this dialogue, but do our filmmakers really take academic scholarship of African cinema seriously? For example, how many African filmmakers will ever read this essay, wrestle with its arguments, or try to understand what I am straining to relate? As we can see, the obstacles to an engagement with African theories of cinema are many. The issue of which language is the most suitable for use as the currency for expressing theories on African performance, literature, and cinema brings us to the most crucial and final question that this essay would address: What exactly is “theory” and what is the “politics of theory” in the West?

What Is Theory, And Why Is the West So Obsessed With It? In his essay, “There Is No More Beautiful Way,” Houston A. Baker, Jr., states that:

304

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

a theory is an explanation. Successful theories offer global description and predictive adequacy. Their goal is an order of understanding, different from intuitive knowledge, common sense or appreciation. They begin where such modes of thought end, or at least where they fail to address questions that require for their answers more than enumeration, cataloguing, impressionistic summaries, selected lists or non-critical formulations . . . Theory is occupied preeminently with assumptions, presuppositions, and principles of production rather than with the orderly handling of material products represented by anthologies and survey courses. Theory’s relentless tendency is to go beyond the tangible in search of a metalevel of explanation. A concern for metalevels, rather than tangible products, is also a founding condition of Afro-American intellectual history. (emphasis added)22

I completely agree with Houston Baker when he points out that theory is a metadiscourse. What is missing in his definition, however, is that theory, by its very conception and execution, at least how it has been understood in the West, is really about power. Power over thought, over what theory itself is or can be, over the media through which theories are disseminated, and a powerful control of what passes into currency as a valid intellectual contribution to the academy and the world at large. The political impetus of theory was articulated by Terry Eagleton to myself at a film conference some years ago in Glasgow when I expressed a lack of interest in film theory. Eagleton said: “We all need to take an interest in theory, especially the theory of racism which argued that people of African descent are genetically incapable of literary or philosophical expression.” “Such notions,” Eagleton stressed, “though disproved by the Nobel prizes won by African writers, may still be lurking in the vestigial unconscious of many scholars of the West when the issue in question is theory in contemporary scholarship.” Eagleton’s observation has immense implications for African and Africanist scholars of African cinema. First, it confronts us all with the following inescapable questions: Do Africans have theories of their own? If so, what and where are these theories? In addition, why aren’t they deployed in our analysis of African cinema? A quote from a conversation I had with a Euro-American scholar in 2001 at a cinema conference in Washington DC will clarify my discourse. As I talked about indigenous African ontologies, teleologies, semiologies, narratives, and the eight literacies needed to appreciate African cinema, this Hammurabi of world cinema said: “Any theory that is not written down does not exist. Even if you have theories of performance in your own language, they are not yet theories until they are translated into a language we can understand. And even when you theorize your work from your so-called African perspective, if that theorization is not to our standards in the West, your scholarship will be dismissed as anthropological.”

Esiaba Irobi / African Cinematic Discourse

305

It is, of course, just this kind of predatory discourse that often intimidates the African scholar into theorizing his or her own historical experiences, semiologies, and ontologies in the implacable interrogator’s own language, epistemologies, discursive structures, and constructs. It is also in this manner that theory, and its deployment as an instrument of academic assessment in the West, becomes an intrinsic tussle for power, position, value, cultural viewpoint, intellectual supremacy, and disputation: consider the stigmatizing notions of “the bell curve,” “affirmative action,” “equal opportunity,” “minority scholarship,” and “ethnic studies” as an example. Therefore, theory becomes an inescapably political issue. Consequently, to the Western scholar, the expression “to theorize” means more than “to bring into theory.” In fact, in the United States and Britain, this very expression sometimes has macabre and sinister connotations. To follow is a prime example of this. Stephen Zacks, at the end of his essay, “The Theoretical Construction of African Cinema,” states: An investigation of the terms in which the problem of authenticity is posed may help us to understand the ways in which the constructs used to evaluate African cultural products continue to return us to the site of colonial conflict, with its nearly exhausted colonial oppositions. We still await, however, the emergence of that Africanist discourse whose authority will be constructed such that it will no longer have the need to call itself African.23 (emphasis mine)

Stephen Zacks’ oddly poor understanding of what it means “to theorize,” is representative of the attitude of many scholars in the West today, for whom ignorance about Africa wears the mask of arrogance. Zacks thinks that he can establish himself as an authority in the scholarship of African cinema by the vilification, instead of the marshalling of, arguments buttressed by facts. His malicious and vituperative attacks on the theoretical positions of Professors N. Frank Ukadike and Teshome Gabriel expose his profound ignorance of the subjects I have been discussing in this article, namely, the complexity of Africa, her cultural intelligence, and the myriad forms through which they manifest themselves in various media, including the cinema. Indeed, I firmly believe that the italicized part of Zacks’ essay above betrays an intellectual blindness that has no logic except through that of prejudice. “To theorize,” in this ilk, means to subjugate the experience of one’s African history, ontology, and identity to a framework of intellectual and critical scrutiny shaped, structured, and based on the philosophic and psychological constructs of Europe and the European diaspora. It is this hegemonic domination of intellectual discourse in the world that has often made the dialectic of African and African-diasporic dialogue with the West about theory confrontational or provocative:

306

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

We black Africans have been blandly invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of colonization—this time by a universal—humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from their history, their social neuroses and their value systems.24

The above paragraph of outrage by Wole Soyinka is one among the many calls for a new approach to theorizing African and African cultural processes and art forms, including cinema. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Haile Gerima25 have also repeatedly thrown down this challenge to African scholars and made it clear that a theoretical framework that is distinct from that of the European or European diasporic is what is truly needed. One of the most coherently argued summons to a new type of theory for African cinema, besides those written by N. Frank Ukadike, Jude Akudinobi, and Sheila Petty in sustained interventions in several books and essays, has come from Tomaselli et al. In their engagingly deconstructive essay, “Towards a Theory of Orality in African Cinema,” Tomaselli et al. state that the key to the task of developing film theories that are applicable in the African context requires a rethinking of the Western psychocentric semiology that informs a great deal of Western film theory. They suggest that: reactivation of the silenced texts in African oral traditions still embedded in the residual surviving cultural traditions and popular memory seems to need another form of argument and theory. . . . Film theory in itself is a form of metanarrative, in which categories of visual reception and filmic representation are arranged so as to provide for the analyst the framework of an argument with which to persuade others to understand films in one way rather than another.26

The Nsibidi Theory of African Cinema is my answer to this call. It is response based and authentically atundacious,27 that is, an African epistemic approach to the place, purpose, and function of “theory” in intellectual and cultural discourse today. Jonathan Culler frames its comparativist albeit interrogative and dialogic impetus when he says: Foucault claims to analyse a particular historical moment, so the question that arises is whether his large generalizations hold for other times and places. Raising follow-up questions like these is, in turn, our way of stepping into theory and practising it.28

This interrogative approach is all the more necessary because, as Biodun Jeyifo has also argued, the prevalent intellectual discourse viewpoint in the West tends, in the name of a powerful critique of essentialism, to itself essentialize pluralism and relativism, in some cases removing them from ethically

Esiaba Irobi / African Cinematic Discourse

307

grounded investments and affiliations.29 My Nsibidi theory incorporates diverse knowledge understandable to the modern and postmodern mind but also goes beyond these to a metalevel of inquiry that is complicatedly African.30

Falling into Theory: History and Epistemologies of Race In the book Falling into Theory, Henry Louis Gates Jr. gives us a provocative definition of “theory.” Tracing the word back to its Greek original “theoria,” he cites Wlad Godzich’s introduction to Paul de Man’s The Resistance to Theory and defines theory as “a public, institutional act of certification which assumes the authority to ‘effect the passage from the seen to the told’: and provides the basis for public discourse. Theory, then, is—like rhetoric—a form of cognition modeled upon public utterance rather than upon private perception.” Gates argues that if we must form black canons, we have to be ready and willing to produce black text-specific theory. He goes on to caution that, “when we mindlessly borrow another tradition’s theory, we undermine this passage from the seen to the told—from what we see to how we tell it—this basis for our own black public discourse, this recognition between cognition and utterance.” Gates argues that in theorizing our cultural experiences and art forms, we must search for paradigms that are indigenous to our cultures and, quite significantly, states that “the future of theory in the remainder of this century” (he was writing in the twentieth century) “is black.”31 Gates’ theoretical hypothesis, which he illustrates with mesmerizing brilliance in The Signifying Monkey, is a critical paradigm that has been adopted by numerous scholars in the fields of art history, literature, music, performance, and cultural studies. Its uniqueness as postmodern metacritical discourse stems from the fact that it deploys a vernacular, albeit African mythopoeic framework, for the author’s exegesis and engagement with African-American literary texts. The basis for Gates’ theoretical coup d’etat, indigenous African mythic and epistemic knowledge that speak frankly to modern and postmodern powers, loose cannons hitting and deconstructing sacrosanct white and Western targets, a public split in the trousers of the great, is a need that all cultures have: an unquenchable desire to explicate, interpret, communicate, mythify, sanctify, and signify on and about their lives from the perspective of their own chosen ontology, mythology, semiology, and teleology. This is done in a bid to create new narratives with respect to their historical experiences, no matter how hybridized, colonized, problematized, hegemonized, creolized, and complex their identities and histories have become. This necessity is not only human but inevitable. In Foucault’s words:

308

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

All knowledge is rooted in a life, a society, and a language that have a history; and it is in that very history that knowledge finds the element to enable it to communicate with other forms of life, other types of society, other significations.32

The “element” that Foucault refers to here through which the knowledge, life, language, and history of any specific African society (or filmmaker) communicates with other forms of life, types of society, and significations, is semiology. Semiology, by definition, is a study of the meaning of the signs and symbols of a culture. As a theoretical concept and field of study, semiotics or semiology, ranges from the study of the communicative behavior of animals, zoo-semiotics, to the analysis of such signifying systems as human bodily communications, kinesics and proxemics, olfactory signs, the code of scents, aesthetic theory, and rhetoric. Semiology is an important index of any given culture’s ontology in the context of African cultures which, like all others, operate and regulate life on two levels: as the primary communicative, in other words, verbal language, and the secondary modeling system, in other words, metalanguages. (This has, of course, been complicated nowadays by the spread of Christianity, Western media, books, television, films, low-waist baggy jeans, the almighty dollar, and so forth.) However, because pre-colonial African societies were largely oral, except for the occasional institutionalization of ideographic writing like Nsibidi in some cultures, the deep knowledge of the society, its worldview, belief systems, history, values, precious experiences, political structure, social hierarchies, class systems, and theories of performance are coded into spatial, kinesics, and iconic metalanguages. These metalanguages, in the form of masks, plinths, shrines, deities, effigies, totems, songs, dances, costumes, colors, drum language, oral poetry, stories, and myths, constitute authoritative vocabulary or keys into a meaningful reading of and participation in the society’s rituals, theatre, ceremonies, works of art, and general iconography, which can be selected and deployed in a film. There are eight primary literacies that require an aural, visual, intellectual, and performative education in order to be comprehended. This type of education is, in fact, more demanding than Western typographical literacy, which can always be referenced since it is written down. The knowledge of African metalanguages is meant to be carried by the memory, often branded into the body like sound or dance. This is why African cultures theorize that the body has a memory, a concept that is theoretically intriguing since it is through the memory of the body that Africans, who were translocated to the New World, were able to replicate their ritual aesthetics, metaphysical systems, and sonic as well as iconic texts. The literacies that I am referring to are iconic, sonic, calligraphic, sartorial, kinaesthetic, proxemic, and linguistic. There are more:

Esiaba Irobi / African Cinematic Discourse

309

the gustatory, olfactory, spiritual, and the like. Any African filmmaker with a keen and intelligent grasp of these literacies, and who does not attempt to simplify or clarify them for an audience the way even a representative African filmmaker like Ousmane Sembène tends to at times, but deploys them as metaphors, not ornaments, in expressing the complex experience that any African society is going through today, will make complex and sophisticated films that will ask viewers visual and epistemological questions. Such a film will merit repeated viewings and thus aspire toward the Nsibidi ideal that I have proposed as a theory for African filmmaking. On this issue of compromise, I believe that it is important to remark that on the theme of “excision” (i.e., clitoridectomy in Africa), while Sembène’s Moolaadé (2004, Senegal) treats this quite disturbing issue with immense sensitivity, one does feel bereaved or cheated out of the aesthetic and narrative possibilities that such a provocative topic could have produced. Somehow one senses that the artistic sophistication that this theme demands has been compromised in the desperation for a non-patriarchal clarifying ideology.

Conclusion: The Nsibidi Theory as a New Approach to Theorizing African Cinema I would now like to conclude my argument with an anecdote which, I believe, clarifies the counter-hegemonic impetus of my discourse about African film aesthetics and theory in this essay. Not long ago, an African journalist at a world beauty pageant was asked by a Western (European-American) critic, “What criteria do you use to define beauty in a woman in Africa?” The African journalist smiled and replied with a mischievous twinkle in his eye: “In Africa we think that the less a woman looks like a man; the more beautiful she is!” This witty remark is invaluable in any theoretical or critical analysis of “African” cinema in the sense that the less an African film looks like that of an American, Asian, Australian, or European film in its totality as an artifact, the more beautiful or innovative it is! The redefining factor in this enterprise, as I have illustrated with African dramatic and filmic texts, is the filmmaker’s interest in his or her own indigenous culture’s semiology as a source of the iconographic or linguistic infrastructure on which to craft other semiologies from diverse places and cultures (European, American, Russian, etc.) into his or her film. Without this deep knowledge of indigenous African semiology, our filmmakers will continue to flounder like our politicians, economists, and scholars, from one political or theoretical model to another. In this context, it is essential that African filmmakers carefully study the vernacular imperative of the best films from all parts of the world. They should read and reread the structures and predominant stabilizing iconographies

310

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

of great films33 and ask themselves the following questions: What gives these films such imagistic density and narrative complexity? Why do they merit reading and rereading? What is responsible for their semiological sophistication? Why do they reveal their subtexts with such reluctance? Why do they differ in their narrative structures from most other films that we see? Why can’t we make films as complicated, poetic, and mythopoeic as these? The assumption that African audiences may not be able to cope with complex narrative or visual cinematic strategies is, at its very best, a silly, albeit commercial argument. One only needs to read Gassire’s Lute34 of the Soninke people of ancient Mali, see the Ijele of the Igbo of Anambra, listen to the intricacies of an Atilogwu choreography, Alagba of the Kalabari, or study Ifa divination or the Oriki’s of the Yorubas, to experience the sophistication that goes into the construction of many of the metanarratives that still exist in indigenous African performance, orature, and culture, metanarratives that can be skillfully transferred from the oral, ritual, and theatrical strata of African cultures to the cinematic medium for greater complexity.35 What I am saying here is that a great many African films are too simplistic to the point of being surprisingly amateurish. I do not need to catalogue our harvest of mediocrity here and there is not enough space to do so. In addition, I do not want to make enemies this early in my career as a film scholar. All I am saying is that we should at least make more challenging demands on our filmmakers. Another important role that we have to play as scholars is that of finding meaningful avenues to encourage African filmmakers to do research and take screenwriting and film directing improvement courses. We should try set up the kind of film school that Gabriel García Márquez established in South America for such filmmakers there. A film school that, in its internationality, prizes local imagination, insisting that ontology is the fundamental location of culture and self, the basis for negotiating the politics of any art form’s aesthetic engagement with the world. Such an institution will greatly improve filmmaking as an art form on the African continent. Then, there is the question of theory. The Nsibidi approach, informed as it is by a deep immersion into the art histories of Africa and African cultures, is certain to help our filmmakers to create more works of art that will endure and merit timeless scholarly investigation. Esiaba Irobi was born in the Republic of Biafra and lived in exile in Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He held a B.A. in English/Drama and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka; an M.A. in Film and Theatre from the University of Sheffield, UK; and a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies from the University of Leeds, UK. He taught at Liverpool John Moores University

Esiaba Irobi / African Cinematic Discourse

311

in England and the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and was Associate Professor of International Theatre and Film Studies at Ohio University, Athens, USA. His scholarly books include: A Theatre for Cannibals:  Images of Europe in African Performance of the PreModern, Modern, and Post-Modern Periods; and Before They Danced in Chains: Performance Theories of Africa and the African Diaspora.

Notes Originally published as Esiaba Irobi, “Theorizing African Cinema: Contemporary African Cinematic Discourse and Its Discontents,” in Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse, ed. Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 23–45. 1. As V. Y. Mudimbe has remarked in his book, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, it is most fruitful to discuss the African continent in pluralities, with an informed understanding of its cultural heterogeneity. Every African society, community, or culture has its own theories of its visual, plastic, or performance arts and this creates enormous complications for any attempt at a monolithic theory of African cinema. Hence, a meaningful approach, to my thinking, is to use one’s own indigenous culture (e.g., Bambara, Yoruba, Wolof, lgbo, Ewe, Ashanti, Bakongo, Zulu), as metonymic or selectively representative of the larger bulwark of what is generically dubbed “African.” 2. By “semiological perspective,” I mean a serious and conscious deviation from the commonplace understanding of what teleology and narrative mean in Western, particularly Hollywood, cinema. The last seven minutes of Yeelen or the funeral scene in Once Were Warriors or the mythic structure of Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner—the first film made by the Inuits in their language and mythic imagination and using their own acting style, typify the kinds of aesthetic and structural, ontological challenge I am proposing to African filmmakers regardless of where they live in the world. This competence, I stress through the essay, involves a serious archaeology and deployment of the indigenous semiology of pre-modern African cultures, such as Gikuyu, Sutu, Ibibio, Ga, Dogon, and so forth. 3. While the term “untheorized” often connotes that the films are examined through the telescope of Western theories, it does not mean a lack of an African theoretical framework. 4. The list is quite long and includes Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Haile Gerima, Roy Armes, Jim Pines, Sylvia Wynter, Colin Prescod, John Akomfrah, Asma El Bakri, and many others. 5. Local amateur video filmmaking in West Africa has virtually eclipsed the older tradition of going to cinematheques to see Western or African films. In Nigeria, for example, there is a huge explosion of this movement and a ready market for it. The majority of Nigerians are happy to see themselves and their stories told on the screen. Although stylistically, some of the video filmmakers are genuinely attempting to incorporate indigenous elements of storytelling, judging from the quantity of work being produced, most of the auteurs really need training in all aspects of video/ filmmaking. 6. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s brilliant deconstruction of Peter Brook’s theory that theater

312

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

takes place in “an empty space,” in his (that is, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s) classic essay “Enactments of Power: The Politics of Performance Space,” is a prime example of what is meant here. See TDR (Fall 1997), 11–30. 7. The language that a theory is couched in often determines how we approach it: with familiarity or suspicion, even in translation. The fact that most Westerners cannot conceive of theory except as a typographic discourse, and generally do not understand any other languages except English and the occasional French or Spanish, also make the undertakings of African scholars quite difficult. However, it is important to note that in most oral cultures of the world, mythology is a theory of origins. 8. Abiola Irele, Transition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 64. 9. Ibid. 10. The Igbos of Nigeria, for example, have clear theories as to their theatrical performances. For more clarification of this phenomenon read Chike Aniakor and Herbert Cole’s lgbo Arts and Cosmos, Robert Farris Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit and African Art in Motion, Olu Oguibe’s African Art—From Theory to the Market Place, and Art from Africa: Long Steps Never Broke a Back, ed. Pamela McClusky (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 11. See Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003). 12. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (New York: Semiotexte, 1987), 99. 13. Michael Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 45. 14. See Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 227–267. 15. Ibid. 16. See Paul Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Haukka in West Africa (New York: Routledge, 1996), 90. Also see Paul Stoller, “Sound and Things: Pulsations of Power in Songhai” in Performance of Healing, ed. Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman (New York: Routledge, 1996), 185. 17. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Pointers Ltd, 1960), 227. 18. See Vivian Sobchack, “The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic ‘Presence”‘ in Film Theory, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 68–84. Robert Farris Thompson has also referred to African religions as “danced faiths.” This critical insight makes the inclusion of a Candomble or Oshun worshipper, for example, a complex iconic signifier in an African or African film. Why is this? Whereas initiates of the religion will respond most viscerally to the choreographic stimuli sent out by the appearance of the worshipper on the screen, the cultural backdrop and spiritual significance of this image may be totally lost on the Westerner or even African viewer whose world is totally secular. 19. See Monaco’s book, How to Read a Film (London: Oxford University Press, 2000). 20. Iconology, in its etymological origins, is a physical manifestation, depiction, or representation of spiritual concepts and presences. It embodies the religious world view of a people and their approaches to faith, godhead, and worship. Iconology has its ancestry in paganism, a Western pejorative term for African religions, the basis of the most potent and multivocal symbols and iconographies seen in African ritual performance, ceremonies, theatre, fiction, poetry, and cinema. 21. See Olabiyi Babalola Yai’s essay “In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of ‘Tradition’ and ‘Creativity’ in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space,”

Esiaba Irobi / African Cinematic Discourse

313

in The Yoruba Artist, ed. Rowland Abiodun, Henry Drewal, and John Premberton III (Washington: Smithsonian Institute, 1994), 107–115. 22. See Houston Baker’s brilliant essay “There is No More Beautiful Way,” in Cornerstones: An Anthology of African-American Literature (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), 856–63. 23. Stephen Zacks’ uniquely spiteful essay is entitled “The Theoretical Construction of African Cinema,” in African Cinema: Post-Colonial and Feminist Readings, Kenneth W. Harrow, ed. (New Jersey: African World Press, 1999), 3–19. 24. See Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins’ book, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1996), 53. 25. See Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s essay “The Homecoming of African Cinema,” in Symbolic Narratives African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving, ed. June Givanni (London: British Film Institute Publishing, 2000), 239–41. 26. See this extremely perceptive essay, Keyan Tomaselli, Arnold Shepperson, and Maureen Eke, “Towards a Theory of Orality in African Cinema,” in IRIS no 18, New Discourses of African Cinema, ed. N. Frank Ukadike. 27. I have coined this word from the Yoruba myth of the great revolutionary, Atunda, a slave like Sisyphus, condemned to interminable labor but who had the guts to roll a stone on Orisa-Nla, the primal deity, while he slept, shattering him into a thousand and one fragments, out of which grew the Yoruba Pantheon of gods and deities. African theoretical scholarship cannot help, in the context of the argument erected by Abiola lrele, to be anything but atundacious. 28. Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 13. 29. See Biodun Jeyifo’s introduction to Conversations with Wole Soyinka. 30. After fifteen years of studying and teaching African cinema, I believe that many of our films are jejune, amateurish, and skip over the surface of African life and our cultural intelligence. Our filmmakers should take courses in art history, see more films, read and understand how icons can impregnate a film with meaning and make it a less cursory and superficial representation of indigenous, rural African life. Yaaba (dir. Gaston Kaboré, Burkina Faso, 1987) is an excellent example of this genre of touristy cinema. No amount of chiropractic scholarship can save Yaaba from being a simplification of the culture it comes from. I remember seeing it in England in 1989/1990 with a group of English postgraduate students and friends and squirming with multiple embarrassment at its jejuneness. My mother’s folktales, I recalled, which she told us when I was a child, were much more structurally sophisticated and engaging than Yaaba. 31. See Henry Louis Gates’s essay “Canon Formation, Literary History, and the AfroAmerican Tradition: From the Seen to the Told,” in Falling in Theory, ed. David Richter (New York: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2000), 175–182. 32. See Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa for an elaboration of the implications of this quote by Foucault as it relates to scholarship about Africa in any discipline. 33. Among the list of great films, I include the following: Once Were Warriors (dir. Lee Tamahori, 1994, New Zealand), Amarcord (dir. Federico Fellini, 1974, Italy), Artanajuat / The Fast Runner (dir. Zacharias Kunuk, 2001, Innuit/Canada), Ulysees Gaze (dir. Theo Angeloupoulous, 1995, Greece), Farewell My Concubine (dir. Chen Kaige, 1993, China), Dreams (dir. Akira Kurasawa, 1990, Japan), Wings of Desire (dir. Wim Wenders, 1998, Germany), Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles, 1941, United States), Yeelen (dir. Souleymane Cissé, 1987, Mali), Daughters of the Dust (dir. Julie Dash, 1991, United States), City of God

314

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

(dir. Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund, 2002, Brazil), Full Metal Jacket (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1987, United States), and Sankofa (dir. Haile Gerima, 1993, Ethiopia). 34. “Gassire’s Lute” is a complex oral epic recited by Soninke warriors in the fourteenth century Mali and recorded by women. It has the complexity and poetic density and mythopoeia infrastructure of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. It is in Roger Abraham’s popular collection of folktales from Africa. Do read “Gassire’s Lute,” for a deeper appreciation of what I mean by the Nsibidi theory as an informative episteme in morphology of African orature. 35. Complexity does what, in my opinion, commercialization avoids. Yet this does not mean inaccessibility. It means providing the reader of a film with ample semiological challenges that enrich the experience, the lexicon, and of seeing the film and participating in its beauties and discourses at a deeper, possibly spiritual and intellectual level.

The Theoretical Construction of African Cinema Stephen A. Zacks

I

n his investigations into the possibility of an African philosophy, V. Y. Mudimbe interrogates the various intellectual movements that have influenced the development of Africanist discourse: Negritude, Sartrean existentialism, missionary writings, ethnophilosophy, anthropological structuralism, and Fanonian neo-Marxist nationalism. A thorough study along the lines which I am proposing for the investigation of ideological currents in African cinema and criticism should, ideally, address all of these influences. For now I intend to make a few generalizations in reviewing some of the recent critical works on African cinema, the publication of which has highlighted the need for a systematic study of the theoretical foundations of the discourse on African cinema. The contentious operative question underlying Mudimbe’s work concerns how African philosophy might be positioned so as to avoid being a priori confined by the Western discourses that were initially introduced into African culture through colonialism, and which originally defined philosophy as a field of knowledge and a disciplinary practice as such. It may be useful to recall how Hegel presented the problem in relation to the African tradition in his Philosophy of History: The peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend, for the very reason that in reference to it, we must quite give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas the category of Universality.1

On the basis of this logic, and by force of the institutions generated in its tradition, it became impossible to conceptualize such a thing as African history except as a sub-category of that of Europe; African thought, insofar as it was acknowledged at all, would necessarily be articulated in terms that extended out of the Enlightenment. It would be hard to avoid the implication that any African discourse making philosophical claims would have to be inherently a hybrid intellectual

316

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

product, its very effort to link itself to the philosophical tradition having as a precondition some reconciliation with Western culture. Thus, unsurprisingly, given the political relationship that has obtained between Africa and the West, the question of what “African philosophy” might consist of has been characterized by a struggle to distill the pure, authentic, original, traditional, or indigenous characteristics from what have generally been considered perverse external influences. Mudimbe’s historicizations lead us to suspect that, articulated in this form, such an activity may not be very useful, and that the concept of authenticity may itself be implicated in formulations of intellectual originality, cultural appropriation, and mimesis that elide the very historical and cultural specificity which it is supposed to animate: The fact of the matter is that, up to now, Western interpreters as well as African analysts have been using categories and conceptual systems dependent on a Western epistemological order, and even in the most explicit “Afrocentric” descriptions, models of analysis, explicitly or implicitly, knowingly or unknowingly, refer to the same order. Does this mean that African Weltanschauungen and African traditional systems of thought are unthinkable and cannot be made explicit within the framework of their own rationality?2

The question grasps the fundamental philosophical problem invoked by the politics of authenticity as practiced by Africanists (both Western Marxists and African nationalists) and holds the possibility of redefining the theoretical grounds on which the Africanist project may be established. I would like to consider how African film criticism and African films as objects of criticism contribute to and mirror this discussion of the possibility for an African philosophy. The same essential problem presents itself: what can be properly defined as African, and is it possible to separate this pure object from the presumably unclean Western influences? By evaluating four major theorists of Third World and African cinema in the context of their critical positions, I hope to suggest how the question of authenticity can confine contemporary readings of African cinema, and how, in the very process of constituting African cinema as a tradition, its critics may contribute to its reduction. It may be assumed that Africa as an entity is an ideological product, that its unity and identity are constructed rather than having an a priori historical or material existence—an assumption that bears importantly upon the three main critical positions employed to discuss African cinema, all of which take for granted that African cinema should be essentially distinct, although they have difficulty identifying its unique characteristics. Without denying that African cinema may have unique qualities, or invalidating the positions of directors who see themselves as establishing a distinctive African tradition with its own techniques of representation, I shall try to demonstrate how the misleading

Stephen A. Zacks / Theoretical Construction

317

issues of authenticity and appropriation limit the ideological power of African cinema. From among the many rich theoretical possibilities available in interpreting African cinematic texts, these three relatively discrete theoretical positions repeatedly reemerge, neo-Marxism, neo-structuralism, and modernism. Neo-Marxism, the most common and fundamental of the postcolonial discourses, places the highest value and authority on opposition or resistance, emphasizing the value of subverting dominant forms, methods, genres, and institutions. It is based upon a critique of production and representation that could be traced most directly to the Frankfurt School; typically, it seeks to define how cultural products can subvert, or exist independently of, a capitalist superstructure. This critical position evaluates texts according to their relation to dominant systems of production and dominant ideologies; it characterizes texts deriving from dominant ideology and capitalist systems of production as less authentic or less valuable than those often speciously understood as rooted in an ideology and practice of resistance.3 A second critical position, neo-structuralism, assumes an almost scientifically objective stance, in contrast to the neo-Marxist one, which is usually overtly polemical; its goal is to describe or translate cultural products for different audiences rather than to prescribe or proscribe cinematic practices. The typical method involves the employment of binary categories to characterize elements within the text and to mediate between the Western readers’ presumptions and the text’s historical, artistic, or cultural context. Neo-structuralist readings, like neo-Marxist ones, are grounded upon the differentiation of African films from Western films; but whereas the neo-Marxist seeks to valorize and heighten the difference, the neo-structuralist sees the difference as already in place within the text or in reality, and merely wishes to demonstrate the differences through which meaning can take place.4 Modernism, the third major position, is closely related to the second in its absence of overt polemical intent; it emphasizes its own subjectivity in ascribing value to a text, attempting to relativize descriptions, level categorical differences, and move toward universalistic interpretation and critique by means of a more detailed, particular, contextualized discussion. This sort of criticism is overwhelmingly practiced in its popular form by newspaper reviewers and biographers; it typically presumes the author’s independence and dwells on the director or auteur as the center of the text, deemphasizing the power relations in which the texts are embedded and the political situation of the work. The critical modernist tradition usually focuses on the text as an aesthetic event, and glorifies the author as a consequence of having elevated the text to the status of high culture.5 Férid Boughedir, one of the earliest critics of African film, is somewhat paradigmatic as a theorist who has insisted on imposing classification systems on the texts. He categorizes African films “according to the theoretical

318

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

positions of their auteurs and their effect on the public . . . their ultimate function”: the political tendency is a consciousness-raising exercise designed to mobilize the people in common resistance; the moralist tendency represents a shortsighted political analysis that individualizes the problems of African society; the commercial tendency attempts to entertain by selling emotions; the cultural tendency reevaluates contemporary African culture in relation to folk traditions; the “self-expression” tendency expresses the personal views of an alienated author; and the “narcissistic intellectual” tendency, a subcategory of the previous one, is characterized by the naïve idealization of traditional African culture and perpetuation of myths about Africa.6 Such categories would enable us to identify the liberatory and distinguish it from the regressive. Within his construct there is a leap of faith where alliance with “the people” is seen as a transparent, positive position. The director has the possibility of being either for or against the people, regressive or liberal. Teshome Gabriel, a leading advocate of the critical theory of Third World cinema, takes a similarly explicit and unapologetically neo-Marxist approach, but with slightly more subtlety.7 Following the critical stance adopted by Franz Fanon and the Latin American advocates of a Third, or Imperfect Cinema, Gabriel’s work is based on an attempt to formulate this other, essentially different cinema, as a subversive movement from domination to liberation. His system of classification identifies texts that fail to promote this movement, a tool toward the imposition of the traditional Marxist distinction between authenticity (true consciousness) and inauthenticity (false consciousness) on films. Gabriel reduces the tendencies of Third Cinema to three phases that represent a schematic evolution from oppression to liberation; only the third category can be properly called Third Cinema. The first phase, described as one of “unqualified assimilation,” is constituted by its close relationship to the “Western Hollywood film industry” and its technical and thematic tendencies. Such films are disparaged, seen as “aping Hollywood stylistically,” but Gabriel fails to cite examples; presumably films of this category are either easily recognized as such or not of much concern. In Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation, Gabriel distinguishes between the typical Western treatment of race in South Africa as exemplified by a South African tourist film, Journey to the Sun (dir. George Canes, 1971) and its non-Western revolutionary counterpart, a film produced by South African exiles in Britain, Last Grave at Dimbaza (dir. Chris Curling and Pascoe Macfarlane, 1974).8 He argues that the film styles are essential to the effectiveness of the films: the tourist film is necessarily technically seamless, since it depends on an exoticization that must induce pleasure and excitement, while the latter need not be finely constructed technically to succeed, but must make a persuasive argument. The examples are slightly specious however, as they seem to draw the line too unambiguously. We would want to know, in

Stephen A. Zacks / Theoretical Construction

319

this regard, how to treat a film like Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season (1989, United States) made through the Hollywood industry, very traditional and seamless stylistically; it is at the same time politically committed to exposing the injustices of apartheid and rooted in the formulation of political analogies through diaspora culture.9 Another film we might use to displace Gabriel’s first category might be Warrior Marks (dir. Pratibha Parmar, 1993), which adheres to clearly committed anti-oppression Pan-Africanist political positions, but is widely regarded as offensive and paternalistic toward Africans even by viewers sympathetic to the underlying motivation of the text to criticize the practice of female circumcision.10 As we begin to cite other ambiguous examples we come to suspect that as many examples of films standing between the boundaries can be found as ones standing within them, leading us to wonder what purpose the categories themselves serve. Gabriel provides a somewhat more careful textual analysis of the difference between Western representation and authentic African representation in his comparison of anthropologist Jean Rouch and Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène. Jean Rouch is accused of treating Africans like insects, of studying them with an alienating objectivity, and above all, of tending to analyze them in voice-over narration rather than allowing them to speak for themselves. Ousmane Sembène is read as a folk hero, a modern griot, who utilizes oral traditions within cinematic texts. This point regarding oral narrative methods is emphasized, if somewhat forced, as it is one of the primary ideological reasons to ascribe authenticity to Sembène, the connection to folk cultural traditions in Africanist discourse having become essential to claims of Africanness. The choice of authors, again, seems specious, effectively drawing an unambiguous distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic. The second phase, the “remembrance phase,” seems to be more obviously contentious for Gabriel. It involves a qualified move from domination to liberation which carries certain dangers. Films in this phase may fall into a reactionary “uncritical acceptance or undue romanticism of ways of the past.” Gaston Kaboré’s Wend Kuuni (1982) is placed in this category because of its thematic grounding in folklore; however, presumably because it represents traditional society as complex and inscribes the problem of female power within the text, the film is vindicated.11 Third World film, Gabriel warns, must approach the medium as a tool for social transformation, “stamping out the regressive elements” otherwise the result is a “blind alley.” The second phase is characterized by an indigenization which will be important to the development of an authentic Third World film in the third phase. The third phase represents the stage of liberation in Third World film. The system of production is uncoupled from capitalist institutions and the ideological concerns are firmly embedded in themes of resistance; the third phase recognizes film “as an ideological tool.”12 An avalanche of Ousmane Sembène’s

320

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

films are generally used to illustrate this third category as texts which are motivated by ideological intentions, although sometimes it is acknowledged that there is some ambiguity with regard to their consistency with Western themes and styles. But such “grey areas” are acceptable because they demonstrate the “process of becoming” and the “multi-faceted nature” of Third World cinema rather than suggesting that the construct itself is problematic.13 Gabriel elaborates his construct as an ideological tool directed toward the “development” of “new critical canons,” and therefore situates himself as a part of this committed movement for liberation. The construct is not intended to provide an understanding of the film texts themselves, valorizing them or their directors, so much as the imposition a revolutionary mandate on Third World film in general. It is not, however, feasible to totalize existing texts—these grey areas suggest that films can simultaneously belong to all three phases—nor is it necessary to fix films within certain political categories; according to Gabriel, critical theory should serve to generate films which stimulate development and liberation of Third World peoples. The goal of liberation becomes more problematic when Western and African film, along with Western theoretical constructs, are viewed with greater complexity, so that Third World film viewed as liberatory solely in opposition to Western cinematic paradigms becomes impossible. The charge of inauthenticity can easily be directed toward any film whatsoever if it fails to conform to certain revolutionary standards. That Gabriel avoids this accusation except in the most obvious cases (as in a film made by the South African government, or by a French anthropologist) merely conceals the dangers of Gabriel’s strategy, which has consistently served the dominant forces of political repression in postcolonial Africa. The liberatory and “revolutionary” substitutes its own classificatory system for the repressive colonial ones, until the two begin to look dangerously similar. Roy Armes and Lizbeth Malkmus, in Arab and African Filmmaking direct their criticism toward understanding the content of the films themselves as texts originating from different social and cultural traditions: the films are presumed to require supplementation to be understood across cultural differences. Although they discuss political implications in the introduction and insist on the importance of political ideology both in providing background understanding and in mediating the symbolic play of meaning, they avoid becoming involved in polemical arguments with regard to the appropriate form of African film. Instead Armes and Malkmus position themselves, fairly self-consciously, as outsiders, looking in and reflecting from a distance on the political situation of the texts. They employ binary distinctions to describe characteristic elements of African and Arab cinema, assuming an essential difference between non-Western and European cinemas and cultures. For Armes the oppositions of voice to voicelessness, narrativity to orality, space to

Stephen A. Zacks / Theoretical Construction

321

time, and individuals to groups are formal tools to frame the description of the artistic, political, cultural, and social differences between African and Western films. The emphasis on structural methodology depoliticizes and depersonalizes, ultimately providing an ethnographic understanding of the texts, which emerge in his readings as authentic expressions of the African other. Armes’s discussion of Wend Kuuni provides a fair example of the benefits and limitations of the neo-structural approach. The film is viewed as turning upon Wend Kuuni’s loss and dramatic reacquisition of voice: “The key event in this virtually wordless film is Kuuni’s acquisition of a voice.”14 While we could argue that the function of voice in Wend Kuuni is somewhat more ambiguous than Armes suggests, and that one could read Kuuni as capable of being integrated within society and of functioning perfectly well within his given role without a voice, nonetheless Armes’s work has shifted the discussion to an engagement with formal elements of the text, which is the greatest advantage of Armes’s approach. According to Armes, Wend Kuuni is structured so as to “set two spaces in opposition,” the negative space of the “intolerant village of Wend Kuuni’s early childhood” and “the supportive community into which he is adopted after being found in the bush.”15 Again, Armes uses structural methodology to generate a fruitful discussion of formal elements of the text. He renders the film broadly accessible, in accordance with the universalist assumptions, in contrast to the neo-Marxist assumption that would limit critical appropriation according to a dichotomy of authentic interpreters (those whose identities and politics allow them to understand the film properly) and inauthentic interpreters (outsiders whose critical appropriation is a regressive product of neocolonialism), and views the difference in the subjective positions of readers as fixed and determined by the political context. As a generative tool to engage creative textual interpretation and to supplant the moralistic neo-Marxist prohibition against critical appropriation, Armes’s approach is extremely fertile. The oppositions allow one entry into the narrative structure and the system of meaning inscribed in formal elements of films, in effect drawing them toward critical appropriation even where they are supposed to militate against such humanist, universalist readings. As Sembène once said: “In a word, Europeans often have a conception of Africa that is not ours.”16 When analyzed more rigorously, however, the structural binarisms that Armes employs, such as the presumption of a Western concept of space as essentially different from African space, or the dominance of time as a narrative technique in Hollywood as opposed to the use of space in African films, appear to be very schematic. Although there is little doubt that the oppositions which Armes constructs are useful to Western interpreters, they can be seen as flawed or questionable as distinctive categories, and point to the very tendentious theoretical presuppositions upon which his work is grounded. The function of the

322

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

individual in relation to the group, for example, as it is taken up in Armes’s discussion of Camp de Thiaroye (dir. Ousmane Sembène, 1988, Senegal), Wend Kuuni, and Yaaba (dir. Idrissa Ouédraogo, 1989, Burkina Faso) rests upon a rather mythical comparison between Africa and the West.17 He argues that in each of these films a central character’s position as marginal or as an outsider becomes important in the narrative only to emphasize the primacy of the group. Even where an individual is clearly central to the narrative, as in Yaaba where the film almost turns on a boy’s individual stance set against the community, Armes claims that the individual merely functions as a symbol of a characteristic role in the culture or a mythological position in oral tales that has a general rather than an individualized importance. We might note that the same could as easily be said of Rambo or Dirty Harry, for instance, in that they could be interpreted as merely animating aspects of certain historical, cultural, or mythical narratives relating to Vietnam and the Old West.18 The individual/group index again turns upon an understanding of reality in terms of a fundamental difference between the West and the Third World: in Hollywood films, “the personal and the social are all internalized within the individual protagonist,” whereas in African films “space, set, and group structure . . . operate at a collective level.”19 Although Armes avoids privileging certain films or making prescriptions, underlying the neo-structuralist approach is the same principle of difference, disguised, despite a more self-consciously theoretically grounded discussion. His fundamental move, to interpret the Other for a Western audience, carries presuppositions which, perhaps inevitably, “invent” the colonized. Manthia Diawara’s African Cinema (1992) is probably the most difficult text to locate within the three critical positions that I have outlined, partially because of its inconsistency—especially the inconsistency of the final chapter on “African Cinema Today” with respect to the modes of criticism operating in the rest of the book. Overall African Cinema provides an extremely valuable historical perspective on African cinema. Diawara emphasizes the importance of local and regional political factors, especially those produced by colonialism, in understanding the background of African film production, and seems to follow Teshome Gabriel’s call for an evaluation of non-Western cinemas according to their specific histories, contexts, and systems of production. He carefully examines the systematic restraints imposed on different regions within the colonial, missionary, and anthropological traditions of film-making, and the establishment of federations, organizations, festivals, and national production systems to promote African production. His construction of Africa does not reinforce the understanding of the history of African film as the site of an essential political opposition between the West and Africa, but rather, relativizes the various colonialisms and their specific practices and products according to effects of particular regimes and spheres of influence. The approach could be described as modernist

Stephen A. Zacks / Theoretical Construction

323

historicist to the extent that it participates in this relativization of the historical narrative, depolarizing political aspects in favor of the engagement, not of the scene of anti-colonial struggle, but of the historical context as a valuable point of the entry into a meaningful understanding of texts and the constraints imposed by underdevelopment. By the time the narrative arrives at contemporary film it becomes clear that Diawara has rendered the films appropriable as texts whose meanings can be approached with less anthropologically grounded tools then the neo-structuralist presumes, and less emphatically politically motivated ones than those of the neo-Marxist. A major shortfall of his approach, however, is that his detailed account of production and institutions fails to provide the reader expecting a general knowledge of African texts with a sense of the content of the films themselves. Although Diawara moves from the generalizations of Gabriel’s Third Cinema to a more nuanced study of specific African regions, he fails to evaluate the texts themselves within the historical context that he presents, so that one is left with the mistaken impression that African texts themselves are underdeveloped. The last chapter on “African Cinema Today” attempts to provisionally address this matter. In this chapter he uncouples the films from their institutional context, addressing them in relation to three thematic groupings. Diawara points toward a “thematic diversification,” but instead of characterizing these themes within a metatheoretical schema and granting authenticity to certain themes, he considers the films historically, using the general narrative themes to indicate prevailing tendencies. His description becomes especially apolitical as the discourses of colonialism, and the historical analysis of institutions, give way to discussions of individual, indigenous, and national film productions: Clearly there are many African images, and it seems trivial to expect filmmakers of different generations, different countries, and different ideological tendencies to see the same Africa everywhere. It is therefore not my intention to sort out which modes of representation are right and which are wrong.20

He observes the political motivations of the filmmakers but evaluates “each narrative movement in the context of its own modes of production.” Diawara does not dispense, however, with the traditional tripartite construct used by the proponents of a Third Cinema, Solanas and Getino, and following them Gabriel, who constituted Third Cinema as the third of three progressively more liberatory phases of world cinema. Diawara’s three categories sensitively modify the political implications that Gabriel assigns to the three phases of Third World Film, evaluating the texts according to their “coherence in the particular discourse they choose to deploy.”21 Certain similarities appear, nevertheless, within the tripartite divisions, pointing to an essentially unchanged theoretical construct.

324

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Diawara’s category of social realism, like Gabriel’s phase of unqualified assimilation, is characterized by films which employ music, romance and comedy to entertain the audience. Diawara describes this category as a popular form because of its ability to identify with working class audiences, while Gabriel disparages the form as regressive, capitalist, Western-identified cinema. This is a significant move by Diawara, in effect resituating popular culture as valid in the African context where Gabriel rejects it out of hand. Diawara’s “return to the source” category, characterized by an absence of polemicism, includes films which review precolonial African conditions in relation to postcolonial problems and films which strive to develop a distinctive African film language. It is almost identical to Gabriel’s “remembrance phase,” described as an effort to indigenize the industry and film style, favoring the narrative conflict between the past and present. This second category is given conditional praise by Gabriel, while Diawara neither privileges nor rejects this category of film. Lastly the “Colonial Confrontation” category in African Cinema closely corresponds to Gabriel’s “combative phase,” both of which refer to a category of films playing on the initial opposition between the Third World/ Africa and the West/Hollywood, although Diawara’s category is somewhat narrower than Gabriel’s; Gabriel includes in this phase not only the effort to combat neocolonialism, but the attempt to make explicit anti-capitalist ideological representations. More important than the similarities between the categories as they have been constructed by Gabriel and Diawara are the margins between the tripartite divisions. The contradiction between the neo-Marxist and modernist interpretation of social realist/popular/assimilationist cinema, typified by the problem of adequately understanding La Vie est Belle (dir. Mwezé Ngangura and Benoît Lamy, 1987, Democratic Republic of the Congo) or A Dry White Season, for example, as either strictly adhering to the social realist, unqualified assimilation, Western or African, categories, signals an essential problematic feature of the construction of categories to describe Third World and African film.22 What is at stake is more than the difference between two critics’ positions with regard to the political and ideological purposes of cinema or criticism or the conflict between differently constructed categories. The question can again be traced back to the initial rupture common to the three critical techniques, all of which turn on the constitution of Africa or the Third World as a unity essentially in opposition to, or separable from, the West and its stylistic, thematic and industrial characteristics. The observation that the critical techniques taken up by the three critics are embedded in Western constructs tautologically returns us to the same presumptuous—but historically founded and culturally determined—opposition; more important is the observation that the critics fail to rigorously

Stephen A. Zacks / Theoretical Construction

325

ground their theoretical projects and as a result utilize prevailing assumptions without evaluating their relation to dominant systems of interpretation. Obviously it would be devastating to expect African and Third World critics to apologize for appropriating Western modes of criticism, or for Western critics to apologize for appropriating African and Third World film, as we will have lost in the atmosphere of contention any true sense of the value of the texts themselves, and ignored the emergent space in which an African world cinema is being established. Ousmane Sembène, the great Senegalese filmmaker, has evidently struggled with the problem on his own terms: We are not trying to define ourselves in relationship to any specific cinema. We want to borrow from each one whatever we can and transform it to make up our own cinema. We know that there is a difference between America and Africa, but we don’t want to spend our time trying to define ourselves in relationship to America.23

Boughedir’s contempt for intellectualism and individual expression, Gabriel’s call to purify Third World Cinema of regressive, capitalist, Western influences, Armes and Malkmus’s more subtle appropriation of Arab and African cinema for the understanding of the West, and Diawara’s still more unobtrusive evaluation of the history of African cinema in the context of particular modes of production and thematic tendencies, all bear the unmistakable imprint of the Africanist imperative, like Said’s Orientalists who began with a mythological conception of the difference between the Occident to the Orient: not to confuse Third World and African cinema with Western, Hollywood, or capitalist cinema, to maintain an essential distinction without bothering to reveal how the difference was introduced into the criticism itself. Julianne Burton is among the many critics who have emphasized the importance of foregrounding one’s critical relation to the text, attempting to resist the assumption of many of the categories and oppositions confining critical practices.24 Burton’s suggestion is that a rejection of the small-minded logic by which Western theory is seen as antithetical to an authentic Third World practice, and a more conscious appropriation of Western theory would benefit Third World theorists and filmmakers by enlarging the possibilities for filmmakers and by enabling a more sophisticated film culture. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea says something similar in his “The Viewer’s Dialectic,” albeit couched in very familiar Marxist constructs.25 It becomes increasingly apparent as African filmmakers continue to free themselves from the ideological constraints of Marxism and African essentialism, and incorporate more and more influences of indeterminate origins, that the critic, in turn, will require a different set of tools. Critics are bound to be stimulated in this direction by Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyenas (1992,

326

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Senegal), an adaptation of a Swiss modernist play (Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit) transposed into contemporary Senegal.26 Indeed, the work of Djibril Diop Mambéty (Touki Bouki [1973], Le Franc [1994], Hyenas) frequently seems to work against the grain of the Africanist imperative, for the reason that his films are so intent on studying human relationships in all their complexity.27 His implicit subject, the African looking toward the West, is always represented with a caustic eye to the ideological complicity of social actors, who are nonetheless viewed sympathetically against the backdrop of their position in society. It is likely that with the right systems of distribution and proper modes of valorization such a body of work could be more fully appreciated in the world cultural system. We might say that African texts exerting an influence on world culture already exist on some limited scale—limited more by the systems of distribution and production than by any ideological constraints or inherent technical incapabilities—and that the question of what is authentically African in film becomes increasingly anachronistic in light of this emerging moment. Cultural syncretism has always been present throughout Africa, but has apparently been covered over by the ahistorical dichotomies of modernity.28 The divergent texts of African world cinema necessitate above all that we consider revising or rejecting the question “what is authentically African?” As critics, we have to approach texts with the idea of retrieving more than a correct representation of Africa, and to do so we must above all come to terms with how intellectual history has left its mark on our understanding of both African societies and the texts themselves. This becomes essential to evaluating the true originality of African cinema, as the inevitable charge that African cinema is grounded in constructs or styles supposedly derivative of a Western tradition still too often succeeds in reducing African cultural products; the encounter between Africa and Europe continues to be played out on the basis of the same rules in which Africa serves as a foil for the universalist claims of the West. What we identify as authentically African apparently must exclude the European and place itself in opposition to it so as to legitimate its authority. But this game of exclusion and opposition, based on the premise—so omnipresent that even when recognized as faulty it still exerts its influence—that Europe is the center and origin of all culture, in advance invalidates African texts as inauthentic; as poststructuralists like to say, even the reaction to the other is defined by the limits of the other’s discourse. An investigation of the terms in which the problem of authenticity is posed may help us to understand the ways in which the constructs used to evaluate African cultural products continue to return us to the site of colonial conflict, with its nearly exhausted colonial oppositions. We still await, however, the emergence of that Africanist discourse whose authority will be constructed such that it will no longer have the need to call itself African.

Stephen A. Zacks / Theoretical Construction

327

Stephen A. Zacks is a journalist, architecture critic, urbanist, and organizer based in New York City. Founder of the socially-engaged art and design organization Flint Public Art Project, he received a B.A. in interdisciplinary humanities from Michigan State and an M.A. in Liberal Studies from the New School for Social Research, served as an editor at Metropolis, writes regularly for Dwell Abitare, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Oculus, Architect’s Newspaper, and Brownstoner, and has received awards from the Warhol Foundation, Creative Capital, ArtPlace, Graham Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, NY State Council on the Arts, and the Newtown Creek Fund.

Notes Originally published as Stephen A. Zacks, “The Theoretical Construction of African Cinema,” Research in African Literatures 26, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 6–17. 1. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), 93. 2. V. Y. Mudimbe, “African Gnosis,” African Studies Review 28, no. 2–3 (June/ September, 1985): 150. 3. See Teshome Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982); Fernando E. Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Toward a Third Cinema,” in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Haile Gerima, “On Independent Black Cinema,” in Black Cinema Aesthetics: Issues in Independent Black Filmmaking, ed. Gladstone Yearwood (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982); Marxism in African Literature, ed. Georg M. Gugelberger (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988); Férid Boughedir, Le Cinema Africain de A à Z (Brussels: OCIC, 1987); and Michael Chanan, ed. Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema (London: BFI and Channel Four, 1983). 4. Also see Andre Gardies and Pierre Haffner, Regards sur le Cinema Negro-Africain (Brussels: OCIC, 1987); Roy Armes, Third World Filmmaking and the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); and Manthia Diawara, “Oral Literature and African Film: Narratology in Wend Kuuni,” Présence Africaine, no. 142 (1987): 36–49. 5. Françoise Pfaff, The Cinema of Ousmane Sembène: A Pioneer of African Film (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984). See also Françoise Pfaff, Twenty-Five Black African Filmmakers (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988); Mbye Cham, Ex-Iles: Essays in Caribbean Cinema (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992); and Black American Cinema: Aesthetics of Spectatorship, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993). 6. Férid Boughedir, “The Principle Tendencies of African Cinema,” in African Films: The Context of Production, ed. Angela Martin (London: British Film Institute, 1982), 79. See also Férid Boughedir, “L’Image Apprivoisée,” Jeune Afrique 914 (July 12, 1978). 7. Teshome Gabriel, “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films,” in Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willeman (London: British Film Institute, 1989). 8. Last Grave at Dimbaza, directed by Chris Curling and Pascoe Macfarlane (1974). 9. A Dry White Season, directed by Euzhan Palcy (1989). 10. Warrior Marks, directed by Pratibha Parma and Alice Walker (1993).

328

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

11. Wend Kuuni, directed by Gaston Kaboré (1982). 12. Gabriel, “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films,” 34. 13. Ibid., 35. 14. Roy Armes and Lisbeth Malkmus, Arab and African Filmmaking (London: Zed Books Inc., 1991), 183. 15. Ibid., 193. 16. Manthia Diawara, African Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 32. 17. Camp de Thiaroye, directed by Ousmane Sembène (1988); Yaaba, directed by Idrissa Ouédraogo (1989). 18. First Blood, directed by Ted Kotcheff, starring Sylvester Stallone (1982). Dirty Harry, directed by Don Siegel, starring Clint Eastwood (1971). 19. Armes and Malkmus, Arab and African Filmmaking, 210–211. 20. Diawara, African Cinema, 141. 21. Ibid., 166. 22. La Vie est Belle, directed by Ngangura Mwezé and Benoît Lamy (1987). 23. Gabriel, Third Cinema, 116. 24. Julianne Burton, “Marginal Cinemas and Mainstream Critical Theory,” Screen 26, no. 3–4 (May–August 1985): 2–21. See also Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Minh-ha, both in her writings and cinematic experiments, has demonstrated more concretely than anyone how the meeting of Africa and deconstructivist practices can enrich and dynamize the emerging African world cinema. Reassemblage (1982) as much as any indigenous African film, has effectively problematized the camera’s objectifying eye, the assumption that the camera can simply record some existing truth about African culture, as well as the notion that “correct” representation is possible. She initiates a genre of critically reflective deconstructivist film that utilizes contemporary criticism in unexpected ways to rephrase the question regarding authenticity of representation. 25. Tomás Gutiérez Alea, “The Viewer’s Dialectic, Part 1,” Jump Cut, no. 29 (February 1984). 26. Hyenas, directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty (1992); Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Visit (1956). 27. Touki Bouki, directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty (1973). Le Franc, directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty (1994). 28. Youssef Chahine’s Alexandrie, Encore et Toujours (1990) is another example of this fourth or fifth cinema, the meeting ground for an indefinite number of dialectical moments between cultures, oppositional without drawing the politics of identity and modern binarisms too tightly around itself. Alexandrie draws from Shakespeare and other texts of the Western tradition to discuss Egyptian identity, including a somewhat affectionate parody of a Hollywood dance sequence that might call to mind Guys and Dolls (1955). In some ways Alexandrie can be read as a response to theorists of national identity and culture who are stuck on the opposition of the West to the African, claiming a much wider scope of influence than that of folk culture.

Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films Teshome H. Gabriel .

Wherever there is a filmmaker prepared to stand up against commercialism, exploitation, pornography and the tyranny of technique, there is to be found the living spirit of New Cinema. Wherever there is a filmmaker, of any age or background, ready to place his cinema and his profession at the service of the great causes of his time, there will be the living spirit of New Cinema. This is the correct definition which sets New Cinema apart from the commercial industry because the commitment of industrial cinema is to untruth and exploitation. —THE AESTHETICS OF HUNGER, BY GLAUBER ROCHA [BRAZIL] Insert the work as an original fact in the process of liberation, place it first at the service of life itself, ahead of art; dissolve aesthetics in the life of society: only in this way, as [Frantz] Fanon said, can decolonisation become possible and culture, cinema, and beauty—at least, what is of greatest importance to us—become our culture, our films, and our sense of beauty. —TOWARDS A THIRD CINEMA, BY FERNANDO SOLANAS AND OCTAVIO GETINO [ARGENTINA]

F

rantz Fanon, in his attempts to identify the revolutionary impulse in the peasant of the Third World, accepted that culture is an act of insemination upon history, whose product is liberation from oppression.1 In my search for a methodological device for a critical inquiry into Third World films, I have drawn upon the historical works of this ardent proponent of liberation, whose analysis of the steps of the genealogy of Third World culture can also be used as a critical framework for the study of Third World films. This essay is, therefore, divided into two parts and focuses on those essential qualities Third World films possess rather than those they may seem to lack. The first part lays the formulation for Third World film culture and filmic institutions based on a critical and theoretical matrix applicable to Third World needs. The second part is an attempt to give material substance to the analytic constructs discussed previously. From pre-colonial times to the present, the struggle for freedom from oppression has been waged by the Third World masses, who in their maintenance of a deep cultural identity have made history come alive. Just as they

330

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

have moved aggressively towards independence, so has the evolution of Third World film culture followed a path from ‘domination’ to ‘liberation.’ This genealogy of Third World film culture moves from the First Phase in which foreign images are impressed in an alienating fashion on the audience, to the Second and Third Phases in which recognition of ‘consciousness of oneself ’ serves as the essential antecedent for national and, more significantly, international consciousness. There are, therefore, three phases in this methodological device.

Phases of Third World Films Phase I—The Unqualified Assimilation The industry: Identification with the Western Hollywood film industry. The link is made as obvious as possible and even the names of the companies proclaim their origin. For instance, the Nigerian film company, Calpenny, whose name stands for California, Pennsylvania and New York, tries to hide behind an acronym, while the companies in India, Egypt, and Hong Kong are not worried about being typed the ‘Third World’s Hollywood,’ ‘Hollywood-onthe-Nile,’ and ‘Hollywood of the Orient’ respectively. The theme: Hollywood thematic concerns of ‘entertainment’ predominate. Most of the feature films of the Third World in this phase sensationalize adventure for its own sake and concern themselves with escapist themes of romance, musicals, comedies, etc. The sole purpose of such industries is to turn out entertainment products which will generate profits. The scope and persistence of this kind of industry in the Third World lies in its ability to provide reinvestable funds and this quadruples their staying power. Therefore, in cases where a counter-cinematic movement has occurred the existing national industry has been able to ingest it. A good example is in the incorporation of the cinema novo movement in the Brazilian Embrafilme. Style: The emphasis on formal properties of cinema, technical brilliance and visual wizardry, overrides subject matter. The aim here is simply to create a ‘spectacle.’ Aping Hollywood stylistically, more often than not, runs counter to Third World needs for a serious social art.

Phase II—The Remembrance Phase The industry: Indigenization and control of talents, production, exhibition, and distribution. Many Third World film production companies are in this stage. The movement for a social institution of cinema in the Third World such as ‘cinema moudjahid’ in Algeria, ‘new wave’ in India, and ‘engage or committed cinema’ in Senegal and Mozambique exemplifies this phase.

Teshome H. Gabriel / Towards a Critical Theory

331

The theme: Return of the exile to the Third World’s source of strength, i.e. culture and history. The predominance of filmic themes such as the clash between rural and urban life, traditional versus modern value systems, folklore and mythology, identifies this level. Ousmane Sembène’s early film Mandabi (1968, Senegal) about a humble traditional man outstripped by modern ways characterizes this stage. Barravento / The Turning Wind (dir. Glauber Rocha, 1962), a poetic Brazilian film about a member of a fishermen’s village who returns from exile in the city, is a folkloric study of mysticism. The film from Burkina Faso (Upper Volta), Wend Kuuni / God’s Gift (dir. Gaston Kaboré, 1982), attempts to preserve the spirit of folklore in a brilliant recreation of an old tale of a woman who is declared a witch because of her conflicts with custom, when she refused to marry after the disappearance of her husband. While the most positive aspect of this phase is its break with the concepts and propositions of Phase I, the primary danger here is the uncritical acceptance or undue romanticization of ways of the past. It needs to be stressed that there is a danger of falling into the trap of exalting traditional virtues and racializing culture without at the same time condemning faults. To accept totally the values of Third World traditional cultures without simultaneously stamping out the regressive elements can only lead to ‘a blind alley,’ as Fanon puts it, and falsification of the true nature of culture as an act or agent of liberation. Therefore, unless this phase, which predominates in Third World film practices today, is seen as a process, a moving towards the next stage, it could develop into opportunistic endeavors and create cultural confusion. This has been brilliantly pointed out by Luis Ospina of Colombia in his self-reflexive film Picking on the People, in which he criticizes the exploitative nature of some Third World filmmakers who peddle Third World poverty and misery at festival sites in Europe and North America and who do not approach their craft as a tool of social transformation. An excellent case in point is the internationally acclaimed film Pixote (1980, Brazil) by Hector Babenco. According to a Los Angeles Times correspondent in Rio de Janeiro, Da Silva, the young boy who played the title role of the film, was paid a mere $320. The correspondent writes: “In a real-life drama a juvenile Judge in Diadema, a suburb of Sao Paulo, last week released Da Silva, now 16, to the custody of his mother after his arrest on charges of housebreaking and theft.” According to Da Silva’s mother, who sells lottery tickets for her living, ‘after a trip to Rio when he got no work, he told me, “Mother, they have forgotten me, I am finished.”’ In the meantime Mr Babenco, the now famous film director, was about to shoot his next feature, The Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985, Brazil), in collaboration with producers in Hollywood.2 The style: Some attempts to indigenize film style are manifest. Although the dominant stylistic conventions of the first phase still predominate here,

332

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

there appears to be a growing tendency to create a film style appropriate to the changed thematic concerns. In this respect, the growing insistence on spatial representation rather than temporal manipulation typifies the films in this phase. The sense of a spatial orientation in cinema in the Third World arises out of the experience of an ‘endless’ world of the large Third World mass. This nostalgia for the vastness of nature projects itself into the film form, resulting in long takes and long or wide shots. This is often done to constitute part of an overall symbolization of a Third World thematic orientation, i.e. the landscape depicted ceases to be mere land or soil and acquires a phenomenal quality which integrates humans with the general drama of existence itself.

Phase III—The Combative Phase The industry: Filmmaking as a public service institution. The industry in this phase is not only owned by the nation and/or the government, it is also managed, operated, and run for and by the people. It can also be called a cinema of mass participation, one enacted by members of communities speaking indigenous languages, one that espouses Julio García Espinosa’s polemic of “An Imperfect Cinema,” that in a developing world, technical and artistic perfection in the production of a film cannot be the aims in themselves.3 Quite a number of social institutions of cinema in the Third World, some underground like Argentina’s ‘Cine Liberación’ and some supported by their governments—for instance, ‘Chile Films’ of Allende’s Popular Unity Socialist government—exemplify this phase. Two industrial institutions that also exemplify this level are the Algerian L’Office National pour le Commerce et I’Industrie Cinematographique (ONCIC) and Cuba’s Institute of Film Art and Industry (ICAIC). The theme: Lives and struggles of Third World peoples. This phase signals the maturity of the filmmaker and is distinguishable from either Phase I or Phase II by its insistence on viewing film in its ideological ramifications. A very good example is Miguel Littin’s The Promised Land (1973, Chile), a quasi-historical mythic account of power and rebellion, which can be seen as referring to events in modern-day Chile. Likewise, his latest film Alsino and the Condor (1982) combines realism and fantasy within the context of war-torn Nicaragua. The imagery in One Way or Another (1977, Cuba) by the late Sara Gómez Yara, of an iron ball smashing down the old slums of Havana, not only depicts the issue of women/race in present-day Cuba but also symbolizes the need for a new awareness to replace the old oppressive spirit of machismo which still persists in socialist Cuba. The film Soleil Ô (1970), by the Mauritanian filmmaker Med Hondo, aided by the process of Fanonian theses, comes to the recognition of forgotten heritage in the display of the amalgam of ideological determinants of European ‘humanism,’ racism,

Teshome H. Gabriel / Towards a Critical Theory

333

and colonialism. The failure of colonialism to convert Africans into ‘whitethinking blacks’ depicted in the film reappears in a much wider symbolic form in his later film, West Indies (dir. Med Hondo, 1979, Mauritania), where the entire pantheon of domination and liberation unfolds in a ship symbolic of the slave-ship of yesteryear. The style: Film as an ideological tool. Here, film is equated or recognized as an ideological instrument. This particular phase also constitutes a framework of agreement between the public (or the indigenous institution of cinema) and the filmmaker. A Phase III filmmaker is one who is perceptive of and knowledgeable about the pulse of the Third World masses. Such a filmmaker is truly in search of a Third World cinema—a cinema that has respect for the Third World peoples. One element of the style in this phase is an ideological point of view instead of that of a character as in dominant Western conventions. Di Cavalcanti by Glauber Rocha (1977, Brazil), for instance, is a take-off from ‘Quarup’, a joyous death ritual celebrated by Amazon tribes.4 The celebration frees the dead from the hypocritical tragic view modern man has of death. By turning the documentary of the death of the internationally renowned Brazilian painter Di Cavalcanti into a chaotic/celebratory montage of sound and images, Rocha deftly and directly criticized the dominant documentary convention, creating in the process not only an alternative film language but also a challenging discourse on the question of existence itself. Another element of style is the use of flashback—although the reference is to past events, it is not stagnant but dynamic and developmental. In The Promised Land, for instance, the flashback device dips into the past to comment on the future, so that within it a flash-forward is inscribed. Similarly, when a flash-forward is used in Sembène’s Ceddo (1977, Senegal), it is also to convey a past and future tense simultaneously to comment on two historical periods. Since the past is necessary for the understanding of the present, and serves as a strategy for the future, this stylistic orientation seems to be ideologically suited to this particular phase. It should, however, be noted that the three phases discussed above are not organic developments. They are enclosed in a dynamic which is dialectical in nature; for example, some Third World filmmakers have taken a contradictory path. Lucia (1968), a Cuban film by Humberto Solás, about the relations between the sexes, belongs to Phase III, yet Solás’ latest film, Cecilia (1982, Cuba), which concerns an ambitious mulatto woman who tries to assimilate into a repressive Spanish aristocracy, is a regression in style (glowing in spectacle) and theme (the tragic mulatto) towards Phase I. Moving in the opposite direction, Glauber Rocha’s early Brazilian films like Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (1964; literally ‘God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun,’ but advertised in the United States as ‘Black God, White Devil’!) and Terra em Transe / The Earth Trembles (1967)

334

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

reflect a Phase II characteristic, while his last two films, A Idade da Terra / The Age of the Earth (1980, Brazil) and Di Cavalcanti, both in their formal properties and subject matter manifest a Phase III characteristic in their disavowal of the conventions of dominant cinema. According to Glauber Rocha, A Idade da Terra (which develops the theme of Terra em Transe) and Di Cavalcanti disintegrate traditional ‘narrative sequences’ and rupture not only the fictional and documentary cinema style of his early works, but also ‘the world cinematic language’ under ‘the dictatorship of Coppola and Godard’.5 The dynamic enclosure of the three phases posits the existence of gray areas between Phases I and II, and II and III. This area helps to identify a large number of important Third World films. For instance, the Indian film Manthan (‘The Churning’), the Senegalese film Xala (‘Spell of Impotence’), the Bolivian film Chuquiago (Indian name for La Paz), the Ecuadorean film My Aunt Nora, the Brazilian film They Don’t Wear Black Tie and the Tunisian film Shadow of the Earth occupy the gray area between Phase II and III. The importance of the gray areas cannot be over-emphasized, for not only do they concretely demonstrate the process of becoming but they also attest to the multi-faceted nature of Third World cinema and the need for the development of new critical canons.

Components of Critical Theory From the above it can be seen that the development of Third World film culture provides a critical theory particular to Third World needs. I would like to propose at this stage an analytic construct consisting of three components that would provide an integrative matrix within which to approach and interpret the Three Phases drawn out from the Third World’s cultural history. The components of critical theory can be schematized as follows:

Component 1: Text The intersection of codes and sub-codes; the chief thematic and formal characteristics of existing films and the rules of that filmic grammar. And the transformational procedures whereby new ‘texts’ emerge from old.

Component 2: Reception The audience: the active interrogation of images versus the passive consumption of films. The issue of alienated and non-alienated identity and the ideal/inscribed or actual/empirical spectatorship illustrates this component of critical theory.

Teshome H. Gabriel / Towards a Critical Theory

335

Component 3: Production The social determination where the wider context of determinants informs social history, market considerations, economy of production, state governance and regulation composes this stage of the critical constructs. Here, the larger historical perspective, the position of the institution of indigenous cinema in progressive social taste, is contexted. The overriding critical issue at this juncture is, for instance, the unavoidable ultimate choice between the classical studio system and the development of a system of production based on the lightweight 16mm or video technology. The pivotal concern and the single most significant question at this stage, therefore, is: “Precisely what kind of institution is cinema in the Third World?”

Confluence of Phases and Critical Theory Each phase of the Third World film culture can be described in terms of all the three components of critical theory, because each phase is necessarily engaged in all the critical operations. For instance, Phase I is characterized by a type of film that simply mirrors, in its concepts and propositions, the status quo, i.e. the text and the rules of the grammar are identical to conventional practices. The consequence of this type of ‘mimicking’ in the area of ‘reception’ is that an alienated identity ensues from it precisely because the spectator is unable to find or recognize himself/herself in the images. The mechanisms of the systems of ‘production’ also acknowledge the status quo—the reliance is on the studio systems of controlled production and experimentation. If we apply the components of critical theory to Phase II only, a slight shift in the text and the rules of the grammar is noticeable. Although the themes are predominantly indigenized, the film language remains trapped, woven and blotted with classical formal elements, and remains stained with conventional film style. In terms of ‘reception’ the viewer, aided by the process of memory and an amalgam of folklore and mythology, is able to locate a somewhat diluted traditional identity. The third level of critical theory also composes and marks the process of indigenization of the institution of cinema where a position of self-determination is sought. Finally, the three components of critical theory find their dynamic wholeness in Phase III—the Combative Phase. Here, the text and subtexts go through a radical shift and transformation—the chief formal and thematic concerns begin to alter the rules of the grammar. Another film language and a system of new codes begin to manifest themselves. With regard to ‘reception’ we discover that the viewer or subject is no longer alienated because recognition is vested not only in genuine cultural grounds but also in an ideological cognition

336

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Figure 1. Here, A and B find themselves in a larger historical perspective C. It is a wider context of indigenization and self-determination, which condition both level A and B to give up their position of dominance to C, a stage which composes and marks the union of the Third World film culture and the social institutions of cinema.

founded on the acknowledgment of the decolonization of culture and total liberation. The intricate relationships of the three phases of the evolution of Third World film culture and the three analytic constructs for filmic institutions help to establish the stage for a confluence of a unique aesthetic exchange founded on other than traditional categories of film conventions (see Figure 1).

Teshome H. Gabriel / Towards a Critical Theory

337

Summary of the Development of Film Culture and Filmic Institutions This new Third World cinematic experience, inchoate as it is, is in the process of creating a concurrent development of a new and throbbing social institution capable of generating a dynamic and far-reaching influence on the future socioeconomic and educational course of the Third World. I contend that the confluence obtained from the interlocking of the phases and the critical constructs reveals underlying assumptions concerning perceptual patterns and film viewing situations. For instance, with respect to fiction films showing in Third World theaters, rejection on cultural grounds forces incomplete transmission of meaning. That is, the intended or inscribed meaning of the film is deflected and acquires a unique meaning of its own— the mode of address of the film and the spectator behavior undergo a radical alteration. Therefore, what has been presented as a ‘fiction’ film is received as if it were a ‘documentary.’ The same fiction film screened in its own country of origin, however, claims an ideal spectatorship because it is firmly anchored in its own cultural references, codes and symbols. A classic example of how films from one culture can be easily misunderstood and misinterpreted by a viewer from another culture is Glauber Rocha’s The Lion Has Seven Heads (O Leão de Sete Cabeças). The film was extensively exhibited in the West, one catalogue compiled in 1974 crediting Rocha with bringing “the Cinema Novo to Africa for this Third World assault on the various imperialisms represented in its multilingual title. Characters include a black revolutionary, a Portuguese mercenary, an American CIA agent, a French missionary, and a voluptuous nude woman called the Golden Temple of Violence”.6 Again, a recent compendium of reviews, Africa on Film and Videotape, 1960–1981, dismisses the film completely with a one-liner, “An allegorical farce noting the bond between Africa and Brazil.”7 Yet Glauber Rocha, in an interview given to a prominent film historian, Raquel Gerber (author of Glauber Rocha, Cinema, Politica e a Estetica do Inconsciente), in Rome, February 1973, and in a discussion with this author at UCLA in 1976, said that the film is a story of Che Guevara who is magically resurrected by Blacks through the spirit of Zumbi, the spiritual name of the late Amilcar Cabral. To Rocha, the film is in fact an homage to Amilcar Cabral. Thus, while the West looks at this film as an offering of clichéd images and an object of curiosity, the filmmaker is only trying to affirm the continuity of the Third World’s anti-imperialist struggle from Che to Cabral (and beyond), to initiate an awareness of their lives, and the relevance to us today of what they struggled and died for. To the extent that we recognize a history of unequal exchanges between the South and the North, we must also recognize the unequal ‘symbolic’ exchanges involved. The difficulty of Third World films of radical social comment for Western interpretation is

338

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

the result a) of the film’s resistance to the dominant conventions of cinema, and b) of the consequence of the Western viewers’ loss of being the privileged decoders and ultimate interpreters of meaning. The Western experience of film viewing—dominance of the big screen and the sitting situation—has naturalized a spectator conditioning so that any communication of a film plays on such values of exhibition and reception. The Third World experience of film viewing and exhibition suggests an altogether different route and different value system. For instance, Americans and Europeans hate seeing a film on African screens, because everybody talks during the showings; similarly, African viewers of film in America complain about the very strict code of silence and the solemn atmosphere of the American movie theaters. How the system of perceptual patterns and viewing situation varies with conditions of reception from one culture to another, or how changes in the rules of the grammar affect spectator viewing habits, is part of a larger question which solidifies and confirms the issue of cultural relativism and identity. The confluence of the phases and the constructs also converges on the technologically mediated factors of needed production apparatuses, productive relations and the mechanisms of industrial operations. It needs to be stated outright that ‘technology’ as such does not in itself produce or communicate meaning; but it is equally true to say that ‘technology’ has a dynamic which helps to create ideological carryovers that impress discourse language, i.e. ideological discourse manifests itself in the mechanisms of film discourse. By way of an example, it is possible that a filmmaker might have the idea of ‘filmic form’ before having ‘a content’ to go along with it. Third World films are heterogeneous, employing narrative and oral discourse, folk music and songs, extended silences and gaps, moving from fictional representation to reality, to fiction—these constitute the creative part that can challenge the ideological carryovers that technology imposes. From the needs of Third World film criticism, contemporary film scholarship is criticized on two major fronts: first, contemporary film theory and criticism is grounded in a conception of the ‘viewer’ (subject or citizen) derived from psychoanalytic theory where the relation between the ‘viewer’ and the ‘film’ is determined by a particular dynamic of the ‘familial’ matrix. To the extent that Third World culture and familial relationships are not described through psychoanalytic theory, Third World filmic representation is open for an elaboration of the relation ‘viewer’/‘film’ on terms other than those founded on psychoanalysis. The Third World relies more on an appeal to social and political conflicts as the prime rhetorical strategy and less on the paradigm of oedipal conflict and resolution. Second, on the semiotic front, the Western model of filmic representation is essentially based on a literary or written conception of the scenario which

Teshome H. Gabriel / Towards a Critical Theory

339

implies a linear, cause/effect conception of narrative action.8 However, Third World oral narratives, founded on traditional culture, are held in memory by a set of formal strategies specific to repeated, oral, face-to-face tellings. It is no longer satisfactory to use existing critical criteria, which may be adequate for a film practice (Western in this case) now at a plateau of relevance, to elucidate a new and dynamic film convention whose upward mobility will result in a totally new cinematic language. The Third World experience is thus raising some fundamental concerns about the methods and/or commitment of traditional film scholarship. The Third World filmic practice is, therefore, reorganizing and refining the pictorial syntax and the position of the ‘viewer’ (or spectator) with respect to film. The Third World cinematic experience is moved by the requirements of its social action and contexted and marked by the strategy of that action. We need, therefore, to begin attending to a new theoretical and analytic matrix governed by other than existing critical theories that claim specific applications for universal principles.9 Cultural contamination is a deeply rooted human fear: it smells of annihilation. Spiritual and traditional practices have a terrific hold on the Third World rural populace. This reminds us of the maxim which was enunciated by Confucius in the sixth century BC and still prevails: “I’m a transmitter, not an inventor.” To the Third World, spirits, magic, masquerades and rituals, however flawed they may be, still constitute knowledge and provide collective security and protection from forces of evil. Unknown forces for the rural community can only be checked or controlled if they can be identified. One way of readily understanding what Third World culture is, is to distinguish it from what it claims not to be. We call at this juncture for a thorough and comparative analysis of ‘oral’ or ‘folk’ art form and ‘literate’ or ‘print’ art form to situate the foregoing discussion on critical theory into focused attention. I propose here to examine the centrifugal as well as the centripetal cultural forces that might determine not only film, but also the media, in the Third World. This dialectical, not differential or oppositional, conception of cultural forms takes into account the dynamics of their exchange.10 Several factors ensue from the examination of the two modes of cultural expression. While, for instance, the community issue is at the heart of Third World traditional culture, the issue of the individual is at the base of Western or print culture. With regard to performatory stage presentation, a Western actor interacting with the audience breaks the compact or marginal boundary. Because a special kind of magic enters a playing space, Western stage performance does not allow crossover. While, therefore, a Western person feels his privacy violated with interactive drama, in the Third World context the understanding between the viewer and the performers is that their positions are interchangeable without notice.

340

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Awe for the old in the Third World culture is very much in evidence. Several films reflect it. The old or the aged as repositories of Third World history is well documented in such films as Emitai from Senegal, They Don’t Wear Black Tie from Brazil, Shadow of the Earth from Tunisia and The In-Laws from the People’s Republic of China. The issue of the aged in Third World culture is beautifully illustrated in Safi Faye’s film Fad’jal, where the opening sequence of the film states: “In Africa, an old man dying is like a library burning down.” A major area of misunderstanding (if we take into account the ‘Cognitive Characteristics’ of the ‘Folk/Print Art’ dichotomy in Figure 1) is the definition and replacement of ‘man,’ the individual, within Third World societies. For any meaningful dialogue centering on Third World developmental schemes the issue of ‘man/woman’ in a society must be carefully debated. As Julius K. Nyerere of Tanzania puts it, ‘The Purpose is Man,’ and as the Wolof saying goes, “Man is the medicine of man.”11 A cultural orientation of ‘man’, the individual, as changeable and capable of effecting change is a condition that reverberates in all advanced societies of the world, be they of capitalist or socialist persuasion. The idea that man, both in the singular and in the plural, has the capability of controlling his/ her own destiny and effecting change by his/her own will is a dynamic force which can alter both the thought patterns and work habits of a people. This concept, it must be stated, is not the opposite of the Third World ideal of the primacy of the community over the individual. An excellent example is the film Beyond the Plains (where man is born) by Michael Raeburn, in which a young man from the Masai tribe in Tanzania was able to change his people’s negative attitude towards education by not only doggedly pursuing it to the university level, but also never losing contact with his people. As he grew up he made sure he performed all the customary rites and fulfilled all the obligations demanded by his people, thus demonstrating that Western and tribal cultural education were not incompatible. From this, it can be seen that the major difference between the Third World and the West with regard to changing the community from a passive to a dynamic entity is one of approach. Whereas the former aims at changing the individual through the community, the latter wants the community changed by the individual. Only time will tell which of the two approaches makes for sustained, beneficial social progress.

Manipulation of Space and Time in Cinema A child born in a Western society is encased, from the initial moments of birth, in purposive, man-made fabricated objects. The visual landscape he experiences is dominated by man-made forms. Even the child’s dolls reflect

Table 1 Comparison of Folk and Print Art Forms Folk (or Oral) Art Form

341

Print (or Literate) Art Form Conception of the Value and Evaluation of Art

Deeper meaning of art held by cultural groups or community. Interpretive device: one needs to belong and/or understand cultural or folk nuances. Recognizes general level of excellence, hence emphasis on group competence in the aesthetic judgment of art. Master artist concept—gifted but normal, and so conforms to the group. Art as occasion for collective engagement. Emphasis on contextual relevance. Art defined in terms of context.

Deeper meaning of art held as the sole property of the artist. Interpretive device: the artist proclaims ‘it is for me to know and for you to find, or art is what you mean it to be.’ Recognizes exceptions, hence emphasis on individual achievement and individual responsibility. Master artist concept—gifted but eccentric and essentially nonconformist. Art as occasion for ‘escape’ from normal routine. Emphasis on conceptual interpretation. Art defined in terms of aesthetic.

Performatory Presentation Boxed-in theatres and elevated to a stage—operHeld in fluid boundaries, churchyards, ating in a 180’ dimension. fields, marketplaces—operating in a 360’ Each scene must follow another scene in linear dimension. progression. A scene flows into another. Cyclical progression linked thematically. Performatory Effect Expects viewer participation, therefore arouses activity and prepares for and allows participation. Multiple episodes that have their own centers.

Discourages viewer participation. Puts an end to activity. Inhibits participation. Singular episode extended through detail.

Cognitive Characteristics Man defined as ‘unchangeable’ alone. Change emanates from the community. Individual interlinked with total social fabric. Concept of human rather than concept of ‘man’ as such. Strong tradition of suggestion in the cultural symbol and in the use of linguistic formulae. Time assumed to be a subjective phenomenon, i.e. it is the outcome of conceptualizing and experiencing movement. Wisdom is a state of intellectual maturity gained by experience. Cumulative process of knowledge, derived from the past. Characterized by slowness to judgment. Earth is not a hostile world; e.g. the cult of the ancestors is an attempt at unification with the past, present and future.

Man defined as ‘man’, changeable and, by virtue of his person, capable of effecting change and progress. Individual perceived primarily as separated from general social fabric. Strong tradition of detail and minute (graphic) description. Time assumed to be an ‘objective’ phenomenon, dominant and ubiquitous. Wisdom is characterized by high degree of specialization in a particular field or discipline. Characterized by—quickness of judgment based on a vast accumulation of data and information. Earth is a hostile world and has to be subdued. Paradise is in the future or elsewhere.

342

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

the high technology of the environment. Nowadays, a child who is beginning to learn to spell can have a computer that can talk to him and interact with him in a human way. All of these developments are based on the insistence of a society that puts a high price on individualism, individual responsibility, and achievement as most necessary. A child in a rural Third World setting is born in an unrestricted natural landscape. From the day he/she is born the child is dominated by untampered natural forms. Even the interior of the dwelling where the child is born is made to look like the natural environment: it is not unusual to see fresh grass and flowers lending nature’s color to the child’s initial world setting. The child grows in this vast universe where his place within the family and in nature is emphasized. A child born and raised in this situation is taught to submerge his individuality and show responsibility to his extended family and his community. His accomplishments are measured not only by his individual achievements but by the degree to which they accomplish and contribute to the social good. Culture, the terms on which films are based, also naturally grows from these environmental factors. An examination of oral and literate culture in terms of film brings to light two very crucial elements of cinema, namely the concepts of ‘space’ and ‘time’. All cinema manipulates ‘time’ and ‘space.’ Where Western films manipulate ‘time’ more than ‘space’, Third World films seem to emphasize ‘space’ over ‘time.’ Third World films grow from folk tradition where communication is a slow-paced phenomenon and time is not rushed but has its own pace. Western culture, on the other hand, is based on the value of ‘time’—time is art, time is money, time is most everything else. If time drags in a film, spectators grow bored and impatient, so that a method has to be found to cheat natural time. In film, this is achieved in the editing. It is all based on the idea that the more purely ‘non-dramatic’ elements in film are considered ‘cinematic excess,’ i.e. they serve no unifying purpose. What is identified as ‘excess’ in Western cinematic experience is, therefore, precisely where we locate Third World cinema. Let me now identify those essential elements of cinematic practice that are considered cinematic excess in Western cinema but which in the Third World context seem only too natural.

The long take: It is not uncommon in Third World films to see a concentration of long takes and repetition of images and scenes. In the Third World films, the slow leisurely pacing approximates the viewer’s sense of time and rhythm of life. In addition, the preponderance of wide-angle shots of longer duration deal with a viewer’s sense of community and how people fit in nature. Whereas when Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard use these types of shot it is to convey an existential separation and isolation from nature and self.

Teshome H. Gabriel / Towards a Critical Theory

343

Cross-cutting: Cross-cutting between antagonists shows simultaneity rather than the building of suspense. The power of images lies not in the expectation we develop about the mere juxtapositions or the collision itself, but rather in conveying the reasons for the imminent collision. Where, therefore, conventional cinema has too often reduced this to the collision of antagonists, on a scale of positive and negative characters, Third World films doing the same thing make it more explicitly an ideological collision.

The close-up shot: A device so much in use in the study of individual psychology in Western filmmaking practice is less used in Third World films. Third World films serve more of an informational purpose than as a study in ‘psychological realism.’ The isolation of an individual, in tight close-up shots, seems unnatural to the Third World filmmaker because (I) it calls attention to itself; (II) it eliminates social considerations; and (III) it diminishes spatial integrity.

The panning shot: Since a pan shot maintains integrity of space and time, the narrative value of such a shot renders the ‘cut’ or editing frequently unnecessary. The emphasis on space also conveys a different concept of ‘time,’ a time which is not strictly linear or chronological but coexists with it. My own observation indicates that while Western films tend to pan right on a left-right axis, Middle Eastern films, for instance, tend to pan generally toward the left, as in Alyam Alyam (Morocco) and Shadow of the Earth (Tunisia). It is quite possible that the direction of panning toward left or right might be strongly influenced by the direction in which a person writes.

The concept of silence: The rich potential for the creative interpretation of sound as well as the effective use of its absence is enormous in Third World films. For instance, in Emitai there are English subtitles for drum messages, and a rooster crows as Sembène’s camera registers a low-angle shot of a poster of General de Gaulle. A neat visual pun! Silence serves as an important element of the audio track of the same film. It is ‘a cinema of silence that speaks.’ Silences have meaning only in context, as in the Ethiopian film Gouma and the Cuban film The Last Supper, where they contribute to the suspension of judgment which one experiences in watching a long take. Viewers wonder what will happen, accustomed as they are to the incessant sound and overload of music of dominant cinema.

344

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Concept of “hero”: Even if a Western viewer cannot help but identify and sympathize with the black labor leader in They Don’t Wear Black Tie, the lunatic in Harvest: 3000 Years, the crazy poet in The Chronicle of the Years of Ember and the militant party member in Sambizanga (dir. Sarah Maldoror, 1972, Angola), the films nevertheless kill those characters. This is because wish-fulfillment through identification is not the films’ primary objective; rather, it is the importance of collective engagement and action that matters. The individual ‘hero’ in the Third World context does not make history, he/she only serves historical necessities. Films, therefore, in their point of view and stylistic choices, are structured to evoke a certain ideology in their production. A consequence of this, quite logically, is their different use of the conventions of time and space in cinema.

Conclusion The spatial concentration and minimal use of the conventions of temporal manipulation in Third World film practice suggest that Third World cinema is initiating a coexistence of film art with oral traditions. Non-linearity, repetition of images and graphic representation have very much in common with folk customs. Time duration, though essential, is not the major issue because in the Third World context the need is for films, in context, to touch a sensitive cultural chord in a society. To achieve this, a general overhaul of the parameters of film form is required. Should the reorganization be successful and radical enough, a rethinking of the critical and theoretical canons of cinema would be called for, leading to a reconsideration of the conventions of cinematographic language and technique. The final result would tend towards a statement James Potts made in his article, “Is there an international film language?” So, far from there being an international language of cinema, an internationally agreed UN charter of conventions and grammatical rules, we are liable to be presented, quite suddenly, with a new national school of filmmaking, which may be almost wholly untouched by European conventions and will require us to go back to square one in thinking about the principles and language of cinematography.’12 Filmmakers in the Third World are beginning to produce films that try to restructure accepted filmic practices. There is now a distinct possibility of James Potts’ perceptive remarks coming true, and it is in anticipation of the emergence of the ‘new national school of filmmaking . . . untouched by European conventions’ that this paper has been written.

Table 2 A Comparison of Filmic Conventions (These are tendencies, not absolutes) Western Dominant Conventions

Non-Western Use of Conventions Lighting High contrast and low key, mostly Rembrandt Lighting as a convention in Third World films is lighting in drama while comedy uses low contrast less developed with the exception of Cuban and high key lighting. films, whose use of lighting as a language is manifest in and . Camera Angle Mostly governed by eye-level perspective which Deliberate choice of low/high-angle shots for approximates to our natural position in the world. purposes of political or social comment. Use of angle shots primarily for aesthetic look. Low/high-angle shots show dominance and power relations between the oppressed and oppressing classes. Camera Placement Distance varies according to the emotional content There is minimal use of the convention of of the scene. Emotion, e.g. anger, is portrayed in close-up shots. This is perhaps due to lack of close-up. emphasis on psychological realism. Camera Movement Fixed perspective in African films. A moving Mostly a fixed perspective (tripod operation), perspective (handheld camera) in Latin promoting exposition and understanding. Often American films promotes experiential the camera moves to stay with the individual to involvement and dramatic identification. If study character development and psychological the camera moves, it is to contain a scene or state. a sequence as a unit and not in response to individual psychology. Set Design A studio set. Tightens manipulatory controls, A location set. Location shooting relaxes enhances fictional reality. manipulatory controls and enhances documentary reality. Acting A Hollywood convention, actor as icon. Mostly non-actors acting out their real-life roles. Parallel Montage Shows the relations of conflicting characters/forces Cross-cutting serves an ideological purpose and for dramatic and expository narratives purposes, denotes ironical contrast and class distinction. i.e., suspense. Consider the film . Point of View Actors avoid looking directly at the camera. Actors It is not uncommon to see a look directed at the are usually positioned or blocked so that their camera, hence a direct address to the audience. emotional stare is easily observed by the camera. A shift to the conventions of oral narrative is evident. Consider the Algerian film The sum total of what is listed above as technique or elements of the filmmaking process is what expresses ideology. Films that hide the marks of production are associated with the ideology of presenting ‘film as reality’, the film that announces its message as an objective reflection of the way things are, whereas, films which do exhibit the marks of production are associated with the ideology of presenting ‘film as message’. A predominant aspect or point of view in Third World film is film announcing itself as a polemic comment on the way things are in their ‘natural’ reflection. Films, therefore, in their point of view and stylistic choices, are structured to evoke a certain ideology in their production. A consequence of this, quite logically, is their different use of the conventions of time and space in cinema.

346

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Already, certain reactions from film critics may be regarded as a sign of this ‘emergence.’ For example, a general criticism leveled at Third World films is that they are too graphic. This spatial factor is part of a general rhythm of pictorial representation in most Third World societies. It is, therefore, precisely because graphic art creates symbols in space that it enables Third World viewers to relate more easily to their films. In the Chinese case, for example: “The spiritual quality achieved in the supreme Chinese landscape and nature paintings is a feeling of harmony with the universe in which the inner psychic geography of the artist and the outer visual reality transcribed are fused through brush strokes into a new totality that . . . resonates with the viewer.”13 Both Chinese contemporary photographers and cinematographers have attempted to create similar syntax and effects to enhance the people’s appreciation of their art. Again, the most inaccessible Phase III film, the one African film that drops a curtain in front of a Western audience, and at the same time a most popular and influential film in Africa, is Emitai (‘The Angry God’). Shot in social space by the Senegalese filmmaker Sembène, the film explores the spiritual and physical tension in a rural community. To begin with the film carries its viewers into the story without any credits, only for the entire credit to be provided some twenty-five minutes later. Spectators have been known to leave the screening room at this point, conditioned to read the credits as signaling the end of the film. What Sembène has provided before the credits is essentially the preface of the story like an African folktale. In addition, the ending of the film an hour and a half later is anticlimactic and this occurs at the moment the film is truly engaging—the film simply stops—what we hear is the staccato of bullet sounds against a screen gone dark. In this film the filmmaker is forcing us to forget our viewing habits and attend to the film in context instead of the experience, framed as artistic package. A lesson is thus learned; concern should be with the language of the ‘film text’ in its own terms and not with the skeletal structure and chronology of the film. Cinema, since its creation, has beguiled spectators by its manipulation of time—it expands, contracts, is lost and found, fragmented and reassembled. The resultant multiple time-perspectives have conditioned film appreciation as pure entertainment. There is perhaps some justification for this objective in a society whose stabilizing conditions can afford the use of the film medium solely for entertainment. The Third World, on the other hand, is still engaged in a desperate struggle for sociopolitical and economic independence and development and cannot afford to dissipate its meager resources and/or laugh at its present political and historical situation. The Combative Phase, in which the historical determinants of Third World culture occur, provides us with the final horizon of a cinema oriented toward a peaceful coexistence with folk-culture. That oral tradition reasserts itself in a

Teshome H. Gabriel / Towards a Critical Theory

347

new medium is a contribution not only to Third World societies but to the cinematic world at large. Film is a new language to the Third World and its grammar is only recently being charted. Its direction, however, seems to be a discursive use of the medium and an appeal for intellectual appreciation. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea perhaps best exemplifies the new awareness when he says: . . . if we want film to serve something higher, if we want it to fulfill its function more perfectly (aesthetic, social, ethical, and revolutionary), we ought to guarantee that it constitutes a factor in spectators’ development. Film will be more fruitful to the degree that it pushes spectators toward a more profound understanding of reality and, consequently, to the degree that it helps viewers live more actively and incites them to stop being mere spectators in the face of reality. To do this, film ought to appeal not only to emotion and feeling but also to reason and intellect. In this case, both instances ought to exist indissolvably (sic) united, in such a way that they come to provoke, as Pascal said, authentic ‘shudderings and tremblings of the mind’.14

Teshome H. Gabriel (September 24, 1939–June 14, 2010) was an Ethiopian-born American cinema scholar and professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in Los Angeles. Gabriel was considered an expert on cinema and film of Africa and the developing world. A colleague at UCLA, Vinay Lal, noted that Gabriel was “one of the first scholars to theorize in a critical fashion about Third World cinema.”

Notes Originally published as Teshome H. Gabriel, “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films,” Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, vol. 5, no. 1 (2011): 187–203. 1. F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 207–48. See also A. Cabral, Return to the Source (New York: African Information Service, 1973), 42–69. 2. J. DeOnis, “‘Pixote” role proves all too real’, Los Angeles Times, June 5, 1984. 3. J. Espinosa, “For an imperfect cinema,” in Twenty-five Years of the New Latin American Cinema, ed. M. Chanan (London: BFI/Channel 4 Television, 1983), 28–33. 4. R. Gerber, Glauber Rocha, Cinema, Politica e a Esthetica do Inconsciente (Brazil: Editora Vozes, 1982), 34 and passim. 5. G. Rocha, Revolucao do Cinema Novo, (Rio de Janeiro: Alhambra/Embrafilme, 1981), 467. 6. From a film catalogue entitled Films about Africa available in the Midwest (Madison: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin, 1974), 37. 7. Africa on Film and Videotape, 1960–81: A Compendium of Reviews (East Lansing, Michigan: African Studies Center, Michigan State University, 1982), 219. 8. It must be freely acknowledged that the future of art criticism and appreciation

348

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

no doubt lies in the domain of semiotic inquiry. Presently, while its greater virtue lies in the attention it gives to the role of the reader, its greatest weakness is its cultural fixation with Western thought. Third World aesthetics and cultures have been ignored, making it impossible for it to occupy its premier place in a unified human science. Since the works of Levi-Strauss and various essays and a book by Roland Barthes, nothing of substance regarding semiotic inquiry into cultural studies has been offered. For a general reading on the topic, see Edith Kurzweil, The Age of Structuralism: Levi-Strauss to Foucault (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), and R. Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1970). For the various contending factions in the semiotic camp—structuralists, deconstructionists, reader-response critics, theories of intertextuality and narratology—the following books will serve as introductions: R. Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), and J. Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). 9. Recently Western filmmakers, in a bid to revitalize their film world, have made ‘realistic’ forays into Third World themes: Gandhi on India’s struggle for independence, The Year of Living Dangerously on Sukarno’s fall from power, Under Fire on the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, and Circle of Deceit on the Lebanese civil war. The statement by one of the characters in Circle of Deceit, ‘We are defending Western civilization’—is an ironic but true epigram for all the films. Far from being radical or new, therefore, these productions give us no more than Hollywood’s version of the Third World. For an illuminating discussion on this recent fascination with ‘the other’, see John Powers, “Saints and Savages,” American Film (January & February 1984): 38–43. 10. Various sources were consulted, including but not limited to H. Arvon’s 7 Marxist Esthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 71 and passim, and K. Gotrick, Apidan Theatre and Modern Drama (Gothenburg: Graphic Systems AB, 1984), 140–63. For an elaboration of culture in the context of Third World films, see my book Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1982). 11. J.K. Nyerere, Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 91–105.v 12. J. Potts, ‘Is there an international film language?’, Sight and Sound 48, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 74–81. 13. A. Goldsmith, “Picture from China: the style and scope of photography are changing as outside influences mix with traditional values,” Popular Photography (February 1984): 45–50, 146 and 156. 14. T.G. Alea, Dialectica del Espectador, Ciudad de la Habana, Sobre la presente edicion, 1982, p. 21. The first part of the book has been translated by Julia Lesage and appears under the title ‘The viewer’s dialectic’ in Jump Cut 29 (February 1984): 18–21, from which this quotation is taken.

Africans Filming Africa: Questioning Theories of an Authentic African Cinema David Murphy

T

he cinema of sub-Saharan Africa began to emerge in the early 1960s, at the height of the process of decolonization. During the colonial era, cinematic images of Africa had been dominated by countless jungle epics, from the Tarzan series to The African Queen (1951) and the various adaptations of H. Rider Haggard’s deeply racist 1885 novel, King Solomon’s Mines.1 Effectively, Western cinematic representations of Africa helped to reinforce the dominant Hegelian vision of Africa as a continent with no history and no culture.2 Therefore, it came as no surprise that African filmmakers in the 1960s and 1970s set out to counter such demeaning and caricatural representations of Africa. At the second meeting of the federation of African filmmakers (FEPACI) in Algiers in 1975, this commitment to the development of an African cinema that would be radically different to previous cinematic representations of Africa was made explicit: not only should African films represent Africa from an African point of view, but they should also reject commercial, Western film codes.3 However, many African directors have retreated somewhat from such radical calls over the past two decades, worrying far more about the problems of forging a popular African cinema and creating a viable African film industry. The reality of “Africans filming Africa” has not produced a unified, ‘authentic’ African cinema. Rather, it has produced a series of complex and often contradictory visions of the continent. Therefore, it is one of the aims of this article to examine the representation of Africa in a number of African films in order to explore the different assumptions and concerns that emerge from these works. The films to be discussed are Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973, Senegal), Ousmane Sembène’s Xala (1974, Senegal), and Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen (1987, Mali), three radically different works with contrasting visions of Africa: Touki Bouki is experimental and non-realistic; Sembène’s film is deeply political and satirical; and Yeelen employs a mythical structure to explore the role of knowledge and power in Bambara society.

350

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

The second aim of this article is closely linked to the first: namely, to address the critical reception of African films, focusing in particular on the Western critic’s relationship to African cinema. A great number of critics, both from Africa and the West, have argued, with differing degrees of subtlety and from varying standpoints, that the modern Western critic continues to be trapped within the Hegelian worldview that imagines Africa as a primitive and incomprehensible “other.” I am in complete agreement with those who argue that the Western critic must be sensitive to differing cultural values when dealing with African culture. However, to follow theorists such as Christopher Miller in calling for critics to interpret African culture from “an authentically African point of view, interpreting African experience in African terms, perceiving rather than projecting” is another matter entirely.4 In the course of this article, I will argue against all notions of “authenticity,” whatever their philosophical or ideological basis: in my view, there is no “authentic” Africa, nor is there an “authentic” West. This article will also engage with the issues raised by postcolonial theory, examining their relevance to the interpretation not only of African cinema, but contemporary African culture generally. As sub-Saharan Africa was one of the last regions in the world to produce its own cinematic images, it probably should come as no surprise that critics have applied themselves so readily to the manner in which a “true” African cinema should differ from other cinemas. For some Western critics, the emergence of African cinema was the source of a grave disappointment. These critics did not know exactly what this cinema should be like, but they knew they wanted it to be radically different from everything that had come before. As the critic Serge Daney has claimed, a certain type of Western critic had been vaguely expecting African cinema to be a non-intellectual, all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza.5 What room do such views leave for the films of Ousmane Sembène and Med Hondo which sought to produce a radical critique of independent African societies? The articulate and socially committed cinema represented by these directors was simply too “Western” for these critics. However, there were just as many left-wing critics, both African and Western, who readily saw such radical African films as defining the “true” African cinema.6 The mood of revolutionary optimism which accompanied the process of decolonization saw the birth of the theory of what was to become known as “Third Cinema,” which was first developed in South America and which stressed the political function of cinema.7 Those critics who have advocated the theory of a “Third Cinema” have stressed that “authentic” Third World films must abandon the structures and thematic concerns of commercial Western cinema. This ideological

David Murphy / Africans Filming Africa

351

imperative is clearly at the heart of Sembène’s work, and he has often stressed the need to move away from the preoccupations of Western cinema and, more particularly, from its stereotypical images of Africa. However, does this mean that Sembène’s work is “authentically” African? If it is “authentically” African, should we then consider the experimental and dreamlike films of Djibril Diop Mambéty, which are primarily concerned with cultural issues, to be somehow less African? Or what of the mythical structure of Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen? Debates upon the nature of African cinema have too often been trapped within a reductive opposition between Western and African culture. This argument proposes that an “authentic” African film must not only exclude all things European or Western, but must also set itself up in opposition to them. If we follow this argument to its logical conclusion, then all African films are “inauthentic” or “Western” simply because cinema was first invented in the West. However, if we remove this strict opposition between the West and the rest of the world, we get a much better view of the way in which different cultures interact with and influence one another. Cultural influence is not simply a one-way street with the West influencing the rest.8 Africa and the West are not mutually exclusive worlds that possess their own authentic and unchanging identites: they are hybrid entities that influence and modify each other, and this process of exchange applies to cinema (although in the current world order, the West remains the dominant force in this process of hybridization). I would now like to look more closely at the three films under discussion, beginning with two Senegalese films: Sembène’s Xala and Mambéty’s Touki Bouki. These two films provide a very useful point of departure for this discussion, as they are both films that portray postindependence Senegalese society in the early 1970s. However, the two directors represent their country in radically different ways. Xala is a Marxist-inspired attack on the neocolonial state, and it has been hailed as a classic example of “Third Cinema.” Touki Bouki, on the other hand, is a complex and confusing meditation on culture, modernity and alienation, and it was immediately greeted by many critics as Africa’s first genuine avant-garde movie. Xala is essentially the satirical story of El Hadji Abdou Kader Bèye, a businessman who has just acceded to the Dakar Chamber of Commerce with his Senegalese colleagues, replacing their white French counterparts. On this very same day, El Hadji is to marry his third wife. As both a businessman and a respectable Muslim, El Hadji would appear to have reached the top of the social ladder. However, disaster strikes on his

352

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

wedding night, when he is struck down with the xala, the curse of impotence. His impotence eventually leads him to financial ruin and personal humiliation at the hands of a group of beggars who turn out to be responsible for the curse. The political symbolism is plain to see: the neocolonial bourgeoisie are presented as an impotent class whose downfall will be brought about by the destitute and the oppressed of their society. Such a militant approach was lauded by critics in the heyday of Third Cinema in the 1970s.9 However, in the skeptical 1980s and 1990s, poststructuralism, with its distrust of totalizing meta-narratives (and Marxism chief amongst them), had become the dominant critical credo. This has led to Sembène’s films being attacked by critics such as Olivier Barlet and Kenneth Harrow, who characterize them as being based on a series of simplistic oppositions: West versus Africa; urban versus rural, rich versus poor, etc.10 Harrow’s critique of Sembène’s film Camp de Thiaroye is a particularly pernicious example of such criticism.11 Sembène’s insistence on the oppressive nature of the French colonial regime in this film is interpreted by Harrow as an instance of the former’s adherence to the rules of Marxist reasoning, with its alleged dependence on simplistic, binary opposites. Harrow conveniently omits any references to the numerous scenes in which Sembène clearly shows that it is African soldiers who are guarding the camp in which the tirailleurs sénégalais are imprisoned. Equally, citing what he sees as other cases of oppressor/victim relationships in Sembène’s work, Harrow neglects to mention the film Emitaï , in which African colonial troops shoot unarmed African villagers. Although Sembène’s work is highly political, with more than a touch of didacticism, I believe that Barlet and Harrow present a wildly inaccurate picture of his films. It is true that Xala does not hide its socialist agenda, but it also presents an extremely complex vision of Senegalese society, addressing questions of gender as well as social, cultural, economic, and political factors. The film is not a simplistic work of propaganda: it is deeply concerned with the rituals and symbols of Senegalese society, particularly those of the emerging urban bourgeoisie. One of the most effective ways in which the film examines these issues is through the use of costume. In this respect, El Hadji’s third wife, Ngoné, is a particularly useful example. She is introduced to the spectator at the wedding reception, where she is wearing a Westernstyle wedding dress. As she arrives, the camera moves in for a close-up of the wedding cake, on top of which we see a plastic model of a white bride and groom. The incongruity of the whole wedding becomes apparent in this one image. Aspiring to Western middle-class standards involves copying the Western marriage down to the last detail, including

David Murphy / Africans Filming Africa

353

the white wedding dress that has no place in either Islamic or African animistic practices. Ngoné’s real value to El Hadji is shown in the scene where the matchmaker prepares the bride for the consummation of the marriage. This scene makes it clear that Ngoné is merely a sexual object that El Hadji has acquired. As the matchmaker undresses her and gives her advice on how to fulfil her “traditional” duties as a wife, we see a nude photograph of Ngoné on the wall in the background. Shot in profile, showing Ngoné’s bare back and a glimpse of one of her breasts, the photograph acts as a sexual promise of what the marriage is supposed to bring to El Hadji. The eroticized Ngoné of the photograph is the one that he is marrying. As the matchmaker finishes speaking, Ngoné turns around and we see her bare breasts, which are mostly hidden in the “tasteful” photograph. El Hadji is about to realize his wish: the image is about to take flesh (until the xala strikes, that is). This commodification of Ngoné is evident from the extravagances of the wedding reception and the presents which are lavished upon her as part of her dowry. Chief amongst these presents is the car. As El Hadji arrives at Ngoné’s house to consummate the marriage after he has been temporarily cured, he pauses to kiss the ribbon on the car. He believes that he will finally be able to enjoy his new possession but is once again left disappointed, as this time Ngoné is having her period. In Xala, money, sexual politics, Islamic culture and animism are all jumbled together in a complex mix of rituals and symbols. It is not Western influence that Sembène rejects (as Barlet and Harrow suggest) but Western capitalism. As I have already argued, the reductive opposition between Africa and the West merely produces a sterile stand-off between the different cultural influences which are so clearly present in African films, and no more so than in Mambéty’s work. Mambéty borrows heavily from Western experimental films in Touki Bouki, but in the process he creates something radically different, adapting such models to his own culture. In fact, Touki Bouki can be read as an exploration of the cultural encounter between the West and Africa. The film tells the tale of a young Senegalese couple, Mory and Anta, who long to escape from their home town of Dakar to the promised land of France, where they hope to find the money that will allow them to return rich and famous to their homeland. As we see in the opening sequence of the film, Mambéty uses a complex array of imagery to reflect this contradictory pull between France and Africa. He deliberately plays around with the standard binary opposition between Africa and the West. In a static, medium-distance shot, we see a small boy riding on an ox’s back, slowly advancing across the open savannah towards the camera. On the soundtrack, we hear what seems to

354

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

be a “traditional” African tune, played on a wind instrument. The spectator is led to expect a tale of rural Africa, perhaps even a tale of a simple, African past. However, as boy and beast move into the foreground, the sound of an engine revving up begins to vie with and eventually to dominate the sound of the music. The image then cuts to a shot of Mory, the male hero of the story, riding along on his motorbike. Filmed from the position of a pillion passenger over Mory’s shoulder, the shot conveys a sense of speed and exhilaration far removed from the peace and calm of the preceding rural imagery. Time and location are fragmented as the spectator is shaken out of his/her original expectations and thrust into a tale of modern Africa, complete with motorbikes, motorways, and machinery. Despite the sudden intrusion of modern, technological artifacts, a visual link to the preceding rural scene remains in the shape of an ox’s skull attached to the front of Mory’s motorbike. In fact, the horns of the skull act as a sort of frame through which we observe the rapidly passing urban landscape. Essentially, Mambéty provides us with a vision of an Africa in which the “modern,” technological world is to be found side by side with the “traditional,” rural world. As one of the characters in the film puts it, Mory is unsure whether he is driving an ox or a motorbike. He is the hybrid product of two vastly different cultures. The meeting of Africa and the West has created a new reality, sometimes exciting and dynamic, sometimes menacing and destructive. In many ways, Mambéty’s cinema itself stands as an example of the diversity and richness of this new culture, while also warning of its dangers. Mambéty rejects the openly political and social considerations of many African filmmakers of the 1970s, including Sembène. Indeed, in one highly significant scene early in the film, Mory is attacked by a group of young, left wing intellectuals who despise him for his apolitical, amoral lifestyle. This scene can be read as Mambéty thumbing his nose at those who would have him present a political agenda in his films. Equally, the figure of the postman who wanders aimlessly through the film appears to be a sideswipe at the figure of the postman in Sembène’s film Mandabi, who is portrayed as someone who “delivers” hope in the form of the film’s political message of social solidarity. These anti-political elements do not mean that Mambéty’s films are not political, simply that he sees the world primarily in terms of culture rather than politics. For the Western spectator, the narratives of Xala and Touki Bouki reveal certain recognizable elements. Xala works broadly within a social realist framework, using a number of Brechtian symbolic devices. One can also readily identify the influence of a number of experimental Western movies on Touki Bouki: firstly, one could mention Easy Rider

David Murphy / Africans Filming Africa

355

(dir. Dennis Hopper, 1969, United States) and its psychedelic tale of the adventures of two drug-fuelled bikers; we might also think of Nicholas Roeg’s films, especially Performance, (1970, United Kingdom), and their blurring of identity, location, gender, and time. A number of African critics have reacted angrily to the cataloguing of Western influences in African cinema. In fact, many critics have convincingly argued that African cinema has borrowed heavily from the oral tradition.12 For example, both Xala and Touki Bouki reproduce elements of traditional “trickster” tales.13 The archetypal “trickster” narratives are those concerning Leuk-le-lièvre, the African forefather of the “Brer Rabbit” character in the tales of the American South. Indeed, the title Touki Bouki, which means “the hyena’s voyage,” evokes another staple character of the “trickster” tale, the hyena; in West African folk tradition, the hyena, regarded as a cunning, deceitful animal that cannot be trusted, plays the role often attributed to the fox in the West. As in these traditional “trickster” tales, the protagonists in both films are set a number of challenges with a prize waiting at the end. In Touki Bouki, Mory and Anta deceive a number of hapless victims only to see the prize of their glorious journey to France ruined by Mory’s last-minute change of heart. In Xala, El Hadji becomes the hapless victim, rather than the perpetrator, of deceit and cunning as he is set a number of tasks to overcome his impotence. A man who has callously deceived people in the past, El Hadji is forced to meet the fate that he has doled out to others. However, the exploration of cinematic links to orality often overlooks the fact that African cinema, while providing a certain continuity with elements of the oral tradition, also constitutes a major rupture with that tradition. Cinema literally introduces a different way of seeing and representing the world to the stories of the griot, the guardian of the spoken word in Africa: a film, with its particular emphasis on spatial and temporal representation, introduces radically different questions to the oral performances of a griot. The oral tradition informs the work of African directors such as Sembène, Mambéty and Cissé, but it cannot be cited as the sole determining factor in the production of African cinematic representations. If elements of orality are used in African films, they must be adapted to the expressive potential of the cinema as a medium. Equally, it is wrong to assume that African cinema audiences can only understand films that work within the structures of their own oral tradition. For generations now, Africans have been viewing Kung Fu movies and Indian melodramas, although they often respond to these films as though attending an oral performance (jumping up and down, clapping, imitating the actors). The relationship between the paying cinema spectator and a film, and the relationship between listener and storyteller, are vastly different. For example, films cannot engage in a dialogue with members of the

356

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

audience as happens in a traditional oral performance. Above all, it should not be forgotten that films are commerical enterprises. One must pay to enter the cinema: it is not a “traditional” communal gathering. The examination of the final film under discussion here, Yeelen (1987), made by the Malian director, Souleymane Cissé, will focus on critical reactions rather than detailed analysis of the film itself. Cissé had begun his career with social realist films in the mode of Sembène, but Yeelen marked a major departure with its exploration of mythology and the supernatural in a rural African society. The first African film to win a prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and also a popular success in Europe, it has been the focus of intense critical debate. Some critics see Yeelen as the first genuine example of a truly African film both in terms of its style and content, while others have denounced it for reproducing the anthropological gaze and pandering to exotic Western stereotypes of Africa.14 However, critics have managed to agree on one point at least: namely, that the film is very complex, and deeply embedded in the culture of the Bambara people of the Western Sudan, particularly the rituals of the secret society of the Komo. The film takes place at an unspecified moment in the precolonial era, and it tells the story of Nianankoro, son of one of the elders of the Komo. Nianankoro, an adept of the society, is impatient at having to wait to learn the secrets of the Komo, so he steals one of the sacred fetishes and flees his homeland. However, he is eventually tracked down by his father, and in the film’s final showdown, both father and son are killed. Despite the mythical trappings of the story, Cissé has consistently argued that Yeelen is, in fact, his most politicized work, and not simply an escape into a glorified African past. Far from pandering to the exotic fantasies of the West, the film attempts to explore a “modernist” vision of Bambara culture, which stresses the power of so-called traditional cultures to modify and develop rather than act as endless repetitions of themselves. The film criticizes the abuse of power and knowledge by the elders of the Komo, and it presents the ultimate act of transgression in revealing their supernatural power both to Nianankoro and to the cinema spectator. Much has been written about Cissé’s meticulous recreation of the rituals of the Komo, particularly in the long scene in which we see the elders of the Komo venting their anger against Nianankoro.15 However, is it absolutely necessary to understand the intricacies of the Komo in order to understand the film’s discussion of the wresting of power and knowledge from what is presented as an oppressive and corrupt elite? Certain African critics have lambasted their Western counterparts for their “misreadings” of Yeelen, which they see as the result of their ignorance of Bambara culture.16 It is indeed salutary that Western critics, with our tendency to universalize our own experience, should be reminded of the cultural specificity of African cultural artifacts.

David Murphy / Africans Filming Africa

357

However, speaking as a Western critic, I feel that I am in good company in not understanding the full complexities of the Komo. For a start, Africans other than Bambaras might be a bit nonplussed at certain points in the film. In fact, even Bambaras cannot be expected to understand all of the film’s many— layered symbols, for the simple reason that only a select few are supposed to know all seven levels of the Komo. In this context, one simply cannot posit an accurate and “authentic” African interpretation of the film against which one can oppose a simplistic, Western version. In fact, the film provides sufficient information within its narrative structure for viewers to comprehend the most important elements of the story. For example, in the scene featuring the rituals of the Komo, the anger of the elders and their fear at the potential loss of their privileged position is clear to the average, film-literate spectator. The film may imitate the complex structures of Bambara mythology, but its cinematic narrative retains more than enough “legibility” as a film for the uninitiated cinema spectator to interpret the basic story. It is not my purpose here to encourage “universalist” readings of African films. On the contrary, I am in favour of using a cultural materialist framework that attempts to situate a film within its specific cultural context, and Western critics should indeed investigate the structures of Bambara society when examining Yeelen. However, I feel it is vital to reject the notion that only Africans can “accurately” interpret African texts. The assumption on the part of Christopher Miller (quoted at the beginning of this article), that there is an authentic African point of view to which the Western critic should vainly aspire, is vitally flawed. While one cannot but accept that an African critic may very well have a different set of assumptions from the Western critic, there is absolutely no means of establishing the existence of a single, unified African view on African issues. The Western critic will always display some degree of “ethnocentrism,” and this must be taken into account when appraising his/her work, but it should in no way be used to disqualify such work. In fact, as Mikhail Bakhtin has argued, an outsider’s view of a culture can be deeply enriching for both parties: Creative understanding does not renounce itself, its own place and time, its own culture; and it forgets nothing. In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his/her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. In the realm of culture, outsideness is a most powerful factor in understanding … We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did not raise for itself; we seek answers to our own questions in it; and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us its new aspects and new semantic depths. Without one’s own questions one cannot creatively understand anything other or foreign.17

358

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Attempts to understand “others” must be accompanied by a recognition of our own cultural specificity. Each of the three films discussed in this article presents a different cinematic and ideological vision of Africa. Therefore, what conclusions can we draw about the category of “African cinema”? The filmmaker and critic James Potts has noted the tendency within Africa and the West to make sweeping generalizations about the nature of “Black” or “African cinema.” Not only do such arguments neglect the vast cultural diversity of the African continent, but they also assume that it is possible to create radically different film “languages.” Having worked as a technical adviser on film projects in Ethiopia and Kenya over a five-year period, Potts was able to experience the problems of filmmaking in Africa firsthand. This leads him to argue that the technical limitations within which African filmmakers are forced to work can be shown to impose an aesthetic on a film far more readily than do the director’s ethnic origins. Essentially, Potts believes that we do not yet have the theoretical basis to talk about national or ethnic film styles. Instead, he proposes an approach that attempts to negotiate the relationship between the “universal” and the “local” aspects of filmmaking: I still prefer to think that film-making is a form of universal speech—not so much a “Visual Esperanto” as a developing visual language with a rich variety of dialects and idiolects which contain both alien and indigenous elements. These elements must be studied more closely and made more explicit if genuine intercultural communication is to take place.18

I believe that this approach allows us to develop a more complex vision of African cinema, viewing it in terms of its ability to adapt and modify established film codes from around the world. Therefore, the category of African cinema should be used descriptively rather than prescriptively: one cannot force the cinema of an entire continent to adhere to some preordained programme. This is even more true when one attempts to create intercontinental categories: for example, as was argued above, most theorists of “Third Cinema” sought to characterize the cinematic production of the entire Third World, not just Africa, as revolutionary and fundamentally opposed to Western hegemony, both in terms of style and content, a characterization that simply did not reflect reality (and which also grossly oversimplified the nature of “Western” cinema).19 I believe that the category of the postcolonial offers a better framework within which to examine the cinematic production of those countries that were formerly colonies of the Western imperial powers. As with all categories and schools, critics

David Murphy / Africans Filming Africa

359

are not in complete agreement as to the definition of “postcolonialism.” In fact, one cannot speak of post-colonialism as a single entity, as it comprises critics working from vastly different critical perspectives, from Marxists to feminists to postcolonialism. Essentially, postcolonialism applies these different approaches in an exploration of the links between cultures that have experienced colonization by one of the Western powers. However, as many critics have pointed out, postcolonialism runs the danger of viewing a nation’s entire history through the prism of the colonial encounter, tying the former colonizer and the former colonized together in a permanent if reluctant embrace. This has led a number of critics to reject postcolonial theory, claiming that it is distinctly Eurocentric in its approach, precisely because of its privileging of the colonial era. Aijaz Ahmad argues this case in the following quotation: In periodizing our history in the triadic terms of precolonial, colonial and postcolonial, the conceptual apparatus of “postcolonial criticism” privileges as primary the role of colonialism as the principle of structuration in that history, so that all that came before colonialism becomes its own prehistory and whatever comes after can only be lived as infinite aftermath. That may well be how it appears to those who look at that history from the outside—to those, in other words, who look at the former colonies in Asia and Africa from inside the advanced capitalist countries—but not to those who live inside that history.20

Essentially, Ahmad accuses “postcolonial theory” of maintaining the colonial paradigm in which Africa (and Asia) are viewed as the object of Western actions rather than as active participants in the making of their own history. As a Marxist, Ahmad believes that it is the fact of “capitalist modernity” and its implications for African and Asian societies that links their literatures and cultures together. While recognizing the value and power of “postcolonialism” as a category, he rightly warns that when applied too loosely it becomes mere jargon. However, it is a gross simplification to say that all postcolonial theory is merely obsessed with the relationship between Africa and its former colonial masters. In fact, postcolonial theory has been greatly effective in forging links across the “peripheral,” formerly colonized world, bypassing the “centers” of Western power altogether. This forging of links along the periphery highlights the structures of power in the modern world.21 Such a move is particularly welcome in African cultural studies: it is all too common for African films and novels from different ends of the continent to be thrown together on the basis that they express some form of common, authentic African identity. In contrast, post-colonialism

360

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

explores links between African cultures in the light of their shared history of colonial exploitation and their rebellion against this oppression (without assuming that this shared experience is identical in every African state). The three African films discussed in this article could all be fruitfully analyzed within a postcolonial critical framework that seeks to explore cultural and political forces in a world that remains dominated by Western capital: the examination of neocolonial Africa in Xala and Touki Bouki is plain to see, but Yeelen, with its desire to present an African vision of modernity, can equally be argued to be challenging Western perceptions of knowledge in Africa. As Homi K. Bhabha has argued: “Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order.”22 I believe that this fact alone makes the postcolonial an extremely useful and strategic critical term in the analysis of contemporary African culture. David Murphy is Professor of French and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Strathclyde (UK). He has published several books on African cinema, including: Sembene: Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction (James Currey, 2000); Postcolonial African Cinema (Manchester UP, 2007); and Africa’s Lost Classics (Legenda, 2014).

Notes Originally published as David Murphy, “Africans Filming Africa: Questioning Theories of an Authentic African Cinema,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (Dec. 2000): 239–249. 1. There have been three Hollywood versions of Haggard’s 1885 novel (1937, 1950, 1987); Henry Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines. 1885, ed. Gerald Monsman (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002); and there have been countless versions of the Tarzan story from the 1920s to the 1980s. See Kenneth M. Cameron, Africa on Film: Beyond Black and White (Continuum International Publishing Group, 1994). 2. Anthropological films provide the other main source of cinematic representations of Africa. The problematic relationship between colonialism and the anthropological project in Africa (with many colonial administrators also working as anthropologists) has been well documented. Jean Copans, Anthropologie Et Impérialisme: Textes (Paris: F. Maspero, 1975). Anthropological films have been criticized for presenting an image of Africa as primitive and ahistorical. Essentially, they are argued to be “external” representations of Africa. Even the work of the French filmmaker Jean Rouch, which seeks to problematize this anthropological gaze, has been accused of producing films in which Africans remain objects of Western discourse rather than autonomous subjects. 3. The full text of the Algiers charter on African cinema is to be found in Imruh

David Murphy / Africans Filming Africa

361

Bakari and Mbye B. Cham, eds. African experiences of cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 27–30. 4. Christopher Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 1. 5. Serge Daney, Ceddo (O. Sembene) in Cahiers du cinema 304 (1975): 51–53. 6. The French journalist Jean-Louis Bory championed “radical” African films in his column in the Nouvel Observateur (Bory 1968). One of the most influential works on the theory is Teshome Habte Gabriel, Third cinema in the third world: The aesthetics of liberation (No. 21. Umi Research Pr, 1982). 7. For an example of Third Cinema theory, see Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” in Afterimage 3 (1971): 16–35. The article was originally published in Spanish in 1969. 8. A fascinating example of the circulation of cultural influences can be found in the work of the late Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa. His early films were heavily influenced by American westerns. Then, as Kurosawa became an established figure in world cinema, his films in turn became models for American directors to copy. African cinema has not yet reached a prominent cultural position within the Western world (not even on the arthouse circuit) that would allow it to influence a generation of aspiring Western filmmakers. However, in other cultural spheres, African cultural influence is clearly visible. For example, African/black music is recognized as a major influence on the development of Western popular music since the 1950s. 9. Teshome H. Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World: the Aesthetics of Liberation (London: Bowker, 1982), 77–86. 10. Throughout his book, Barlet continually refers to Sembène as a filmmaker who rejects the influence of the West in his films. See Barlet, Les Cinémas d’Afrique noire: le regard en question (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996). 11. Kenneth Harrow, “Camp de Thiaroye: who’s that hiding in those tanks and how come we can’t see their faces?” Iris: A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound 18 (1995): 147–152. 12. See Barlet, Les cinémas d’Afrique noire; Manthia Diawara, “Popular Culture and Oral Traditions in African Film,” in African Experiences of Cinema, ed. Imruh Bakari and Mbye Cham (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 209–218. 13. For a discussion of orality in relation to Sembène’s work, including analysis of ‘trickster’ narratives, see Mbye Cham, “Ousmane Sembene and the Aesthetics of Oral African Traditions,” in Africana Journal 13 (1–4; 1982): 24–40. 14. Manthia Diawara praises Yeelen for creating an African cinema which “obeys the mise-en-scène of the oral tradition.” Diawara, African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 164. Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike also praises the film’s inventiveness in imitating the structures of orality, but he is wary of the film’s “universalism,” which is seen to be the result of the targeting of “foreign” (i.e. Western) audiences. See Ukadike, Black African Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 254–262. 15. For example, see Philip Gentile’s examination of the film’s depiction of the rituals of the Komo. Gentile, “In the midst of secrets: Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen,” in Iris: A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound 18 (1995): 125–135. 16. For instance, see the scathing comments made by Nixon K. Kariithi about Western “misreadings” of Yeelen and other African films. Kariithi, “Misreading culture

362

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

and tradition: Western critical appreciation of African films,” in Africa and the Centenary of Cinema / L’Afrique et le centenaire du cinema, ed. Gaston Kaboré (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1995), 166–187. 17. Quoted in Paul Willemen, “The Third Cinema question: notes and reflections,” in Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (London: British Film Institute, 1989): 1–29. 18. James Potts, “Is there an international film language?” in Sight and Sound 48 no. 2 (1979): 81. 19. In his excellent introduction to Questions of Third Cinema, Paul Willemen expresses similar doubts about the homogenous and over-simplified picture of Third World Cinema that was emerging from the work of critics such as Teshome Gabriel. See Willemen, “The Third Cinema question,” 15–17. 20. Emphasis mine. Aijaz Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,” in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Padmini Mongia (London: Arnold Press, 1996), 280–281. 21. The conference at which this article was first presented brought together critics working on cinema from different parts of the world (Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the Caribbean). Remaining attentive to cultural specificities, speakers also sought to explore common ideas in each of these cinemas: the problematic relationship with the former colonizer, questioning of “national” and “ethnic” identities, the “postcolonial” cinema of recent years with its focus on individual rather than group identity. 22. Homi Bhabha, “The postcolonial and the postmodern: the question of agency,” in his The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 171.

Figure 1. Ink drawing by artist Carole Ouedraogo.

Figure 2. Ink drawing by artist Carole Ouedraogo.

Figure 3. Ink drawing by artist Carole Ouedraogo.

Figure 4. Ink drawing by artist Carole Ouedraogo.

Figure 5. Ink drawing by artist Carole Ouedraogo.

Figure 6. Ink drawing by artist Carole Ouedraogo.

Tradition/Modernity and the Discourse of African Cinema Jude Akudinobi

Q

uestions of identity and culture prevalent in contemporary African cinema are often mistaken as, essentially, a contest between “tradition” and “modernity.” This is perhaps a consequence of attempts to devise a critical paradigm that would “explain” the complexities of contemporary African social experience and cinematic practice. However, the realities of contemporary African experience cannot be productively assessed without the revision or abandonment of the tradition/modernity schema. Interestingly, this schema has gained currency in academic and popular “understandings” of contemporary African cinema. Witness a few examples: for Manthia Diawara, it is the basis of social realist narratives; for Sheila Petty, it is a structuring principle; for Lizbeth Malkmus and Roy Armes, it is a conceptual space.1 The restrictive nature of the modernity/tradition schema is clearly illustrated by the assertion that: “In Africa, modernity and tradition seem so incompatible more than anywhere else.”2 This statement marks Africa as aberrant and recalcitrant, and is deeply embedded in racist mythologies (in so far as it suggests that there is something intrinsically wrong or somehow problematic about African peoples/cultures). Equally important, the schema promotes the consignment of African institutions to a primordial cultural space and the bifurcation of very complex social experiences/expressions.

Labyrinths Despite the developments that have occurred in African arts, popular culture, and cinema recently—cultural syncretism and a diversification of themes, styles, and genres—they must still contend with the fact that “western dichotomies of aesthetics and function, tradition and modernity have not facilitated understanding of indigenous concepts” and “realities.”3

370

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Ideas of “modernity’’ in dominant discourse are implicitly synonymous with western civilization. But, one “cannot easily separate modernity and tradition, from some specific tradition and some specific modernity . . . The modern comes to the traditional society as a particular culture with its own traditions.”4 This specificity is especially important, since the structural opposition of the tradition/modernity formulation does not pit one tradition against another, but polarizes (African) tradition against an essentialist notion of modernity. As has been observed by A. E. Afigbo: In the rival mythologies of European imperialism and colonial nationalism, change was one of the many vital innovations which European rule introduced into what is usually described as traditional societies. If imperial apologists were to compile a dictionary of their own, in it the word change, as applied to colonial peoples, would be defined approvingly as progress, a dramatic and beneficial linear transition from a static and unproductive traditional culture to a dynamic and limitless modernism.5

The reigning scenario explicitly assigns “tradition” different roles and meanings in the West and Africa. In the West, “tradition” is endowed with a curatorial function—to the extent that it preserves a coherent, albeit idealized, notion of self and continuity; especially, since the “term tradition belongs to lexical fields that are emotionally charged and evaluative.”6 It should, also, be noted that at the most elementary level, the opposite of “modern” is “ancient,” not “tradition”; but positing African traditions as opposite of modernity recasts the terms of reference and allows for the surreptitious projection of a narcissistic western(ized) selfi-mage. As has been noted by Corinne Kratz, “notions of tradition are invariably implicated in the politics of identity, and domains central to representations of tradition bear on those politics.”7

Roots The cinematic critique of “modernity” has a literary antecedent in the works of African novelists whose books were instrumental to the collapse of the mystique of colonial authority. In these works, the disruption of colonial authority, and especially its fixed sense of stability, secured a niche for the construction of an unfettered Africanness. These works also raised questions about the position of Africans within the colonial order (since the latter’s discourse of progress, ventriloquially, is a discourse of power). Some examples include Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Weep not Child, Ousmane Sembène’s God’s Bits of Wood, Ferdinand Oyono’s The Old Man and the Medal, and Mongo Beti’s The Poor Christ of Bomba. Close parallels to these examples abound in plays

Jude Akudinobi / Tradition/Modernity

371

and poems. Consider, for example, the opening lines of Dennis Chukwude Osadebay’s poem, Young Africa’s Plea: “Don’t preserve my customs / As some fine curios / To suit some white historian’s tastes.”8 This call for cultural autonomy attacks the interpretive system through which African traditions are fossilized and exoticized; specifically, the institutional authority of the historian is inverted since “in the case of African history, colonial historiography denied African societies their past so as to legitimize the process of ‘colonial enlightenment.’“9 Taken together, the literature introduced here demonstrates an unapologetic political consciousness “born in a hostile milieu” engendered by “denigration and historical catalepsy.’’10 Rather than being intimidated by their circumstances, these writers continued to redefine the status of Africans within the colonial “realities” and their post-colonial residues. Works like Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Chinua Achebe’s The Anthills of the Savannah, to name a few, are apt examples of this redefinition. As has been previously stated, the tradition/modernity schema is predicated on the idea of an eternal/unchanging Africa(n). Consequently, representations of African traditions are related adversely to change and the associative ideals of progress. But as has been pointed out by Tanure Ojaide—with examples from Things Fall Apart and Death and the King’s Horseman—African cultural life contains intrinsic and complex mechanisms for regeneration and did not need gratuitous catalytic inoculations into its body politic.11 As Diana Akers Rhoads observes about Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: What is remarkable about his Igbos is the degree to which they achieved the foundations of what most people seek today—democratic institutions, tolerance of other cultures, a balance of male and female principles, capacity to change for the better or to meet new circumstances, a means of redistributing wealth, viable system of morality, support for industriousness, an effective system of justice, striking and memorable poetry and art.12

Be that as it may, Terence Ranger’s point about the realities of precolonial Africa adds an important dimension to this issue. According to him: These societies had certainly valued custom and continuity but custom was loosely defined and infinitely flexible. Custom helped to maintain a sense of identity but it also allowed for an adaptation so spontaneous and natural that it was often unperceived [emphasis mine].13

Within these parameters, it is not difficult to see that (1) the demands of Euro-modernity include overhauling African cultural systems (and relegation of more diffuse aspects of cultural syncretism); (2) the indices of

372

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

cultural dynamism are evident in African cultural systems, but their acknowledgement goes against the structures through which the observing (western) self is undeservedly superordinated. Further, as Gusfield points out, “the all too common practice of pitting tradition and modernity against each other as paired opposites tends to overlook [emphasis mine] the mixtures and blends which reality displays.”14 It may be useful then, at this point, to point out a few instances of cultural syncretism in the films under examination. In Kasarmu Ce (dir. Saddik Balewa, 1991), there is mention of an upcoming local government election—an important event reflecting the people’s contemporary political realities. The unique painting on the tailboard of Alhaji Musa’s Mercedes truck shows a cowboy—an icon of western films—adopted and transformed into a unique African popular expression. Also, when Alhaji Musa plots to create artificial scarcity of fertilizer, hinting that the price would rise in two days, the villagers protest, saying that was what they heard from the radio. Even though a transistor radio initiates Kuru’s cultural and professional displacement in La Vie est Belle / Life is Rosy (dir. Mwezé Ngangura, 1987, Democratic Republic of the Congo), it also fosters his resolve to “play electric music.” Thus, at the end of the film, he adopts western musical instruments but transforms his musical impulses in a unique, patently “modern” non-western expression. Furthermore, in Zan Boko (dir. Gaston Kaboré, 1988, Burkina Faso) that the dispossessed farmer’s son (Tibo) fashions a car (a modern contraption) rather than a “traditions” toy, is metaphoric of the adaptive capacity of African cultures. Besides, a crucial point in the film is that there are not enough classrooms to absorb the overflowing demand for an ostensibly western education. Above all, the moral crusader in the film, Yabre, is not a town-crier but a “modern” TV/newspaper journalist. Similarly, in Sango Malo (dir. Bassek Ba Kobhio, 1990, Cameroon), the reformist crusader, Malo Malo Bernard, is a western trained schoolteacher who dons blue jeans and leather jackets, accoutrements of western pop culture, but nonetheless espouses the educational equivalent of liberation theology. Moreover, the centrality to community life of Honba’s shop attests to certain cultural modulations. In Quartier Mozart (dir. Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 1992, Cameroon), the witch Maman Thekla uses a taxi as a means of transportation (rather than the broom prevalent in western folklore or its indigenous variant). Atango (also called Young Ladies Candy) is a Sorbonne graduate and aspiring fashion designer. Crucially, the film’s locale—a working class neighborhood—is a feature of “modern” capitalist class distinctions. To be sure, the cinematic discourse on postcolonial identity is less premised on the reconstruction of a historical past, than it is interested in examining the present. It rests on the view that new frames of reference—terms, categories, and premises—are necessary to revise the circumscriptions by means of which Africa is positioned in the dominant discourse on modernity. The idea

Jude Akudinobi / Tradition/Modernity

373

of modernity is thus viewed not through idealized and universalist tenets, but in terms of its impact on African cultures and identity. This shift is remarkable because prior to it, African realities had been (1) interpreted for the African through the bogus logic of colonial authority; (2) obfuscated and rendered meaningless, except to the extent that they enhance the desirability of western values; or (3) otherwise consigned to the domain of absurdity. In the films under consideration, we find incidents of “magic,” “witchcraft,” and “divination.” In dominant discourse these incidents are often consigned to the realm of the absurd, since they ostensibly negate western rationality, logic, and accepted “scientific” modes of inquiry. But as Renaat Devisch notes: Traditional divination cannot be said to be pre-scientific any more than any other authentic symbolic practice, nor can it be said to be contrary to a rational outlook: it is qualitatively different.15

Fascination with the supernatural is not unique to Africans, as any observer of western popular culture would find. In fact, this fascination has roots in early Christianity: The medieval church acted as repository of magical power which it dispensed to the faithful to help them cope with a wide range of daily activities and secular problems . . . Religious charms, talismans and amulets were worn as prophylactic agents against evil and bad luck. Such devise were essential props of medieval superstition, symbolically expressing the potency of religious magic mediated by the church.16

There is little doubt some of these elements exist in “modern” Christian beliefs and practices. Besides, commodification of these practices in the forms of psychics, fortune-tellers, astrologists and the like provide an enormous repertoire of daily western life. The point here is not to argue for the validity or credibility of such beliefs—since as will be shown, they are treated ambivalently by the filmmakers—but to examine whether their supportive grids can offer any understanding of how the African constructs notions of self and world. Saddik Balewa’s Kasarmu Ce establishes the transgression of cosmic and cultural harmony as the predatorial Alhaji Musa Treda’s undoing. Appropriately, Musa Treda dies a rather mysterious death (framed in a context beyond empirical reality and logic). Furthermore, when a troubled Sani urges the diviner, Hadi, “to look into the sands” for a clue to his grandfather’s death, it is waved off and countered with a parable about thievery that provides the moral imperative of the film. Ordinarily:

374

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

People look into divination to uncover the hidden, to gain insight into occurrences, which go counter to the even tenor of life and the normal sense of events, so as to enable remedial measures to be taken or to restore peace of mind. Such occurrences include dangers and needs outside technical control, disasters, exceptional losses, misfortune, mysterious illness and death, insoluble conflict.17

Thus, Mr. Nganga, the diviner in La Vie est Belle, is at the core of the film’s narrative dynamics. We find a somnambulate Kuru, apparently under a spell during a session Mr. Nganga holds for Kuru’s love interest Kabibi. The spell is, however, broken rather too easily and comically when the wife of Kuru’s employer orders him back to work. Mr. Nganga also divines correctly that Kuru is a houseboy, not the free-spending rich man Kabibi had thought. Furthermore, Kabibi’s mysterious illness following Kuru’s attempted suicide, and her subsequent cure at the hand of Mr. Nganga, rather confirms the idea that in African systems of belief: Illness is not conceived of as a consequence of pathological changes; rather, the supernatural element is brought into a causal relationship with health and ill-health.18

This holistic approach restores her to health and love. In Quartier Mozart, the inexplicable explosion of a wine glass at inner is attributed to witchcraft. Subsequently, Mad Dog, the imperious head of the household, hires a priest to exorcise the house—an action which, arguably, manifests his belief about the existence and efficacy of witchcraft. Interestingly, a recent report states that the persecution of witches in Cameroon has abated so much that “now some of them enjoy a degree of official recognition, since judges have no alternative but to rely on their version and expertise which has been established as conclusive proof.”19 A witch, Maman Thekla, is also at the center of Quartier Mozart’s narrative. Her transformation of a schoolgirl, Queen of the Hood, and of herself into a man (Panka) who causes men’s genitals to vanish, initiates an exploration of gender politics. The film’s construction of witchcraft as an assault on masculinity, incidentally, has its equivalent in the early Christian church: Interestingly, the church’s main handbook of witchcraft Malleus Malleficarum (literally—the hammer of the witches) was heavily concerned with such masculinity problems as castration, bedeviled intercourse, vanishing penises and impotence—neurotic fears which modern psychologists would correlate with increased sexual repression.20

Jude Akudinobi / Tradition/Modernity

375

While the above examples do not necessarily establish a universalist understanding of witchcraft, it could at least be said that its significance in the film points out certain phenomena through which cultures mediate social order. In Zan Boko, the insistence on a water-ritual (to palliate labor pangs) is significant not just because the birth and the child are symbolic of the culture’s regenerative capacity; fundamentally, it positions the film within a system of beliefs on which other realities interact with everyday realities.

Bridges It is important to note that contemporary African cinematic expressions are not much concerned with policing cultural identities and formulations. Rather than construct a monolithic persona anathematic to “modernity,” these works propose critical analysis of self and world. Mama Dingari, the citified landlady in La Vie est Belle, who is given to exploitation, at one point accuses Mr. Nvouandu, Kabibi’s rich suitor, of being a “fetisher”— that is, an aficionado of “dark” powers—and bars him from setting foot in her compound and even suggests that Kabibi go to the village for “exorcism.” Interestingly, her repugnance is not so much based on altruistic principles; rather, it stems from the belief that his alleged proclivity might bring her adverse uneasiness. In Quartier Mozart Lady Di is admired as a trendsetter; Michael Jackson is dismissed as “too effeminate,” to the preference of Denzel Washington, who is appraised as a “real man fine as wine.” We also hear about Caroline of Monaco’s menstrual cycle and how (some) AfricanAmericans—tinted with racist propaganda and embroiled in a similarly complex identificatory milieu—reflect a negative view of Africans: “They think we are savages.” In La Vie est Belle we also hear the question, “Playing Rambo, eh?”—an obvious reference to Sylvester Stallone’s hyper-masculinist screen persona. In Zan Boko, a TV program, “The Golden Dream,” promises to take viewers to “the magnificent Riviera.” These examples seem to imply that the bulk of African films are more interested in opening up areas for understanding, negotiation, and interpretation of their contemporary predicament. Further examples abound. In Sango Malo, a group of villagers listen, with rapt attention, to the airline steward’s “cosmopolitan” pontifications: “If you like noise, hamburgers and pop-music go to the States . . . But I prefer Paris— wine and cheese.” And when asked if he meant palm-wine, an indigenous drink of choice, he replies, “No. Good table wine.” A similar situation arises in Zan Boko where a local delicacy, Soumbala, is deemed unhygienic by Tinga’s rich neighbor, Mr. Tougouri, who instigates its prohibition by registering his distaste with health officials. Taken together, the two examples signal the

376

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

rejection of a cultural heritage of which certain dietary preferences are local extensions. Articulating these dietary preferences around absolute good/ bad categories represents the character’s cultural destabilization or alienation. Furthermore, it illustrates the limitations that “modernity”—here, the acquisition of “refined” tastes—places on African identity. Significantly then, these films dramatize the dilemma of self-representation. In Sango Malo, Malo Malo Bernard’s innovative curriculum subverts residual colonial education but, ironically, he is undone by his contempt for certain “traditions”—especially his decision to cultivate a sacred forest, the nexus between the ancestors and the living.21 Land is also imbued with a historical and spiritual significance in Zan Boko (which means, “The Place Where the Placenta Is Buried’’).22 In the film, the encroachment of the city on a village is equated with social atrophy. For the Mossi, land is “imbued” with a meaning that is at once religious, cultural, historic, and emotional but also signifies a real relation with place.23 The issue here, therefore, is about estrangement from home, hearth, and heritage. In this vein, Saddik Balewa’s points about the metaphoric/nationalistic inflections of his film’s title Kasarmu Ce (“This Land is Ours”) deserves note.24 Thus, Alhaji Malik, who covets a village’s land because of its rich mineral deposits lives in opulence— peacocks, Mercedes-Benz, water fountain—and is constituted as a figure of disruption just like Mad Dog in Quartier Mozart. But in the case of Mad Dog, privilege establishes a tyrannical repertoire characterized by fantasies of masculinity. Ironically, Mad Dog recruits Panka (a man inhabited by the spirit of a woman, Maman Thekla) to be his night guard. Having divorced himself from the land, Mad Dog finds reassurance and social legitimation outside “traditional” limits. When Honba the shopkeeper in Sango Malo is faced with adverse business conditions, fostered in part by his own greed and Malo Malo’s demystification of market forces for the villagers, he procures prostitutes to circumscribe the villagers’ demand for a fair market system. This move strategically expands his areas of profitability. The strongest link of sexuality with privilege could perhaps be found in La Vie est Belle. In this ribald farce, Mr. Nvouandu, impotent, westernized African elite seeks remedy in “traditional” medicine. But Mr. Nganga, the diviner, expresses this dilemma thus: “Not to get it up while still young, that’s a crime for a man as rich as you.” Clearly, this understanding conflates virility with wealth. The assumptions Mr. Nganga makes about “prevailing” values, therefore, signal a broader, social crisis. As has been said by Ousmane Sembène: A society that has its own culture can confront all sorts of calamities and adversities with its head held high. I always say, if I were a woman, I’d never marry an African. Women should marry real men, not mentally deficient ones.25

Jude Akudinobi / Tradition/Modernity

377

This rather provocative statement is not really about any unique pathological affliction of African men; its barbs are directed at a political and cultural framework that cultivates uncritical submission to “modernity.”

Milieux Ultimately, the idea of selfhood the films propagate becomes feasible not by internalizing the extreme in order to reconstruct his/her fractured identity. Indeed, this point is crucial to V. Y. Mudimbe’s observation: Marginality designates the intermediate space between the so-called African tradition and the projected modernity of colonialism. . . . This space reveals not so much that new imperatives could achieve a jump into modernity as the fact that despair gives this intermediate space its precarious pertinence and simultaneously, its dangerous importance . . . It reveals the strong tension between a mythical past . . . rather than being a step in the imagined “evolutionary process,” it has been the locus of paradoxes that call into question the modalities and implications of modernization in Africa.26

As a corollary, much has been made about the rural/urban “dichotomy”—as a staple of African cinema—in such a way that the African is essentially (mis)construed as homo ruralis.27 Given such an approach, and shrouded as it is by undertones of biological/cultural determinism, it is not surprising then that certain African social realities are left open to arbitrary interpretation; for example, conceiving “the urban phenomenon as an expression of modernity and thus development.”28 Absent from this reasoning, usually, is any notion of modernity—other than progress—as accessory to the enervating cultural configuration of contemporary urban Africa. Thus, what is under scrutiny in African films is not urbanism per se, since cities existed in Africa before colonialism, but colonial urbanism, which expedited imperial interests and burdened the African with a position of severe marginality: Hence, there is need to investigate privileged “places of colonization,” where change and westernization occurred early. Obviously, the city is one of these places, not only as a geographical site, but as a privileged locus of inter-penetration and mediation where change was necessary for people to manage survival and future, neither by mere collaboration nor by stubborn resistance but through an increasing process to adjust and combine internal social structures with external ones.29

378

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Representation of the urban phenomenon in African films thus emerges at the intersection of African cultural assertion and imperial “domestication” efforts. In Sango Malo, prostitutes are recruited from the city; in Kasarmu Ce, the city is chaotic and corrupt; in Zan Boko, it is disruptive and rapacious; in Quartier Mozart, it is incarceratory; and in La Vie est Belle, it is a sybaritic haven. These depictions, therefore, mark the cities as reference points for the reconstitution of fractured African identities. One must not, however, overlook the multilayered grids that shape this view. In Quartier Mozart, the city is both an enchanted place (it is bewitched) and a place of enchantment (it is fascinating). Furthermore, according to the director, JeanPierre Bekolo, the film’s title signifies the hybridity of contemporary African existence; but both it and Vladivostok, the other city mentioned in the film, allude to a historical context in which the colonial establishment of dominion included renaming African towns.30 Interestingly, despite the vicissitudes of city life, in La Vie est Belle, Kuru finds love, fame, and fortune there. Thus, because the “modern’’ and the “traditional” exist side by side in contemporary Africa, their moments of friction—even collision—inevitably provide elemental sparks for investigating the situation that had previously been marked by evasion and insinuations. The infusion of political and cultural awareness in these films not only provide tonality in the African experience. It affords the African a claim to and ownership of a unique and essentially unapologetic identity. The critique of “modernity” in these films, it must be stressed, does not advocate a return to anachronism. In fact, it recognizes that society is dynamic, that changes are inevitable, but that the investment of Euromodernity with some kind of talismanic powers underwrites Africa’s cultural enslavement. Interestingly, various forms of ambivalence about “traditional” ideals manifest themselves in the films. In Quartier Mozart, the character “Good For Is Dead” (whose name means, No More Credit), either out of frustration or individualistic affliction, declares: “Because I am a brother you want credit. Call me Good For Is Dead.”31 In Sango Malo, The village chief— ideally the repose of tradition—is shown to be a corrupt and conniving rogue. Intimations of summary justice in Kasarmu Ce, where a mob chases a robbery suspect, could be read as an expression of community outrage, breakdown of judicial order, or a feature of ineffective law enforcement. Not even the age-old tradition of bridewealth escapes scrutiny: In La Vie est Belle, it causes filial discord between Mama Dingari and Kabibi but also receives a peculiar twist when Nvouandu offers a rotisserie (a modern gadget) as part of Kabibi’s bridewealth; in Sango Malo, it results in tragedy; in Kasarmu Ce, it engenders debtorship. None of this, however, detracts from the idea that advocating new foundations for an African modernity favors cultural syncretism, but with the proviso that such a “synthesis must

Jude Akudinobi / Tradition/Modernity

379

be within the parameters of African tradition rather than outside it.”32 Thus, Malo Malo’s efforts in Sango Malo are not so much about which developmental trajectory to follow, as a facile reading of the film would suggest, but the (re)definition of education itself. The talk show sequence on “The Problems and Needs of Modern Urbanization” in Zan Boko, especially the officials’ vapid regurgitation of bourgeois “remedies,” echoes Malo’s concern. In Quartier Mozart, Maman Thekla provides an education of sorts to the schoolgirl, Queen of the Hood, outside of the “regular’ curriculum. The moral imperative of Kasarmu Ce does not derive from the Euromodernist or Islamic “traditions,” but from the timeless wisdom of the Hausas as articulated in parables and proverbs. Even La Vie est Belle, for all its frivolity, trumpets the value of perseverance. By and large, these instances proved the characters’ access to selfknowledge requisite for the reclamation of subjectivity and equilibrium. If the discursive frameworks through which the choices are constructed appear to favor “tradition,” it is perhaps because “modernity” had denied the African an autonomous identity and viable authority. If the “modernized” Africans appear to be the “baddies” more often than not, it is perhaps an index of their status in the “new” order—usually marked by authority and privilege, but also indicating their circumscription—to the extent that they have not been able to reconcile adequately the complexity of contemporary African existence, and to the extent that in exercising their newfound potency they duplicate those sets of relations which hitherto had held the African at a disadvantage.

Conclusion What the films discussed here do, among other things, is give the concept “African” a more realistic—complex and plural—representation. Kasarmu Ce, for instance, typifies the Mazruian triple heritage—Arab/Islamic, Eurocolonial, and indigenous strands—from which so many contemporary Africans weave their identities.33 These films also manifest the struggle to find a language to articulate the ideological tension generated by casting African cultural heritage as a dark shadow on modernity. Thus, the phone disconnection at the end of Zan Boko accentuates the disjuncture within contemporary Africa exemplified by characters like Kouma, Tinga’s brother in Abdijan. In some instances, the sequesterment is marked by anthropomorphization: in Zan Boko, a musician laments the community’s fate with the comment that, “The monster has triumphed.” In Kasarmu Ce, the predatory Alhaji Malik is metaphorically linked to the serpent; and in Quartier Mozart, the alias of the tyrannical police officer Abina Charles de

380

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Gaulle—despite his invocation of authority/history/Frenchness by appropriating the late French president’s name—is Mad Dog. Furthermore, the films force us to acknowledge that inseparable from the discussions about self, society, and change is the question of moral authority. This point is particularly noteworthy because “in the African traditional societies, the welfare of the individual was a function and consequence of the welfare of the society, the society being summum bonum of African traditional moral philosophy.”34 Consequently, the films are suffused with instances of corruption—personal, official, and religious. The latter, for instance, is shown with subtlety in Kasarmu Ce and through the caricatural priests in Sango Malo and Quartier Mozart. Evidently, the tradition/modernity formulation glosses over the categories and terms on which the discourse of contemporary African politics hinges. Not only is it mechanistic, it is patently simplistic and expressly misleading. As has been noted: Even the most industrialized nations have many “traditional characteristics,” while pre-industrial societies possess many of the traits usually imputed to “modernity” . . . all societies are transitional and more can be learned by starting from this assumption than by casually utilizing traditional modernity classification.35

Jude Akudinobi earned his PhD in Cinema-Television from the University of Southern California. His works on African cinema have appeared in Iris, The Black Scholar, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Social Identities, Third Text, Research in African Literatures, Meridians, Visual Anthropology Review, among other publications and anthologies. His research interests span the complexities of postcolonial literatures, cultural politics, media, and cinematic representations, merges theory with practice through poetry, fiction, screenplays, and experimentations with the expressive capacities of the cinematic medium. President of the Advisory Board for African Voices Cinema Series, he has consulted for production companies, reviewed for scholarly journals and presses, served on film festival juries, delivered keynote lectures, and been a special guest at various distinguished workshops, seminars, and conferences. His expertise has, also, featured in national and international media, such as CNN’s Headline News, The Dr. Phil Show, the Nigerian Television Authority, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian (Nigeria), The Age (Australia), and El Mercurio (Chile).

Jude Akudinobi / Tradition/Modernity

381

Notes Originally published as Jude Akudinobi, “Tradition/Modernity and the Discourse of African Cinema,” Iris: Journal of Theory on Image and Sound 18 (Spring 1995): 25–37. 1. Manthia Diawara, African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 140; Sheila Petty, “Cities, Subjects, Sites: Sub-Saharan Cinema and the Reorganization of Knowledge,” Afterimage (Summer 1991): 11; Lizbeth Malkmus and Roy Armes, Arab and African Filmmaking (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1991), 210. 2. Tereza Wagner and Claude Ondobo, “African Cinema: A Young and Relatively Unknown Art,” Unesco Courier (March 1988): 27. 3. See African Studies Review 32, no. 2 (September 1989); also African Studies Review 30, no. 3 (September 1987); N. Frank Ukadike, “African Films: A Retrospective and a Vision for the Future,” Critical Arts 7, no. 1 (October 1993): 43–60; Paula Ben-Amos, “African Visual Arts from a Social Perspective,” African Studies Review 32, no. 2 (1989): 38. 4. Joseph R. Gusfield, “Tradition and Modernity: Misplaced Polarities in the Study of Social Change,” in Political Development and Social Change, ed. Jason L. Finkle and Richard W. Gable (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1971), 25. 5. A. E. Afigbo, “Education, Urbanization and Social Change in Colonial Africa,” in Readings in African Humanities: African Cultural Development, ed. Ogbu U. Kalu (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1980), 129. 6. Corinne A. Kratz, “We’ve Always Done It Like This . . . Except for a Few Details”: ‘Tradition’ and ‘Innovation’ in Okiek Ceremonies,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 1 (January 1993): 31. 7. Kratz, “We’ve Always Done It Like This . . . Except for a Few Details,” 60. 8. Isidore Okpewho, ed., The Heritage of African Poetry (London: Longman, 1985), 241. 9. Arnold Temu and Bonaventure Swai, Historians and Africanist History: A Critique (London: Zed Press, 1981), 113. 10. Omafume F. Onoge, “The Crisis of Consciousness in Modem African Literature: A Survey,” in Onigu Otite, ed., Themes in African Social and Political Thought (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1987), 106; Abdul R. Jan Mohamed, Manichaean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), 151. 11. Tanure Ojaide, “Modern African Literature and Cultural Identity,” African Studies Review, 35, no. 3 (December 1992): 47. 12. Oidna Akers Rhoads, “Culture in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,” African Studies Review, 36, no.2 (September 1993): 61. 13. Terence Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” in The Invention of Traditions, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 247. 14. Joseph R. Gusfield, “Tradition and Modernity: Misplaced Polarities in the Study of Social Change,” 26. 15. Renaat Devisch, “Perspectives on Divination in Contemporary sub-Saharan Africa,” in Theoretical Explorations in African Religions, ed. Wim van Binsbergen and Matthew Schoffeleers (London: Kegan Paul International, Ltd., 1985), 56. 16. James Curran, “Communications, Power and Social Order,” in Culture, Society and the Media, ed. Michael Gurevitch et al. (London: Methuen, 1982), 206.

382

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

17. Renaat Devisch, “Perspectives on Divination in Contemporary sub-Saharan Africa,” 50. 18. Onigu Otite, “Introduction: The Study of Social Thought in Africa,” in Themes in African Social and Political Thought, ed. Onigu Otite (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1978), 24. 19. Catherine Sackey, “Witchcraft in Cameroon,” West Africa 3943 (April 19–25, 1993): 663. 20. Paul Hoch, White Hero, Black Beast: Racism, Sexism and the Mask of Masculinity (London: Pluto Press, 1979), 130. 21. See Chinua Achebe, “Literature of Celebration,” West Africa (February 5–11, 1990): 167. His points about the Earth goddess, Ana, in Igbo culture, provides a pertinent parallel: “Ana combined two formidable roles in the Igbo pantheon as fountain of creativity in the world and custodian of moral order in human society [emphasis mine]. An abominable act is called nso-ana, taboo-to-Earth.” 22. In another interesting parallel, the Igbos bury the umbilical cord. 23. Gaston Kaboré . . . Production notes as quoted in Sheila Petty, “Cities, Subjects, Sites: Sub-Saharan Cinema and the Reorganization of Knowledge,” 11. 24. Biyi Bandele-Thomas, “This Land Is Ours,” West Africa (August 12–18, 1991): 1326. 25. Firinne Ni Chreachain, “lf I were a woman, I’d never marry an African,” interview with Ousmane Sembène, African Affairs, 91, no. 363 (April 1992): 244. 26. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 5. 27. Catherine Coquery-Vidvrovitch, “The Process of Urbanization in Africa (from the Origins to the Beginning of Independence),” African Studies Review 34, no. 1 (April 1991): 44. 28. Ibid., 37. 29. Ibid., 71, 73. 30. Library of African Cinema (San Francisco: California Newsreel, 1993), 15. 31. Ibid., 14. 32. Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechuku Madubuike, Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1980), 239. 33. See Ali A. Mazrui, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986). 34. Friday M. Mbon, “African Traditional Socio-Religious Ethics and National Development: The Nigerian Case,” in African Traditional Religions in Contemporary Society, ed. Jacob K. Olupona (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 102. 35. Jason L. Finkle and Richard W. Gable, eds., Political Development and Social Change, v11.

Towards a Theory of Orality in African Cinema Keyan G. Tomaselli, Arnold Shepperson, and Maureen Eke

T

he direct importation into Africa of methods, theories, ideas, and psychoanalytical assumptions developed in the First World and applied to African cinema is not without epistemological problems. Marxist, positivist, or liberal-humanist approaches, among others, do not automatically apply in attempts to understand African films and audiences. The call on mainly Lacanian psychoanalysis as an interpretive framework assumes that African viewers have essentially white, Westernized subjectivities and that their readings are determined, as John Higgins expresses it, in terms of how “the film seeks to position the spectator so that the film can be understood.”1 This kind of film theory has little purchase among audiences which evade the subjectivities and viewing positions assumed or constructed for them by directors, and which in turn are assumed by the critics to be themselves located within the post-Freudian psyche. These kinds of “European deconstructivist rituals”2 assume particular sets of modern and post-modern conditions and periodizations not necessarily replicated in Africa in quite the same ways. Oral cultures, as one example of cultural divergence, speak a different world than those of written cultures. Ontologies shaped by orality assume that the world consists of interacting forces of cosmological scale and significance rather than of discrete secularized concrete objects.3 The kinds of storytelling strategies possible within the discourse of cosmologies which include the influence of para-normal agents, as described to an extent in Jean Rouch’s films, provide the grounding for divisions of existence that differ from the dualism postulated by the dogma of the ghost in the machine. The relationship of Africans as quintessentially the “Other” to the historical “Same” of Europe emerged from the respective experiences of colonialism and neocolonialism. It is against this background of indeterminacy that we discuss the failure of Western film theory to understand the various comprehensions of existence that inscribe the narratives and forms of much cinema in Africa.

384

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

W. V. O. Quine’s notion of the indeterminacy of radical translation proposes one way of approaching an understanding of such ontological difference: if the ontologies of African (the observed) and European (observing) languages differ, then such an indeterminacy can be seen to have existed at the historical root of the relationship between Europe and Africa. The relevant differences are ontological: the history constructed by an observer originating in one society will refer to existence in a world not quite the same as that constructed by someone from another part of the society or from a different society. We follow the question of ontology by locating it in the interpretation of the realm of activity. Put differently, we draw on the kind of phenomenological interpretations carried out by, on the one hand, Martin Heidegger and, on the other, Hannah Arendt’s project to “think what we are doing.”4 Specifically, we take that which exists to be culturally prior to that which is known, in the context of “culture” taken in its root sense of “nurture.” Things are encountered as existents before we attain knowledge of them. Ontology is, therefore, involved with the interpretation of what we encounter in our maturation into this world during our lives. Further, however, the fact that there is a “we” who are “here” implies that there are at least two generations present in the context of culture-as-nurture. In the African sphere, the ongoing disruption following the move to independence further implies, therefore, that experiences of the world differ from one generation to the next in a given context: the elders of a community can recall different “forms of life”—the whole context within one can speak about meaning and knowledge—in comparison with which they can pass judgment on their present condition.5 Younger generations frequently have no experience of these forms of life, and they become, in a special kind of sense, alienated from the possibilities subject to recollection among their elders.6 A final point before going ahead: the temptation does exist for this kind of work, whether by ourselves or others who engage critically with Westernmodern thought, to come across as if our position seeks to replace a “Eurouniversalizing” paradigm with some or other “Ethno-universalizing” one. With some trepidation we suggest that if one adheres in part to Stephen Toulmin’s analysis of the “hidden agenda of modernity,” then the shift away from the universal has become an accepted feature of the human sciences. We differ slightly from Toulmin in our position (derived from Agnes Heller) that, in the realm of human affairs, the universal has to be replaced by the general, conceived as a global condition within which social and political action are possible. Where modernist discourse posited a dichotomy of the local with the general, we accept that the local can be seen as a specific realization of a concrete global potential for the human condition, and not as the interpretation of an abstract axiom regarding some kind of “human essence.”7

Tomaselli, Shepperson, & Eke / Theory of Orality

385

Ontology Previous work has pointed to the ontological encounter as being primarily pragmatic in nature. Heidegger, for example, locates that which is primordially interpretable in the “ready-to-hand.” This, in turn, is a character of those “equipments” (Zeug) which connect with our average everyday activity such that: when we deal with them by using them and manipulating them, this activity is not a blind one, it has its own kind of sight, by which our manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its specific Thingly character. Dealings with equipment subordinate themselves to the manifold assignments of the “in order to.”8

This sight and manipulation can be compared to those things people do prior to there being any theory constructed about those things. Equipment (das Zeug in Heidegger’s original) is those things which become defined in relation to that which has to be done. Thus, the character of “equipmentality” (Zeuglichkeit) is at one remove from reality, because reality is more readily to be considered in the desired consequence of some or other intervention in the world.9 We return to this point later when discussing the ways in which African filmmakers differ from their Hollywood counterparts. Circumspection is this very special kind of “sight,” and it implies a pragmatic “looking-towards-use” that precedes the actual grasping of an entity in its being.10 In opposition to the ready-to-hand, Heidegger speaks of that which is “present-at-hand”11: entities of this kind are not grasped in their equipmentality, but are encountered through what has been translated as “idle talk.”12 They are, in other words, present to us through “interest” that does not incur any responsibility for the consequences of the use of things.13 In this sense, the critique of film theory and practice also has to account for how film is exhibited and analyzed. These activities have consequences that are both desired and unintended: the “equipmentality” of film, in other words, precedes its exhibition because the filmmaker and/or exhibitors are doing what they do for a purpose (be this profit, resistance, pedagogy, or whatever). At a different level, C. S. Peirce, and later theorists like Ian Hacking and Clifford Geertz expand on a similar theme with regard to the existence of scientific entities and cultural imperatives, respectively. In all cases, the presence of a community, be it scientific or traditional, is central. Cultures/ communities cannot exist in the absence of activity, a tradition of behavior, or doing something. In this context, their ontology is precisely that ready-tohand-ness (so to speak) that precedes what they are taught or enculturated into knowing of the world. But this readiness-to-hand is never altogether a

386

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

transcendental quality: it has a temporality that is related to the generational span specific to the generations present in a situation,14 and this, as indicated above, can have an alienating cultural character in situations of change and/ or disruption.

Psychoanalysis and Knowledge of Africa Teshome Gabriel, among others, has questioned the validity of psychoanalysis in terms of African and Third World Cinema: contemporary film theory and criticism is grounded in a conception of the “viewer” (subject or citizen) derived from psychoanalytic theory where the relation between the “viewer” and the “film” is determined by a particular dynamic of familial matrix. To the extent that Third World culture and familial relationships are not described through psychoanalytic theory, Third World filmic representation is open for an elaboration of the relation “viewer”/”film” on terms other than those grounded on psychoanalysis. The Third World relies more on appeal to social and political conflicts as the prime rhetorical strategy and less on the paradigm of Oedipal conflict and resolution.15

Lacan’s psychoanalysis originates in the context of Freud’s project of explaining the social and individual pathologies which evolved along with industrial cultural (as in nurturing) practice. In this sense, then, the field is to an extent predicated on the idea (and the gaps in its formulation) of a paternalistic nuclear family, mirror phases, and clearly demarcated gender roles.16 The historical discourse within which these cultural norms and practices emerged is one that has been subject to critique many times (e.g., Toulmin, Rorty, Arendt). In the context of this discussion, however, the historical dualism of the urban and the rural which is part of the discourse is relevant. Traditionally, Western industrial discourse has associated (rightly or wrongly) the rural with the illiterate. Urban industrial culture cannot consistently be conceived of in the absence of literacy. The consequence of this is a tacit association of the oral traditions of African society with the rural conditions against which capitalist production emerged in opposition to medieval agrarian practice. In certain respects, the historical readiness-to-hand of writing in industrial communities places a limit on the ways in which the reality encountered by their members can be adapted as other conditions change. In the Western tradition, the idea of community in the sense of an ongoing intergenerational procession of average everyday contacts, is becoming tenuous. Agnes Heller points to the historical emergence of what she calls a “dissatisfied society” in

Tomaselli, Shepperson, & Eke / Theory of Orality

387

response to the classically modernist conception of progress.17 In the context of this inquiry, we accept this “dissatisfaction” as a feature which is most strongly associated with the economics of Hollywood cinema, as it will also be found to be the case with other kinds of “commercial” media organization. The “ready-to-hand” has become relegated to the “merely presentat-hand,” existents which are not grasped in their essential and complex readiness-to-hand.18

Indigenizing Theory European methods and theories often cannot account for ways in which African forms of expression have integrated with other forms, or for indigenous ways of knowing and making sense and interpreting films. Two entirely different ways of making sense—the literate and the oral (which often retains pre-modern cosmological elements)—ensure differences in the encounter between them. In part, this is a consequence of the role that is played by religion in African communal life. As Pene Elungu points out, religion in the African context is not seen as part of the rush of confessions which accompanied Western culture. In fact, our traditional religions placed that which is sacred—(the secret— sacre) things that cannot be discussed, things before which we bow—not in the individual person but in the link with parents and ancestors, community, the universe, and with God. This linking current is “life.” Life is what is sacred, what is absolute: life is everything, everything is life, life overflows everything, even death, life feels everything.19

In this framework, reality in the ontological sense can be thought of as incorporating African kinship systems. As a context of nurture-culture, these are simply far too complicated, multi-layered, polysubjectival, and multigendered to be easily subjected to the Lacanian categories upon which Screen Theory attempts to analyze representations of them. Screen Theorists coalesced in the late 1960s around the British journal Screen with the translation of Christian Metz’s structuralist semiological propositions into English (Film Language and Language and Cinema). These were then read through Louis Althusser’s Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalytical positions (e.g., Higgins). Screen Theory privileges the Text and the critics’ interpretation of it, irrespective of discrepant and different readings by others: it is a prescriptive rather than open-ended approach. In the religious context of the colonial missionary project, it is not surprising, therefore, that among the first sympathetic attempts to come

388

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

to terms with African thought the focus was on the ontology addressed by African languages.20 If our interpretation of this ontology is not quite the same as the being = force orthodoxy that emerged from these interventions,21 we are not convinced that the oral tradition can be represented in purely epistemological terms as in formal anthropology. What is germane is that the reality of, for example, ancestral influence goes beyond the mystification of the recognition of one’s forebears as “worship.” The present necessarily contains the consequences of previous generations’ actions, as much as the future will be influenced to some extent by what our generation gets right or wrong when we act in our own lifetimes. In a different sense, the objectivity of this kind of thought is rooted in ubuntu, the having-been-there of some subjective agent who was always one of Bantu, all the people who were there engaging the ready-to-hand, the consequences of which are now ours. While European theories offer explanation of how Western audiences might interpret films that set out to portray such a world, they simultaneously displace not only the subjectivities of their directors, but also the reception strategies and interpretations of their non-Westernized or partly acculturated African viewers. The separation of the text from context—a limitation of Screen Theory—is a “regime of signification” no matter the ideological allegiance of those who apply this method. Theories are needed to explain the various, often widely different and original, African applications of imaging and recording technologies and their resulting aesthetics, which take into account the subjectivities and cosmologies of particular sets of viewers. Such theories need to examine the extent to which literate, semi-literate, and non-literate viewers interact through Western-African and African cultures and gnoses. This is a crucial point as sight (i.e., emphasis on the visual) fragments consciousness—the Subject-Object relation—situating the observer outside of what s/he sees or studies. Such an explanation cannot easily be accounted for by unreconstituted Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalytic analysis.22 An example of this kind of ignoring the obvious in the search for the abstract can be found in Jeanne Prinsloo’s challenging attempt to understand African cinema through feminist perspectives. Citing the examples of Elaine Procter’s On the Wire (1992) and Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1992), Prinsloo uses the explicitly pro-patriarchal (Oedipal) categories of psychoanalysis to affirm antipatriarchal arguments. This presupposes that one can generalize from an explicitly European mythology to the oral (and residual oral) traditions and gnoses rooted in entirely different cosmologies. We are not arguing that cultural or cinematic theories from other societies are inappropriate in the African context. Rather, our point is that they have a different purchase in these partly similar and partly different societies, which often exhibit in

Tomaselli, Shepperson, & Eke / Theory of Orality

389

their generational-cultural temporality a simultaneity of the modern, postmodern and even pre-modern.23 African interpretations of Western media, their rearticulation into different African contexts, and theoretical mixes which acknowledge the impact on our analytical tools of the way theories travel and mutate similarly need explication and development. One route for such explanation is to study the way critical African filmmakers have tried to indigenize theoretical perspectives on film, video, and cinema within the African continent.24 With the exceptions of Teshome Gabriel, Haile Gerima, Françoise Pfaff, A. Gardies and Pierre Haffner, Férid Boughedhir, and Mbye Cham,25 academic, and certainly reviewer, emphasis has tended to foreground discussions of national industrial structures and resources, production methods, the Ouagadougou Pan-African Film Festival (FESPACO), and the difficulties of making films in Africa. Concerns with political economy have tended to overshadow questions of aesthetics and reception. The paradox of cinema made by Africans that is critical of neocolonialism is that its makers act as cultural intermediaries germinating oral and visual styles and themes that are currently stored in exile. These films have to wait for appropriate conditions to break before returning “home.” But even then, audience acculturation to Hollywood and conventional genres may have removed them even further from these cinematic memories of the readiness-to-hand which the film makers are trying to access. As intermediaries, critical African film makers are also travellers. They physically and psychically travel between the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Worlds, cultures, and ontologies. As global griots or bards, they memorize and recite African legends and valiant deeds through storytelling.26 They are the storehouses of oral knowledge. The reach of these griots is global because they are often located outside Africa where they have sought safety from repression in their own countries. It is also here where they raise the bulk of their financial support. As griots, they represent and incubate the cultural ready-to-hand of the African societies from whence they derive. These films recover memories which have been partly destroyed by colonialism and neocolonialism. Most specifically, griots serve to recover and preserve for exhibition in film, that which has been alienated from the present generation because of the disruption consequent to imposition of modernization policies. In this sense, these filmmakers are also travellers between generations, and as griots they are the intergenerational counterparts of the medieval European troubadours who travelled in a more literally geographical sense. Peculiarly, the evolution of modernity has collapsed geographical space in a way that makes this kind of travelling one of the few ways open for exploration, with film being one of the vehicles wherein the explorer can voyage on quests, not of “new” discovery, but of rediscovery.27

390

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

The key to the task of developing film theories applicable in the African context requires a rethinking of the Western psychocentric semiology which informs a lot of this theory.28 Reactivation of the silenced texts in African oral traditions still embedded in the residual surviving cultural traditions and popular memory seems to need another form of argument and theory. In broad terms, film theory is itself a form of metanarrative, in which categories of visual reception and filmic representation are arranged so as to provide for the analyst the framework of an argument with which to persuade others to understand films in one way rather than another. The problem with using the above kinds of categories is that they tend to be appropriated as having a priori status, instead of being understood as the negotiated outcomes of historical and intergenerational activity. For example, Prinsloo’s use of Vladimir Propp’s theory of narrative categories29 in conjunction with Lacanian psychoanalysis gives rise to the following possible argument (narrative) when strictly applied in Western discourse (even though Prinsloo is explicitly opposed to it): 1. every film narrative is a priori preceded by Proppian narrative categories; 2. every film spectator is a priori preceded by his or her Oedipal status; therefore 3. one can review a film by asking viewers to complete a suitably formulated Oedipal questionnaire, and not have to go to the trouble of watching the film for oneself. These kinds of a priori assumptions highlight the extent to which film theories tend to minimize the potential for critical theory in the analysis of film in exhibition and reception. The way in which the simultaneously public and enclosed space of film exhibition can be appropriated according to the public traditions of a given form of life links what is shown into very different possible experiences from those anticipated by commercial and art film producers. A vivid example of this is Hamid Naficy’s ethnography of spectatorship in Iranian cinemas, where he describes all the extraordinary activities that occur while the film is showing. These range from buying and eating hot meals to urinating on the floor. Those who had seen the film before would retell the story ahead of the screen action, calling forth shouts from others that they stop ruining the screening for viewers who objected to these impromptu performances. What Naficy can be seen to be portraying is the relation of the activity and space of exhibition to the forms of life which prevail for those who attend such exhibits. Rather than seeking to connect such activity-in-exhibition with the logic of the categories of industrial production and consumption,

Tomaselli, Shepperson, & Eke / Theory of Orality

391

the exhibition might also be seen as an index of the ways in which film is appropriated in the reproduction and reinforcement of the social and other relations present to the life of a community.30 In the African context, film frequently is exhibited in the presence of people alienated from their historical condition as a result of the cultural alienation between generations consequent upon the disruptions of modernization. Film theory, therefore, has to be cognizant of the context of these forms of alienation if it is to permit an understanding of what African filmmakers are attempting to portray as significant. If Lacanian and Proppian theory is based in an assumed universality of psychological development and narrative forms respectively, then the way people encounter language and meaning in other parts of the world becomes problematic. In the next section, we draw on Wittgenstein’s conception of the encounter with language within a “form of life” to reconstruct the notion of what occurs when film is exhibited in contexts other than Western ones.31 It is in relation to this imposition of the “givenness” of the European “form of life” that the notion of a Third Cinema can be conceived: such film begins from an understanding of the specificities of another form of life.

Third Cinema “Third Cinema” is a set of strategies developed by critical filmmakers in South America and North Africa.32 “First Cinema” describes commercially structured film industries, as in Hollywood entertainment; “Second Cinema” accounts for avant-garde, personal, art, or auteur movies. Third Cinema offers resistance to imperialism, to oppression. As a cinema of emancipation it articulates the codes of an essentially First World technology into indigenous aesthetics and mythologies. These aesthetics and mythologies respectively inform and explain the specific ready-to-hand nature of the world encompassed and encountered by the predominantly oral context of subjectivity within the so-called Third World. Since the 1980s, Third Cinema has been redefined into other sites of resistance, including those in First World situations where class, gender, and other kinds of social conflicts have taken on various kinds of racial/ ethnic character.33 Third Cinema is a set of political strategies using film (and video) to articulate the experiences and hopes of the colonially oppressed.34 Its purpose, according to the originators of the term, Solanas and Getino is to create a “liberated space” for emancipation. Third Cinema engaged the positive aspects of Screen Theory in an emancipatory direction, but crucially introduced non-English and non-Western ethnocentric approaches to European cultural politics. In pursuing this framework the critic has to create

392

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

situationally adequate theories which match the experiences of non-Western audiences rather than shoehorning viewers into a pre-existent Grand Theory. Much African cinema is Third Cinema in nature, if not in direct derivation. An example is Ethiopian Haile Gerima’s Sankofa (1993). Sankofa is an Akan term meaning “to return to one’s past, to rescue it from oblivion and to turn towards the future.” The film tells the story of a vivacious contemporary Ghanaian photographic model called Mona, who through following her possession by spirits, travels back to the brutal past where she lived as a slave on a North American sugar plantation. Through this less than pleasant recovery of the historical experience of slavery and rape via unconscious popular cultural memory (ready-to-handedness) induced by the spirit medium, named Sankofa, Mona recovers her African identity and rejects Western consumerism, exhibitionism, and idolatry. Initially, African films, and much of Third Cinema, tended to be explicitly political, though this dimension has softened in the past decade or so. They start from the social premise that the Community is in the individual rather than that the individual is in the community, as is the case with Western genre cinema. The nineteen-year-old Islamic peasant girl in Ramparts of Clay (dir. Bertuccelli, 1971, France), for example, represents an emergent personal awakening, but within the context of an unshakable allegiance to the freedom of her peasant community. In the process of suppressing her individual subjectivity she knowingly commits metaphorical suicide in both her individual and feminist selves. She recognizes that she can be neither part of traditional culture nor of the corrupt new ruling class through which she is most likely to achieve her individualism and personal freedom. In Sankofa, the Community triumphs and Mona is reinserted into a pre-colonial romantic past as a slave girl, Shola. She is observed by a white photographer who represents contemporary commercial exploitation and the Western consumerist sexist gaze. Mona returns from her historical journey dressed as Shola in traditional garb. She sullenly ignores the photographer who helplessly watches her walk away from him and all that he represents. Gerima gives no clues on how Mona, and those she stands for, should cope and interact with the present. In such narratives, the community, as a form of life, changes the individual rather than the individual changing the community. The structural relations of this process are acknowledged and made visible. This does not necessarily disempower the characters as individuals. Rather, it empowers them (and audiences) with knowledge as to the real nature of exploitation, both historically (the brutal stealing of labor) and contemporarily (the pop-commercial appropriation of culture). This reconstitution into a communal subjectivity may come across as paradoxical to Western film scholars and audiences, but it is hardly so to Third World audiences which find their identities within communal relations. As

Tomaselli, Shepperson, & Eke / Theory of Orality

393

forms of life, deliberately expressed in the plural, oral traditions rely on the contact between generations for the elaboration of individual subjectivities. The upshot of this is that where the ongoing existence of written language can occur in the encounter between an individual and a text in isolation from other persons, orally formed subjects need the presence of others in order to assert their identities. In part, this paradox of identity is a function of the way in which the emergence of industrial social forms has transferred the realm of identity from the public sphere into the intimate. It is sharpened when the form of film exhibition is taken into account, since this is always both public (especially in the case of cinema) and private, in that the venue of exhibition is sundered from other aspects of the public realm. As an explicitly modern art form, the cinema also works in exhibition in the peculiarly private way found in the case of the novel: the shrinking-away of the public realm in modern society is mirrored in the withdrawal of subjectivity from the communal into the solipsistic. Critical African cinema is about the right of Africans to represent to themselves the possibilities inherent in their past. The role of African filmmaker as griot becomes important when seen in the context of recent attempts by colonized people to reconstruct their histories and pasts against a predominantly European colonialist interpretation of those experiences. For instance, in his film, Afrique je to plumerai (Africa, I will fleece you, 1991), Jean-Marie Téno uses a combination of his reminiscence of childhood as cultural colonized person and a fable his grandfather told about a country of larks dominated by a race of hunters to comment on and re-examine Cameroon’s colonial history and past. Not only does Téno present his own personal testimony as relevant for an understanding of Cameroon’s cultural domination, but he also presents his grandfather’s interpretation of colonization. Téno shows how the original oral culture of Cameroon has been influenced by writing. The narrative is driven by the thorny question of how to steer Africa out of its cultural vulnerability—a vulnerability that has led to its apparent helplessness and internal repression by the local black elite apparatchiks of global capital. In so doing, Téno fulfils one of the functions of the griot or oral historian, that of transmitting stories or history from one generation to another. This intergenerational transmission or testimony is one of the fundamental features of the oral tradition. Writing brought with it a new form of oppression—that of surveillance and records regulated by the modern state bureaucracy. This cinema contests mediated images recirculated to Africa from the Western, and Islamic, neocolonial centers. Téno exposes this dependency through the words of his narration in Afrique: “colonialism perpetrated cultural genocide.” The struggle of Africans is to overcome this genocide, and the feelings

394

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

of inferiority that are its results. As one of his indignant, but humorous characters, complains: “Even when it comes to the number of seasons, we’re surpassed by Europe!” This cinema aims to transform the observer-observed relation where Africans are “Other” to the historical “Same” of Europe. The title Africa, I Will Fleece/Pluck You, is a lampoon of a children’s nursery chant, “Alouette, gentille alouette, alouette, je te plumerai” / “Lark, pretty lark, lark, I will pluck you.” The song suggests the violence associated with the cultural colonization of Africa. Téno connects this song to the fable about the country of the larks. The plucking of “alouette” becomes a metaphor for the plucking or fleecing of Africa. The visual track reinforces this with scenes of Africans under forced labor, building roads for European penetration into the African hinterland, or harvesting cash crops for European markets. The message is blatantly communicated through the visual image, but is insidiously presented in this song. Like Gaston Kaboré in Wend Kuuni (1983, Burkina Faso), Téno utilizes the oral performance genre as a significant part of his narrative technique in Afrique. While Kaboré’s film is a cinematic retelling of an oral tale, Téno rather exploits various aspects of oral narrative performance to communicate what becomes a tale of Cameroon’s political, cultural, and economic colonization by Europe, and its continued exploitation and “humiliation” by its political leaders. Wend Kuuni’s episodic structure reflects that of the African folk narrative, also resembling European picaresque narratives. Various events are tied together only by virtue of their relationship to the theme or as they are encountered by the author/narrator/ protagonist during the story. In contrast, Téno undertakes his journey to understand how a country, which was “once composed of well-structured, traditional societies,” could fail to succeed as a state. As a journey/story, various stories run through Afrique. The film adopts the style of a journey/documentary of one person. But it ends up being polysubjectival, including several Cameroonians as points of narrative subjectivity: Jean-Marie Téno, Sultan Ngoya, and a number of African political leaders. The metaphor of the journey is a feature of folk narrative, taking the form through a quest, a movement in search of something lost or yet to be found. Afrique is first and foremost Téno’s quest for understanding of the political dilemma of his country/continent. Téno uses documentary, reenactments, news footage, humor, praise poetry, drama and music, and monochrome sections in a color film. Direct and indirect narration, dialogue and subtitles recreate the oral emphasis of African cultureas-nurture. This orality is further emphasized in that the storyline is advanced through a variety of different characters—as opposed to the single meta-narrator of conventional First Cinema, and, for that matter, of the classical novel. Music (songs, performances, lyrics), for example, is sometimes heavily foregrounded, operating as a narrative voice in its own right. The song is also used

Tomaselli, Shepperson, & Eke / Theory of Orality

395

as a choral device, as in storytelling at various intervals of the film. It serves as a thematic and structural device, returning the audience to the central theme of the film and at the same time holds the various parts of the film together. The filmmaker examines various issues simultaneously. As such, this film appears very disjointed at times. The song is the structural thread that ties the disjointed parts to the central theme of “plucking Africa.” The result, in the case of Afrique, is an entertaining postmodernist political protest film which retains the depth and irony of the oral style. The orality-visual combination is wider and potentially deeper than the codes of First Cinema, indicating therefore a need for a new film semiotics (grammar).

New Visual Grammars African directors rearticulate and localize Western-invented technologies in the context of the forms of life which ground African themes, stories, forms of oral storytelling, and cultural expression. The intergenerational continuities and pragmatic encounter with reality suggested by these forms of life generate, we suggest, ontologies in which are to be found new visual grammars. In the way Elungu’s evocation of a “linking current” calls forth the possibility of a less atomized world of the ready-to-hand, so the ways in which people make sense of such a world might be understood as being governed by articulation strategies less rigid than the modern forms of subject-predicate grammars. If these grammars are less precise in dealing with discrete objects, then they possibly have greater applicability when dealing with relations of culture-nurture which do not exclude non-equipmental influences which are ready-to-hand in the form of spirits and ancestral relationships. African languages, unlike those which have emerged from industrial imperatives, describe a world consisting of more than objects. In a significant way, their grammar (especially when not subjected to the attentions of European educational specialists), has a place for qualifying an existent in terms of its relatedness to the other things, persons and animals around it. Subject and Object remain interconnected and narratives retain spaces for the authority of the spirits, as in Sankofa. Yet, very little critical work on films made by Africans takes these kinds of spiritual and other-worldly dimensions into account. One of the few exceptions is the work of French anthropologist Jean Rouch, who used his camera to try to understand the “scientifically unthinkable” occurring amongst his collaborators in Niger.35 Perhaps it is the more than essentially physical, or material, context of African ontologies and experiences represented in its cinemas that is unexplainable in terms of conventional Western film theories. This is one reason that academic analysis concentrates on the material, the plots and

396

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

the industrial structures, avoiding aesthetics, form and signification of interrelatedness—what Gerima calls “the central nervous system of what is at stake—African cinema language.” He continues, “As long as critical theory in African cinema does not make the transition to critical analysis, (critical analysis deals with both content and form), the state of African cinema, now thirty years old, remains underdeveloped.” The role of a critical African cinema theory, he concludes, will emerge only when an appropriate theory “fashions itself as a mediator between the African filmmaker and the African audience.”36 African Third Cinema directors are part of their societies in relation to the everyday activities of those societies; their profession places them in a unique position with respect to the exploration of those activities in ways that can break the way in which the dependency cycle has influenced their viewers’ everyday social activity. Editing and encoding in critical African films reflect this gnosis in which the world is interconnected through the specificities of African languages. The writer in Afrique, for example, works at her typewriter in the middle of a street, not in seclusion, in the isolation of the Western artist or littérateur. She is part of the everyday life about which she is writing and which surrounds her. This image raises questions about the nature of Africanicity and its emphasis on being, on totality, on an integrated world not separated into dualisms—where the Western artist tends to hide away from “life” in seclusion while “creating.”

Dreams as Part of Life In African ontologies, the dream is in the realm of existence as part of the “linking current” in which contact is by nature established with the spirit world, the gods, ancestors, and unborn (the future) as well as the human essence, thus creating a sense of universal unity and interrelation between the living and the dead. A revelation in a dream thus becomes very significant and spiritual. As important features of folktales, dreams give the stories that “surrealistic quality” frequently ascribed to them by Western observers. They also provide a forum for communication between the protagonist and the spiritual world, and the sacred and the profane realms of existence. Dreams, definitively since Descartes, have been excluded from the reality of Western material waking experience. In earlier European forms of expression, for example A Midsummer Night’s Dream or some of the scenes in Macbeth, dreams and portents are integral to the comic or historical action of the works. After the seventeenth century, dreams become more the subject of fantasy, as in Alice in Wonderland or in Tolkien’s sagas. In other aesthetic spheres such as painting and sculpture, the marginalization of dreams and

Tomaselli, Shepperson, & Eke / Theory of Orality

397

other events of a non-material nature becomes realized in the very marginalization of the work of art into a “high-cultural” object. Indeed, the very need for there to be elaborate theories of aesthetics relying on psychoanalysis has tended to divorce the dream-content of the work of art from the everyday ready-to-handedness of the uninitiated. As “art,” dreams become the object of specialist explanation, something displaced by their non-objective character into the realm of the merely present-at-hand: in art there is no certain knowledge in the sense demanded by Descartes. The question here is expressed as an epistemological one, precisely because for Descartes (and thus for subsequent paradigm philosophy) the question was one of certain knowledge as opposed to what people could assert on the basis of experience. As one of the most subjective of experiences, along with pain,37 dreams in the Western philosophical tradition cannot be separated from the dreaming and therefore cannot be placed into an Archimedean point from which they can be displayed for examination. As part of this tradition, psychoanalysis understands film as having certain characteristics that make the encounter with it similar to a dream, primarily because of the exclusion of dreams from epistemological validity by paradigm thinking. In the exchange between Western film production and non-Western film consumption, the ontological community of the producers is effaced during the exhibition of the film within the ontological community of the viewers. People for whom the world exists in the religious sense described by Elungu are also likely to have come to their knowledge of their world through a different route to that assumed by Western cognitive development theories (e.g., Piaget). In their coming to know, they engage far more with the actual ready-to-hand equipment of their contexts. In the West, on the other hand, learning includes a greater emphasis on the deferred meanings of the written word, and in this context knowledge becomes directed more to the present-at-hand. Film theory generally has approached its topic as something present-at-hand, in the sense of being an “object of Knowledge,” precisely because this is the manner in which knowledge is cast: it is always at one or more removes from the ready-to-hand. However, in the context of film exhibition in communities for whom knowledge of the world is closer to the ready-to-hand, viewers do not necessarily become aware of the fact that what is shown in the film is assumed by the film’s makers to exist in a way that is different.38 By this we mean that for those in the post- or neocolonial subaltern classes, there is a greater reliance than in the industrialized West on what is learned by doing. As a result, it is possible (even likely) that the kind of explanations and interpretations of this activity will be very different to those generated in a language which has been shaped by the exigencies of literacy. Language and action, that is to say, are

398

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

more closely involved for these communities in the nurture of new generations than is the case of industrial societies where writing and labor define the historical relation between what-is and what-can-be-done.39 What seems to have occurred is that the conditions under which Western industrial society emerged have become defined on what Richard Rorty has labelled the explanation of the world in terms of “philosophy as a theory of knowledge.”40 As Toulmin indicates, however, the establishment of this culture in the West has its origins in a clearly articulated historical context of specific conflict between ways of doing things in the world. In the course of time there has been a devaluation of what Toulmin calls the “oral, the particular, the local and the timely” in favor of grand theories based on the “written, the universal, the general and the timeless.”41 Products proper to the world of the latter (e.g., film) are introduced into a world (or worlds) in which there remains to a greater or lesser extent the forms of life associated with the former. Massive disruptions in the conditions under which African peoples experience their average everyday lives have occurred. As a result of the imposition of industrial orders of society (both market and state oriented), the effect has remained to a greater or lesser extent disruptions rather than revolutions. Put differently, African people outside of the elites associated with postcolonial (or, for many, neocolonial) development still experience their lives in oral, timely, particular and very local ways, and they experience the exhibition of film in much the same kind of ways. It is not the purpose of this article to judge whether these ways are authentic or debased or whatever, but rather to accentuate the difficulties inherent to interpreting the experience of peoples for whom the separation of knowing from doing is foreign to their form of life. In the specific context of African film and its producers, there is the added burden of transferring the sense of this form (these forms) of life into a medium developed within and suited for variations on a single form of life in which to know (epistemology) is formally separated from a really existing realm of activity (the ontological). The critique here is that of a tradition in which truth inheres in the Heideggerian present-at-hand in strict contrast with the Renaissance/ peasant/savage/working-class everyday engagement and consciousness of the ready-to-hand. There is, if we follow Charles Taylor’s analysis of Hegel’s antecedents,42 no doubt some Romantic influence in this, although there is no necessary hankering after some prelapsarian Golden Age so prevalent in the influences on much Continental thought. More to the point is that there is a tradition in the West that essentially states that “history is bunk” (pace Henry Ford), and that there is or ought to be one and only one true knowledge irrespective of what can or has to be done in the world. In contrast, we suggest that there is a possibility for equally valid knowledge to emerge

Tomaselli, Shepperson, & Eke / Theory of Orality

399

from a context in which the continuity of human affairs does not exclude the consequences of human action.

In Summary To recast the ideal of Marx’s philosophy, the construction of African thought through Third Cinema interpretations can be seen rather simply and elegantly to efface the Western dichotomy of Subject and Object. It also restores some measure of the radical ideal of a collective consciousness, specifically in the way the present, as that which can be encountered by everyone there, is the consequence of what everybody has done (or of that which someone failed to do) among those who came before. In contrast, a positivist approach to science, which derives from sets of dualisms driven by industrial imperatives calling themselves “disciplines,” cannot coherently come to grips with views of the world which have resisted fragmentation and which try to retain cosmological coherence through orality and contact with the spirit world. These Mind/Body (ideal/material; base/superstructures, etc.) separations are further sharpened by the move from orality to literacy. The result is to drastically reduce reliance by the young literate educated on their oral elders for information. This process of enculturation into the industrialized technological world results in the foregrounding of a solipsistic individualism over communalism, leading to a disruption of traditional intergenerational forms of deference and respect. Cultures and communities become fragmented, cultural memory fades into the cultural unconscious. This communal unconscious is recovered and brought to the surface by directors through appeals to the past as occurs in Sankofa. Critiques of African films which are inadequate to the task of reintegrating the Subject with the Object can never meet Gerima’s challenge for an African cinema language or appropriate kinds of criticism. This is because Western-based criticism tends to separate the visible world of actual behavior from the invisible spiritual realm. It can be hard for those from the West, in the absence of a sound understanding of the ontological referents in African languages, to establish whether non-Westernized Africans are in fact distinguishing the material from the spiritual. It is not an accident, then, that much of early African philosophy was most sensitively recorded by a few sympathetic European missionaries and theologians such as Frans Placide Tempels. In visual terms, this task of recording and articulating African philosophies has now fallen to African film makers as they embrace the multiple and complex roles of traditional oral bards/historians. The filmmakers depend on their art for economic survival and thus function in a similar manner as the traditional “roving poets” who make their

400

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

livelihood through their art. These poets/griots often show no allegiance to anyone in particular and can vilify and praise an audience, politicians, rulers, or a lay person simultaneously. Thus economics often determine the nature of the praise poetry performed. African filmmakers’ art, however, is often not influenced by loyalty to established power, or faithfulness to an individual. Rather, the filmmakers’ function is determined by a combination of artistic, economic, and political ideologies, as well as social vision. The integration of the spiritual and the material is partly found in the oral tradition that many African societies have sustained through the centuries of colonization and Westernization. These filmmakers see their art as commentaries on their societies in order to enlighten people about the contexts of their experiences. Thus, seen in broader terms, the African filmmaker embodies the complex, yet multiple roles of griots/bards in their traditional contexts of origin. They are simultaneously social critics, historians, bards and seers; they criticize the present to encourage change; re-examine and reconstruct the past to shed more light on its effects on the present; and they transmit cultures and histories from the past generation to those who are present. African directors, in decolonizing Western images of Africa presented to Africans, face the problem of Hollywood-hooked audiences and escapist entertainment-seeking in their own countries. Thus, while African governments mostly ban films made by their critical citizens, they become artistic fodder for First World film festival and conference circuits. As such, critical African films are sometimes subjected to alienating and misleading post-Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic critique. These theories are often inappropriately imported into African critical canons by travelling scholars trying to secure their First World relevance by recreating the neocolonial bastions of Western psychocentric Screen Theory in a continent still resolving the tensions and problems of colonialism, let alone postmodernism. Keyan G. Tomaselli is a South African communication professor and author, currently Professor Emeritus and Fellow at University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban where he established and operated its Centre for Communication, Media, and Society for twenty-nine years until becoming a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at University of Johannesburg. He is also editor of the UKZN-UJ journal Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies and coeditor at UJ’s Journal of African Cinemas.

Tomaselli, Shepperson, & Eke / Theory of Orality

401

Arnold Shepperson was a scholar and part-time researcher at The Center for Communication, Media, and Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. His dissertation was titled On the Co-existence of Persistence and Change: A Semiotic and Logical Inquiry into the Ethnology of Social Developments. He died in 2007. Maureen Eke is professor of English at Central Michigan University. Her research focuses on African and African diasporic literatures, postcolonial theory, and African cinema. Eke has a forthcoming book titled Emerging Perspectives on Tess Osonye Onwueme.

Notes Originally published as Keyan G. Tomaselli, Arnold Shepperson, and Maureen Eke, “Towards a Theory of Orality in African Cinema,” in Research in African Literatures, 26, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 18–35. 1. John Higgins, “Documentary Realism and Film Pleasure: Two Moments From Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season,” Literator 13 (1992): 105. 2. Paul Willemen, “The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections,” in Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pine and Paul Willemen (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 1–29. 3. Our theory of orality is drawn mainly from Walter Ong. See Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen, 1982). Our approach to semiotics is detailed in Arnold Shepperson and Keyan Tomaselli, “Semiotics in an African Context: ‘Science’ vs ‘Priest Craft’, ‘Semiology’ vs ‘Semiotics,’” Acta Fennica Semiotica 2 (1993): 159–76. 4. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 5. 5. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963). 6. See Arnold Shepperson, “A Social Interpretation of Cultural Experience: Reflections on Raymond Williams’ Early Cultural Writings, 1957–1961” (MA thesis, University of Natal, 1995). 7. See Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 32–33; and Agnes Heller, A Theory of History (London: RKP, 1983), 328–333. 8. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), 98. 9. Ibid, 99. 10. Ibid, 98–99. 11. Ibid, 70–74. 12. Ibid, 168. The German original is Gerede. 13. This point is made in different ways by Tomaselli and Smith, “Semiotics in an African Context”; Jane Gaines, “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory,” Screen 29 (1988): 12–26; Teshome Gabriel, “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films,” in Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul

402

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Willemen (London: BFI, 1989), 30–52; Teshome Gabriel, “Third Cinema as Guardian of Popular Memory: Towards a Third Aesthetics,” in Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (London: BFI, 1989), 53–64; and Hamid Naficy, “Autobiography, Film Spectatorship, and Cultural Negotiation,” Emergences 1 (1989): 29–54. 14. Shepperson, A Social Interpretation. 15. Gabriel, “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films.” 16. See S. Flitterman-Lewis, “Psychoanalysis, Film and Television,” Channels of Discourse, ed. R. Allen (London: Methuen, 1987). 17. Heller, A Theory of History, 303. 18. Heidegger’s exposition of the ready-to-handedness of existents closely matches Marx’s analysis of the material reality of the products encountered in the context of alienated labor. 19. P. E. Elungu, “African Liberation and the Problem of Philosophy,” trans. M. Mulumba, mimeo (Durban: CCMS, University of Natal-Durban, 1992), 2. 20. See Placide Tempels, Bantu Philosophy (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1959). 21. See Valentin Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1979). 22. Some Screen Theorists who have now seen the light have veered totally in the other direction—calling for reception studies, seemingly to the exclusion of other dimensions of cinema study. Eve Bertelsen, for example, writes as if no one else in Africa or South Africa has dealt with these issues. In fact, it is not clear exactly which South African film theorists, if any, she has in mind. All her sources are European and North American. Eve Bertelsen, “Radical Cheek: Film Theory and the Common Viewer,” South African Theatre Journal 5 (1991): 2–4. 23. See R. Berman, “Rights and Writing in South Africa.” Telos, 75 (1988): 161–72. 24. See Chinua Achebe, Library of African Cinema (San Francisco: California Newsreel, 1990). 25. See Mbye Cham, “Film Production in West Africa: 1979–1981,” Presence Africaine 4 (1982): 168–187. 26. See Paul Stoller, The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992). 27. The notion of griots in African cinema is subject to considerable debate. Manthia Diawara argues that while African filmmakers rest on the shoulders of traditional storytellers, the films point toward a new order, rather than the old and stagnating one in which griots are implicated. Diawara’s position is critiqued by Henry Overballe, who argues that griots protect values not institutions and that they are the carriers of innovation and change. 28. This is not our task here. The reader is referred to Shepperson and Tomaselli. 29. Propp presented a formalist analysis of Russian folktales, concluding that folk narratives generally can be analyzed in terms of thirty-one categories of actions. These include the classical notions of tasks assigned to characters, magic aids and objects donated and/ or withheld, and so on. 30. See Arnold Shepperson, “Tits ‘n’ Bums: Film and the Disposal of Human Body,” Visual Anthropology 6 (1994): 395–400. 31. Ludwig Wittgenstein carried out an analytical critique of the 20th-century AngloSaxon tradition of linguistic philosophy. This work was aimed, albeit implicitly, at the way in which earlier work by, among others, G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell had been

Tomaselli, Shepperson, & Eke / Theory of Orality

403

received by the logical positivists. Indeed, Wittgenstein himself had started his philosophical career with a groundbreaking critical assessment of the early logical positivism of the Vienna Circle (1961). In the former work, however, he takes what has been described by Agnes Heller as a “tragic” view of linguistic philosophy (not to be confused with philosophical work deriving from structural linguistics). References to “form(s) of life” are not frequent, but they are crucial in grasping Wittgenstein’s position that meaning cannot be abstracted from the context of all the different kinds of activity possible for members of a community (Heller and § 23). Similarly, he points out that the matter of consensual rule-following that is sometimes labelled as “conventionalism” cannot be reduced simply to “agreement in opinions,” but to an agreement which stems from the whole active context shared by those who so agree (§ 241). It is this context that Wittgenstein calls a “form of life.” See also § 19, and Heller 174 and 226. 32. See Fernando Solanas and Octavia Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” Movies and Methods,. ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: U of California P, 1976), 44–64. 33. See Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, Questions of Third Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1989). 34. See Solanas and Getino as well as H. Salmane, S. Hartog, and D. Wilson, Algerian Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1976). 35. See Stoller, The Cinematic Griot. 36. Haile Gerima, Appropriations: New Directions for African Cultural Studies: Conference Programme (U of Cape Town, 1993). 37. See Arendt, The Human Condition. 38. See D. Conquergood, “‘Is It Real’: Watching Television with Laotian Refugees.” PCDS Directions 2, no. 2 (1986): 1–5. 39. The idea of “society” here is informed by the critique of the social sciences in Hannah Arendt. The Social (note the capitalization) is for Arendt a consequence of the exclusion from human activity of the possibility of action, a condition brought about by the organization of human society as a consequence of the labor theories of value in early political economy. In the world within which film as commodity emerged, there was an already-existing tradition in which the oral had been long made secondary to the written; film and what can be said of it became elaborated precisely within the consumption-reproductive form of life Arendt describes. In the absence of a comparable history of struggle regarding industrialization in the colonized world, the orality of nurture has never been completely marginalized by the imposition of the Social and its labor theories of (surplus) value, as has been demonstrated of British life in the 1930s to the 1950s by Richard Hoggart. 40. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 6. 41. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: The Free P, 1991), 30–35. 42. Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1972), 11–14.

Film and the Problem of Languages in Africa Paulin Soumanou Vieyra

M

any domains of artistic creation rely on speech. Such is the case with theater and cinema, among others: their manifestation requires the use of spoken language. Of course, in their initial creation phase, theater and cinema emerge through written language, the way the novel does. Yet to signify language [langage], this vague conception of speech, requires the support of a language [langue] that explains it into words. Let us raise the economic aspect of using the main or the national language in films. It has been noticed that audiences prefer watching films postsynchronized into their own language, over watching them subtitled. Based on this fact, and for purely commercial reasons, upon the emergence of the talkies, producers and distributors, to ensure sales, started to postsynchronize them in each of their customers’ language. But this endeavor has not been extended to any of the African languages. Of course, if one raises the cultural significance of this operation, the method seems barbaric at first sight. Let us recall that a language, to quote Jacques Berque, “is not a phenomenon that transcends nature nor society, falling from the sky as it were.”1 A language is filled with a people’s values of civilization. To put German or Russian in the mouths of French actors is necessarily to create a gap between the language’s affective and emotional density and the foreign thoughts that it is called on to signify. If the languages in question belong to the same geographical determinism and originate from the same civilization, it could be argued that little harm is done. When the language of substitution used to dub the film belongs to another geographical area and carries values of another civilization, the outcome is more dramatic. We have seen Japanese films dubbed into French, and we have felt a certain awkwardness and intellectual discomfort. That is why, in fact, real cinephiles will always prefer to watch a film in its original language, with subtitles only. In the case of Africa, such cultural misgivings are certainly not what prevented producers and distributors from dubbing their films into African languages. Let’s address the economic issue at play here.

Paulin Soumanou Vieyra / The Problem of Languages

405

Figure 1. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and Georges Caristan during the filming of Afrique sur Seine / Africa on the Seine (dir. Mamadou Sarr and Vieyra, 1955, France). Image courtesy of Stéphane Vieyra and PSV Films.

I am not suggesting we dub all films screened in Africa in all African languages. However, I do advocate for dubbing for the simple reason that, instead of receiving a film in a language that ninety percent of people do not understand, it would be the lesser of two evils for Africans to receive the world’s most important productions in some of the main African languages that are understood by at least fifty percent of people. This option offers a clear cultural advantage. No serious experiment has ever been undertaken to even know what the financial cost of this operation could be. Let us take the example of Senegal, which is linguistically more unified than many other African countries. It can therefore serve as an example for our demonstration.2 As demonstrated, films dubbed into Wolof would be more profitable than French language films. It was necessary to let the figures speak for themselves to provide a clear sense of the profit that producers and distributors could turn through dubbing. One could object that while the operation might be profitable in Senegal and for the Wolof language only (considering the country’s existing infrastructure), it does not mean that it would be profitable elsewhere and for other languages.3 Even if this objection were accurate, we still suggest that an organization such as UNESCO try the experiment with films deemed of interest. Any other organization, including the African states themselves, could of course support the dubbing of certain films in the context of a

406

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

cultural policy. [In our previous discussion] we have extended our demonstration [that dubbing films into Wolof would be profitable] to 450 films, the totality of new films distributed yearly in Senegal. We could, for instance, start by retaining only about ten of these films for dubbing. As we have signaled above, in the case of dubbing, one could object that the gap could prove too wide between, on the one hand, a purely Western action (in its unfolding and ontological status, in its spiritual dimension, and in its material manifestations), and, on the other hand, the African language that is grafted onto it to bring local meaning to the film’s components and lend them the necessary affective dimension. That gap could even prove irreconcilable and lead audiences to reject the film. This is a possibility that could turn the dubbing operation in Africa, at least in its early phase, into a failure. As we have said, it will be important in the beginning to choose films whose cultural orientation makes it acceptable, if not plausible, that Europeans speak in Wolof, for instance. The danger could be that dubbing would reaffirm the values of Western civilization, this time from within Africa itself, and thus even more effectively. Yet is this not the time of cultural symbioses? Africa can no longer remain outside of the general circuit of the world. Africa might as well derive a real and sustainable benefit from it and attempt to shift the power relations away from domination and subordination. This leads us to consider the part that African cinema plays in Africa’s cultural exchanges with the world. For this to happen African cinema must start by being totally African; it is from this vantage point that it will have something to contribute to the world. This means that African cinema must originate with African languages. African filmmakers are aware of this issue, and they would rather not spread to cinema the current paradox of African literature, which is written in foreign languages and better known abroad than in Africa itself.4 We have already witnessed the making of many African films in African languages. In 1964, the author of this book shot the short film Sindiély entirely in Wolof; Moustapha Alassane made Le Retour d’un aventurier / Return of an Adventurer (1966, Niger) in French and Hausa. Oumarou Ganda directed Cabascabo (1968, Niger) in Zarma.5 Ousmane Sembène made his film Mandabi (1968, Senegal) in Wolof.6 African cinema will be greatly enriched by all kinds of experiences, and the least of these will certainly not be the use of African languages in African films. We will then have caught up with what is happening everywhere in the cinemas of the world: national productions in national languages, dubbed in different foreign languages to facilitate circulation abroad. There will also be films in African languages simply subtitled in foreign languages, foreign films dubbed in African languages, and foreign films subtitled in those African languages for which a written system has already been fixed.

Paulin Soumanou Vieyra / The Problem of Languages

407

Figure 2. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Ben Diogaye Bèye, and Ousmane Sembène at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Image courtesy of Stéphane Vieyra and PSV Films.

From that point on, in the domain of cinema, Africa will no longer be solely a consumer of civilization but a producer of culture too. Which technique should be used to dub Western films into African languages or African films into other African languages? In terms of major African languages, those spoken by millions of people, the classical technique generally used in this process can be deployed. For films to be dubbed, it will be necessary to continue setting up what is called an international track. This track will comprise, as per usual, music, sound, and the film’s special sound effects. On another track, there would be the film’s dialogue, which would serve as the reference version for voice actors, allowing them to perceive the actors’ intonations and to emulate them in the dubbing language. Once the new dialogue is recorded, a standard copy can be printed, as per regular conditions, to obtain an optical soundtrack. If the audiences to be reached speak less commonly spoken languages, it will be necessary to use magnetic sound to record the new dialogue track in the dubbing language. The reproduction of this record will require a dualsystem projection.7 Commentaries in as many languages as is necessary can also be recorded at a low cost on a magnetic tape. The dubbing of films in African languages will necessitate changes in theater equipment. One can envision dedicating rooms in certain theaters to dubbed films that require

408

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

dual system projection. In any event, this technical solution is perfectly affordable, and it could be efficiently used until other processes are discovered. But the projection of films on big television screens that are adaptable for theaters is already being promoted. Television will acquire a greater role in the broadcasting of film, thus bringing a solution to the language problem. The same film could be screened, at no risk for damage, from just one broadcasting station and cover a whole country in a language, to then be taken up again in the same day in another language; or it could be broadcast in multiple languages at the same time, through selected channels, similar to simultaneous interpretation. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1925–1987) was the first African admitted to study at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC, now known as La Fémis). In 1955, Vieyra directed the first substantial film by a French-speaking sub-Saharan African, Afrique sur Seine. His multidisciplinary career as a filmmaker, producer, and scholar is central to West African film history.

Notes Originally published as Paulin Vieyra, “Film and the Problem of Languages in Africa,” trans. Mélissa Gélinas, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58, no. 3 (2019): 122–125. Excerpted translation of Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, “Le film et le problème des langues en Afrique,” Le cinéma africain: Des origines à 1973 (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1975), 251–268. I would like to thank Présence Africaine and Ms. Suzanne Diop for the authorization to translate into English and publish this excerpt. It should be noted that some paragraphs were combined to foster legibility in the target language—Trans. 1. Jacques Berque (1910–1995) was a French sociologist and anthropologist. He is best known for his research on decolonization and the Maghreb (mainly Algeria and Morocco). This quote probably originates from a chapter by Berque that Vieyra quotes earlier in this piece: “Problème des langues,” in Les cinémas des pays arabes, ed. Georges Sadoul (Beyrouth: Centre interarabe du cinéma et de la télévision, 1966), 53–59. —Trans. 2. Wolof is spoken by ninety percent of Senegal’s population as a first or acquired language. Its status as the lingua franca of Senegal (and The Gambia) was first supported by the dominance of the Wolof people as an ethnic group (they constitute forty percent of the population) and the traditional socioeconomic status of their language as an important trade language. Increased social mobility (and thus the need to communicate across linguistic communities), the dominant status of Wolof in Dakar, and widespread use of the language alongside French at the governmental, educational, and cultural levels have contributed to the dominance of Wolof in Senegal. This situation contrasts to that of many other countries in Africa, where no language effectively functions as a link between people. Gary F. Simons and Charles D. Fennig, Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 21st ed. (Dallas, TX: SIL International, 2018), https://www.ethnologue.com/.—Trans.

Paulin Soumanou Vieyra / The Problem of Languages

409

3. Vieyra also considers that the cost of the initial investment required from producers and distributors may reduce their interest in dubbing films in African languages. Yet he provides detailed figures that suggest that producers and distributors could recoup their initial investment and turn more profit than before. Vieyra, “Le film et le problème des langues en Afrique,” 264–265.—Trans. 4. Vieyra uses the term littérature africaine d’expression étrangère (Vieyra, “Le film et le problème des langues en Afrique,” 267).—Trans. 5. Then known as Hausa-Zarma (“haoussa-djerma” in the original).—Trans. 6. Mandabi or Le Mandat (1968), Ousmane Sembène’s fourth film, actually has two dialogue tracks, one in French only and one in Wolof and French. The film makes ample use of diglossia as a plot point to illustrate the disenfranchisement of its protagonist visà-vis a corrupt French-speaking Senegalese bureaucracy. Sembène’s (French) producer nonetheless imposed the condition of a French version, so the film was shot simultaneously in French, with two final versions released, one in Wolof and French and the other completely in French. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Ousmane Sembène, cinéaste (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1972), 178.—Trans. 7. The International Federation of Film Archives’s Glossary of Film Technical Terms defines the dual system projection (or double-headed projection in the United Kingdom) as “a two-reel projection method, with the film image on one reel, sound on separate magnetic sprocketed film.” I thank Thorn Chen from the Translation Committee of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies for his help with the translation of this technical term.—Trans.

In Defense of African Film Studies Boukary Sawadogo

A

s is customary with the celebration of a jubilee in the history of an organization, reflection is often centered around memory, the current state of affairs, and proposing changes or corrections to improve the organization. The fiftieth anniversary of the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) at its twenty-sixth edition provides a timely forum not only to celebrate achievements of the festival in promoting African cinema, but more importantly to reflect on critical discourse that shapes the creative process, reception, and dissemination of African visual media. Very often, funding and distribution challenges facing African cinema have eclipsed the debate or long-overdue attention on African film studies. So, as part of the three-volume collection on the history of African cinema, this contribution briefly examines the subject of African film studies now that the fanfare of the festivities has faded from our memories and the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the world to a halt. The underlying idea of this article is to argue for how African screen media could be (re)imagined through several initiatives such as fostering a robust African film studies, incorporating more critical studies into the training of audiovisual storytellers, and diversifying outlets for the production and dissemination of critical knowledge on African cinema. Specifically, this article is about how to move African film studies from the margins of the larger field of film and media studies globally, and also to advocate for a more vibrant expression and presence on the continent. To some extent, the piece builds on the conversation by a Black Camera dossier in 2016 on the marginalization of African media studies globally.

Relations between African Film Industry and Critical Studies Critical studies and technical training should not be mutually exclusive, as it has unfortunately appeared to be the practice for many years on the continent. Since the 2000s, the creation of film schools across Sub-Saharan Africa has helped address the lack of locally trained technicians, but we cannot say with

Boukary Sawadogo / In Defense of African Film Studies

411

confidence that critical studies of African film have grown at the same pace on the continent. Over the last fifteen years, governmental and private entities in Africa have developed several initiatives to address the structural challenges facing African screen arts, especially in production and distribution. These initiatives concern the creation of film schools to train local technicians and the next generation of filmmakers: Imagine Institute in Burkina Faso, Institut Supérieur des Métiers de l’Audiovisuel in Benin, Blue Nile Film and Television Academy in Ethiopia, Kenya Film School, and the master’s degree program in Documentaire de Création at Université Gaston Berger in Senegal. The training of local technical talent and the expansion of distribution circuits have marked key junctures in the development of African screen arts, but the gaps between theory and practice and between critical studies and technical expertise have never been so far apart. Too often, the curriculum at these film schools is built around production courses or modules. The creation and dissemination of scholarship on African screen media should be given more attention, with the ultimate goal of developing a vibrant field of African film and media studies. As for circulation of moving images, transnational media corporations and several film festivals—subregional and international in scope—have been created to expand African film distribution circuits. These developments in the industry have been the subject of numerous scholarly investigations. For example, Moradewun Adejunmobi1 spoke about the televisual turn of African film distribution, and Olivier Barlet2 uses the term “multiple screens” to describe the proliferation of distribution outlets thanks to digital technology breakthroughs. Computers, tablets, and smartphones have revolutionized media content delivery and consumption patterns. It is in this context of the digital technology revolution that transnational media corporations (such as M-Net’s Africa Magic channels; Africable; Abidjanbased A+, a subsidiary of Canal+; and the many private local TV stations throughout African countries) are (re)shaping the landscape of contemporary African cinema. As I have argued elsewhere, the corporate intervention in the production and distribution of content (iROKOtv, China’s Star Times, India’s Zee TV, DStv, Africable, A+), video and digital technologies shaping the emergence of popular cinema and genre film, and audiences’ preferences for local stories are (re)defining narrative construction and delivery.3 Other scholars have noted the role of festivals both on and off the continent as extensions of diverse African cinema exhibition initiatives.4 The circulation of critical knowledge on African screen media—locally produced works and/or productions by Western-based scholars—still remains limited on the continent in comparison to that of the films. The number of quality scholarly investigations of African audiovisual productions published every year is significantly lower than that of the total

412

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

cinematic output. The discrepancy is indicative of deep structural issues of the economics of publishing and circulation of ideas, which the promise of digital/online accessibility has yet to fully materialize.

The Marginalization of African Screen Arts in Film and Media Studies The multifaceted changes in African cinema over the last fifteen years—in production techniques, distribution methods, and creation of film schools— have yet to change the status quo of the critical studies component, which lacks significant attention or is neglected altogether. This is evident on the continent by the relative invisibility of African cinema studies at African universities, the limited number of scholarly journals that focus on African cinema, and the few conferences on African cinema being held regularly. Generally, and outside the continent, African cinema still faces challenges in attracting attention within the field of film and media studies. On the continent, African cinema studies tend to be housed under particular disciplines in the humanities (English, literature, and communications), arts programs (dramatic and performing arts), or social sciences (anthropology and sociology). There is currently limited research into why African cinema studies have been marginalized in African universities. However, Tunde Onikoyi5 provides some evidence of the absence of fully developed cinema studies departments at Nigerian universities. The closure of the master’s degree program in African cinema offered by the Center for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, has left sub-Saharan Africa with few degree-granting programs of its kind. The marginalization, or what I refer to as the fragmentation, of African cinema studies along disparate disciplinary lines is not conducive to the formation of the field of African cinema studies, particularly in Africa, where intuitively it should have a strong foothold from which to expand to the rest of the world. On the contrary, the majority of critical studies publications comes from Western-based scholars. This trend needs to be reversed, or at least be balanced out. Few initiatives have been developed over the last ten years by the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and the American Council of Learned Societies that address the production and dissemination of knowledge around African screen media. These institutional initiatives consist of thematic workshops organized by CODESRIA at editions of FESPACO to engage scholars and practitioners in critical reflections on African cinema and on the African Humanities Program, through which research projects such as Dominica Dipio’s book Gender Terrains in African Cinema are published.6 The African Humanities Program is a mentoring and networking program designed for scholars in

Boukary Sawadogo / In Defense of African Film Studies

413

five commonwealth countries: Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, and Tanzania. The contributions of these two major initiatives are not negligible, but more is undeniably needed to create a tangible impact across the field. Similarly, the development of more scholarly journals as outlets for critical studies of African cinema is required in addition to publications such as the Journal of African Cinemas; the Pan-African cinema magazine Awotele; Sanaa Journal of African Arts, Media, and Cultures; Journal of Nigerian Theatre and Film Studies; African Studies Review; Research in African Literatures; and Black Camera. These publications follow the long-standing tradition of outlets such as the magazine and publisher Présence Africaine, the South African Drum Magazine, and the bimonthly review L’Afrique littéraire et artistique. Beyond Africa, especially in the global context of media and film studies, African cinema studies remain at the margins of the field. The contributing factors for this concern departmental and disciplinary affiliations of the faculty members teaching African cinema, particularly at North American universities, according to Moradewun Adejunmobi7 and Lindiwe Dovey.8 In her article cited above, Adejunmobi demonstrates how most African cinema scholars are in departments of foreign languages, literatures, or English, and few are based in media or cinema studies departments. Another possible way of analyzing the marginality of African cinema studies is to liken it to the struggles of a nascent discipline within its field. For instance, in their historical overview of the development of film studies in the West, Richard Rushton and Gary Bettinson9 show how film studies entered academia in the 1960s by not only demonstrating their scholarly credentials, but also by taking advantage of the political and cultural antiestablishment movements of the 1960s. The numerous academic articles and monographs on African cinema are enough to warrant its scholarly credentials. Maybe the development of digital technologies, social media, and free online platforms for distribution of audiovisual content will change the economics of the image and power dynamics in the circulation of cultural productions from the Global South. These historical and contextual circumstances have the potential to bring African cultural productions into more mainstream distribution outlets. The ensuing visibility and popular reception could translate into the creation of more academic studies of African cinema.

From the Margins to the Mainstream: Fostering More Critical Studies in Shaping African Film Studies The visibility of the field of African film studies can be realized by taking concrete steps to produce and distribute critical knowledge, creating classroom resources for teachers and students, organizing more conferences or

414

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

panels on African cinema, and most important, setting up academic departments of African film and media studies at African universities. There is already a diverse corpus of scholarship on African cinema that was produced by Western-based researchers and teachers, so similar or higher levels of scholarly publications on the continent would lead to a well researched field. The research methods and critical frameworks through which to examine African audiovisual productions could reflect a wider variety of traditions of thought, from Afrocentric perspectives, minor cinema, and auteur cinema as well as Western film theorists. Eventually, preferred critical approaches to African film and media studies will emerge as more work is produced, conferring upon the field its distinctive or characteristic features. The effort to move from the margins to the middle requires Africa and the black diaspora to work together, which has not been the case over the last few years, as the participation of the black diaspora at FESPACO has slowed in comparison to its peak in the 1990s and early 2000s. Up to this juncture in the historical development of African cinema, most of the publications have been scholarly, which are not often accessible to readers with no experience with African cinema. In this respect, introductory books for a broader public audience and undergraduate textbooks are instrumental to the growth of the field. There are currently only two textbooks on African cinema: the introductory and undergraduate textbook African Film Studies: An Introduction (2018), by Boukary Sawadogo, and the high school textbook Teaching African Cinema: Video and Teachers Book (1998), by Roy Ashbury, Wendy Helsby, and Maureen O’Brien. However, at least one hundred scholarly monographs on African cinema have been published over the last twenty years. In addition, curriculum reform is needed at film schools on the continent, where the current model of training focuses more on production courses than on critical studies (history, aesthetics, criticism). The next generation of filmmakers should be not only technicians, but also critical thinkers of the filmmaking art and its discourse. As indicated earlier, the creation of academic departments for African film and media studies, and the organization of more African cinema panels at humanities and social sciences conferences would increase interest in the field of African film studies. In conclusion, the issue of the marginality or lack of visibility of African film studies as an academic field requires a thorough rethinking of the different ways of producing and disseminating critical knowledge, and where it should happen. We need to reimagine film festivals by not only focusing on traditional exhibitions, press conferences, post-screening discussions with directors, and professional media markets, but also by taking festivals to new

Boukary Sawadogo / In Defense of African Film Studies

415

venues and developing new practices in critically reflecting on or analyzing African cinematic works. How can we produce meaning out of African films and disseminate those critical investigations throughout the continent and beyond? How can we develop a significant basis of critical knowledge that shapes and is being shaped by the art of filmmaking? How can we best appropriate the discourse on one’s own images and stories? The discussion of these questions and many more relevant ones should find a home in festivals. A film festival is not only a place where films are screened; it is also, and most important, a place of teaching and producing critical knowledge. Maybe that is one dimension that FESPACO should add to its mission in future editions. Other spaces such as African universities are expected to, and should, rise to their mission of being centers of knowledge and set up academic units fully dedicated to the study of African films. Boukary Sawadogo is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies in the Department of Media and Communication Arts, and the Black Studies Program at the City College of New York, City University of New York. His latest books include West African Screen Media: Comedy, TV Series, and Transnationalization (Michigan State University Press, 2019) and African Film Studies: An Introduction (Routledge, 2018).

Notes 1. Moradewun Adejunmobi, “African Film’s Televisual Turn,” Cinema Journal, 54, no. 2 (2015): 125. 2. Olivier Barlet, Contemporary African Cinema (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2016). 3. Boukary Sawadogo, West African Screen Media: Comedy, TV Series, and Transnationalization (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2019), 17. 4. Lindiwe Dovey, Curating Africa at the Age of Film Festivals (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Boukary Sawadogo, West African Screen Media: Comedy, TV Series, and Transnationalization (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2019), 115. 5. Tunde Onikoyi, “Nollywood, African Cinema and Film Studies: Marginality at the Core of the Nigerian Academy,” African Notes, 41, nos. 1&2 (2017): 29. 6. Dominica Dipio, Gender Terrains in African Cinema (NISC (Pty) Ltd, 2019). 7. Moradewun Adejunmobi, “African Media Studies and Marginality at the Center,” Black Camera, 7, no. 2 (2016): 128. 8. Lindiwe Dovey, “On the Matter of Fiction: An Approach to the Marginalization of African Film Studies in the Global Academy,” Black Camera, 7, no. 2 (2016): 165. 9. Richard Rushton and Gary Bettinson, What Is Film Theory? An Introduction to Contemporary Debates (New York: Open University Press, 2010), 4 and 7.

IV. ARTICULATIONS OF AFRICAN CINEMA

Figure D. Ousmane Sembène (left) and Sarah Maldoror (right) at FESPACO. Image courtesy of FESPACO.

Dossier 1: Key Dates in the History of African Cinema Olivier Barlet and Claude Forest 1895–1954: Cinema in the Colonial Period

A

s soon as the cinematograph was invented, operators were sent to Africa and all over the world to bring back distant and unusual images. In Africa as elsewhere, screenings were a great success and quickly became widespread, first in mobile form. Colonial cinema combined exoticism, ethnocentrism, and propaganda (nature versus culture, savage versus civilized, group versus individual, belief versus science, etc.), and the films shown to local populations came essentially from the North. However, an industry began to be set up in certain countries, notably in Egypt and South Africa. 1895

On-screen projections of “animated photographic views” by the Skladanowsky brothers in Berlin in November and by the Lumière brothers in Paris in December. Discovering the world. Une femme ouolove, by Félix Regnault (France), on a Senegalese potter: the documentation of behaviors. From 1908 onward, Albert Kahn reports on the cultures of some sixty countries.

1896

Lumière operators shoot short films in Africa. Projections in South Africa and Egypt.

1897

Screenings at the Lumière Cinema in Tunis by Albert Samama Chikly. Screenings in Morocco.

1900

Screening of the Lumière brothers’ L’Arroseur arrosé in a circus in Dakar.

1903

Screenings in Nigeria.

420

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

1910

Independence of South Africa and first film (silent, now lost), The Great Kimberley Diamond Robbery / The Star of the South (15 min., director unknown).

1911

Eight cinemas in Cairo, three in Alexandria.

1914

Seven “theater-cinemas” in Algiers, twelve theaters in 1920, forty in 1939.

1916

African Film Productions is founded by the American businessman Isadore W. Schlesinger, who also set up Killarney Film Studios in Johannesburg, produces thirty-seven fiction films in South Africa over the next six years.

1918

Tarzan of the Apes, by Scott Sidney (86 min.), makes a turnover of $1.5 million in the United States.

1921

Denouncing the daily workings of colonialism, the novel Batouala, by Martinican René Maran, wins the Prix Goncourt but is banned in Africa. L’Atlantide, by Jacques Feyder (163 min.), adaptation of Pierre Benoit’s novel, is a huge hit: mystery versus white male force and impossible interracial love as key elements of colonial cinema. Remakes in 1932 (Georg-Wilhem Pabst), 1947 (Gregg G. Tallas), 1961 (Edgar G. Ulmer), 1972 (Jean-Kerchbron and Armand Lanoux), etc.

1922

First Tunisian short fiction film: Zohra, by Albert Samama-Chikli (35 min.), a tribute to the Bedouins. Independence of Egypt, which becomes a kingdom.

1923

First short fiction film Barsoum Looking for a Job, a comedy by Mohamed Bayoumi (12 min.), promoting tolerance between Muslims and Copts. First experimental radio broadcast in Johannesburg, South Africa.

1924

Commissioned by Citroën, Léon Poirier shoots La Croisière noire (70 min.): from Timbuktu to Madagascar by half-track truck. A huge success. The empire is growing in importance. Cinema theaters in Casablanca, then in Rabat.

1925

Marc Allégret shoots Journey to Congo (94 min.), on the beauty of Black peoples, in collaboration with André Gide, who publishes a book of the same title, an indictment against colonial exactions.

Dossier 1: Key Dates

421

1930

Seven hundred fifty-five cinemas in Africa. This number would rise to 1,683 in 1951, then 2,168 in 1960, mainly in North Africa. First adaptation of an Egyptian novel: Zeinab, by Mohamed Karim, based on the populist novel by Mohamed Hussain Heykel Pacha (talking version in 1952, 120 min.).

1931

Nigeria’s Health Propaganda Unit, a mobile educational cinema test, supervised by William Sellers, established.

1933

Inauguration of the Majestic in Algiers, the largest cinema in Africa with thirty-five hundred seats. Bantu Educational Cinema Experiment (BEKE): test of traveling educational cinema with commentator-translators, supervised by L. A. Notcutt and G. C. Latham.

1934

France: the so-called “Laval” decree aimed at controlling musical and cinematographic works recorded in French-speaking West Africa. In Itto, by Marie Epstein and Jean-Benoît Levy (117 min.), on military medicine and the battles between colonialists and the local population, the latter speak “chleuh” (a local language, subtitled).

1935

Creation of the Misr Studios by the Misr Bank in Cairo to bolster national identity and oppose the British occupiers: fifty to eighty musicals, melodramas and comedies per year, using famous actors. Nationalization in 1961. Development of traveling educational film shows in the British colonies, screening films whose production remains based in London. Sanders of the River (Zoltan Korda, UK, 98 min.), an award-winning success at the Venice Film Festival, suggests that British colonial rule in Nigeria is in the interest of Africans. Paul Robeson, who had accepted the role of Chief Bosambo if the Africans were shown positively, disavows the film.

1936

The Egyptian diva Oum Kalsoum plays the role of a slave in Fritz Kramp’s Wedad (130 min.) and would later play in about one hundred musicals. Establishment of the Commission for the Control of Films for Natives in the Belgian Congo. Nationalization in South Africa of Isidore William Schlesinger’s broadcasting stations under the name of the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

422

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

1937

The Malagasy deacon Philippe Raberojo shoots a docudrama in 9/5mm, The Death of Rasalama (22 min.), on the occasion of the centenary of the death of the Malagasy Protestant martyr Rasalama. Creation of a censorship board in Nigeria.

1938

Anthropologists use the camera to document their research, particularly in Mali, where Marcel Griaule shoots Au pays dogon (15 min.) and Sous les masques noirs (15 min.), followed from 1947 onward by Jean Rouch, Germaine Dieterlen, Claude Meillassoux, etc.

1939

The Will (Al Azima), by the Egyptian Kamal Selim. Without song or dance, a populist realist work on the urban middle class affected by the economic crisis. Algeria has 188 cinemas, Morocco fifty-six, Tunisia forty-seven. The Frenchman Jacques de Baroncelli shoots L’Homme du Niger (102 min.), which magnifies the the colonists’ devotion to their so-called civilizing mission.

1940

The British government’s creation of the Colonial Film Unit (CFU) to adapt educational screenings (mobile cinema with interpreters) and support the Western war effort.

1941

First success, in Intisar al-chabab, by Ahmed Badrakhan (120 min.), of the Syrian-Egyptian singer-songwriter and actor Farid El Atrache, who would continue to often perform in duo with the dancer Samia Gamal.

1944

Creation of the Moroccan Film Center (CCM).

1945

Salah Abou Seif, the father of Egyptian realist cinema, makes his first feature film. Like Youssef Chahine, he would go on to collaborate with the writer Naghib Mahfouz, winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, who played a major role in the renewal of themes.

1946

Sixty-four films are shot in Egypt in the years 1946–60, the golden age of Egyptian cinema, which shines throughout the Arab world.

1948

Creation of the Gold Coast Film Unit (now Ghana) with a training unit for Africans.

1950

Afrique 50 by René Vautier (17 min.): denunciation of colonial exactions; the director was later sentenced to one year in prison and his film confiscated until 1990.

Figure 1. Film poster for Bongolo (dir. André Cauvin, 1952, Belgium). Image courtesy of the author.

424

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Belgian Congo: a film club in Leopoldville brings together Congolese film-lovers who try their hand at cinema. In 1951, Albert Mongita shoots La Leçon de cinéma. In 1953, Emmanuel Lubalu shoots Les Pneus gonflés with the actor Bumba. 1951

Libyan Independence.

1953

Guinea: Mamadou Touré shoots Mouramani (23 min.), a tale about a king. Statues Also Die, by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais (France, 30 min.): on racism toward Black art; the film was banned until 1964. Bongolo et la princesse noire by Belgian André Cauvin (85 min.), played by Congolese actors, is screened at the Cannes Film Festival.

1955–1981: A Cinema of Decolonization with Independence African filmmakers emerge and seek to group together in a Federation. The time had come for Pan-Africanism, which the festivals created in Tunis and Ouagadougou made a reality. The challenge was to decolonize screens as much as minds, but the economic and political stakes were high. 1955

Afrique sur Seine, directed in Paris by the Senegalese Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and Mamadou Sarr (21 min.). It is often mistakenly considered the first sub-Saharan African film, but its claim to the equality of human beings makes it an inaugural manifesto.

1956

Independence of Morocco, Tunisia, and Sudan. The Schlesinger monopoly in South Africa is broken up by the appearance of Jamie Uys, the first independent director who would go on to meet world success with the racist comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980, 100 min.). First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. Participation of Ousmane Sembène.

1957

Independence of Ghana. Creation of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC), with excellent facilities, based on the Gold Coast Film Unit created in 1948. Creation of SATPEC, a Tunisian limited company for film production and expansion. Decree promulgating taxes to support cinema in Egypt and creation of the Film Support Organization.

Dossier 1: Key Dates

425

Jean Rouch shoots Moi, un noir (72 min.) in Abidjan with docker Oumarou Ganda who would later become a prominent filmmaker in Niger. 1958

Guinean Independence. Youssef Chahine causes a scandal in Egypt with Gare centrale (76 min.), which was banned for two years. Chahine plays a destitute erotomaniac with a limp. First Moroccan feature film, Le Fils maudit, by Mohamed Ousfour (50 min.): his parents’ neglect leads the son to delinquency and crime. Referendum on the Constitution of the Fifth French Republic, whose article 12 concerns the French Community. Only Guinea votes “no” and takes its independence.

1959

Come Back Africa, by Lionel Rogosin (USA, 95 min.), first feature film shot in South Africa denouncing the condition of the Black population. Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Rome. Participation of Ousmane Sembène. Creation of the Conseil de l’Entente (Dahomey, Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, Niger, joined by Togo in 1966). Federation of Mali grouping together Senegal, French Sudan, Dahomey, and Upper Volta, then reduced to the first two. First television channel in Nigeria: Western Nigerian Television (WNTV) in Ibadan. Guinea nationalizes the importation and distribution of films. Opening of the Higher Institute of Cinema in Egypt.

1960

Declaration of Independence in Cameroon, Federation of Mali, Togo, Madagascar, Belgian Congo, Somalia, Dahomey, Niger, Upper Volta, Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, CongoBrazzaville, Gabon, Nigeria, Mauritania. The Federation of Mali breaks up. French Sudan becomes the Republic of Mali and declares itself free of any commitment to France. First Egyptian national television channel.

1961

Partial nationalization of the Egyptian film industry. Independence of Sierra Leone and Tanzania. Casablanca Conference with the most radical African States (Guinea, Morocco, Algerian FLN, Ghana, Libya, United Arab Republic). Creation of the African and Malagasy Union (future OCAM, Joint African and Malagasy Organisation, 1965) by the most moderate countries (the so-called Brazzaville group).

426

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Creation of the French Ministry of Cooperation and the International Audiovisual Consortium (CAI) to facilitate the production of reports and documentaries. Establishment of the Ministry’s technical unit headed by Jean-René Debrix. 1962

Independence of Rwanda, Burundi, Algeria, Uganda. Creation of the Malian Film Office. The creation of national television companies in French-speaking Africa is based on the legal and administrative model of the Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française (ORTF): 1962 in CongoBrazzaville, Algeria (set up in 1956) and Morocco; 1963 in Gabon, Upper Volta, Tunisia and Ivory Coast; 1966 in Zaire; 1973 in Togo; 1977 in Guinea; 1978 in Benin; 1983 in Mali; 1984 in Mauritania; 1985 in Cameroon; 1987 in Chad; 1992 in Rwanda. Creation of the Société Ivoirienne du Cinéma (SIC, shut down in 1979)—promotional films and technical support for fiction, and even production, producing Henri Duparc’s first two comedies: Abusuan (1972, 93 min.) on family predation and L’Herbe sauvage on adultery and jealousy (1975, 76 min.). Aouré, by the Nigerien Moustapha Alassane (30 min.), on a village meeting and marriage.

1963

Independence of Kenya. The Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) becomes Voice of Kenya before returning to its original name in 1989. National television companies follow in Uganda, Sudan and Zambia. Thirty-two states create the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which adopts the principle of inviolability of borders (1964). Paulin Soumanou Vieyra reports these figures for cinemas on the continent: South African Union 368; Nigeria 82; Senegal 65; Ivory Coast 50; Tanganyika 45; Ethiopia 40; Libya 40; Mozambique 35; Congo-Brazzaville 32; Congo-Leopoldville 30; Somalia 27; Madagascar 27; Angola 20; Mali 19; Uganda 18; Cameroon 15; Sierra Leone 11; Upper Volta 7; Chad 6; Niger 5. After a year of training at the Gorky Studio in Moscow, Senegalese Ousmane Sembène shoots Borom Sarret (22 min.) in Dakar, a realistic manifesto asserting identities vis-à-vis the neocolonial elites. Peuple en marche, documentary by Ahmed Rachedi and the filmmakers of the audiovisual training center run by René Vautier in Algeria (55 min.), based on their images partially destroyed by the French police.

Figure 2. Film poster for La Noire de… / Black Girl (dir. Ousmane Sembène, 1966, Senegal). Image courtesy of the author.

428

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

1964

Independence of Malawi and Zambia. Creation of the Algerian National Film Center (CNCA). Creation of the amateur film festival in Kélibia, Tunisia.

1965

Independence of the Gambia. The Dawn of the Damned by Algerian Ahmed Rachedi (100 min.): for a demystified history of Africa and against racism.

1966

Independence of Botswana and Lesotho. World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar. First Carthage Film Festival (CFF) created by the Tunisian Ministry of Culture under the impetus of Tahar Cheriaa. Golden Tanit Award: Black Girl by Ousmane Sembène, the first feature film from Senegal (65 min.; a 55 min. version had been shortened to be registered in France), on the journey of a maid, portraying the cruelty of class contempt. The Battle of Algiers, by Gillo Pontecorvo (121 min.): AlgerianItalian epic film that became cult through its portrait of Brahim Hadjadj (Ali la Pointe). The Wind of the Aurès. by Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina (Algeria, 90 min.): about the war of liberation; First Film Prize at the Cannes festival. Le Sergent Bakary Woolen, by Mohamed Lamine Akin (100 min.), first feature film in Guinea, against forced marriage.

1967

Creation in Guinea of the state-run Syli-Cinéma, which serves as the National Film Center. Dissolution of the CNCA, replaced by the Algerian Cinematography Center (CAC) and the National Office for Cinema Trade and Industry (ONCIC, shut down in 1984). Establishment of the Fund for the Development of Art, Technique and Cinematographic Industry.

1968

Independence of Mauritius, Swaziland, and Equatorial Guinea. Sam Arieetey directs the first Ghanaian feature film, No Tears for Ananse, adapted from a folktale about a peasant facing his family. The following year, he takes over the direction of the GFIC. Creation of the Kenyan Film Corporation (KFC), which limits itself to the distribution of mainly foreign films. The Nigeria Television Authority (NTA) broadcasts, until 1988, a successful soap opera in English and Nigerian pidgin, The Village Headmaster.

Dossier 1: Key Dates

429

Manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema,” by Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino. 2nd edition of the Carthage Film Festival (CFF). Golden Tanit Award not attributed. Le Mandat. by Ousmane Sembène (105 min.), evokes the emergence of an African bourgeoisie and class struggle. International Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Les Hors-la-loi, by Tewfik Farès (95 min.), the first Algerian film in color, a western about a Robin Hood trio before the revolution. 1969

First African Film Festival in Ouagadougou (which would become the Pan-African Film Festival of Ouagadougou, FESPACO). Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, under the aegis of the OAU. The symposium adopts a Pan-African cultural manifesto. Creation of the Pan-African Union of Filmmakers, which becomes the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) in 1970 at its first Congress at the CFF. MPEAA (Motion Picture Export Association of America) founds AFRAM (Afro-American Films), a film distribution cartel that sets up in Dakar to compete with the French-led duopoly the SECMA (Société d’exploitation cinématographique africaine) and COMACICO (Compagnie africaine de cinéma commercial). Nationalization of Somali cinema and its first feature film in 1970: Hopes and Dreams, by Ibrahim Mallassy. La Femme au couteau (80 min.), first feature film in Ivory Coast, a fantasy by Timité Bassori about the sexual inhibition of an intellectual following repression by his mother in his childhood. L’Opium et le bâton, by Ahmed Rachedi (Algeria, 135 min.): an action film on revolutionary commitment, based on the work by Mouloud Mammeri. SATPEC obtains the state monopoly of cinema distribution in Tunisia, retaining such control until 1981).

1970

Creation in Niamey by twenty-one French-speaking states, including fifteen African ones, of the Agency for Cultural and Technical Cooperation (ACCT), the future Intergovernmental Agency of the Francophonie (AIF), in 1998; then the International Organisation of La Francophonie (OIF), in 2006, with eighty-eight countries. Second African Film Festival in Ouagadougou. Hamid Bénani shoots Wechma (100 min.), which opens new narrative techniques in Moroccan cinema.

430

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Mali nationalizes SECMA-COMACICO cinemas, entrusted to OCINAM (Office cinématographique national du Mali) created in 1962, followed by Dahomey, and Senegal in 1972. The 3rd CFF awards their Golden Tanit to the Egyptian Youssef Chahine for his entire body of work and for Le Choix (110 min.), a film about ambient schizophrenia. Three hundred six cinemas in French-speaking Africa, including 119 owned and 130 programmed by SECMA and COMACICO, which dominate the importation and distribution of films in Frenchspeaking Africa. The number of cinemas would increase to 328 in 1980, and then decrease to 138 in 2000 and 49 in 2015. Upper Volta nationalizes six cinemas programmed by the COMACICO and the SECMA. Creation of the Société nationale voltaïque du cinéma (SONAVOCI) to continue to have films distributed by these two companies and to create new cinemas (it would become the Société nationale d’exploitation et de distribution cinéma du Burkina, SONACIB, when the country changed its name in 1984). Ten percent of its revenues go to the Voltaic Film Development Fund which would produce the country’s first feature-length fiction film, Le Sang des parias, by Mamadou Djim Kola (1971, 90 min.), about an impossible marriage to a young man from the blacksmiths’ caste. Back from his film studies in Moscow, Souleymane Cissé is employed by the Film Service of the Ministry of Information of Mali (SCINFOMA, created in 1966 to take over the production section of OCINAM and replaced by the CNPC in 1977) for which he would shoot thirty newsreels and five documentaries. He made Five Days in a Life (50 min.) in Bambara in 1971 about a young thief. The film receives a bronze Tanit at the 1972 CFF. With Soleil Ô (102 min.), Med Hondo directs the first Mauritanian feature film in Paris, where racism and humiliation drive an immigrant to madness. 1971

Les Tams tams se sont tus, by Philippe Mory (80 min.), the first Gabonese feature film: a man seduces his uncle’s young wife; he tries to shoot the lovers, as is the custom. Kodou, on the strength of traditions (89 min.), the first feature film by the Senegalese Ababacar Samb-Makharam, who would head the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) from 1972 to 1976. Emitaï (103 min.), the first historical film by Ousmane Sembène and an indictment against colonialism.

Dossier 1: Key Dates

431

1972

The first Libyan fiction: When Fate Hardens / Destiny Is Hard, by Abdella Zarok. The Indigenization Decree transfers ownership of three hundred cinemas to Nigerians, but they continue to show American films, even with the creation of the National Film Distribution Company in 1981. Third FESPACO: The organizing committee becomes national, segregationist states are boycotted but the ANC is now invited, represented by filmmaker Lionel Ngakane; Stallion of Yennenga Award: Le Wazzou polygame, by Oumarou Ganda (Niger), on polygamy as a religious hypocrisy. Creation of the Société nationale de cinéma (SNC) in Senegal, which coproduces Le Bracelet de bronze, by Tidiane Aw (1974, 93 min.), on the rural exodus; Baks, by Momar Thiam (1974, 90 min.) on the tribulations of a young delinquent; Xala, by Ousmane Sembène (1974, 128 min.), on the impotence of a businessman; Njangaan, by Mahama Johnson Traoré (1975, 90 min.), a severe critic of Koranic teaching. Funds exhausted in 1976. FVVA: Femmes Voitures Villas Argent by Moustapha Alassane (68 min.), first feature film by a Nigerien, where this mirage leads to prison. The Fourth CFF Golden Tanit is attributed ex-aequo to The Dupes by Egyptian Tewfik Saleh (107 min.), about the tragic emigration of Palestinians, and Sambizanga by Guadeloupean Sarah Maldoror (102 min.), a political drama of the struggle for independence from Angola. Forty screens in Madagascar, reduced to eleven in 2007.

1973

Independence of Guinea-Bissau. Creation of the General Council for Cinema. Innovative and subversive, Touki bouki, by Djibril Diop Mambéty (Senegal, 87 min.), opens a new aesthetic and thematic path. Anta embarks for France while Mory refuses this mirage. Fourth FESPACO. Liberation movements such as FRELIMO, MPLA, AND PAIGC are invited. Theme: The role of cinema in the awakening of an awareness of black civilization. Stallion of Yennenga Award: A Thousand and One Hands, by Moroccan Souheil Ben Barka, a portrait of social inequalities resulting from religious alienation. By order of French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the SOPACIA (Société de participation cinématographique africaine), controlled by UGC (Union générale cinématographique), buys the SECMA and the

Figure 3. Film poster for Touki Bouki (dir. Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973, Senegal). Image courtesy of the author.

Dossier 1: Key Dates

433

COMACICO. It holds seventy-five percent of the film distribution market in French-speaking Africa (against the twenty-two percent held by AFRAM) and gradually sells its cinema stock up until 1980. Creation of SIDEC (Société d’importation, d’exploitation et de distribution cinématographique) in Senegal with twenty  percent for SOPACIA. Nationalization of cinemas in Zaire. First summit of French and African Heads of State in Paris. Conference of Third World filmmakers in Algiers, which advocates a tricontinental film distribution organization. La Rançon d’une alliance, by Sébastien Kamba (71 min.), the first feature film from Congo, about fratricidal struggles, showing the condition of slaves, women, and peasants in the pre-colonial era. Very remby, le retour, by Ignace Solo Randrasana (88 min.), Madagascar’s first feature film, a docu-fiction about a family fleeing urban misery in the hope of a better life. 1974

Under the Sign of Voodoo, by Pascal Abikanlou (100 min.), in which a traditional marriage incurs the anger of the divinities. The first feature film from Dahomey and first African film edited by Andrée Davanture. Walanda. La leçon (90 min.), Mali’s first feature film in which the writer Alkaly Kaba adapts his own novel: a young village girl and a rich city dweller are too different for their union to work. Senegalese Samba Félix Ndiaye makes his first documentary, Pérantal (30 min.). He would go on to shoot about fifteen documentaries up until his death in 2009. ACCT seminar in Ouagadougou on “the role of the African filmmaker in the awakening of an awareness of black civilization,” which gives as much importance to form as to substance. The Fifth CFF Golden Tanit is awarded ex-aequo to Les Bicotsnègres vos voisins, by Med Hondo (Mauritania/France, 190 min.), on the situation of immigrant workers in France; and Kafr Kassem, by Borhane Alaouie (Syria, 120 min.), on the 1956 massacre of Palestinian villagers by Israeli soldiers. Nationalization of cinemas and creation of the National Film Office of Dahomey (privatization and dissolution in 1988). Creation of the Pan-African company CIDC (Inter-African Cinema Distribution Consortium) and CIPROFILM (Inter-African Film Production Center), the principle of which had been decided by OCAM in 1970.

434

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

1975

Independence of Mozambique, Cape Verde, Comoros, Sao Tome and Principe, Angola. Creation of the National Cinema Institute (INC) in Mozambique, which would produce the film journal Kuxa Kanema, distributed via mobile cinemas. Creation of the Gabonese Cinema Center (CENACI), directed by Philippe Mory, who would also later chair the Gabonese Filmmakers Association (ACG) in 1981. Malian Souleymane Cissé shoots the drama Den Muso (The Young Girl; 86 min.) to denounce the rejection of teenage mothers. Wrongly accused of embezzlement, Cissé is imprisoned for ten days and the film is banned for three years. Letter from My Village (Kaddu Beykat), by the Senegalese Safi Faye (98 min.), the first feature film by a French-speaking African director, on the economic problems of the rural world. Creation of the Somali Film Agency. Nationalization of cinema and film importation in Madagascar. The Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or goes to Chronicle of the Years of Fire by Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina (157 min.): history of Algeria from 1939 to 1954, expropriation of land and deculturation. The second FEPACI Congress adopts the anti-imperialist and panAfricanist “Algiers Charter.” Nigerian Ola Balogun shoots Ajani-Ogun, a musical and popular first adaptation of Yoruba theater on the screen, with Ade Folayan, who will himself become director.

1976

Ceddo (120 min.), the second historical film by Ousmane Sembène, shows popular resistance against religious oppression. Banned until 1984 by President Léopold Sédar Senghor under the pretext that Ceddo should only take one “d”! Independence of the Seychelles and declaration of independence of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic. Omar Gatlato, by Merzak Allouache (80 min.), a realistic evocation of youth, opens a new path for Algerian cinema. National television companies set up in Portuguese-speaking Africa: 1976 in Angola; 1981 in Mozambique; 1984 in Cape Verde. Fifth FESPACO postponed due to the armed conflict with Mali; an organizational fiasco but a public success. Theme: The African filmmaker of the future: educational involvement. Stallion of Yennenga Award: Muna Moto / The Child of the Other, by Cameroonian JeanPierre Dikongué Pipa (89 min.), in which a love marriage is prevented by the tradition of the dowry.

Dossier 1: Key Dates

435

Creation of the African Institute for Film Studies (INAFEC) in Ouagadougou, partly financed by UNESCO for ten years, with an inter-African vocation (closed in 1987). A single television channel created in South Africa after the government hesitated to create one for white and one for black people. The Sixth CFF Golden Tanit Award goes to The Ambassadors, by Tunisian Naceur Ktari (102 min.), on North African emigrants in Paris subjected to racism. Creation of the International Arab Film Festival of Oran (Algeria). Creation of the International Film Festival of Cairo (Egypt), the only one on the African continent to be recognized by the International Federation of Producers. 1977

Independence of Djibouti. Creation in Upper Volta of the National Center of Cinematography, which would notably later produce the film of its director Gaston Kaboré: Wend Kuuni (1982, 75 min.), a timeless tale about a child who regains his voice. Creation in Mali of the National Film Production Center (CNPC), also in charge of censorship. The military in power in Nigeria creates the National Television Authority (NTA), the sole guardian of the nationalized regional stations.

1978

Cameroonian Jean-Pierre Dikongué Pipa shoots Le Prix de la liberté (93 min.), on the sexual favors that African women must grant to gain their place in society. The Seventh CFF Golden Tanit Award: Les Aventures d’un héros, by Merzak Allouache (Algeria, 134 min.), on the destiny of a child in the Sahara.

1979

Sixth FESPACO, from now on held every odd year to alternate with the CFF; Theme: The role of the African film critic. Stallion of Yennenga Award: Baara, by Souleymane Cissé (91 min.), denouncing the collusion between economics and politics. The film marks a turning point by tackling the question of demands and trade unions in an urban environment. Adoption of the statutes of CIDC and CIPROFILM created in 1974. Creation in Ouagadougou of the African Cinema Society (CINAFRIC) by Martial Ouedraogo with the help of the state: film studio and post-production tools. The complex would never be completed and the company closed five years later.

Figure 4. Film poster for Baara (dir. Souleymane Cissé, 1980, Mali). Image courtesy of the author.

Dossier 1: Key Dates

437

Sale of the SOPACIA cinemas to the Gabonese State. SOPACIA becomes the UAC (African Cinema Union) and limits itself to the role of central purchasing agency for films on behalf of the CIDC and the SIDEC. Creation of the Durban International Film Festival (South Africa). Creation of the Nigerian Film Corporation, for the construction of a 160 ha industrial complex near Jos, which from 1985 to 1989 provided a laboratory, national archives, technical assistance, but produced only ten documentaries. 1980

Independence of Zimbabwe. Closure of the editing unit of the French Film Office. Creation of ATRIA, headed by the editor Andrée Davanture (closed in 1999 following the end of state subsidies). The Eighth CFF Golden Tanit Award: Aziza, by Abdellatif Ben Ammar (100 min.), on the changes in urban Tunisia. Creation of a fund to support production in Morocco, managed by the CCM.

1981

Creation of the Marrakech International Film Festival, the best endowed festival in Morocco. Moroccan Ahmed El Maânouni shoots Trances (86 min.), a docudrama that became a cult with the group Nass El Ghiwane. The first Ghanaian independent film, Love Brewed in an African Pot by Kwaw Ansah (Ghana, 125 min.), a romance in English set in colonial Ghana; is a huge popular success in English-speaking Africa. Creation of the Egyptian Film Fund, but continuation of censorship. Seventh FESPACO; Theme: Production and Distribution. Stallion of Yennenga: Djeli, by the Ivoirian Fadika Kramo-Lanciné, on love in the face of caste oppositions. Creation of the filmmakers’ collective L’Oeil vert, aiming to break away from the hold of France and Europe.

1982–1998: Market Economy and Individualization Nationalizations had limited the freedom of filmmakers and the international distribution of their films. All over Africa South of the Sahara, states were losing interest in the film industry both financially and in terms of regulations; these were about to collapse and disappear in most countries. The failure of the attempts of the rare trans-African structures revealed national egotism, the predation of a few actors, and favored short-term visions. Filmmakers

438

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

were gradually abandoning Pan-African ideals and turning to the market economy, while collective conscientization was giving way to novelistic introspection. 1982

Ninth CFF Golden Tanit Award: Finyé, by Malian Souleymane Cissé (107 min.), about two teenagers from different backgrounds in revolt against the authorities. Colloquium on film production in Africa held in Niamey, which leads to a manifesto proposing, among other things, a market for African cinema, which the FESPACO would create in 1983 (it becomes the MICA in 1987).

1983

The Cameroonian Jean-Marie Teno makes his first documentary Schubbah (15 min.), marking the beginning of a great career as a self-produced documentary filmmaker. Eighth FESPACO; Theme: African filmmaker before their audiences. The Stallion of Yennenga, presented by Thomas Sankara, then prime minister, also goes to Finyè, by Souleymane Cissé, who wins his 2nd Gold Stallion. My Country, My Hat, a thriller documentary by David Bensusan (84 min.), describes the suffering caused by South Africa’s pass laws.

1984

The Tenth CFF Golden Tanit: Dreams of the City (120 min.), by Mohamed Malas, renovator of Syrian cinema. Bankruptcy of the CIDC and CIPROFILM. Yeelen, by Malian Souleymane Cissé (104 min.), a son’s initiatory journey to possess the magical powers his father jealously holds, is the first feature film by an African from South of the Sahara to be awarded at the Cannes Film Festival. Ninth FESPACO takes a revolutionary turn; the filmmakers participate symbolically in the “Battle of the railroad”; opening up to the diaspora (out of competition). Theme: Cinema and people’s liberation. Colloquium: Literature and African cinema. Stallion of Yennenga: History of a Meeting, by Brahim Tsaki (Algeria), on North/ South relations. Third FEPACI Congress, known as “the Renaissance.” A crossed portrait of three women, Visages de femmes, by Ivorian Désiré Ecaré (105 min.), is banned for one year for obscenity, which gives the director enormous publicity.

1985

1986

Eleventh CFF Golden Tanit: Man of Ashes, by Nouri Bouzid (Tunisia, 148 min.), about the trauma of two raped boys. Yam Daabo, by Burkinabe Idrissa Ouédraogo (80 min.), marks a new type of narrative, close to the novel.

Figure 5. Film poster for Yeelen (dir. Souleymane Cissé, 1987, Mali). Image courtesy of the author.

Figure 6. Film poster for L’Homme de cendres / Man of Ashes (dir. Nouri Bouzid, 1986, Tunisia). Image courtesy of the author.

Dossier 1: Key Dates

441

1987

With Tabataba (90 min.), Raymond Rajaonarivelo denounces the repression of the Malagasy insurrection of 1947. Tenth FESPACO. Integration of the “diaspora” competition with the Paul Robeson prize as well as the “television and video” competition, and a more assertive opening to English-speaking countries. Theme: Cinema and cultural identity. Colloquium: Oral tradition and new media. Stallion of Yennenga: Sarraounia, by Med Hondo (Mauritania/Burkina Faso/France), on a queen fighting against colonialism. The Camp at Thiaroye, by Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow (150 min.), evokes the massacre of the colonial infantrymen who demanded the full payment of their war indemnities. A successful coproduction between Algeria, Tunisia, and Senegal, the film won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice and at the CFF. Production aid fund in Morocco.

1988

Ball in the Dust, by Henri Duparc (91 min.), about polygamy, marks the birth of the “African-style comedy.” With Mortu Nega (85 min.), the Bissau-Guinean Flora Gomes highlights the continuity between the anticolonial struggle and the struggle for development. Twelfth CFF Golden Tanit: Wedding in Galilee, by Palestinian Michel Khleïfi (113 min.), a confrontation between a soldier and a patriarch. With Yaaba (90 min.), the initiatory journey of two children who learn to overcome prejudices, the Burkinabe Idrissa Ouédraogo makes an ode to tolerance. Senegalese Djibril Diop Mambéty documents the filming with Let’s Talk Grandmother (34 min.).

1989

Eleventh FESPACO, partially boycotted by filmmakers after the assassination of Thomas Sankara; Theme: Cinema and economic development—Colloquium: Cinema women and poverty. Stallion of Yennenga: Heritage Africa, by Ghanaian Kwaw Ansah (125 min.), on the alienation of the colonized. Creation of the Cinémathèque africaine in Ouagadougou, under the supervision of the FESPACO (flooded in 2009). Fall of the Berlin Wall, followed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Arab Maghreb Union (Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania).

1990

Independence of Namibia. Franco-African Summit in La Baule, France: a strong link between French aid and the democratization of states.

Figure 7. Film poster for Bal Poussiere / Dancing in the Dust (dir. Henri Duparc, 1989, Ivory Coast). Image courtesy of the author.

Figure 8. Film poster for Tilaï (dir. Idrissa Ouédraogo, 1990, Burkina Faso). Image courtesy of the author.

Figure 9. Film poster for Hyenes (dir. Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1992, Senegal). Image courtesy of the author.

Dossier 1: Key Dates

445

Thirteenth CFF Golden Tanit: Halfaouine, Boy of the Terraces, by Tunisian Férid Boughedir (95 min.), about a young man torn between the worlds of men and women. 1991

Twelfth FESPACO; Theme: Cinema and Environment—Colloquium: Partnership and African Cinema. Stallion of Yennenga: Tilaï, by Burkinabe Idrissa Ouédraogo (81 min.), a tragedy that questions the relationship to tradition. Hyenas (110 min.) marks the return of Senegalese Djibril Diop Mambéty: adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit of the Old Lady, about the greed of the hyenas that men have become. The comedy Gito the Ungrateful, by Leonce Ngabo (90 min.), is Burundi’s first feature film, about a black man torn between a white and a black woman.

1991 to Bilateral film coproduction agreements initiated by Dominique 1995 Wallon, director general of the French CNC, between France and Burkina Faso (1991), Senegal (1992), Cameroon (1993), Guinea (1993), Ivory Coast (1995). 1992

Kawilasi: Sabi, la mort et moi, by Blaise Kilouzou Abalo (90 min.), Togo’s first feature film, investigates an enigmatic murder. With Black Light (103 min.), Mauritanian Med Hondo adapts a novel by French author Didier Daeninckx about the links between a crime and the deportation of 101 Malians from France. Nigeria: the ruin of the economy prevents filming and insecurity leads to the closure of theaters. Shot on video and broadcast on this circuit, Living in Bondage, by Chris Obi Rapu (163 min.), a story of satanic worship in order to get rich, is an enormous hit. A popular and cheap cinema is born which will forge an industry: Nollywood. With Guelwaar (111 min.), Ousmane Sembène calls to rely only on one’s own strength to attain dignity. Fourteenth CFF Golden Tanit: The Night, by Syrian Mohamed Malas (115 min.), where a filmmaker’s son tries to reconstruct the journey of his father, a pro-Palestinian fighter.

1993

Independence of Eritrea. Thirteenth FESPACO; Theme: Cinema and liberties—Colloquium: Cinema and children’s rights. Stallion of Yennenga: Au nom du Christ, by Ivorian Gnoan Roger M’Bala (90 min.), who humorously evokes the proliferation of sects. The comedy Rue princesse, where a musician from a wealthy background falls in love with a prostitute, by Ivorian Henri Duparc (88 min.), tries to popularize the condom.

446

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

1994

Creation of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) between Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Mali, Togo, Niger, and Benin. Creation of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) between Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, and Chad. fifty percent devaluation of the CFA franc. Creation of the Rabat International Festival of auteur cinema (Morocco). Genocide in Rwanda. Nelson Mandela becomes the first black president of South Africa. Fifteenth CFF Golden Tanit: The Silence of the Palaces, by Tunisian Moufida Tlatli (124 min.), depicts the harsh memories of the servants of the Bey.

1995

Fourteenth FESPACO; Theme: Cinema and African History. Stallion of Yennenga: Guimba, by Malian Cheick Oumar Sissoko (94 min.), about the rise and fall of a cruel despot. In Keïta ! l’héritage du griot (100 min.), the Burkinabe Dani Kouyaté has a griot tell a child the epic story of the founder of the Mandingo empire, thus avoiding a large budget.

1996

Creation in Cape Town of the Sithengi Film & Television Market (until 2006). Tsitsi Dangarembga directs Everyone’s Child about children in poverty (90 min.), the first feature film directed by a black Zimbabwean woman. Three feature films marking the endurance of Kabyle culture are shot in this language in Algeria: Machaho (Belkacem Hadjadj, 90 min.), La Colline oubliée (Abderrahmane Bourgemouh, 135 min.), and La Montagne de Baya (Azzedine Meddour, 107 min., 1997), and meet with great success. Ghana sells seventy percent of GFIC’s shares to a Malaysian television production company. Collapse of the film industry, replaced by video (“Gollywood” for English-language films, “Kumawood” for Twi films). The phenomenon of video production in local languages can be found in Kenya (“Riverwood”), Tanzania (“Swahiliwood” and “Bongowood”), and in the Somali diaspora (“Somaliwood”). Fools, by Ramadan Suleman (90 min.), about the perpetrator of an unpunished rape, is the first feature film made by a black South African after apartheid (Thomas Mogotlane had cowritten Mapantsula, by Oliver Schmitz in 1988).

Dossier 1: Key Dates

447

Sixteenth CFF Golden Tanit: Salut cousin, by Algerian Merzak Allouache (98 min.), about a young man caught between the straitjacket of Algerian society and the harshness of life in Paris. 1997

Fifteenth FESPACO: Theme: Cinema, childhood, and youth. Stallion of Yennenga: Buud Yam (97 min.) where Burkinabe Gaston Kaboré explores the quest for identity, giving, link in tales, a sequel to Wend Kuuni (1982). Youssef Chahine presents his 33rd film Destiny (135 min.) at the Cannes Film Festival. He receives the fiftieth anniversary prize for his entire work. First edition of the Ecrans Noirs festival in Yaoundé. National Film and Video Foundation Act in South Africa, which sets up two public funds to support cinema and video and promotes diversity. At the same time, the Ster-Kinekor and NU Metro duopoly, integrated groups that dominate distribution, start building multiplexes.

1998

Absorption of the French Ministry of Cooperation by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Death of Senegalese Djibril Diop Mambéty, who did not have the time to finish his trilogy on “ordinary folk” after Le Franc (1994, 45 min.) and La Petite vendeuse de soleil (1998, 45 min.). First edition of the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF), with a focus on Maangamizi: The Ancient One, by Tanzanian Martin Mhando and American Ron Mulvihill (110 min.), a confrontation between Western psychiatry and East African spirituality. The Seventeenth CFF Golden Tanit: Vivre au paradis, by Bourlem Guerdjou (105 min.), on the hard life of immigrants in France during the Algerian war. The African Guild of Directors and Producers, which develops the solidarity of filmmakers, publishes a newsletter and criticizes existing practices.

Since 1998: Aesthetic Renewal and Digital Revolution A new generation of directors proposes a radical thematic and aesthetic renewal, while digital technology gradually eases technical and financial constraints, allowing a broadening of production and promoting the circulation of films, but blurring the boundaries between the different cinematographic and audiovisual forms, with English-speaking Africa showing a

Figure 10. Film poster for Buud Yam (dir. Gaston Kaboré, 1997, Burkina Faso). Image courtesy of the author.

Figure 11. Film poster for Le Destin / Destiny (dir. Youssef Chahine, 1997, Egypt). Image courtesy of the author.

450

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

dynamism following Nigeria’s emergence as one of the world’s leading producers of (video)films. 1998 With Bye Bye Africa (86 min.), Mahamat-Saleh Haroun directs the first Chadian feature film and a manifesto for a new cinema. With Life on Earth (61 min.), Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako also proposes a new positioning in the world. 1999

Sixteenth FESPACO, in a country electrified by the assassination of journalist Norbert Zongo; Theme: Cinema and distribution channels in Africa. Stallion of Yennenga: Identity Pieces, by Congolese Ngangura Mweze (93 min.), where an African king in search of his daughter discovers the diversity of the inhabitants of Brussels.

2000

Creation of the Namibia Film Commission. With Faat Kiné (90 min.), a portrait of women from three generations, Ousmane Sembène defends equal rights for men and women. Eighteenth CFF Golden Tanit: Dolé, by Gabonese Imunga Ivanga (92 min.), on a gang of kids facing the seductive power of money.

2001

Seventeenth FESPACO; Theme: Cinema and new technologies. Stallion of Yennenga: Ali Zaoua, by Moroccan Nabil Ayouch (90 min.), a realistic and poetic look at street children. Creation in Cameroon of the annual trust account that finances culture. Transformation of the OAU into the African Union.

2002

The Africadoc program of writing residencies for creative documentaries is launched by Ardèche Images (France) and enables the production of multiple films and the constitution of a network of associations and festivals. Documentary filmmaking develops throughout Africa. Nineteenth CFF Golden Tanit: The Price of Forgiveness, by Senegalese Mansour Sora Wade (90 min.), a fable about the consequences of jealousy. Opening of the first multiplex in Casablanca under the name of Megarama, with about fifty screens in six locations in Morocco by 2020, and a distribution subsidiary covering a third of the market. Establishment of the Fund for the Promotion of the Film and Audiovisual Industry (FOPICA) in Senegal (endowment in 2014).

2003

Eighteenth FESPACO; Theme: The actor in the creation and promotion of African film; Stallion of Yennenga: Waiting for Happiness (Heremakono), by Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako (95 min.),

Dossier 1: Key Dates

451

where a young man who does not speak the language tries to decipher the universe around him. Appointment of Nour-Eddine Saïl at the head of the Moroccan Film Center, which increases and boosts public support for the entire film industry in Morocco, a country that becomes (and remains in 2021) the leading film producer and the country with the most cinemas in the whole of French-speaking Africa. A manifesto against female genital cutting, Moolaadé (117 min.) is the last work of Ousmane Sembène, called “the elder of the elders,” who died in 2007. 2004

In an African court, a legal trial against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is held. Bamako, by Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako (118 min.), meets with worldwide success. Reappearance of movie theaters in Nigeria: Silverbird multiplexes in shopping centers, based on the South African model. Privatization after bankruptcy of SONACIB, taken over by Idrissa Ouédraogo’s ARPA (Association of African Directors and Producers), but failure and sale of the cinemas in 2006. Twentieth CFF Golden Tanit: In Casablanca, Angels Don’t Fly, by Moroccan Mohamed Asli (97 min.), on the torments of the rural exodus. Creation during the CFF of the African Federation of Film Critics (africine.org).

2005

The Bloodettes, by Cameroonian Jean-Pierre Bekolo (92 min.), tries to renew film aesthetics by combining humor, horror, and action. Nineteenth FESPACO; Theme: Training and professionalization issues. Two other Stallions are awarded (silver and bronze) so that Stallion of Yennenga becomes the Golden Stallion, awarded to Drum, by South-African Zola Maseko (104 min.), a portrait of a black journalist in Sophiatown. International success for South African films: U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, a musical drama by Mark Dornford-May (120 min.), wins the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. In 2006, My Name is Tsotsi, a social thriller by Gavin Hood (94 min.), wins the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

2006

The twenty-first CFF to Golden Tanit Making Of, by Tunisian Nouri Bouzid (120 min.), an innovative film about Islamist temptation among young people. Irapada, by Kunle Afolayan (120 min.), a supernatural thriller in Yoruba, is the first film of the Nigerian New Wave, “New Nollywood,”

452

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

breaking with video and filming with more investments and sponsors. The government and Ecobank’s “Project Nollywood” fund supports the production of quality films. First Rencontres du Film court in Antananarivo. 2007

Twentieth FESPACO; Theme, festival and colloquium: African cinema and cultural diversity. Panel: Auteur cinema and popular cinema in Africa. Golden Stallion: Ezra, by Newton Aduaka (110 min.), a filmmaker from the Nigerian diaspora, on the trauma of child soldiers. Algerian Amor Hakkar shoots The Yellow House (87 min.) entirely in Chaoui language, about a family who finds in a video images of their only son who died. Nollywood encounters an overproduction crisis (2,700 video films released during the year): a lack of creativity, piracy, the internet, and competition from specialized channels undermine films’ profitability.

2008

Creation of the National Film Office of Côte d’Ivoire (ONAC-CI) and a support fund for the film industry (FONSIC). Creation of the Niger National Film Center. The twenty-second CFF Golden Tanit goes to Teza, by Haile Gerima (140 min.), an allegory about the traumas of the Ethiopian civil war.

2009

Twenty-first FESPACO, huge organizational problems (“la fespagaille”); Theme: African Cinema: Tourism and Cultural Heritage. Golden Stallion: like at the CFF, Teza, by Haile Gerima. South African pay TV M-Net launches its VOD platform, African Film Library, purchasing the twenty-five-year flat-rate rights to nearly six hundred films by eighty leading African filmmakers in order to digitalize them. It later abandoned the loss-making project, entrusting the catalog to Côte Ouest Distribution. The Figurine, another supernatural thriller by Kunle Afolayan (122 min.), enjoys an international success that crowns the “New Nigerian cinema.” A Screaming Man, by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (100 min.), about an Africa torn apart by its murderous contradictions, is the first African film in twelve years to be in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where it wins the Jury Prize.

2010

The Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) announces that it is funding a feasibility study for a Pan-African Film and Audiovisual Fund (FPCA) to be managed by the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI), but after five years’ work, it will never see the light of day.

Figure 12. Film poster for Ezra (dir. Newton I. Aduaka, 2007, Nigeria). Image courtesy of the author.

Figure 13. Film poster for Teza (dir. Haile Gerima, 2008, Ethiopia). Image courtesy of the author.

Dossier 1: Key Dates

455

The Twenty-third CFF Golden Tanit: Microphone, by Egyptian Ahmad Abdalla (120 min.), where a young man rubs shoulders with the underground art scene in Alexandria. Ster-Kinekor builds a first multiplex (six screens) in Lesotho. It opens others in Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. 2011

Revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, beginning of the “Arab Spring” Twenty-second FESPACO; Theme: African Cinema and Markets. Golden Stallion: Pegasus, by Moroccan Mohamed Mouftakir (104 min.), where a psychiatrist tries to pierce the trauma of a patient confronted with machismo. Creation of Tunisia’s National Center of Cinema and Image. National Support Fund for Chadian Artists.

2012

Election of the Islamist Mohamed Morsi to the Egyptian presidency, overthrown by a coup in 2013. Major instability and increased authoritarianism and social inequalities in the Arab states. The twenty-fourth CFF Golden Tanit goes to The Pirogue, by Senegalese Moussa Touré (87 min.), in which emigrants try to cross the sea.

2013

Twenty-third FESPACO; Theme: African cinema and public policies in Africa. Golden Stallion: Tey (Today), by Senegalese Alain Gomis (86 min.), where, without ever speaking, a man in transition to death reviews his life and questions his place in the world. Timbuktu (97 min.), in which Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako chooses derision to reveal the hypocrisy of the Jihadists, is the biggest success in French cinemas for a film directed by an African (1.7 million tickets sold). Ster-Kinekor builds the first Imax cinema on the continent in Durban (South Africa).

2014

Endowment of the Fund for the Promotion of the Film and Audiovisual Industry (FOPICA) in Senegal, set up in 2002. Twenty-fifth CFF Golden Tanit awarded to Omar, by Palestinian Hany Abu-Assad (96 min.), in which a Palestinian activist escapes from prison in exchange for a promise of treason.

2015

Twenty-fourth FESPACO; End of the obligation to provide a 35mm copy for the competition. Theme: African Cinema: Production and Distribution in the Digital Age. Golden Stallion: Fevers, by Moroccan Hicham Ayouch (90 min.); in the Parisian , a tormented teenager goes to live with his father whom he doesn’t know.

Figure 14. Film poster for Timbuktu (dir. Abderrahmane Sissako, 2014, Mauritania). Image courtesy of the author.

Dossier 1: Key Dates

457

Digital terrestrial television begins in Africa. The CFF becomes annual and awards the Golden Tanit of its Twentysixth to The Orchestra of the Blind of Moroccan Mohamed Mouftakir (110 min.), an allegory of the political galaxy at the beginning of the reign of Hassan II. 2016

Arnold Aganze, a Congolese filmmaker living in Uganda, directs the comedy N.G.O.: Nothing’s Going On (82 min.) with less than three thousand dollars; selected in many festivals. The twenty-seventh CFF awards its Golden Tanit to a documentary, Zaineb Doesn’t Like Snow, by Tunisian Kaouther Ben Hania (94 min.), which follows a family moving to Canada over six years. The Bolloré group launches a program to build around fifty Canal Olympia single-screen cinemas plus an open-air stage in Frenchspeaking Africa. The Netflix streaming video platform is launched in 130 new countries, notably the fifty-four African countries.

2017

Twenty-fifth FESPACO, whose selection disappoints all professionals; Theme: Training and jobs in the film and audiovisual industry. Second Gold award for Senegalese Alain Gomis with Félicité (100 min.), in which a courageous mother escapes despair by accepting to be loved. The Twenty-eighth CFF Golden Tanit goes to The Train of Salt and Sugar, by Mozambican Licínio Azevedo (93 min.), where the wondrous is instilled in the middle of a civil war.

2018

The Twenty-ninth CFF Golden Tanit awarded to Fatwa, by Tunisian Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud (102 min.), on the rise of the Salafists.

2019

Twenty-sixth FESPACO; fiftieth anniversary of the festival and improvement of the selection. Theme: Confronting our memory and forging the future of Pan-African cinema in its identity, economy, and diversity. Golden Stallion: The Mercy of the Jungle, by Rwandan Joël Karekezi (91 min.), where a young recruit and a sergeant have to face the jungle and rebel fighters. Creation of the Network of African Exhibitors and Distributors (REDA) which brings together eighteen cinemas (Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad) and intends to focus on the African content. The seventy-second Cannes Film Festival awards its Grand Prix to a black director for the first time: Senegalese Mati Diop for Atlantics

Figure 15. Film poster for Félicité (dir. Alain Gomes, 2017, Senegal). Image courtesy of the author.

Dossier 1: Key Dates

459

(104 min.), a fantasy film where the dead demand justice and women emancipate themselves. The thirtieth CFF Golden Tanit goes to Noura’s Dream, by Tunisian Hinde Boujemaa (90 min.), in which a woman has to face her husband coming out of prison. Pathé Gaumont launches a multiplex construction program in French-speaking Africa: Tunis, Rabat, and Dakar, then the Ivory Coast. 2020

Announcement of the replacement of the CFA franc by the ECO in eight West African countries. Netflix broadcasts its first series entirely produced in Africa, Queen Sono, a South African spy series. The Thirty-first CFF has no competition due to Covid-19 and focuses on heritage films and talks about the future of the festival.

2021

Showmax shoots the series Blood Psalms in Johannesburg in collaboration with CANAL+, presented as the “African Game of Thrones,” a bloody epic based on the precolonial mythology of South Africa. Ster-Kinekor, the leading film distributor and cinema exhibitor in Africa, owns fifty-five locations and 424 screens; its competitor NU Metro twenty-two locations. Africa has 34 million pay-TV subscribers.

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène Curated by Samba Gadjigo and Sada Niang This dossier includes key works by Ousmane Sembène as well as tributes to him, including a discussion of the documentary Sembène! considering his life’s work.

1. Introduction by Samba Gadjigo and Sada Niang 2. “Vigil for a Centennial” poem by Ousmane Sembène 3. Cinema as Evening School by Ousmane Sembène 4. Statement at Ouagadougou by Ousmane Sembène 5. “Art for Man’s Sake”: A Tribute to Ousmane Sembène by Samba Gadjigo 6. On “Mediated Solidarity”: Reading Ousmane Sembène in Sembène! by Michael T. Martin 7. Ousmane Sembène: An Annotated Gallery, curated by Cole Nelson

Figure 1. Caricature of Ousmane Sembène. Artist unknown. Courtesy of IU's Lilly Library.

Sembène’s Legacy to FESPACO Sada Niang and Samba Gadjigo

O

n June 9, 2007, late in the evening, a news item reverberated throughout Senegalese radio stations: “Ousmane Sembène, the world-renowned father of African cinema, has died in his Yoff residence on the outskirts of the capital city Dakar.” The next morning, in the state-run newspaper Le Soleil, Abdou Diouf, then president of Senegal, stated: “Africa has lost one of its greatest filmmakers and a fervent defender of liberty and social justice.”1 The prime minister, Macky Sall (Senegal’s current president), called on the nation “to pay respect to Ousmane Sembène, who fought for freedom and dignity and who leaves behind an exceptional legacy.” Cheikh Omar Cissokho, then secretary-general of the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) declared to Agence France Presse, “African cinema has lost one of its lighthouses” before boarding the first flight out of Bamako to attend Sembène’s  funeral.2 On June 11, in an interview with the New York Times, Manthia Diawara, a film critic and professor at NYU, stated: “He really is the most important African filmmaker, the one that all subsequent filmmakers have to be measured against.”3 The chorus of praise for Ousmane Sembène was aptly summed up by Michael Atkinson: “If a film won’t matter on a fundamental level to his countrymen, as films rarely matter here, Sembène won’t make it. . . . Sembène represents the dying heritage of political films still possessed of a virginal faith in social change, a faith not in films for profit’s sake or even film’s sake, but for man’s sake.”4 A prolific militant writer and filmmaker, Sembène was born in 1923 in Casamance, in southern Senegal. Expelled from school in fourth grade and sent to Dakar, the former capital of the French West African empire, young Sembène discovered literature, comic books, and the cinema. He was drafted into the French colonial infantry unit in 1944 and served on the war front in Niger, an experience that broadened his horizons and deepened his understanding of his status as a colonial subject. In 1947, the young unemployed veteran traveled to Marseilles, in southern France, where he found employment as a dockworker.

452

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Soon immersed in the fervor of union and political activism of the early postwar era, Sembène became an active member of the left-leaning labor union Confederation General du Travail (CGT) and took membership in the French Communist Party (PCF). By 1952, Sembène had become a powerful spokesperson within the radical arts and political movements of the region. An avid reader, he devoured the writings of Karl Marx, Pablo Neruda, Jack London, Birago Diop, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway. Having “discovered literature like a blind person who discovers light,” soon Sembène realized that Africans were largely absent from the texts he was reading.5 Even in books and poems on the Negritude movement, there was a lack of diversity. “Nowhere did I find the voice of the working class, of the farmers, the wretched of the earth; in sum, Africans were rare in the Western canon and African literature was reduced to complaints of the black elite caught in the straightjacket of their blackness.”6 Sembène resolved to fill this void. In 1956, Sembène, the selftaught African docker, published his first literary work, “Liberte,” a poem that gave voice to the voiceless and laid out what may be described as his “Africa Project.”  I wish I were a poet For you only Your griot. Only to sing the praises of our elders Play the kora to wake you up . . . This country is ours indeed Her poets we shall seek out Her philosophers we shall find Her natural areas we shall exploit Monuments for her heroes we shall build Her sons of old—sold into slavery—shall return Out of the communities of today Molded under heavy manners We shall hammer out A nation Our sons shall walk Free In a free world.

As an artist, he championed himself as a spokesperson (in the mold of the “griot,” a West African storyteller and historian) for the people of Africa. Sembène’s goals were clear: participate in the liberation of Africa and in the building of an African nation, through art. Before returning to Africa in

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

453

1960, in the whirlwind of the independence era, Sembène published three successful novels. During a 1961 tour of the continent, then exploding with revolutionary fervor, creative possibility in the midst of postcolonial backlash, this laborer-turned-writer recognized that the peoples of the continent could not be effectively reached through written literature in any language. Cinema, however, could help get the essential stories of Africa to the African people. Cinema was ushered into French West Africa in the 1900s, but due to legislation put in place by French authorities Africans in the region were banned from filmmaking. Nonetheless, a small number of works were made by pioneers such as Mamadi Toure of Guinea (Mouramani, 1953) and Paulin Vieyra (C’était il y a quatre ans / It was four years ago, 1954, and Afrique sur Seine / Africa on the Seine [1957, France]). Sembène traveled to Moscow to learn filmmaking in 1962. His 1963 short film Borom Sarret, though not the first film to emerge from the region, is remembered as a crucial early work of African cinema. It won an award at the Tours Film Festival in France. In 1966, his feature La Noire de . . . / Black Girl (Senegal) was winner of the prestigious Jean Vigo Award and the prize for best feature at the First Festival of Black Arts (1966). It was the first sub-Saharan African film widely screened in and outside of Africa. Thanks to the film’s success at international film festivals, Sembène began a career that put him in the company of world cinema artists, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Alain Resnais, and Ingmar Bergman.  By the mid-sixties, Sembène had created his own production company, Filmi Domirew, working independently of the European system that until today continues to dictate filmmaking practices in Africa. Made with limited resources, under impossible circumstances, Sembène’s works won awards at festivals throughout Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. His films transformed Africa from a continent of media consumers into one with a potential to produce them. Throughout the next forty years Sembène remained keenly aware of his entwined roles as artist and revolutionary, working tirelessly to create powerful works infused with a deep sense of social responsibility. By the time of his death in 2007, Sembène had produced and directed nine features and written ten books, translated into many languages. Some, including his 1960 masterpiece, Les Bouts de bois de Dieu / God’s Bits of Wood, have been taught throughout Africa and the world. Today, Sembène’s literary and cinematic legacy has earned him the title the father of African cinema. It should also be mentioned that Sembène was among the first filmmakers to indigenize cinema. Sembène’s innovative film language in Borom Sarret (1963) and Mandabi (1968) served as a foundation to the recommendations of the FEPACI and informed cinema practice both in Africa and around

454

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

the world. It provided inspiration to other marginalized groups, whose members began to pick up the camera and tell their own stories. Arguably the most important cultural figure of twentieth-century Africa, a folk hero and contemporary artist, Sembène has, more than any other, succeeded both in capturing the complexities of African culture and in looking forward to a more equitable society.  On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Festival Panafricain du Cinema Ouagadougou (FESPACO) it is fitting to remember the role that Sembène and other trailblazers played in setting up the cultural and political, national and Pan-African infrastructures necessary to the development of a genuine African film industry. The stage for increased African film production was, in part, set in Senegal in 1966 during the First Festival of Black Arts. Cinema was included in the program, featuring Sembène’s Black Girl and Ababacar Samb-Makharam’s Et la neige n’était plus / And the Snow Was Gone. The first film festival devoted to African films, Les Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage, was held in 1966 in  Tunisia.  In sub-Saharan Africa the first film festival, named Semaine du Cinema de Ouagadougou, was set up on February 1, 1969, when the French/Burkinabe cultural center in Ouagadougou organized a gathering of filmmakers from four African countries.  The filmmakers included Sembène, Oumarou Ganda and Moustapha Alassane (Niger), Timité Bassori (Côte D’Ivoire), and Jean Rouch (France). The collaboration between Burkina Faso and the French cultural services lasted only one year. Following that first collaboration, in 1970, the Burkinabe authorities nationalized its production and distribution channels, thus setting off a conflict with the two French-sponsored distribution companies, COMACICO and SECMA, which ran  movie theaters in Burkina Faso and were considered to be price gouging. After the French companies closed their movie theaters, Burkina Faso’s president, Sangoulé Lamizana, considering the French actions an attempt to quash the region’s nascent film industry and its national sovereignty, issued a presidential decree that nationalized the distribution channels in Burkina Faso. Soon after, with Lamizana’s support, a week of film screening was launched, featuring only African filmmakers and coordinated by Sembène. Nine African countries participated, and forty short and feature-length films were projected in theaters in Ouagadougou. All filmmakers granted all commercial rights to their films for free to Burkina Faso, in support of their cultural sovereignty. During the third edition of the gathering in 1972, the annual event was renamed the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou. By this time, it was attracting more than forty African filmmakers and  fifteen journalists from ten countries. As Tahar Cheriaa noted, by 1985  and 1987 “FESPACO had become the most important

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

455

political and cultural event, not only in Burkina but in the whole Sub-Saharan Africa and the black Diaspora around the world.”7 Over the years, Sembène’s influence on FESPACO became so important that he became a folk hero in Ouagadougou. Restaurant menus were named after him; a green taxi was named “Docker noir” in reference to his first novel. “L’homme à la pipe” (the man with the pipe) was at the center of crowds who gathered around him hoping to share a word with him. In the evenings, at times stretching into the next dawn, the Hotel Independence poolside (dubbed the Baobab Tree) became a site for palavers hosted by the “oldest of the elders,” as Sembène was affectionately called. In 1995, on the occasion of the centenary of cinema, Sembène wrote “Veillée pour un centenaire” (Vigil for a Centennial), a tribute poem dedicated to Tahar Cheriaa and to all those “warriors” of the early days of FESPACO.8 The unique place reserved for Sembène at FESPACO could also be seen at every edition, when he presided over a “ritual” of libation at the “Place des Cineastes” on the opening of the festival, to pay tribute to all those “Lumiere Warriors” who died the previous year, another symbol of Sembène’s towering figure on FESPACO. Given the above, it was also no surprise that Baba Hama, general director of FESPACO from 1996 to 2008, was one of the first foreign dignitaries to fly to Dakar to attend Sembène’s funeral, along  with Burkinabe filmmaker Gaston Kaboré, a Sembène disciple and a towering figure among the second generation of African filmmakers. To the crowd gathered on June 11, 2007, at the morgue of Hôpital Principal, in Dakar, Baba Hama declared, eulogizing Sembène: “You are gone, but you will forever be with us. You have greatly contributed to the growth of FESPACO; you were part of all the battles; rest in peace.”9 Cheikh O. Cissokho, then minister of culture of Mali, also in attendance, echoed Baba Hama: “Sembène was part of all the battles (of African cinema), like the battle that launched the Ouagadougou Film Festival, FESPACO, and it was you who gave to that festival its international dimension.”10 As one of our African elders stated: “When memory goes looking for firewood, it only brings back the bundle it wishes.”11 Today, as FESPACO celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, no one could evoke the memory of this gathering without also evoking the memory of Ousmane Sembène. To remind us of the indelible mark of Sembène on FESPACO, an event borne out of protest for national sovereignty and Pan-Africanism, Ecobank, the largest bank in the region, has instituted an Ousmane Sembène Prize (2007) and in 2009 paid for the installation of a bronze statue of the filmmaker holding a FESPACO trophy in the Ouagadougou Place des Cineastes. The city of Ouagadougou named one of its most notable boulevards, also home to the American embassy, after Sembène. No filmmaker better

456

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

understood the meaning of FESPACO and fought more vehemently for its creation than Sembène. He spelled out that vision to a gathering of his fellow filmmakers and actors, with Burkinabe officials in attendance on the first day of the shooting of his latest film, Moolaadé (2004). “It is good to go to Cannes but I wish we would create something of our own. Let’s not always be invited guests. It is up to us to create our values, to recognize them and to carry them around the world. We are not alone in the world but we should be our own sun!”12 That shining sun for Sembène was FESPACO. Samba Gadjigo is the Helen Day Gould Professor of French at Mount Holyoke College. His research focuses on French-speaking Africa, particularly the work of filmmaker Ousmane Sembène. Gadjigo’s 2015 documentary Sembène!, codirected with Jason Silverman, is a biopic focusing on Sembène’s life and work, exploring the themes developed in the biography through interviews and extensive footage from Senegal, Burkina Faso, and France. Sada Niang is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at University of Victoria. He holds a Ph.D. from York University. His recent work focuses on postcolonial cinema, the cinema of Francophone sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia), and Francophone women’s films.

Notes 1. Abdou Diouf, “Un militant de l’art est parti,” Le Soleil, June 12, 2007. 2. Cheikh Omar Cissokho, “L’Afrique Reconnaissante a un géant du cinema,” Le Soleil, June 12, 2007, 9. 3. Manthia Diawara, “Ousmane Sembène, 84, Dies; Led Cinema’s Advance in Africa,” New York Times, June 11, 2007. 4. Michael Atkinson, “We are no longer in the era of prophets,” Film Comment 29, no. 4 (July–August 1993): 63, 67, 69. 5. Carrie D. Moore, “Interview with Ousmane Sembene,” in Evolution of an African Artist: Social Realism in the Works of Ousmane Sembene (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1973), 212–65. 6. Ibid. 7. Tahar Cheriaa, L’Afrique et le centenaire du cinema/Africa and the Centenary of Cinema (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1995), 253.  8. Ibid.  9. Baba Hama, “L’Afrique reconnaissante a un géant du cinéma,” Le Soleil, June 12, 2007.

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

457

10. Cheikh Omar Cissokho, “L’Afrique Reconnaissante a un géant du cinema,” Le Soleil, June 12, 2007. 11. Birago Diop, “Introduction,” Les contes d’Amadou Koumba (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1961), 11. 12. Ousmane Sembène, on the set of Moolaadé, Djerisso, Burkina Faso, 2002.

Figure 2. Statue of Ousmane Sembène in Ouagadougou. Image courtesy of FESPACO.

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

Vigil for a Centennial To Tahar Cheriaa Mad gallops of Elders at Hotel INDIA . . . Sacred wood under a starlit sky Nocturnal sanctuary for Lumiere warriors Frails skiffs anchored for days and nights Alloy of plants and minerals never altered Adrift from the large banks of Africa Arriving from faraway horizons ballasted Anchors in Ouaga . . . Our aching flanks reflected On the surface of the sleeping wave Biennium for a CENTENNIAL Ritual libation for the initiates Our worn out, ashy grey pupils Pierce the opaque diurnal ocean Straddling the bats Tumbling the air over our grey hair Shouting out joyous welcomes The naked daybreak dances Sublime moment of reunion INDIA . . . Relay for libation Harbor for the warriors of Light Bottom roller of evaporated rivers Confident and sleepy the earth snuggles up Awake spirits we watch over The birth of the dawn of The XXI Century Ours. Sembène, the oldest of the elders Galle Ceddo : February 25, 1995

459

Cinema as Evening School Ousmane Sembène

M

y first thought goes to my age mates in this profession, to their tenacity and conviction. In books on the history of cinematography, this part of Africa is TERRA INCOGNITA. In spite of their age, they have cleared the path with determination and a youthful spirit. Young old people, with an adolescent faith, they have cut down clearings in this forest . . . Carthage, the FESPACO . . . Not much, still a lot . . . So another thought comes to me. A new generation of filmmakers, strong-willed and with a superb mastery of technics is born. A relief troop. In a first letter addressed to all, it was said that “scientific discovery belongs to all.” Making films has become our profession. So it is up to us to express our own concept of the seventh art, to place it along the other art forms for this new upcoming Africa. New generations, new struggles. The elders strongly believed in this idea. An altogether collective and individual work. Nowadays, there is not a single international film festival without the participation of at least one film directed by one of us or without one of us being a member of an international jury. Weeks, seminars, festivals about Africa are organized outside the continent, worldwide. Slowly the presumptive know-how of one or some paternalistic groups vanishes and our participation to all these meetings about cinematography would certainly have pleased the solitary inventor of cinematography. So it is just fair to pay him homage but we have to go even further . . . Each culture pictures itself with the aim of perpetuating its morals and ethics. In the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, our fellow countrymen in the cities, nicknamed the “ADVANCED,” were influenced by foreign films. I remember some of the “ADVANCED” people who named themselves after American or European actors. Another memory from the same period comes to me: our anticolonial or unionist meetings used to take place in cinema halls during the day. At night, we would go back there to watch films. In fact, we have a marvelous written account by the great Hampaté Bâ telling us about his attending a public screening for the first time in Bamako, in 1905.

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

461

In the 1930s, after my expulsion from the French school, I used to go fishing carps in the river with my father. He would give me a coin to go to the pictures. He always showed great amazement at my regular attendance at cinema halls. For him, it was a white man’s business. He never attended any film show. When by chance we were passing in front of a film poster, he never stopped. What is more, he refused to be photographed and so did my mother. It is only shortly before she died that I was able to photograph her. Africa and Africans are present in many films:: the African landscape as background and the natives as crowd artists. Ethnographers have used film commentaries to establish the so-called superiority of their civilization. These Africanists have told their own audience lies but if we change the commentaries, the dances and festivities will remain authentic for us Africans. In publishing these texts gathered from various sources, we contribute to the universal edifice. This is a sign of our vitality. This commemorative act should not be a glorification of our “poor” know-how. We are still far from reaching our aim. Our cinema is extravert. We have to question our shortcomings, the imperfections of our associations and of our Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers, the FEPACI. Our film productions are not screened at home. That is why, keeping in mind the cultural exception, our struggle is right. This occasion which provides an opportunity for our coming together should be devoted to reflection. Our continent ridden with so many internal and external problems is more alive than ever. We have to be daring and reconquer our cultural and cinematographic space. To defend our countries, our villages, our homes from the invader is an act of heroism. It is even more noble to be strong-minded enough to fight imposture and iniquity at home. The coming twenty-first century is full of hope for us, for our children and grandchildren. In this year 1995 which marks the Centenary of cinematography, we take the baton relayed to us by our first generation filmmakers. All the considerations in this book represent a sincere homage to the inventor of cinematography. In Africa, we are finally on our way out of the skimpy films and we are about to enter full scale African film production. Thank you all for the elders. The Elder of Elders Ousmane Sembène

462

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Ousmane Sembène was a prolific Senegalese filmmaker and author. He is commonly considered the father of African cinema.

Notes Originally published as “Cinéma école du soir/Cinema as evening school,” in FEPACI Présence Africaine (Hrsg.): L’Afrique et le Centenaire du Cinéma /Africa and the Centenary of Cinema (Dakar: Présence Africaine, 1995), 9–14.

Statement at Ouagadougou (1979) Ousmane Sembène The Role of the African Filmmaker in the Struggle for National Liberation in Africa At the Sixth FESPACO (Pan-African Film Festival), LIPAD1 hosted a public debate on February 7, 1979 at the Maison des Jeunes et de la Culture de Ouagadougou (Ouagadougou Youth Cultural Center). LIPAD had invited renowned filmmaker Ousmane Sembène to give a talk, followed by a Q&A session with the audience. In attendance at the event were many LIPAD militants and sympathizers, all brimming with fervor and enthusiasm. Below is a transcript of the talk. We apologize to Sembène and the readers for any error or flaw in this rendering.

Opening Remarks and Presentation of the Speaker Ladies and gentlemen, Fellow LIPAD comrades and sympathizers, It is quite an honor to have among us this evening Ousmane Sembène, the great writer, filmmaker, and African patriot. I guess everyone in Ouagadougou knows Sembene in one way or another, through direct engagement and enjoyment of his brilliant literary works and films, which include:

Literature Black Docker (1955) O Beloved Country, My Beautiful People (1957) God’s Bits of Wood (1960) Tribal Scars (1962) The Harmattan (1964) White Genesis (1966) The Money Order (1966) Xala (1973)

464

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Cinema Borom Sarret (1963) Niaye (1964) Black Girl (1966) The Money Order (1968) Tauw (1970) Emitai (1971) Xala (1975) Ceddo (1977) Indeed, filmmaker Ousmane Sembène is a household name in the city of Ouagadougou. He has been involved in all the editions of FESPACO, going back to its inception in 1969. Sembène has thrown all his weight in the fight to tilt the balance toward billing FESPACO as a grassroots, popular cultural event, rather than enclosing it within the narrow confines of movie theaters. More importantly, he has championed open air popular film screenings, followed by a discussion with viewers. The quintessential man of the people, easy-going, as plain as his speech, and with a bright mind: these are, as can be gathered from his interviews and interventions, the dominant features of the man Sembène, without a doubt the most popular contemporary African filmmaker. So today we are welcoming an exceptional individual. On behalf of LIPAD’s National Executive Committee, we warmly thank Sembène for accepting to be here among us, this evening, and give a talk on a topic dear to us all, that of the role the African filmmaker is supposed to play in the struggle for national liberation in Africa. We appreciate the gesture all the more since his stay in Haute Volta2 is short, and seeing that he is quite on demand during the festival. We picked this topic after pondering the exemplary conduct of Sembène as writer and filmmaker, as a man who, both in his daily activities and his works, spurs us into raising the question at issue here, while also challenging us to probe deeper into all possible answers. For to regard oneself as a popular artist means, above all, to partake, withal all one’s gifts and talents, in the struggles of the people. At present, the fundamental issue African peoples are facing is that of their complete liberation from imperialist domination, whether such a domination exhibits all the outward features of naked colonialist exploitation, as in the southern part of the continent, or dons the cool mask of neocolonialist exploitation, as here in Haute Volta. How, then, can one become a popular artist? How can one get to know the people and get involved in its struggle for liberation? How can one, as an

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

465

artist, writer, painter, sculptor, musician, actor, filmmaker, and so on, contribute to development and the victorious outcome of the struggle? As creative artists or public, should we adopt the same attitudes with regard to various literary and artistic works, whether they are put out by deeply bourgeois or feudal elements of society to vent their reactionary class feelings, or are authored by artists seeking to identify with the people and its cause? Should we seek in artworks only beauty, the purely artistic and technical side of the equation, and consider as subsidiary their content and the ideology they convey? What role should fiction, the imaginary, play in this context, far removed from the real concerns of existence, the concrete issues of life in society? What should be the relationships between the artwork and the political and ideological factors making up the fabric of our society? Are the views of the bourgeoisie and of professional art critics the only ones worthy of consideration? Or should we attempt to know how popular masses understand, feel, and appreciate the work that stands in front of them? In other words, who should be the intended public of literary and artistic works, and what elements should be deemed essential to bringing these works to completion and out in public view? These are the fundamental questions we ask ourselves, as revolutionaries from Haute Volta, living in a neocolonial society but determined to fight on, no matter how hard and tough things can get, and in solidarity with the popular masses, to bring to an end the imperialist domination that has caught our country in its grip, to achieve popular revolution and national liberation, and to usher in the era of direct popular democracy. By accepting our invitation, in spite of his tight schedule, Ousmane Sembène, the African patriot, is doing us an immense favor. Yet once again this illustrates, concretely, the solidarity that, of necessity, must bind the patriots of all countries. Without further ado, I will now give the floor to comrade Ousmane Sembène.

Transcript of the Talk Given by Ousmane Sembène Good evening, comrades, I do not have a text to read out to you on the topic under discussion. You see, I’m no university lecturer, and I freely admit that I do not have a thorough knowledge of everything. Mine is a class struggle, it is a fact of life for me, there is no point in denying it. Even when I’m dead, I want everybody to get this fact straight. (Applause). We are going to talk about a very important issue: the role of the artist living among his people. The speaker introducing me has touched on some key points

466

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

and ideas. Before addressing them, I would like first to share some personal reflections, and ask questions, questions meant for both you and me. To start with, the artist is nothing without his people. There is no such thing as art without a people. So I cannot claim to be an internationalist if, first off, it is impossible for me to say that I belong to this or that people, if I cannot intensely feel and empathize with its most dramatic and joyous moments. This is a personal view, but I want it to be like a prick of conscience, my daily prayer. As an artist, what did I do for my people? I know what the peasant has done for me, what the baker, the mason, the electrician, the taxi driver, the teacher, etc., have done for my family, my wife, myself. In return for their bounties and services, what do I have to offer them? We artists are often sought after, spoiled, flattered: this is the sideshow. They say, “See this one here? He is an artist.” They think the artist is above the fray, that nothing can affect him, but let me tell you, it is so easy to bribe and coopt an artist, so easy. We can be easily swallowed up, treated like puppets dangling on strings. In a nutshell, this is the tragedy of African cinema, but we shall come to that later on. Another side of the issue, the hardest to confront, is the role of the artist among his people. Who is this man who, overnight, claims to advocate for the masses and speak on their behalf? On what basis and why? Why do we recognize in him our spokesperson, “our mouth, our ears, our feet,” as Césaire put it? On what grounds do we see ourselves in this man and, so to speak, give him power of attorney? Here is the break between the creative artist and his public. This public revers and trusts him unreservedly, so in the end nobody keeps an eye on him anymore, instead people are invading his privacy, they spoil and flatter him, and at times take advantage of his nice, gentle demeanor. This could damn well happen to me, and that is why sometimes I have to come down hard on some of my so-called admirers, because they think I have no commitments, that my day does not consist of a 24-hour cycle, but of a 72-hour cycle. For the militant who struggles every day and faces daunting odds, come rain or hail, day or night, there is no Sunday, no rest, no retirement, every day he sacrifices a little bit of his family welfare, and the quiet intimacy with his wife, on the altar of the struggle. At times, for those who are heads of families, this means you will never find the time to help the children with their homework. It is like the doctor who must send his children to do their checkup with another colleague. So the militant person working among the people has more responsibilities than the writer. I know quite a handful of them, and can mention their names, men and women who gave the cause everything they got, exemplary figures of what I call the heroism of the everyday. In order to live intensely among one’s people, there is no need to show off and parrot revolutionary catchphrases. That is, if we truly harbor the

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

467

ambition of changing our dear continent. For it is not the Chinese, Russians, Frenchmen, Americans, etc., who are going to change Africa, but us, and only us, Africans. At what price? Let us, together you and I, try to look deeper into the matter. We need art just like we need millet or chapalo.3 We need art just like we need love and affection. The problem is: what purpose does art actually serve? That is the question I keep asking myself all the time. Can we live without art? I think it would be very difficult, quite a challenge, but I cannot answer the question on my own. We need to hear singers, read writers, go to the movies. It brings us solace, some sort of inner peace. If art is only meant to lull us into sleep, to tear us away from thinking, or to prevent us from thinking altogether, then I believe we have no need of such art. Art can bring us joy, enhance our senses, cool down our tempers and, at times, ignite powerful ideas. The fact is, art can only come from the people. It is the sum total of the daily experiences the people go through. When I watch folks on the streets of Ouagadougou, I feel like I could write a short story every day, if I were to live here. Sure, it has a different vibe than the pulse of urban life in Dakar, but the difference is almost negligible, of a material kind, perhaps. In Abidjan, same thing. So there are no barriers for artists, no airtight partition wall between the Senegalese artist and his counterpart from Haute Volta. Let us get back to the issue at hand: African cinema. First let me give you a brief overview of its history. African cinema came into existence during the colonial period. We tend to forget that the colonizers, as part of the skillset their native cadres were supposed to gain through training, had actually trained some filmmakers on how to extol colonial occupation and daily life, its achievements, in order to perpetuate said colonial occupation and get us to a point where we would accept it as just a “natural” fact, like the air we breathe. Until 1960, there were the actualités (“newsreels”) of regional governors and district commissioners, and there were schools, cultural centers, and so on, where the screenings of these actualités took place. Cinematographic art went no further than that. Nobody said what should be done. A few tried to break out of this debilitating deadlock, but they were mostly abroad, especially in Paris, London, and Italy. African filmmakers tried to shoot films, but only if these were historical “reconstitutions” tinged with nostalgia for the past. For us, this is nothing new. When you pay attention to all things literary in Africa, you realize there was a period when African literature consisted of nothing but evening storytelling sessions around the communal fire, folktales and, as always, choice morsels of our so-called African wisdom. Arguably, this was not a regression into some primitive state, but rather a form of resistance against the permanent assault African society was under, on a daily basis,

468

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

during the colonial era. These tales and novels, like the first films of the same ilk, served a purpose, we cannot dismiss them out of hand. These literary and cinematic trends played no small part in the emergence of Présence Africaine, the Société des Auteurs Africains, and the Société Africaine de Culture. This revivalist movement was born prior to the nominal independences of 1960. But from then on, things started to change. Until then, it was nothing but the nostalgic evocation or contemplation of some idyllic past. But is it fair to say that the few books on these topics did not deserve to be published? Do we have a right to be so harsh in our judgment? Most of the artists from that generation did not take an active part in the struggles for national liberation. Living outside their homelands, in high demand at milquetoast private gatherings and chic salons, they were not equal to the task, could hardly feel the burden of historical responsibility weighing on their shoulders. They spoke grandiloquently of one thing, and one thing only: Africa’s glorious past. What was lacking in most of them, I think, was active involvement in the struggle alongside the masses. Those from my generation here today no doubt remember that Ouagadougou was a major hub, a hotbed of protest and unrest in the days of RDA’s anticolonial resistance. But what writer bore witness to all the meetings that took place here with the late Ouezzin Coulibaly, Mamadou Konate from Mali, etc.? None that I know of. If you draw a parallel with other contexts, you realize that elsewhere writers have done just that: bear testimony to similar situations of vibrant grassroots militancy. This is the crucial difference I think, a real knowledge of their people was sorely lacking in those writers. They were just not in the thick of it, not deeply involved in the resistance movements and the people’s struggles. This is a matter of paramount importance for an artist: to be among his people and take part in the daily quest for freedom, a freedom both inside his mind and outside in the world. From 1946 to 1948, the struggle of trade unions was primarily anticolonial. I take my generation as a case study to illustrate this point. At the time, we came to this struggle like flies in a soup or, if you prefer, like cockroaches in a bowl of chapalo. (Laughs). I cannot cite any source, but all those who were in Dakar like Sékou Touré, Nazi Boni, spoke of the dialectic of national culture and liberation. We were the first to address these issues because the people who hosted those meetings paid more attention to the number of degrees earned than to effective organizational work. For us, the point was not so much to catch up with them and earn as many degrees as possible, as to delve deeper into the life of our peoples, that is, to learn more from the peoples, not in order to get on our high horses and then say, “Look here, this is what needs to be done,” but simply to learn how to better attune our ears to what the peoples have to say.

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

469

Some chose to ply this route. At the time, their enemies wrote to raise issues that they were supposed to address as individuals. For someone like Ahmed Sékou Touré, literature was, you know, not devoid of interest, but for him direct struggle took precedence over culture, literature, the fine arts. For me, everything took a backseat to literature. There was this duality between those who, twenty years later, would lead our countries and me as an individual. Today, the debate still rages on, and it is what we are gathered here to discuss, on this evening. Is art essential? We have seen what Sékou Touré was able to achieve in terms of cultural politics. In Guinea, the failures in matters of economic policy are hard to miss, but there is no way we can say that Sékou Touré’s cultural politics did not help Guineans, and by implication all Africans, to regain some sense of dignity. When state power takes hold of art, grabs it by the roots, as it were, and sets out to mold it into some shape, such a state has the wherewithal to succeed. But the individual artist, especially the young artist, who tries through his works to reach as many people as he can while remaining faithful to his idea or ideal of art, that individual artist will necessarily encounter some mishaps and difficulties. To come back to cinema, let us say that until 1971 there were many forms of cinema epitomizing the cultural movement, on the one hand, and the political movement, on the other. In 1960, at the time of our sham independences, I did not know how to make films, not yet. It so happened that through my frequent journeys inside Africa, and my hiking on foot from Dakar to Kinshasa, in the Belgian Congo, I found myself involved in Lumumba’s political movement. For months I waged the struggle on the frontline of culture, while trying to remain an artist at heart. It was a contradiction, because for the Congolese real independence was the priority, it dwarfed everything else. For me the main thing was to document this period in writing. So during the day I was absorbed in my tasks, and at night I debated. It was around that period, after the death of Lumumba, that I decided to learn how to make films. I had just turned 40. At the time, I had twenty years of trade union militancy under my belt, whether in Senegal or in France with the Communist Party. So I found myself in Moscow for a year, to learn filmmaking. During that year, I reflected in private on cinema, but always in relation to what I consider to be the just cause, that is, the communist ideal. Two years later, I returned to Senegal and started making films. I shot Borom Sarret, I made a documentary on the Songhay Empire, explaining, through the lens of my camera, the chain of events that led to the collapse of that great West African empire. For this film, I ran afoul of Modibo Keita, who harbored motives that I deem legitimate, but that I do not condone. To the extent that the fall of our states, the unraveling of our political structures, can be traced back to imperialism, whatever

470

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

its form, we must stand up and denounce it. If you refuse to tell your friend that he is lying, it can only mean that the two of you are no longer friends. Anybody who hesitates to tell his friend the hard truth must regard himself as his worst enemy. So in Dakar, I shot Borom Sarret. For a long time, the government banned its distribution. Maybe it was entitled to act like that. For my part, I was entitled to make the film, it was my civil right. Why? Because I had chosen my side. I was not necessarily standing on the side of the cart drivers and other underprivileged. I shot the film because I saw that, at the time, my comrades from PAI, that is, the Communist Party branch in Senegal, were tossed into jails, and still they were struggling for an invisible cause, a cause that still had their wholehearted support. Making films was my assignment, nobody else could perform the task. Just like I cannot fill the shoes of our leaders and do in their stead what they are supposed to. So there is always this duality between the artist and power structures, whatever their form. Eventually, we managed to shape our own cinema, making films, roving across Africa to screen them, staging impromptu meetings off of them, not just through the regular gatherings of radical militants, but also by casting our films as discussion topics, the post-screening debate as a forum. In so doing, our films could last longer in their public life, without any need for us to peddle them like commodities only meant for instant gratification. Thus, we distanced ourselves from a certain cinema that drowns truth in the acid bath of rank falsehoods, a cinema that does not enrich us a bit and, instead, turns us away from ourselves, planting the seeds of alienation deep in us. On this score, and if one follows the evolution of cinema as a medium and a technique of representation, one comes to the bitter realization that in Africa commercial cinema has always invaded, occupied, monopolized our screens, and this is consistent with its collusion with our rulers, for they are complicit in this. We speak of government complicity to the extent that, to give you a concrete example, since 1978 we are in a position to supply Haute Volta in African films for six months. Yes, we can. So there is no reason, none that we can see in any case, why SONAVOCI4 could not distribute these films. So we must come to the conclusion that African states are in cahoots with French or American cultural imperialism. (Long applause). Okay, okay, let us settle down, let us not get easily carried away, this is not an electoral campaign meeting. Like I said, I do not hold the key to absolute truths and, of course, it may well be the case that I’m dead wrong on some of these issues. I’m only doling out these reflections, especially my own musings, as food for thought. Actually, you can enrich me more than I can enrich you, for only through your critiques, your own reflections, observations, and experiences can I improve my work and go beyond the simple, naturalistic representation of how we act and behave in society.

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

471

To come back once more to the issue of cinema: it is worth noting that African filmmakers of the first and second wave—now we are in the third wave—are increasingly treading on a dangerous path, and I would like to draw your attention to this alarming trend. Cinema, our art, is also an industry. You cannot make a film without funding. In Haute Volta, a film would cost around 30 to 40 million CFA.5 In the high-volume spheres of state industry and multinational corporations operating on the continent, this is not a costly investment, it is a bargain price. Actually, 30 million CFA is a pittance, in this context. There are films that cost nearly a billion CFA,6 and in the case of some films, the advertising campaign alone is budgeted north of a billion CFA. Why? Because to instill in you, the public, a burning desire to go and watch these films, they churn out ads like lube out of a Vaseline tube, so that once seated in the movie theater you are sure to get your kicks out of the images on the screen. More seriously, we see today that African cinema, next to what is called militant third cinema, is branching out toward commercial cinema. This is hardly an insight, and I’m not making this stuff up. Omar Bongo, yes Omar Albert-Bernard Bongo, the president of Gabon, is the first to venture into this niche. Recently, he had his filmmakers, with the help of European technicians, shoot a cute little movie,7 technically flawless but amounting to no more than a stale sentimental slush. The public, in Senegal and Haute Volta, is going to love it. They are going to love it because it is shallow, devoid of any substance, albeit impeccably shot. This is precisely the tragic flaw of cinema: the aesthetic, form primes over content. We can expect to see more movies like Bongo’s, as other states are bound to jump on the bandwagon of entertainment cinema. We’d rather that African filmmakers translate into images the concerns of the masses, instead of selling themselves out to their governments. But what is there to say, really, about these filmmakers? Aren’t we even being self-righteous in our complaint? The truth is, we avail of neither incentives nor disincentives to steer them in this or that direction, so we have no right to cast the first stone. They feel the need to express themselves, and that is exactly what they are doing. What would you do, if you were in their shoes? But at least there is a silver lining amidst the dark clouds of contemporary African cinema, and it is the fact that, as the previous speaker pointed out in his opening remarks, signs and symbols of class belonging and social status cannot be concealed any longer. Cinema is the first medium to shed light on this, to bring them out of the shadows. This is normal, given that the state has commandeered radio and television, just like it seeks to confiscate cinema itself in order to spin its own narratives on celluloid, all well-rounded, formulaic and sanitized, with mind-numbing themes, junk food that will leave us still craving for something more substantial. Yet we will go watch them. We will, indeed, because Africa is going through its biggest crisis, a cultural

472

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

crisis in which classical African culture, the one we have tried, until now, to salvage and preserve, is showing worrying signs of decay. In most cases, going to the movies tends to be our preferred cultural activity. It is so much easier and less expensive than buying and reading a book. We prefer going to the movies over listening to a kora player. Why? Because in a movie theater you are seated, you come with a party, and depending on your ticket category you are more or less feeling the cool breeze from the AC. This should be a matter of alarming concern, given that cinema is now so much a part of the fabric of social life. The youth of today, even their elders, start out their Saturday night date with a trip to the movies, don’t they? In practical terms, yes, it saves you much trouble with a girl if you can just tell her, “I’ll see you at the movie theater, then, right?” or “Let’s meet after the movie, okay?” In itself, this is none of our concern, but since it exemplifies the deep reach of cinema’s ideological tentacles inside our collective consciousness, more than juvenile romance and dating strategies is at stake here. When we watch a movie, we do not analyze the images because we are seeking an escape from reality. The cinema controlled by our governments is pernicious to the extent that such a cinema provides a frame of reference for new forms of behavior, attitudes, ways of doing things. We all know of many young men, even older men, who often try to identify with this or that actor. We all want this or that three-piece suit, this or that pair of shoes. Women want this or that hairstyle, this or that gown, seen in this or that movie. Well, if this is not alienation, I do not know what is. Let us face it, these fashion trifles are indeed the symptoms of our acute alienation. (Applause). They have been infused in our blood vessels, but I’m not blaming the common people, rather I say and I repeat that the state is the culprit, that our leaders should be held to account. In the light of our chronic lack of any frame of reference, what is called the identificatory complex reigns supreme. If one takes a closer look, one even notes that some want to look like Marlon Brando and Jean-Paul Belmondo, down to the haircut. Look at your hair salons and barbershops, study them like sociological phenomena. (Laughs). We also have the Django style. (Laughs). You are laughing, but I’m telling you this is no laughing matter, because this belies a lack in us. It is severely affecting you, me, your son, your daughter. We are all painfully aware of the great emptiness inside us, and what we are asking our governments is to change their course of action and find in African culture the role models we need and crave. We can forge our own myths, too, you know. At the end of the day, however, you and I know that this is going to be an uphill battle, insofar as our governments have their hands tied by various brands of cultural imperialism imposing their foreign cultures on them, meaning on us. I was not here in January 1970, when the government of Haute Volta decided to shut down all the movie theaters. We arrived in Ouagadougou

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

473

two days later, after the closures. For three days, I do not know if you also noticed it back then, people did not know where to go at night, since they were deprived of the regular outlets where they could let off some steam. So for three days the movie theaters were shut down, but the government was forced to reopen them, not for your sake, mind you, one never closes and opens a movie theater just to please the public. But pressure was mounting, and it reached such proportions that it would have been foolish not to let people go back to the movie theaters. So cinema plays a huge role in contemporary civilization, in what is also called the civilization of the image. Far from contesting the value of cinema as a technique and medium of representation, what we object to, what we deplore is our overexposure to content not aligned with our desires and needs. This content continues to alienate and colonize us. In the days of our fathers, and even in my own time, colonization meant the occupation of lands. Now neo-colonization is a more advanced species, it means the occupation of both lands and minds. (Applause). When you go back home, everything around you is tainted with Western culture, down to the bed you lie in. (Laughs). In the times of our fathers, they worked the land, afterwards they went back home to their huts, to be among their agemates, to retreat back into the bosom of their culture. Right now, African governments, unwittingly or not, are allowing cultural imperialism into our very homes, the last strongholds of our intimacy and integrity. Of course, you can always point out to me that we only have ourselves to blame for this sorry state of affairs, that this is our own doing, nobody else’s. To come back to the filmmaker, I will only say this: I think the tragedy of African cinema, and of its filmmakers in particular, is that they embraced the medium as individuals. They did not embrace cinema out of a deep sense of commitment to political beliefs, no, they embraced it for the glitz and blitz of celebrity, for thrill it held out. Some enjoy being pampered and adulated, they love to hear critics say, “He’s an artist after this or that manner.” It is quite flattering, but I think it also shows that we are only humans, especially in the case of young filmmakers. However, what is more alarming to me is that in the next decade or so, we are going to see Africans putting out European contents for other Africans, that is, they are going to peddle Western cultural products to you and me, whilst making you believe it is still African. In such a context, I anticipate a bitter struggle between power holders, who want to control cinema as their propaganda tool, and those who want it to serve the people. The power structures that control cinema, the movie theaters, can ban any film that does not fit into their cultural policy schemes. As a result, there are many countries in Africa where films are banned outright, where film cannot be screened because, allegedly, they are not in compliance with government policy. As filmmakers, we want to bear witness to the historical situation and convey the aspirations of the people.

474

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Cinema is the medium best suited, today, to throw a stark light on the historical situation of the ordinary African: corruption, nepotism, grand thefts, wasteful spending, private accumulation of capital. (Applause). I think one has to be singularly dishonest to deny that these things exist in our societies. In Senegal or Haute Volta, we know of many people who pounce on public assets to claim them as their own, and without skipping a legal beat, because they made laws tailored to suit their predatory designs. We know of many more who own four or five properties and rent it out to the state, who pimp huge amounts of money out of state coffers, in order to put up buildings they will then lease out to the same state or to use it themselves and have the state foot the bill. This is nothing but highway robbery in high places. (Applause). What else does it look like? But when we, filmmakers, denounce it, we are scolded for “meddling” in politics. Well, yes, the hell we are, actually we have never denied it. But our politics is primarily cultural, it is meant to help the people to shape their own consciousness. We know for a fact that one hundred MPs cannot replace a single filmmaker. On the other hand, a peasant is worth ten filmmakers. This is how we set our value system, if you will. But when we decry the thefts, we are flagged as subversives, when we decry influence peddling, interloping, and abuses of power, they say we are meddling in politics, exactly what they do every single day. Well, it is just that they do not have the balls to admit it (Laughs), while we, by contrast, do have the courage to watch, listen, and engross ourselves in such matters so as to expose the dirty laundry in public. Perhaps we won’t be able to do it anymore, in the near future. It will be due to the simple fact that the thieves and crooks of today are going to be the film producers of tomorrow. With all their accumulated ill-gained wealth, they are going to fund films, on condition that they exert absolute control over the whole process, from script to screen. Once again, we are issuing a stern warning. We have no ready-made solution to the issue. However, we believe the same scheme of dominance is repeating itself over and over, just like in the context of trade unionism you have the trade union of honest men and the trade union of crooks set up by the state. In the context of trade union organizations, we know that often, in a single country, a situation arises where you have these two groups battling for dominance: state representatives and members of the working class. The same split obtains among African filmmakers. The other deplorable trait in the character of the African filmmaker is his lack of knowledge about the society he lives in. We can speak of a generation cut loose from the living roots of African culture, more attuned to Western cinema and little concerned with shaping new film forms from within the hub of African culture. Instead of working on scripts with writers, they prefer to sketch out some treatment in collaboration with a European.

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

475

Here, I deliberately refrain from citing the name of any country. We know of certain African countries that pay Europeans up to 25 million CFA,8 just to cloak their long history in a tight cinematic garb, and of films where the entire crew is “shadowed” by a second team, all Europeans. The only thing the African filmmaker has to do is sign his name, for he is nothing but a dummy. This is our misfortune, us filmmakers. We say it here out loud, in front of you: we have no clue how to fix this. In any case, personally I do not know how to set this crooked matter straight. This dangerous trend threatens to morph into a huge trap. The severe lack of knowledge with regard to African culture is not only hobbling the evolution of cinema in Africa, it is not only hanging over the film screens like a cloud of doom: sooner or later it will prove our undoing as a relevant, meaningful cinema. Cinema involves a lot of money, but making a film also implies that you have a story to tell. Not everybody can pen down a storyline. If you look at countries outside Africa, say France and the United States, a single film mobilizes four or five persons, just to hash out a script. There are those handling dialogues, those handling the plot, and so on. That is why we have helped to kickstart a network of schools where people can get training or some preparatory training prior to entering other film schools. In some film schools, you are only trained to acquire the ropes of film technique, it is like when you attend a driving school, you learn how to drive a car without knowing the ins and outs of automotive mechanics. As far as celluloid cinema, you won’t be told that a given speed corresponds to a set volume of words or spool velocity, why at some point a given speed is always required. Why is such film spool velocity required? It is like you are being told: when you reach 20 mph, shift into a higher gear, when you get to 25 mph, shift gears again, and when you reach 30–35 mph, settle into cruise mode. (Laughs). It is true, that is how it is supposed to work. If you know your road safety code, like I do, then you can get on the road and drive smoothly through traffic. But when the car breaks down, and you have to fix it, that is an altogether different matter. It is like the end of the world! I will give you a concrete example: the screening of my film Ceddo at the opening ceremony.9 The operator was provided with a worksheet detailing all sorts of technicalities: speed, images, sound, etc. A man of goodwill, he confined himself to applying what he knew, that is, changing the speed regimes of the spool. It did not pan out, during the projection something was off. So we went up to his booth to tell him that he was doing a poor job. His answer was, “Boss, this is how I work, this is how I have always worked.” After some inquiries, it turned out that for the last two years the man had reported the flaws in his projection apparatus, but since the supervisors in charge were as clueless as he was, the issue was left pending. In training filmmakers, one can run into similar problems. The goal is to introduce you to topics without necessarily taking you deep inside the

476

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

sociological contexts, without opening your eyes to the complex mutations underway, the new emerging trends and movements, the new layers in the pyramidal stratification of society. Nowadays, one can pinpoint the signs of an emerging bourgeoisie in our societies, even though its members are a far cry from the bourgeois of Western Europe, now or during the 18th or 19th centuries. They form a small clique enjoying a number of privileges. As a creative artist, it is always a good thing to know the laws, the causal chains, how all of this takes shapes over time and winds up into a specific form, at some point, like our current comprador bourgeoisie. So you see that artists have a huge responsibility. In any case, we are always reminded of it, but we must equally remind ourselves of all the things that we do not know and perhaps will never know. African cinema is grappling with a host of issues that are far more complex than the issues literature is facing or has ever faced. In the current struggles for national liberation in Africa, filmmakers, whatever their weaknesses and contradictions, are way ahead of their counterparts in the other arts. It is not so much that we are more cognizant, smarter or whatever, as that the tool of our trade is the most widespread, and its products the most consumed. Actually, the crowd inside a movie theater is bigger than the congregations inside a church or a mosque. We can safely claim to mobilize, every day, a sizable chunk of the population. I wish churches and mosques were able to pull it off the way we do on a daily basis. It is a tough assignment for them, for the motives inclining us toward this or that direction are always shifting. Moreover, the African Church, for good or ill, displays a keen interest in cinema. Well, we know that the Lord works in mysterious ways, but how to account for the fact that all of a sudden these people show such an intense and passionate interest in cinema? Governments try to control distribution. For a long time, over the course of its first decade, they showed no interest in cinema at all. Those were the good old days when we had carte blanche to attack, rail against politicians, launch into whatever critique we fancied. But when they came to grasp the impact cinema could have, they quickly set up new ministries, staged events to draw crowds, built movie theaters. Bypassing us, they issued decrees and crafted regulations, even laws, to rein in our freedom of speech. It shows you that cinema, albeit not the most significant, must be counted among today’s most potent cultural weapons. We could spend all evening talking about man and cinema, the public and cinema. On all these points, I have my own private thoughts. But I would like to end on a different note and sketch out for you the relationship between cinema and the awakening of consciousness. Let me tell you a real story about an experience I went through in Yaoundé, Cameroon, where I was invited to take part in a conference. I was well accommodated, in a hotel room with a properly functioning AC. Strange

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

477

as it may seem, we often find more hospitable living quarters outside our own home, that is true in my case anyway. (Laughs). So I was staying at my hotel room when the phone rang. I picked it up, and at the other end of the line someone says, “A police commissioner is asking for you, sir.” Well, out of habit I took my passport and sent brief notes to some comrades nearby in the adjacent rooms. A police commissioner? Oh boy! Am I in some deep trouble? So I took the necessary precautions, since the comrades who were supposed to welcome me were not there yet. I went down to the lobby. The commissioner turned out to be a nice, good-natured fellow. He asked me, “Do you drink beer?” This caught me off guard, but I just said, “No, but a glass of water would be fine.” (Laughs). He was having none of that and insisted I order a proper drink, so in the end I found myself fondling a glass of beer. He started looking at me intently. Honestly, it made me feel uneasy, fidgety. (Laughs). Don’t laugh, this was serious stuff, I was standing before a police commissioner who was eyeing me as if I were some girl he wanted to score. (Laughs). After a while he said, “You know, your film The Money Order, do you know that you did it for me?” I said, “Really? How so?” So here is his story. A Cameroonian peasant had received a money order from his son living abroad. He went to the post office to cash the check. He made the trip multiple times, and every time he was told that the money order wasn’t in yet. Out of frustration, one day he took aside the post office employee and, punching him in the face, said, “Look here, mister, don’t play me for a sucker, The Money Order trick doesn’t work on me! I have seen the film, I know what’s going on!” (Laughs). So they went to the police commissioner, the same who called on me at the hotel. They rummaged through the logs, and they found out that indeed the money order had reached the post office, but the employee had simply diverted the funds, he “ate” the money order. The commissioner was surprised I never heard of this story! (Laughs). Whatever the limits set to the distribution of a film, we have always managed to reach many people. So we can discuss politics with them without assuming a patronizing tone. A film must raise issues, but going forward, I think in the future African cinema must transcend this too, it is crucial that we filmmakers be sensitive to the aspirational heartthrobs and desires of African masses. This leads me to assert that without a revolutionary power structure no revolutionary cinema will ever come into existence. Progressive cinema is tied to the action of progressives and the dynamic of revolution. However, there is no such thing as revolution by proxy, from the comfort of your living room armchair. By the same token, we are not out to make propaganda leaflets, but films that stand in osmotic relationship with the struggles of oppressed peoples. The birth of revolutionary cinema is coterminous with the ultimate victory of the revolution. In Francophone African countries,

478

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

words like “culture” and “truth” are scarecrows for government officials. Well, we did not learn from foreigners how to seek and speak the truth. Africans gained that skill through their deliberations under the palaver tree. But as long as power is not genuinely popular, the going will be rough for artists, and we will keep ingurgitating decadent works, artistic junk food. This does not mean that in capitalist countries there is no militant cinema, a cinema sympathetic to the struggles of ordinary peoples, but we do not know of it, or we know only half the picture, given that once a film is banned in France the ban is automatically carried over to our countries. So to conclude this talk, I will sum up by saying that truth resides with the people. The struggle must be waged alongside the fighting, downtrodden masses, we must put ourselves wholly at their service and be part of the journey, not mere bystanders or fleeting fellow travelers. Otherwise, any given day, any artist can end up the way of turncoats and sellouts: by accepting bribes. There is always a struggle to wage, always, and we should never recoil from fighting if we want to achieve the ultimate victory of the people and of the revolution. (Applause). After his presentation, comrade Ousmane Sembène took questions from the forum participants, who were entreated to make it short, given the numerous commitments that did not allow him to stay for too long after the presentation. The filmmaker then asked the audience to tell him about their critiques and complaints with regard to African cinema, the role of women in cinema and in the films, the performance of actors, the technical quality of the films, the social themes and issues addressed, etc. Various LIPAD militants and sympathizers provided thoughtful and candid answers.

Notes 1. Ligue Patriotique pour le Développement (Patriotic League for Development). 2. Former name of present-day Burkina Faso. 3. Also called dolo. A popular beer in Burkina Faso, made from millet. 4. Société Nationale Voltaïque du Cinéma (National Cinema Society of Haute Volta). 5. 54,500 to 72,700 USD, in today’s currency exchange rate. 6. Around 1.8 million USD, in today’s value. 7. The film is Demain, un jour nouveau (Tomorrow Will Be A New Day), by Omar Bongo, with Pierre-Marie Dong (1978, Gabon). 8. 45,500 USD, in today’s currency exchange rate. 9. Ceddo kicked off the 6th edition of FESPACO in 1979.

Art for Man’s Sake: A Tribute to Ousmane Sembène Samba Gadjigo Ousmane Sembène Born: January 1, 1923, Ziguenchor, Casamance, Senegal Died: June 9, 2007, Dakar, Senegal Ousmane Sembène was known among film critics as “the father of African cinema” and, among African filmmakers, as “l’Aine des anciens” (the oldest of the elders). He wrote ten books of fiction (novels and short stories) and one essay over a period of forty years (1956–1996) and, between 1962, the year he came to filmmaking, and 2004—forty-two years—he directed eighteen films: four shorts, ten features, and four documentaries. After the release of Xala, his fourth feature, in 1974, Sembène told the Tunisian film critic Tahar Cheriaa: In this part of the world [Africa], there is one thing we must recognize: filmmakers carry a mission and, more generally, the artist is the one who prepares a revolution, the one who incites it. I would go further. Even in the middle of a revolution, the true artist is the one who prepares the next revolution, he incites revolt: that is his necessary role, his possible glory, and also his limit. Through his work of analysis, clarification, unmasking and denunciation, the artist arouses in his people’s consciousness the clear conviction that revolution is necessary and possible. [The artist has a historic and social responsibility, and art should be a liberating activity].1

Almost two decades later, after the release of Guelwaar (1993), the American film critic Michael Atkinson, in his examination of Sembène’s film production, echoed Sembène’s profession of faith: “Quite possibly the only filmmaker left in the world who cannot be bought and sold, Sembène represents the dying heritage of political films still possessed of a virginal faith in social change, a faith not in films for profit’s sake or even film’s sake, but for man’s sake.”2

480

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Figure 1. A young Ousmane Sembène. Screen grab of the documentary Sembène! Screengrab by Black Camera.

Ousmane Sembène was born in Casamance (southern Senegal) in 1923 and died at his Dakar residence, Galle Ceddo (“House of the Rebel”), on June 9, 2007, at the age of 84. He died at 9:00 p.m., the exact time I was boarding a South African Airways flight at New York’s JFK airport to go see him. I had last seen an already frail Sembène on November 10, 2006, and those of us who belonged to a very narrow circle of friends knew his days were numbered. But, his illness remained a well-kept secret until February 2007 when, for the first time since 1969, he missed the Ouagadougou Pan-African Film Festival, which he cofounded. For four decades, he was known as the occupant of Room 1 at the Hotel Independence, the site of the festival. I last spoke with Sembène a week before he died and, as he always did when I came to

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

481

Senegal, he gave me his shopping list on the phone. We both looked forward to seeing each other on June 10. He was expecting me that morning, also expecting to enjoy those bags of vanilla nut coffee and boxes bath salt I carried for him in my suitcase. There was indeed a long love story between Ousmane Sembène and tobacco, coffee, and water! When I landed in Dakar that morning, seven hours after boarding the South African flight, I learned “Tan ton” Sembène was gone, gone seven hours earlier. In the eighteen years I had known Ousmane Sembène, this was our first missed rendezvous. Over those eighteen years, his work had become for me more than a scholarly interest—it was a political imperative. I became his liaison with American universities and other cultural institutions, his biographer and, most importantly, his ‘‘jarbaat” (nephew) and friend. With him, I roamed the world: Africa, Europe, and the United States. My first encounter with Ousmane Sembène dates back to my high school years in the 1970s (1972, precisely), when I first read his third novel and masterpiece, God’s Bits of Wood. This book was my first exposure to African literature, after years of alienation caused by a school curriculum that included only French classics. The effect on my self-image, my worldview, and my political consciousness as a “francophone African” was instantaneous. Like a tsunami, I was swept away by a sudden awakening to the realities of class, race, gender, the realities of culture and politics. After studying God’s Bits, a historical fiction about the west African railroad workers’ strike of 1947, not only did I stop believing Hegel’s view that “the only history in Africa is the history of the white man in Africa,” I understood (albeit with a somewhat obscured awareness) that “to write history is also to make history.” Whereas my high school books were written by history’s “winners” (either the former colonial master or his surrogate, the neocolonial elite), in his novel, Sembène appropriates one of the major narratives of African colonial history and turns it on its head, giving agency to the black African railroad workers and thereby transforming them into “makers of history.” During my college and graduate years (1974–80) at what was then the Université de Dakar (now named after the famous Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop), writers of the negritude movement were made part of the canon, albeit reluctantly. But Sembène’s works remained marginalized, to the point that I did not even know him as a filmmaker. It was at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, in the 1980s that I discovered Sembène’s body of film work. I met the man himself in 1989, seventeen years after I first read God’s Bits of Wood. As a young assistant professor of French and African literature at Mount Holyoke College, I returned to Senegal to extend to Ousmane Sembène an invitation from the Five-College consortium to be artist-in-residence for a month.

482

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Figure 2. Samba Gadjigo with Ousmane Sembène. Screen grab by Black Camera.

Despite our missed rendezvous this past June 10th, I did see Ousmane Sembène again, but only for a few minutes. I saw him not at this Galle Ceddo residence, not at his office at the old communications building on the Avenue de la Republique, but at the morgue of the Hospital Principal, the site of Sembène’s official funeral. It was 3:00 p.m. and, despite the scorching rainy season heat, the room was absolutely packed—the adjacent streets became an extension of the morgue. Artists and officials from the whole country and from neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso gathered, waiting to pay their respects to the last “Ceddo.” Before Sembène was wrapped in a green shroud embossed with gold Arabic letters, in preparation for public viewing, and against the backdrop of Koranic songs, I took two minutes to visit the father of African cinema. As I looked at his peaceful face, his closed eyes, and his deliberately smiling lips (he was no doubt smiling at the Koranic songs, thinking: “They can chant as they like but they will never get me”), I was suddenly transported back to Djerisso, to the shooting in 2002 of Moolaadé, his last feature film. After all those years of studying Sembène’s work, it was only then that I fully understood both his 1974 statement to Tahar Cheriaa and Michael Atkinson’s judgment of Sembène. It was June 2002. I was present at the shooting of Moolaadé in the village of Djerisso in Burkina Faso. It was the first time I was invited to his set and the first time Ousmane Sembène allowed any academic or journalist to film him at work producing an African film, transforming his ideas into images. (My own documentary, The Making of Moolaadé, was an attempt to capture that experience). Like many rural African villages, Djerisso

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

483

seems completely cut off from the rest of the world: no paved roads, no running water, no electricity. The unrelenting heat of the tropical sun was replaced at night by dust and mosquitoes. Sembène was then seventy-nine years old. He had brought with him a crew of dozens of technicians, artists, and actors, as well as very heavy machinery. The film is a crusade against female genital mutilation, also referred to as “female genital cutting.” The shooting had been going on for nine weeks—five days a week, 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., with only a one-hour lunch break, which Sembène never took, preferring to meditate on the afternoon’s work. Over twelve hours, he would only have a glass of sour milk. One afternoon, about to shoot a scene while seated in his director’s chair, Ousmane Sembène collapsed, his eyes rolling upward: he had fainted. It took ice water and fanning to bring him back. It was high drama on the set, but not for long. Indeed, as soon as he could once again sit in his chair, Sembène summoned his crew back to work. As I discreetly approached Sembène and suggested he take a few days off to rest at a Banfora hotel, I was startled by his incisive reply: “Let’s get back to work. I will have plenty of time to rest after I die.” Following his collapse on the set, a village health care worker came every evening to see Sembène; for hours, the “infirmier” (nurse) fed his weakened body through intravenous tubes. The next morning at 8:00, unfailingly, Sembène was back on the set. As I stared at Ousmane Sembène’s face, for the last time, that June afternoon, in the morgue of the Hôpital Principal, images of Djerisso flashing back on the dark screen of my mind, I was suddenly filled with hope—hope that I will see him again, every day, because, like few great artists of our times, he had merely traded his perishable body for eternity. In that Djerisso heat, when Sembène was fighting death to collect images, he embodied the greatness of a true artist, torn between beauty and pain, between his love for humankind and the madness of creation. Ousmane Sembène used to say that one had to be crazy to make films in Africa. What truly makes the greatness and timelessness of artists like Sembène is their sense of responsibility toward humankind, their duty to generate hope, to galvanize their fellow men toward action against all forms of alienation and oppression and so make for a better tomorrow. Ousmane Sembène felt a calling: through his art, he sought to fulfill his responsibility to contribute to the building of a new life for the living. It is a sense of responsibility that, unlike the Hollywood model, does not allow rest or individual comfort. Instead, throughout his writing and film “career,” this old communist felt that each of his works was a stone he offered for the building of a new world, a better world for humankind. Rejecting Atkinson’s prophecy, I have the hope that Ousmane Sembène is not the last heir of political filmmaking, not the last to have faith in films for man’s sake.

484

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Samba Gadjigo is Professor of Francophone Studies at Mount Holyoke College and Ousmane Sembène’s official biographer and representative in the United States. His books include Ecole blanche, Afrique noire (L’Harmattan, 1990) and Ousmane Sembène, Une conscience africaine (Homnispheres, 2007). He directed The Making of Moolaade: A Documentary Film (2006).

Notes Originally published as Samba Gadjigo, “Art for Man’s Sake: A Tribute to Ousmane Sembène,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49, no. 1 (2008): 30–34. 1. Tahar Cheriaa, “Interview with Sembène Ousmane,” Cinema @ebec 3, nos. 9–10 (August 1974). 2. Michael Atkinson, “Ousmane Sembène: ‘We Are No Longer in the Era of Prophets’,” Film Comment 29, no. 4 (July–August 1993): 63–69.

On “Mediated Solidarity”: Reading Ousmane Sembène in Sembène! Michael T. Martin1

T

his conversation with Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman, codirectors of the feature documentary Sembène!, took place during their campus visit and screening of the film at Indiana University Cinema on October 19, 2015 at the Black Film Center/Archive, Indiana University Bloomington.

Michael T. Martin: It’s a pleasure to have you here, Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman, to discuss Sembène!, which illuminates and humanizes the legendary African filmmaker and writer Ousmane Sembène and his contribution to the historical project of recovery that is African cinema. Let’s begin with a question: What’s in a name? Such as the reference to Sembène as the father of African cinema. Indeed, but is there a subtext to be discerned in the term itself, apart from his cinematic achievements?

Samba Gadjigo: As a West African, who was raised by a grandmother who spoke to me in African languages, I’m very interested in this question: “What’s in a name?” Among the Bambara, Soninke, and the Pulaar’ Fulani, there’s a very famous song by Fodéba Keïta,2 an artist from Guinea, and former minister of culture under Sékou Touré.3 In it, he uses this old Fulani saying, “You can borrow a shirt, you can borrow a pair of shoes, but you cannot borrow a name, a name is to be bought.” In other words, it is your deeds that confer your name and distinguish you from others. In the Mandé culture a name is very profound and it is not “given,” it is “bought.” That said, Sembène’s affectionate nickname “the father of African cinema” stands both as sign of tribute and respect. He was not the first African to make a film; Paulin Soumanou Vieyra4 and the Groupe africain du cinema preceded him with Afrique sur Seine (1955). Sembène, nevertheless, ushered in a new era of media activism in Africa; a new cinema that mirrored Africans the way they are physically, and popularized the seventh art form as something more than entertainment. He argued for a cinema that enabled Africans to see their past, their present, and to imagine a way forward. And that’s

486

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Figure 1. Animated image from the documentary Sembène! (2015) depicting Ousmane Sembène with a film camera. Image in the public domain.

why Sembène deserved this title. He was the first innovator and the oldest of all. Yet, creatively speaking, he remained the youngest consistently for a half century. For this reason he is honored by the title, father of African cinema. MTM: Does the term “father” mean something particularly personal to you in relationship to Sembène?

SG: Yes. In the documentary, I say that in Senegal, during the 1960s our curriculum was replete with French classics. In fact, I was schooled to be French. I emulated the French and, as Fanon said, such a predicament is symptomatic of a complexe d’infériorité [the inferiority complex]. I lost my political innocence, so to speak, when I read Sembène’s God’s Bits of Wood (1960). Besides, allow me to be personal: when I was two years old, my father died, and I always felt that Sembène had adopted me as a son. MTM: After that initial trial by fire! (laughs)

SG: Yes, after that initial trial by fire. He often said that to inherit your father doesn’t mean you wait until he dies to take his belongings; it means to take what he did, pick up from where he left off, and move it further. In that sense, I can claim Sembène as a father. MTM: Sembène! starts with a haunting admonition by Sembène himself: “If Africans do not tell their own stories, Africa will soon disappear.” Why begin with this call?

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

487

Figure 2. Quotation from Ousmane Sembène. Screen grab by the author.

Jason Silverman: In order to answer the question, I’m going to return to your last question. In the 1950s, there was a cinema of entertainment, a Hollywood cinema, a cinema that was made for distraction. There was also a cinema of creative expression, what we think of as the European cinema. Sembène knew them both in addition to Soviet cinema, which was a cinema of ideology. But he created his own cinema that didn’t have a precedent. This is a cinema that tells a story from the opposite end of the spectrum, especially, as he moves into Mandabi [1968], where he fashions a cinema of the streets, shot with a handheld camera to generate images from the reality of the [African] working-class. It feels as if this cinema was representing something that had not been represented before. For Sembène, giving birth to African cinema was not about making the first film on the continent, nor was it about making the first film about Africa. It was about making films that imagine an African reality from an African perspective. And I think it starts with Borom Sarret [Le Charretier, 1963] and continues with Black Girl [La Noire de . . . , 1966] and Mandabi. SG: Yes. JS: In terms of your opening statement, it’s clear that the colonial project, which Samba will be able to address better than I can, was not just about invading forces with boots on the ground and weaponry. It was about an invasion of the mind. It was about the replacement of one set of stories with another set of stories. And the intent of that project was to eradicate [African] identity. Samba’s story about leaving home and attending high school, where his language was proscribed, is a story of erasure.

488

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

MTM: And complicity!

JS: Yes, for sure complicity. If you make something seductive enough, you’ll get buy-in from your audience. That was the power of the colonial system, and fair to say, even after 1960. SG: Yes, absolutely right! JS: Sembène wrote a poem in 1956 called “Liberté.” Have you read it? MTM: I have not.

JS: Samba can cite several lines from it, but essentially it asserts that as Asians have their monuments and poets, and Europe its monuments and poets, Africa, too, needs its monuments and poets. It needs to till its own soil and create its own culture. And that was Sembène’s project. He recognized that active resistance and battle were needed so that we could tell our stories and protect who we are. Sembène may have said that in his address at Indiana University in 1975. SG: Entitled “Man Is Culture.” JS: In that year, the threat was much greater than ever before, as commoditydriven stories were replacing indigenous storytelling and displacing cultures not only in Africa but everywhere, including in small American towns. MTM: Is it fair to say that it was Sembène’s call to arms in the long struggle for representation and self-determination?

SG: There is a contemporary of Sembène—Cheikh Hamidou Kane,5 who also is a Senegalese writer. He speaks metaphorically about the encounter between the West and the rest, the rest being Africa. MTM: That’s the title of a book in the 1970s: The West and the Rest of Us [1975], by Chinweizu Ibekwe.

SG: The title of Kane’s book is The Ambiguous Adventure [1961]. He compares the encounter between the West and Africa to a rainy season and deploys a very powerful image—the cannon—as a metaphor for a destructive military force associated with the impact of the West. For Kane in that novel, education carries the most damaging impact. Literacy in the European languages serves as an antidote for the survival of local [indigenous] narratives. JS: The conflict depicted in the novel lies in whether or not the local aristocratic families will send their children to the European school.

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

489

Figure 3. Sembène with his son Alain, on the set of one of his films. Screen grab by the author.

SG: Yes. The assenting family explains their decision, saying, “Yes, let’s send our children to school so they learn how to win without being right.” So, very early, Sembène understood the role that stories, storytelling—Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe—played in justifying colonial rule. MTM: He declared war!

SG: Exactly. He declared war. A colleague at the University of Regina edited a book on Sembène, A Call to Action: The Films of Ousmane Sembene.6 It’s an echo to Albert Camus’s acceptance speech for the 1957 Nobel Prize for literature. He declared, “We should not say the writer is engagé (engaged), but embarqué (embarked)” because he’s on the same boat as his fellow citizens. The artist should not be there in the ivory tower looking down on what is happening; s/he has to be in the mix. MTM: Right!

JS: For a while, the tagline for our film was “The man who used the camera as a weapon . . .” MTM: That corresponds to a tagline of the New Latin American Cinema movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

JS: It would be interesting to know how much intersection there was between them. There’s a picture of Sembène with Glauber Rocha7 in the film, but we don’t know the extent of their interaction.

490

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Figure 4. Sembène with Brazilian filmmaker and pioneer of Third Cinema, Glauber Rocha. Screen grab by the author.

MTM: It’s possible that one such encounter occurred at the Third World Filmmakers Meeting, held in Algiers in 1973, where Sembène chaired “Committee 2,” which was devoted to production/coproduction.8

JS: I would love to know more about that. MTM: If we are referring to the same convocation, consider that Rocha, Fernando Solanas,9 Humberto Solás,10 Tomás Gutiérrez Alea,11 and Fernando Birri12 were there . . .

SG: Sembène was at the 1956 Congress for Black Writers in Paris. When asked about the significance of this meeting, he said, “It’s our cultural Bandung.”13 MTM: The Non-Aligned Movement.

SG: Yes, Sembène’s stories are a call to action, asserting that, if we fail to reappropriate our weapons, meaning our words, there is no future. That’s why we placed it at the beginning of the film. MTM: Observing the opening scenes of your film, I can say it is no less than brilliant. The autobiographical emphasis on your youth, the bucolic and village setting, and your compelling testimonial of growing up with the stories of your grandmother. Your personal narrative labors as a powerful counterpoint to technology and what we associate with modernity. Why did you frame the opening scenes in these terms? Do they correspond with Sembène’s childhood experience?

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

491

SG: They parallel Sembène’s childhood [as he] was also raised and nurtured with stories by his grandmother. MTM: The reason why I’m asking has less to do with two particular modes of communication, but rather because the technological one anticipates and supplants the [oral] one. In doing so, it sets up a conflict in my view.

JS: That’s exactly why we did it. That was the motivation to say there was one thing and then there was another thing; they collided. MTM: And displaced the indigenous one with imported modes of communication—TV, radio, print.

JS: Yes, causing an ideological, as well as technological, collision and Sembène is . . . SG: A living incarnation of that. JS: He is the Zelig, a participant and our narrator through this odyssey. SG: But at the same time, he is a living symbol of how storytelling can impact our lives because, if I had not encountered Sembène and Sembène’s stories, my own itinerary would have been different. And because of that encounter, my scholarship is a form of political activism. JS: Now thinking about it, this is a very unusual kind of conflict to have. Often, in a story there is a battle metaphor, an alien invasion, or some other kind of incitement for the conflict. The conflict here is between one kind of story and another kind of story. MTM: But it’s you speaking in your own voice. It could have been Sembène saying the same thing.

SG: Today, we would not be talking about Sembène as a major activist if he had followed the normal path of French colonial education. He did not go to the Sorbonne. He did not absorb the French classics. He did not absorb Molière. Instead, he was self-taught. What did he teach himself? Fanon, Marx, Lenin, and the literature of the working class. It was Nâzım Hikmet.14 So, he was influenced by a different source of counter narratives of narratives of empire. JS: Until age seventeen, Sembène’s story is compressed in a few sentences in the film, but it begins in childhood when you are socialized in terms of your place in the culture of your birth. Then you are removed from that culture and other stories that take hold. Samba was sent away to school from thirteen to seventeen, forbidden to speak his native language or participate in his culture, causing an internal [psychic] shift. At seventeen, he discovered Sembène. I think it’s a pretty common story for—

492

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

SG: For colonized people. In Sembène’s work, there is a constant thread that contrasts voice and voicelessness. His first novel, Black Docker [1956], is about a dockworker in Marseilles, France, who labors to escape his circumstance by writing a novel. In this sense it is a novel within a novel. JS: And the novel is stolen. SG: Stolen and published by a white woman under her name. MTM: Which, too, is appropriation.

SG: Yes. And when he was sentenced for killing her, it’s also because he had the arrogance to claim that he wrote a novel in French. MTM: That’s far more threatening because it disrupts the presumption that the colonized doesn’t possess the innate capacity to write in the colonizer’s language.

SG: Exactly! And was sentenced because “he insulted the French letters.” JS: In Black Girl, Diouana doesn’t speak, until we hear her say her first words in the opening sequence, which are “Yes, sir.” And just before she dies, her last word in the closing sequence is “The mask is mine.” That’s the path, silence throughout the film, as her monologue is internal.

Figure 5. Title card of Sembène’s first feature-length film, La Noire de… / Black Girl (1966, Senegal). Screen grab by the author.

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

493

Figure 6. Final shot of Black Girl, where a boy partially removes a mask from his face to confront the audience directly. Screen grab by the author.

MTM: The next part of the film, a continuation of Samba’s voice-over, you declare, “By the time I was fourteen, I dreamed of becoming French because of French books I read in high school.” Then, “When I was seventeen, I discovered the stories of a Senegalese artist, the characters in his stories were just like my grandmother’s, my friends, and me. Suddenly, I did not want to be French anymore, I wanted to be African.” Together, these two statements frame, as they illustrate, the first and second movements of the Fanonian dialectic of master and slave, colonizer and colonized.

SG: Yes. MTM: You’ve answered my question because in a short span and with economy you foreground the dilemma of all colonized people in the two statements.

SG: Yes. When it comes to analyzing the psychology of the colonized, I don’t think we can talk about the three stages without referencing Fanon. The first phase is alienation. MTM: Total identification with the master, endeavoring to become in the image of the master.

SG: The colonized lose themselves in the culture of the colonizer, try to master the language of the colonizer, but the second phase ushers in a

494

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Figure 7. Title card of Sembène’s 1988 film Camp de Thiaroye about a group of West African troops who protested their poor treatment by French forces. Screen grab by the author.

Figure 8. Image still from Camp de Thiaroye. After serving in the French army in World War II, West African soldiers refute the inhumane treatment of them by the French. Screen grab by the author.

discovery process as the colonized labors to recover his/her past. While in exile, Senghor15 brilliantly described this process in “Femme Noire.”16 But Senghor stops there and does not transition to the third stage. For Fanon, in the third stage, the writer, the cultural worker becomes one with the people. And I think it’s Fanon or Lenin that said, “You don’t need to sing revolutionary songs; make revolution and the songs will come.”

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

495

JS: Sembène’s filmmaking career follows along that path. Borom Sarret is a neorealist film, Black Girl, French New Wave, followed by such portrayals of rebellion in Emitaï [1975], Xala [1975], Ceddo [1977], and Camp de Thiaroye [1988]. And then his films Guelwaar [1992], Faat Kiné [2000], and Moolaadé [2004] constitute the synthesis in the dialectic. MTM: The arch of his work is itself dialectical.

SG: Yes. JS: We structured the film that way. Samba talks about the rebel trilogy. These things have to be submerged and subtextual, or else you’re thinking too much when you’re watching the film and you’re not feeling it. But it’s there. MTM: Yes, it’s there.

SG: We considered organizing the film as if you were sitting in class with fourteen-year olds, so we framed it in a way that everybody could understand it. MTM: You walk us through it.

SG: And that was the academic in me. We cut it down to size and in an accessible language. When I say, “My grandmother told me stories” and “I discovered Sembène later on,” that explains Fanon’s arch, without calling it out by name. JS: And you were the grandmother, the elder telling the story. And the grandmother doesn’t tell the story of the story. She doesn’t analyze the story. She tells you a story. It’s about the story. And the story is embedded with themes and information that you needed to code the world, and exist within the framework of your culture. SG: Right! JS: But if she said, “Let me start with the introduction to this story, and the introduction is designed to do X, Y, and Z”? You don’t want to do that with storytelling. SG: I’m glad you said that because we started with African languages. In Western culture, when you start a story, you say, “Once upon a time”? Well, in Fulani culture, you have similar openings, but more profound. For example, in Fulani I would say, “Once upon a time.” The Fulani audience, even before the start of the narrative, would respond, “Maybe it happened, maybe it did not happen.” In the realm of storytelling, our film is a story . . . MTM: Within a story.

SG: Yes.

496

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

MTM: In the last part of your introduction to the film, you cut to an image of Sembène, elderly and dignified, seemingly to inscribe visually the idea of him as the father. Here, you are the protagonist in your own evolution, moving from colonized object to anticolonial subject. There is an elapsed time between these two moments for what purpose?

SG: In the evolution of the film, I am first a disciple of Sembène. But before I enter the door, I say, “One day I came to Sembène and he gave me the keys to his house. And I realized he was not just inviting me, he was making me the keeper of his legacy.” So, I am the keeper of his legacy, meaning that I have to tell his story and, in so doing, to preserve his memory, because every story you tell has a finality. JS: You’re correct in saying we wanted to suggest, in that moment, a mentoring figure in Sembène, a father-son relationship and Samba as the teenager. MTM: It works. Sembène says in the beginning moments of the film, “It’s not we who present our own images, it’s others who create the images of Africans. I have a job I love. And no one asked me to do it, no one. I do it because I want to talk to my people.” In this direct and eloquent statement, Sembène constructs a role and script for himself. The role of an artist originating and illuminating culture, transmitting and contributing through culture to self-expression, self-realization of Africans for Africans by Africans—self-determination. Is Sembène declaring that artists have responsibility to their society and to the project of—

SG: Nation building. In 1993, Sembène wrote his own résumé. Nowhere on the résumé are stated the vocations of “filmmaker” or “writer.” Under profession, he lists two items: fisherman and dockworker. JS: Yes, the part I love and that you just quoted is “I have a job I love.” There’s nothing self-aggrandizing about it. He might as well be a baker or a leatherworker. SG: That’s how he sees himself. I remember once asking him, “What inspires you?” He replied, “Forget about inspiration, it’s all perspiration.” MTM: It’s labor.

SG: Labor. He could have said, “If you want to understand the process by which I work, go visit a baker and come see me tomorrow. The process is the same.” MTM: How do you read that, Jason?

JS: For society to function properly, everyone needs to do their work. MTM: The division of labor.

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

497

JS: My take: The bakers need to bake, the leatherworkers need to fix the shoes, and the storytellers need to tell stories. Sembène’s doing the thing that he needs to do. And I love how he talks about it: “I have a job I love, no one asked me to do it, I’m doing it, I’m doing the thing that needs to be done.” SG: And filmmaking and writing are his contributions to society, like the fisherman and farmer. JS: And in the statement “I have a job I love, I want to talk to my people,” I think Sembène was saying, “I am the ears of my people, the eyes of my people, I speak for them.” While there are moments of the humble dockworker, laborer, Sembène also had an ego. I don’t think he could have done all that he did without a massive ego. SG: I mean he’s repeating the same thing from Césaire, “I’ll be the mouth of the mouthless, and if I only know how to speak, it’s for you that I will speak.” MTM: Does that gesture Sembène’s self-aggrandizement, as something more than a job, but a job he’s chosen to do that evokes pleasure in him, while performing the role of the artiste engagé.

SG: Yes. JS: I think it is a sign of self-empowerment because people pass on jobs from one to the next. What were you supposed to be in your family, a leatherworker or a donkey herder? SG: A woodcarver. JS: Woodcarver. He has a job he does. No one asked him to do it. He made the decision to do it. So we have agency. There’s a message in that, too. SG: Sembène believed that doing the job you had to do didn’t preclude deriving pleasure from it. For him, a job well done was also a source of pleasure. He said, “For me, artistic creation is like a kora.” It has many strings and “I just want to be free to play whatever string I want.” For Sembène, music for pleasure and work were not discrete or exclusive of each other. MTM: Samba, you insinuate yourself in Sembène’s story, and in doing so become a protagonist in the narrative.

SG: Yes. MTM: Why this approach?

SG: Because Jason and I had been considering which narrative strategy to follow and came to the conclusion that the most convincing and authentic way to tell Sembène’s story was to have it told by someone who experienced it in a very intimate way. After seventeen years of companionship with

498

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Sembène, open invitations to dinner at his house, access to his unpublished papers, being like a son in whom he confided, there was no one else to tell his story. Consequently, our stories intertwined. JS: My answer to your question is different from Samba’s because he is exactly what Sembène set out to make. When you make a piece of art, you don’t know what kind of impact it’s going to have on the world. This is a story in which you see the artist at work and you see the art, and you see exactly how the art impacts the world. MTM: In that sense is Samba himself Sembène’s art?

JS: He is the product of the art. From the beginning, Sembène set out to make stories that would empower his people. And Samba is a man who is empowered by those stories. And that in itself is a beautiful story, even if they never crossed paths again. MTM: I get that.

JS: What we have is a virtuous cycle of influence, where Sembène decided to tell stories to empower people, and without knowing it, he influenced a young boy who read his book that turned on a light bulb in his head. Someone who had a eureka moment because of the stories and became the kind of African citizen that Sembène wanted to cultivate. And Samba returned to help ensure that the stories are told and continued. There’s a beautiful and organic chain of influences in the film. That’s what was interesting to me. And I’ll reveal that there are people close to Sembène who feel a sense of ownership over that story. MTM: Because they’re invested in it?

JS: Yes, but also because he was a great man and people wanted to be close to him. Every time we show the film, no matter the setting, someone in the audience who had some sort of encounter with Sembène or his work would stand up and testify. People, like Samba, whose eyes were opened by him, or one of his books or films. SG: Across generations. JS: We showed the film in Berkeley last week, and half of the Q&As were about how “I met Sembène” or how “I saw his work and it opened my eyes.” We had that happen yesterday at the screening in Minneapolis. And Samba is . . . SG: The voice. MTM: Speaking of Sembène’s archive, it was horrifying to see the images of the condition it appears in his home. Who’s at fault for the deteriorating condition of

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

499

the collection? The government of Senegal in Dakar? The betrayal of the Senegalese nation and people?

SG: Certainly, Senegal’s government failed to fulfill its responsibility. However much he did not always glorify the powers that be, Sembène spent fifty years telling Senegal’s story. They should have preserved his memories and failed. JS: Yet. SG: They haven’t done it, yet. MTM: They promised to?

SG: We hope this film will attract their attention, inspire them to dialogue and assume their historical responsibilities. We hope. MTM: Can the government do that when Sembène’s archive is no longer in Senegal?

SG: You know there is a law in Senegal stipulating that the Senegalese government has the first shot at acquiring the rights to archives; although I think there is a certain statute of limitation for such claims. MTM: Has that time elapsed?

SG: Yes. but since it is a private collection that belongs to Sembène’s estate, his children have the right to dispose of it as they wish. MTM: Despite the fact that the collection constitutes a national treasure?

SG: Exactly. For example, Léopold Senghor’s papers are in Verson, France. Birago Diop’s17 papers, where are they? This is not the first time they [Senegal’s government] have failed to preserve our collective memory. MTM: Jason . . .

JS: It’s an institutional problem. There’s a beautiful line in Manthia Diawara’s interview that didn’t make it into the film when he says, “Sembène took cinema to a level and I’m afraid it’s going to plummet. Africa doesn’t have enough money for schools or hospitals, let alone cinema.” Whether you believe that or not, there are very wealthy people in Africa who have the means to make whatever they want happen, happen. MTM: There is also the complicity of African leaders and the political class to not promote and invest in the film sector, who deliberately undercapitalize film production, claiming “our priorities are elsewhere,” when in fact they fear that film and television may serve to challenge policies and destabilize their governments.

JS: They’re dangerous.

500

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

SG: Yes, the need for historical responsibility and animosity against complacency fuel Sembène’s cinema. JS: You’re right. It’s not just a matter of resources, because if the will is there, solutions are possible and can happen. They closed the National Film Museum in Moscow, and it’s not because they can’t afford to keep it. They evicted them from the building. It’s a state-owned building and they sold it to a private investor. It has nothing to do with money. It has everything to do with ideology and with controlling the messaging. SG: There are three countries I know of in Africa that invested in cinema; poor and underdeveloped, though they are. Among them, Burkina Faso has been investing since 1969. Aboubakar Sangoulé Lamizana18 nationalized movie theaters in Burkina Faso because of issues with French distributors. The French retaliated with an embargo. He sent an emissary to Senegal to see Sembène, even though the latter had only completed one feature, Black Girl, and I think Moustapha Alassane of Niger.19 They flew to Ouagadougou and created La Semaine du Cinéma Africain. The rest is history. MTM: An informational question before we turn the corner. You use animation for what purpose?

JS: It’s practical. MTM: Were they commissioned?

Figure 9. Animated image from the documentary Sembène! Sembène’s three consecutive films, Emitaï (1972), Xala (1975), and Ceddo (1977) are regarded as his ‘rebel trilogy’. Screen grab by the author.

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

501

JS: All of the graphics were original. When Samba and I started talking about the film, the phrase that rose to the surface was “this is a story about the power of storytelling.” An earlier iteration of the film included a fictional narrator, who was animated, which was fun, but a terrible idea if you’re a low budget independent documentary filmmaker with limited access to resources. And, if you’re not, it’s probably still a terrible idea (laughs). But we planned to have this storyteller tell the legendary story of Ousmane Sembène, and to create that, we brought two animators to Dakar, and set up at the West African Research Center (WARC).20 For several weeks, we collected images and materials, and worked with local interns and art students. SG: At the workshop, we used local animators. JS: Yes. We made beautiful things and left the animation station in Dakar, so that students could continue working. When we got into the mechanics of storytelling, the animation idea receded with the last iteration of the film. We deleted the entire image bank and printed out the animated stills to create chapters in the film. Narrating a film whose story spans 1923 to 2007, during a period of political and social turmoil, that few people in America would have heard of, was a challenge, so we structured the film with chapters and the animations served as our chapter heads. MTM: They work well as jump cuts to pause and transition to the next movement or chapter in the film.

SG: Exactly. It has that function.

Figure 10. Sembène with his son, Alain. Screen grab by the author.

502

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

MTM: Much of the historical footage was deeply moving. Is it from Sembène’s archive?

JS: From public archives in Casamance [Senegal] and Marseilles. SG: From the documentary Afrique 50, by René Vautier,21 when Africans were denied a camera to make their own films in Africa. JS: We also worked closely with the Sembène archive for footage, as well as Paulin Vieyra’s archive for behind the scenes footage of . . . SG: Ceddo. JS: The soundtrack includes two Philip Glass compositions that gesture the clash of cultures that Sembène experienced arriving in Marseilles. There is this strange violin sound not unlike that of Glass, but played on a stringed instrument. MTM: The music was commissioned?

SG: No, it was recorded by a group, Uakti, from Belo Horizonte [Brazil], who construct their own instruments from materials in the Amazon rainforest. JS: We also had a track from Youssou N’Dour and one from Baaba Maal; the rest is original. MTM: Speaking of Marseilles in the 1950s, it figures prominently in Sembène’s cultural and political formation, where the colonized émigrés inhabit the colonizers’ home turf. What lessons are we to draw from the encounter with the metropole? For example, can Sembène’s physical injury to his back lifting heavy sacks be read as a metaphor?

SG: Yes. Marseilles is very significant in Sembène’s formation, it did not begin there, but rather in Niger when he was a soldier and aware of the purpose and function of the colonial system. After he arrived in Marseilles, he furthered his education in schools run by the French Communist Party and started working with the General Confederation of Labour (Confédération générale du travail/CGT).22 That experience organized his knowledge and enabled him to become more systematic. It was also during this period that Sembène read Claude McKay and Richard Wright, among other black writers, which became an important part of his schooling and political awakening. Before that, I would say his consciousness was driven by visceral anger, having returned to Senegal enraged after the experience of Niger, which shattered his worldview. MTM: As a ticket out or as . . .

JS: An adventure?

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

503

SG: It’s more simple than that. It was very macho because he belonged to a generation when machismo was very important, particularly during the war in Niger when the sentiment was “Men go to war. Women stay at home.” Men who were not enlisted were ridiculed by family, and it was for this reason that men went to war to assert their manhood. Sembène was no exception to this mindset, and being a French citizen, he was required to serve in the military. MTM: Conscripted.

SG: Yes, and his father before him, who was born in Dakar, was a French citizen and so had also been conscripted. MTM: Is the metropole, in the larger sense of the term, where the contradictions of racism and colonialism are most evident and distinct from that of the colonizersettler who inhabits the colonized space?

SG: Let me share a more salient distinction: Algeria was also settler-colonizer, while Senegal was referred to as “colonizer-exploitation.” The relationships pertaining there were predicated entirely on a relationship of exploitation. There was no cohabitation as in the Algerian context. But in the metropolis, Sembène made a huge discovery—the humanity of the colonizer. MTM: And the contradictions and hypocrisy of the democratic project itself.

SG: Exactly! What he witnessed, unlike what they claimed, were the contradictions of the metropolis. JS: There’s a short scene in the film where Sembène’s being interviewed and remarks, “I discovered Mozart—it was a wealth to me,” and then in counterpoint we cut to an African worker carrying a giant sack. MTM: That was strategic?

JS: Definitely and revealing at once the contradictions and beauty Sembène experienced in Marseilles. While he had friends of all colors and ethnicities and class backgrounds, he labored as a slave. On the matter of the broken back, we thought for a long time that it would be a key part of the film. SG: Yes, in earlier iterations. JS: What was it about Sembène that allowed him not to despair, which in that moment would destroy most people? What enabled and encouraged him to use that moment for growth and reinvention? It’s something for which we have no answer. What made Sembène different? A lot of people had devastating injuries on the docks of Marseilles that were life altering, while for Sembène it was transformational?

504

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

MTM: Were such experiences what deepened Sembène’s consciousness and determination for change and distinguished him from others in the metropole?

SG: Having survived Niger during the war experience is evidence of Sembène’s will and determination. MTM: As a sidebar—did he experience combat?

SG: Directly no, he was a driver. MTM: Driver?

SG: He drove troops and saw comrades die in the Battle of Niger. He also witnessed many Black African workers become dissolute in the ports of Marseilles. JS: Not unlike Sembène, Samba is someone who migrated here. What does it mean for you to have come here in contrast to the experience of so many other people coming here? How did you embrace those contradictions? SG: Yes, you have to have a clear understanding of your situation. I think the difference between Sembène and most other black workers in Marseilles is that soon after his arrival he understood the system and how it functioned, while others did not: how he became a docker, why he was a docker, and how he could escape being a docker. JS: [He] was reading The Communist Manifesto as a part of that understanding, because you can’t be Sembène, read Marx, and not understand the circumstance of your condition. SG: Marx asserted that before you can change the world, you must change yourself. Sembène was convinced that in order to change the world, he had to first change himself by obtaining knowledge. And while others labored on the docks, frequented the pubs, and drank alcohol to forget, he acquired knowledge and awareness. MTM: Samba, while consciousness requires knowledge, knowledge doesn’t mean you’re going to act upon it. I’m trying to parse how knowledge is a requisite for change, but what accounts for one person who acts from another, who also has that knowledge but doesn’t?

JS: It may be useful to revisit the arc of Sembène’s life here. SG: The encounter with the trade union activists in the 1950s was very important because in Marseilles he became a member of the Communist Party and protested against the Algerian War. He also protested against the Korean War and the war in Indochina. He understood that the struggle to improve his life was also to improve the lives of African workers. Consider that Sembène was the first African to organize African workers in Marseilles into a union.

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

505

JS: Let me suggest something. Sembène was born and grew up in a family that labored in nature. He was then educated in a European school and later expelled from that school. Following that, he moved from village to village, culture to culture and was sent off to the city. In the city, he did what he could to survive and for a while engaged with Islamic fundamentalism. As a child, Sembène grew up learning how to negotiate situations and, in a sense, reinvent himself. SG: Many of his generation also experienced that, but I think Sembène’s reinventing himself didn’t occur in a conscious way until Marseilles. What is also quite interesting is that Marseilles is partly the subject of his first novel and that he was influenced by Claude McKay’s novel Banjo [1929]. He observed how Black workers escaped their despair in alcoholism and other vices and determined, “I am not going to be like this, and what will prevent this is hard work and knowledge.” Knowledge is power. MTM: Circumstance, experience, and determination.

SG: Exactly, those three. JS: And the fourth, for which Marxism contributed to, was self-consciousness. SG: I also think protesting the Korean War made Sembène what he became until his death—a man of action. JS: But he was a man of action when he arrived in Marseilles; he just didn’t have the consciousness. SG: Yes, it was the combination of the two. Until Marseilles, he was only a moving force; in Marseilles he became a moving organized force for change. MTM: From the individual to the collective.

SG: And that’s reflected in his work. JS: Among writers and filmmakers who address the experiences of the working class, it’s hard to think of another major artist who lived it, experiencing the machinery of exploitation the way Sembène lived it, and who could speak to working-class issues the way he did. SG: Jack London inspired Sembène. In an interview in Morocco, after reading Martin Eden [1909], Sembene said, “If he could do it then, I can do it now.” JS: Not many people who did hard physical labor for twenty years wrote about it. SG: And writing while laboring. He never stopped laboring, even on the film sets, which he built with workers. I even saw him dig holes. JS: And he built his own house. SG: He never stopped being a laborer.

506

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Figure 11. Sembène on the set of one of his films. Screen grab by the author.

MTM: Let’s turn to Sembène’s deployment of African languages in his films. For what purpose?

SG: It was his commitment and way to give cinema back to Africans. If you subtitled the films, audiences would not be able to read them. If spoken in French, they would not have access to them. While Sembène was not the first to make a film in Wolof, he took it to a higher level and made it systematic. Beginning with Mandabi to the end of his career, all of his films were in African languages, and in that sense he set a trend and standard. Many African filmmakers now do this from Nigeria and Niger in Hausa, from Burkina Faso in Mòoré, from Mali in Bambara, and from Guinea in Fulani. MTM: What’s lost in translation, particularly in the colonizer’s language? Is it only a matter of access, or also a matter of meaning?

SG: I did the subtitling of Moolaadé from Jula to French and English, and a lot was lost in the translation. For instance, Jula is a very colorful language, spoken with proverbs, which you cannot render in any other language. Translations enable access but only approximate the core message. I watched Moolaadé in a movie theater in Ouagadougou and the audience reacted to the film unlike other audiences because they were hearing the dialogue in their own language with all its inflections, metaphors, and beauty. So, at best you can convey the core message in a translation, but the source language’s flavor is lost.

Figure 12. Cover image of the French edition of Sembène’s first novel, God’s Bits of Wood (1960). Screen grab by the author.

508

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

MTM: Fanon says in Black Skin, White Masks, “To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.”23

SG: So maybe in the translation of another language you cannot convey a civilization? MTM: Given the limitations of translation, is it fair to say that a people’s identity, culture, and worldview constituted in language, as Gaston Kaboré asserts, because language “brings specificity to [our] experience.”24

SG: What you are saying here is deep. I’ve spent almost thirty-four years in [the United States] and think I’m functional in English. But the way I relate to Fulani or Wolof, I’ve never been able to in that way with English. MTM: Samba, in the film, you say, “Here was the first book [God’s Bits of Wood] by Sembène, a Senegalese, who was just teaching me how to be myself. And for the first time since I entered school I was proud to be an African.” What do you mean by “to be myself ”?

SG: Because the other texts I was reading were transforming me into something else I could never be. What I’m saying is, in reading Sembène, I found myself. It was like standing in front of a mirror. JS: There’s a character named Samba in the book who has agency and power like the elders you grew up with. SG: Which the black characters in French texts I read did not have. JS: If black characters existed at all. SG: Yes, if they existed at all. If you read Ourika [1823], by Claire de Duras, the first black female character in French literature was portrayed as a toy, an object. With Sembène, black people take the historical initiative and become the subject rather than the object of history. That was the first time I had read that in a book. I tried to express that discovery in the film when we entered the French literature class, the class stopped being a literature class. We sat there for hours. Imagine thirty-two seventeen-year-old students completely focused on and mesmerized by a book that was not only speaking about us, it was speaking to us. That was life changing and shattered my world as it opened a new world to me. It gave me a sense of my self-worth. MTM: Empowering.

SG: Yes, of course and outside of class, we talked only about that book. MTM: To see yourself in the text and not the object of someone else’s interpretation . . .

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

509

SG: And who, for the first time, triumphed! MTM: To Jason’s point, on a visceral level, what did you feel in the moment?

SG: I was proud and believed what I said in the film. For the first time, I was proud to be just who I am. I felt neither superior nor inferior. I felt I was me. I discovered myself in the book. Since the age of seventeen, I have been on a quest to discover and learn more of Sembène. During [my] studies at the University of Dakar [1974–1982] no one taught Sembène. I discovered Sembène at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Ironic that our film was shown in Senegal only once because no one would host a screening there. MTM: Did it also connect you differently to your own people?

SG: Yes. MTM: Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers [1966], and particularly Queimada! [1969], was revelatory for me. I recall being in a movie theater in New York and, at the close of the screening of Queimada!, shouting as I exited something about the death of colonialism and ascent of the Third World.

SG: Similarly, God’s Bits of Wood signified that to me, and that African unity was a matter of class; it’s people standing and fighting in a common cause that Sembène embraced. MTM: Solidarity.

SG: Solidarity. In an interview with Carrie Dailey Moore in Paris [in] 1972, Sembène said, “My solidarity is not racial solidarity, it’s class solidarity.” Of course, race matters, but there are black bourgeois who exploit black workers. The fact that I am sitting here and talking with you today is because Sembène opened my eyes. I’m a living incarnation of what he thought art should accomplish. MTM: Among Pan-Africanists, where does Sembène align?

SG: Kwame Nkrumah.25 MTM: In what sense?

SG: Nkrumah, whom he visited often, was his idol. When Nkrumah died, Sembène attended the funeral in Guinea, and like Nkrumah he began as a Marxist for sure. Nkrumah understood, as Sembène did, that Pan-Africanism in practice could ensure our survival because, after colonial rule, the African continent was reconstituted into microstates. This key understanding made

510

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Figure 13. Sembène with world-renowned Pan-Africanist and author W.E.B. Du Bois. Screen grab by the author.

relations between Sembène and Nkrumah very strong. During this period, Sembène also idolized Ahmed Sékou Touré, but later disassociated himself from Touré when he began killing artists. In that same generation, but from afar, Sembène also admired Julius Nyerere for having tried to establish farming cooperatives in Tanzania. Indeed, his 1957 novel Ô Pays, Mon Beau Peuple! [Oh country, my beautiful people!] was exactly about that project. However, I would say that the Pan-Africanist whom Sembène was closest to was Touré, but it didn’t last. MTM: George Padmore?26

SG: Padmore inspired him and there are similarities between them. Sembène and Padmore were supported by the French Communist Party and the European Communist Party. Since Sembène knew how to read and write, it was not long before [the Communist Party in France] said, “Here’s someone we can use to penetrate the black masses!,” as they did with Padmore in Germany and Lamine Senghor.27 If not for Senghor and Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté28 of Mali, we would not be talking about Sembène today because they did the clearing work. MTM: Amílcar Cabral?29

SG: Cabral was on the set of Emitaï with Sembène in 1971, his soldiers cast as extras. In Sembène’s native village in Casamance, I interviewed villagers about the making of Emitaï, and who had inspired it. The source of inspiration was a young maid who was crippled and had a vision which prompted

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

511

Figure 14. Animation from Sembène! depicting five leaders of African independence: Kwame Nkrumah from Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta from Kenya, Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ahmed Sékou Touré from Guinea, and Amílcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau. Screen grab by the author.

her return to Casamance. There she organized peasants so they would stop selling their rice to the white colonists. MTM: What was Sembène’s relationship to the negritude movement?

JS: It’s evident in a scene in Xala [1975] during the president’s address when El Hadji says “Africanité.” SG: Yes, I recall him declaring, “We must not let modernity dilute our Africanness.” MTM: And I remember him drinking and extolling the superiority of a European brand of mineral water above local brand and production. Jason, did Sembène’s training in the former Soviet Union influence his approach, style, and practice as an African filmmaker?

JS: I’ll tell you what I know, which is that he was influenced by Soviet cinema, which developed his technique of filmmaking. Samba and I have talked about the importance of Battleship Potemkin [1925] on Sembène’s filmmaking. MTM: Ideologically influential?

SG: Potemkin foregrounds the collective rather than the individual hero of the story in contrast to the American [or Hollywood] story and that was certainly an influence; we see this in specific shorts and moments in the film. We

512

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

were wondering if Sembène had seen Potemkin before he wrote God’s Bits of Wood because the themes are so similar. MTM: Is it probable he did in Moscow?

SG: Yes, in 1961 or 1962, after publication of God’s Bits of Wood, although he visited the Soviet Union as early as 1953. JS: But I think he returned to Senegal not wanting to make didactic films that were overtly ideological or propagandistic. Instead, he wanted to make films grounded in the African experience. While they have polemical moments in which occasionally the protagonists give speeches, his project was to immerse people in human stories, not ideological ones, which was different from the Soviet approach. SG: While some people contend that he went to the Soviet Union in 1961 to learn filmmaking, his earlier visits there and to Prague were to groom and prepare him, a black intellectual, to join the Communist Party. He attended seminars in Moscow hosted by the Communist Party. And then in 1961, when he chose to train as a filmmaker, unsuccessfully he began in France, until film historian Georges Sadoul30 helped him obtain a grant to attend Gorky Studio with Mark Donskoy31. . . JS: Who was Eisenstein’s first assistant. SG: And made the film Mother [1906] by Maxim Gorky.32 However, as Jason explained earlier, Sembène was on a quest for what he would call “an authentic African cinema” that would hold a mirror in front of people, rather than indoctrinate them. MTM: Does his stance and approach break with Marxist aesthetics and orthodoxy?

SG: Sembène considered Marxism an instrument of analysis applied to the specificities and historical circumstance of a society. MTM: And project for social change?

SG: Well certainly. I mean he said that the only ideological choice that promoted African progress is socialism. His films not only aimed at fighting neocolonial forms of domination and exploitation; they also called for social justice within countries ruled by the political class of African elites. MTM: Referring back to the earlier remark about the African bourgeoisie that Fanon condemns in The Wretched of the Earth and Sembène denounces so powerfully in Xala . . .

SG: And then the third phase of Sembène’s project was building solidarity among Africans.

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

513

JS: It seems as if Sembène was more of a pragmatist than ideologue and, if Marxist theory could get it done, then that would get the job done. SG: Yes, he was very much a pragmatist and his principal goal was not ideological, but rather to lift up and sustain Africa. Later, he would resign from the French Communist Party as Aimé Césaire33 did, and later Richard Wright, who in 1952 resigned from the US Communist Party. MTM: On Hungary?

SG: I don’t know. For Césaire, he concluded that, whether communist or capitalist, both were derived from western ideologies and unable to address the needs of their own societies. A famous letter Césaire wrote to Maurice Thorez,34 General Secretary of the French Communist Party, stated why it was inconceivable for someone from the Third World to affiliate with the Party in France. MTM: Did Sembène break with the Party on Algeria?

SG: No, he didn’t. Before 1946, there was no organic or indigenous African political party, as they were affiliated with French parties. In 1946, the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) was created in Bamako, Mali. MTM: To Black Girl, consider Manthia Diawara’s35 take on the importance of the film. This statement is particularly compelling in my view: “Sembène came to cinema and he invented a new language to represent black people. This begins in Black Girl. You see her in the way she sees herself. To me, this illuminates how characters can embody characters from subject positions we as Africans can identify with.” Is this, too, another feature of Sembène’s cinematic legacy to African cinema that self-identifies as it resonates with others?

SG: Or to pose your question differently: “Would the same shot be the same if it was shot by a non-African?” MTM: Or by virtue of being African creates self-identification.

SG: The way I see it is that Black Girl, the first feature film made by an African and whose main subject and character is an African, repositions Africans from the periphery to the central protagonists in the story. MTM: Is it more nuanced than that when he says, “You see her in the way she sees herself.”

JS: By contrast, before 1960 black representation relied on stereotypes, as it did for Native Americans and Asians. The “other” in cinema based on a concept of what “Black” should be or is. In referring to Sembène, Diawara was

514

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

saying that he was going against one hundred years of stereotypes. And so, the very act of a person of color sensitively telling the story of another person of color was, in itself, a radical moment in film history. The fact that Sembène’s story has autobiographical resonances also means that it’s a personal story. Moreover, when an African tells an African story that has deep meaning to him, in that particular moment in history, gestures a turning point in the history of ideas, right? That’s why this is such a momentous achievement for Sembène and others, but particularly Sembène, when he takes up the camera to see Diouana [in Black Girl] from the way she sees herself outside of the one that had existed through cinema to this point. MTM: Yes!

SG: That’s exactly what it is. MTM: Can we say, while Sembène engaged in the African/diasporic specificity, his concerns were universal?

SG: He’s telling human stories, where pride, dignity, and justice are not exclusively Black or White. They are human values. For example, the close of Black Girl, Diouana commits suicide in the name of freedom and dignity. JS: So, telling a story from the margins is an act that is going to resonate with people. I’ve taught cultural studies and film history at the Institute of American Indian Arts [IAIA],36 which has an entirely Native American student body composed of artists. The film that resonated most with them was Black Girl. More than The Bicycle Thief [1948], more than the Lumière films, more than just about any other film because it’s a story about them even though they don’t have anything to do with Africa. They got it because they know what it means to live on the margins, to be and feel alienated and exploited. MTM: In the second half of the film, you intervene in Sembène’s personal life, revealing his aversions, failures, and familial conflicts in a way that humanizes him but doesn’t problematize his artistic achievements. How did you come to terms with this paradox?

SG: Unlike my book on Sembène, which was almost hagiographic, during the process of discussion and negotiation, I learned an important lesson making this film: How can we highlight the greatness of Sembène as an artist and not lose sight that he was also a man? He had his failures. I witnessed them. Many other people witnessed them. Ironically, rather than reduce him to a catalog of deeds, I think that recognizing his failures made him even greater. And it gave me a deeper understanding of his sacrifice—if that’s the right way to describe it—of his family, the joy of family, the joy of marriage and everything. There is a moment in the film where his wife recalls him telling her, “Even when we

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

515

Figure 15. Sembène with his signature pipe. Screen grab by the author.

spend the night in the same bed, there’s always creation between us.” He was a passionate man—passionate about what he did, what he believed in, and in the liberation of Africans. He believed that the process of filmmaking was a genuine participation in the liberation of Africa. MTM: Is Samba being generous and, arguably, romanticizing Sembène?

JS: We tried to make a stirring and revolutionary account about this great storyteller, but I think the film coursed towards sadness. MTM: Is he a tragic figure?

JS: I don’t think of him as a tragic figure. Sembène spent fifty years working, and there’s still so much more work left to be done. SG: And his project, not always understood, isolated him. JS: I think there’s another and larger sadness that began in 1960, when there was so much hope for the future in postindependence. Sembène grew out

516

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

of that moment and again at the close of 2004, when he triumphed with Moolaadé, which was a hopeful, yet false, ending. The reality is that the work of the African experiment is unfinished and when we can accept that and recognize that we’re all doing our best at treading water, then you can’t but acknowledge the sadness of this moment. MTM: Unfinished in terms of Sembène’s labors and project, or unfinished in the context of the failures of African states in the postindependence period?

SG: That, too. JS: State failure is a symptom of it, I think. Hope in the moment and achievement of freedom, but what happens in the vacuum after freedom? MTM: What comes to mind is Pontecorvo’s Queimada! [Burn!] when, in the transition to independence, the promise of freedom is betrayed by the local bourgeoisie and foreign capital, ushering the era of neocolonialism.

JS: Exactly! We can feel it in more subtle ways here in America where we fritter away opportunities to become a great society. There’s a certain poetry in having spaces to express that sadness, and we do that metaphorically with water in the film. In the beginning when Sembène’s archives are being destroyed by the moisture. The water becomes the sound of moisture eroding . . . MTM: Life into death.

SG: Yes. JS: And water is the sound of time passing in recognition we’re not getting the job done. That imagery and the sounds of water play throughout the film, and you realize that time is passing and that a great man has died. For me, the answer to your question is yes; a bittersweet and melancholic tone to the film was honest. MTM: Is it fair to say that Sembène, by example, taught us to make films as something more than entertainment?

SG: I think the generations that followed Sembène, Souleymane Cissé,37 even Abderrahmane Sissako,38 were schooled in the tradition of Sembène. Souleymane Cissé, the second living giant of African cinema, followed Sembène’s footsteps. Malian filmmaker Cheick Oumar Sissoko39 also [followed] in Sembène’s footsteps. Sembène was a trailblazer and his legacy is with us into the future. MTM: To return to the start of this conversation, in the arc of Sembène’s life, can we say that like the dialectic of his films, some sort of synthesis was achieved, as in the synthesis depicted by the character of his daughter in Xala?

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

517

SG: Yes. MTM: And, not a broken man unable to reconcile his failures, who observes in his own bodily transformation, the memory and chronicle of his life?

SG: I was on the set of Moolaadé in 2004, and your description of his physical appearance is certainly accurate. But I can tell you he had not lost one iota of the fire in his belly. He was driven to the last minute. I will even say that the day he was pronounced dead, he was putting the final line on a script he was working on. Does that mean he reconciled himself? I don’t know. In 1992, he wrote a very self-reflective poem, a kind of take on his life and inventory of what he had accomplished. And in it there is not one regret. MTM: To you, Jason. Is Sembène the tragic figure?

JS: I don’t think he’s a tragic figure because he did the work he wanted to do. The obstacles and challenges probably energized him. It would be hard to see him as a tragic figure, given the magnificent films and books he authored. MTM: Is he an antihero of sorts?

JS: I don’t think so, but some people have noted his ethical failings, which we explored in the film. He stepped on some people and disregarded others. SG: Including his friends, family, and me. JS: But in pursuit of a higher purpose, which he articulated and practiced. It goes back to that first poem, “Liberté,” in which he says we need our own heroes, we need our own poets, we need our own monuments. There are a

Figure 16. Sembène by the ocean. Location unknown. Screen grab by the author.

518

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

lot of things that Sembène did that I couldn’t do. I couldn’t imagine a broken back as an opportunity to teach myself how to read. It’s a sense of daring and ambition. And so he did it. And while Moolaadé has helped make positive changes in the battle against female genital mutilation, he made that girl suffer, and maybe she was damaged by that. I’m glad it’s not my daughter, and I’m glad I didn’t have to make that decision, but he did it for a higher purpose. I can’t say that he made the right or the wrong choice by taking the film from Ben Diogaye Beye and Boubacar Boris Diop to make Camp de Thiaroye, but I can say Camp de Thiaroye is a masterpiece. SG: It was a difficult choice he lived with. People in the streets of Dakar called him a thief. That was very hard, but the film is making a difference. MTM: By what metric do we assess Sembène?

SG: I think, despite his character and moral failings, for fifty years he consistently pursued his project and we are sitting here talking about his work. We are not mourning his death. We are celebrating his life because Sembène is among giants who contributed artistically to our cinematic history and cultural patrimony, and more broadly to humanity. At the end of the day, we tried in Sembène! to strike a balance between the personal and creative that humanized him. MTM: Yes. Near the end, an interviewer says to him, “Someone told me that frankness is your downfall.” Sembène replied, “That’s not a downfall, that’s my freedom. That’s the truth.”

SG: Let me give you subtext for that statement: what he was saying was that Sembène’s truthfulness was biting the fingers that were feeding him, which partly explains the difficulty funding his films. Sembène’s response was like saying, “So be it! Yes, I want my films to be funded, but that is not reason enough for me to depart from telling the truth.” MTM: And that price for freedom is consequential.

SG: Exactly. Freedom has a price, and Ceddo means you tell the truth even if it means you’re going to die. MTM: Let’s conclude with the penultimate movement in the film, when you, Samba, talking to students, say, “The camera and the pen are the tools of the modern African artist.”

SG: Yes, the griot. In Sembène’s grandmother’s era, the griot was prominent because they were the voice of the African people. Today, they exist in small villages. Sembène’s work is a continuation of the griot tradition. Whether

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

519

Figure 17. Sembène on the set of his last film, Moolaadé (2004). Screen grab by the author.

you do it with a camera or some other instrument, artists are breaking the silence and bringing to the world the voice of Africa. MTM: Thank you, Samba and Jason.

SG: Thank you. JS: That was great. SG: Thank you; that was fantastic. Michael T. Martin is editor-in-chief of Black Camera and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University Bloomington’s The Media School.

Notes 1. Special thanks to Yalie Kamara for her much needed edits and critical comments. 2. Fodéba Keïta (1921–1969) was a Guinean musician, writer, dancer, and political figure who among his many accolades arranged Guinea’s national anthem and founded Africa’s first professional dance company, Le théâtre africain. 3. Ahmed Sékou Touré (1922–1984) was Guinea’s first president. He served from the beginning of the country’s independence from French rule in 1958 until his death in 1984. 4. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1925–1987) was a Senegalese-Beninese filmmaker and

520

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

film scholar and is noted to have been the first black African to receive a directing credit for Afrique sur Seine (1955). 5. Cheikh Hamidou Kane (b. 1928) is a Senegalese writer who received wide acclaim for his novel Ambiguous Adventure (L’Aventure ambiguë, 1962). 6. A Call to Action: The Films of Ousmane Sembene, ed. Sheila Petty (Praeger: 1996). 7. Glauber de Andrade Rocha (1939–1981) was a Brazilian film director, screenwriter, and actor who received wide acclaim for his films Entranced Earth (Terra em Transe, 1967) and Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, 1964). 8. Members of this committee included Med Hondo (Mauritania), Santiago Alvarez (Cuba), Benamar Bakhit (Algeria), and Mostafa Bouali (Palestine). Michael T. Martin, ed., New Latin American Cinema, Volume One—Theory, Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 252–62. 9. Fernando Solanas (1936-2020) is an Argentinian film director, screenwriter, and politician who penned the seminal manifesto “Toward a Third Cinema” and whose films include The Dignity of Nobodies (La dignidad de los nadies, 2005), Tangos, the Exile of Gardel (Tangos, el exilio de Gardel, 1985), and The Hour of the Furnaces (La hora de los hornos, 1968) 10. Humberto Solás (1941–2008) was a Cuban film director who received critical acclaim for his film Lucía (1968) and was also a recipient of the prestigious Cuba’s National Film Prize for his cinematic oeuvre. 11. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1928–1996) was a Cuban filmmaker who played a significant role in the establishment of the Cuban film industry and whose works include Strawberry and Chocolate (Fresa y chocolate, 1993), Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del Subdesarrollo, 1968), and Death of a Bureaucrat (Muerte de un burócrata, 1966). 12. Fernando Birri (1925–2017), who is often referred to as “the father of New Latin American cinema,” was an Argentinian filmmaker, poet, and theoretician whose films include Elegia Friulana (2007), A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings (Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes, 1988), Toss Me a Dime (Tire dié, 1960). 13. The Bandung Conference (Konferensi Asia-Afrika) of 1955 was largely comprised of African and Asian political figures of countries recently independent of colonial rule, who gathered to discuss and implement resolutions toward sustainable, decolonized futures. 14. Nâzım Hikmet Ran (1902–1963) was a Turkish poet, novelist, playwright, and screenwriter who is well-known for his contributions to twentieth-century Turkish letters, which include Things I Didn’t Know I Loved (1975), The Day Before Tomorrow (1970), and Human Landscapes from My Country (1938). 15. Léopold Senghor (1906–2001) was a Senegalese politician and poet and the country’s first president during the years 1960 to 1980. 16. This poem was published in Senghor’s Chants d’Ombre (1945). 17. Birago Diop (1906–1989) was a Senegalese poet, storyteller, diplomat, and veterinarian who is known for his contributions to the Négritude movement and commitment to the recording of the folklore and legendary tales of the Wolof people. 18. Often referred to as Sangoulé Lamizana, Lamizana (1916–2005) served as the president of Upper Volta (present-day Burkina Faso) during the years 1966–1980. 19. Moustapha Alassane (1942–2015), who was called the father of African animation, was a Nigerian filmmaker whose oeuvre included fiction films, animation, and

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

521

documentaries, among them Kokoa (2001), Return of the Adventurer (Le retour d’un aventurier, 1966), and Bon voyage sim (1966). 20. Founded in 1993 and located in Dakar, Senegal, the West African Research Center (WARC) offers opportunities for international exchange between West African and American scholars. 21. René Vautier (1928–2015) was a French film director known for often examining issues of oppression and human rights violations; his films include Afrique 50 (1950). 22. Founded in 1895 in Limoges, France, The  General Confederation of Labour (Confédération générale du travail/CGT) is a labor union confederation. 23. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1952), 17–18. 24. See Michael T. Martin, “‘I Am a Storyteller, Drawing Water from the Well of My Culture’: Gaston Kaboré, Griot of African Cinema,” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 4 (2002), 163–64. 25. Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) served as the first president of Ghana from 1960 to 1966. 26. Born Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, George Padmore (1903–1959) was a Trinidadian writer, journalist, and leader in the Pan-African movement who in the latter part of his life moved to Ghana and served as an advisor to Kwame Nkrumah during his presidency. 27. Lamine Senghor (1889–1927) was a Senegalese politician figure, a Senegalese Tirailleur, and member of the French Communist Party who wrote the pamphlet The Violation of a Country (La violation d’un pays, 1927). 28. Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté (1902 –1944) was a Malian political figure, schoolteacher, communist, and labor organizer who founded The League for the Defense of the Negro Race (Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre) and was a member of the French Communist Party. 29. Amílcar Cabral (1924–1973) was a Cape Verdean and Bissau-Guinean theoretician, politician, intellectual, and poet and founder and secretary-general of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), whose political action led to the independence of Guinea-Bissau. 30. Georges Sadoul (1905–1967) was a French writer, journalist, and film critic whose work includes the Histoire générale du cinema, a volume of encyclopedias dedicated to film. 31. Mark Donskoy (1901–1981) was a Soviet film director, screenwriter, and writer who received critical acclaim for his Childhood of Maxim Gorky Trilogy which included University of Life (1940), On His Own (1939), and The Childhood of Maxim Gorky (1938). 32. Born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) was a Soviet writer whose works include My Universities (1923), In My World (1916), and My Childhood (1913). 33. Aimé Césaire was a Martinican poet, writer, playwright, and politician whose works include A Season in Congo (Une saison au Congo, 1966), Discourse on Colonialism (Discours sur le colonialism, 1955), and Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 1939). 34. Maurice Thorez (1900–1964) was a French political leader who served as the leader of the French Communist Party for over thirty years.

522

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

35. Manthia Diawara is a Malian writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist, scholar, and art historian. African Cinema: Politics and Culture (1992) and In Search of Africa (1998). 36. Located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) is a public tribal college and is the sole academic institution dedicated to the creation and study of contemporary arts of Native American and Alaska Native peoples. 37. Souleymane Cissé (b. 1940) is a Malian film director whose films include Tell Me Who You Are (Min Ye/Dis-moi qui tu es, 2009), Cannes Prix du Jury winner Brightness (Yeelen, 1987), and The Wind (Finye, 1982). 38. Abderrahmane Sissako (b. 1961) is a Malian film director and producer whose films include Timbuktu (2014), Bamako (2006) and Life on Earth (La Vie Sur Terre, 1998), and whose works have earned honors from the César Awards, Cannes, FESPACO, and elsewhere. 39. Cheick Oumar Sissoko (b. 1945) is an award-winning Malian film director whose films include Bàttu (2000), Genesis (La genèse,1999), and Guimba, the Tyrant (Guimba, un tyrant, une époque, 1995).

Ousmane Sembène: An Annotated Gallery Curated by Cole Nelson

T

he documents reproduced here are meant to offer further nuance to our reception of the life and work of Ousmane Sembène, giving breath—not to mention a degree of breadth—to the body of work that has for so long stood as an emblem of African cinema. The critical vision of Sembène, whose unique eye was keen on penetrating through the varied contradictions of modernity, did not arise spontaneously, as in a vacuum. Rather, the inspiration which is evident in Sembène’s work arose from the confluence of a set of circumstances that presented Sembène with the opportunity—or many opportunities—to create art that continues to move and challenge subsequent generations. Embedding Sembène’s life and work within the context of its emergence adds texture to both and, indeed, positions the two as inseparable from one another: Sembène the world-famous artist was never once separate from Sembène the dockworker, father, lover, neighbor. It is for the humble aim of further connecting these two elements of Sembène—the personal and the prolific—that we reproduce here a modest selection of some of the documents that touched his life. What is contained herein is a small selection of intimate documents—scans of passports, a marriage certificate, personal correspondence—that offer us a view into the legacy of Sembène through a prism of the more quotidian dimensions of his life. They approach the figure of Sembène by way of the granular details of his existence which texture his life. Contrasted against the view of Sembène as the Father of African Cinema—seemingly immaculate in its formulation—is Sembène as world traveler, as lover, and as father of a different sort, of a paternal and filial relation. In bearing witness to these documents and their preservation, we can see the strokes of Sembène’s pen brush across the page as he commits his name to a Senegalese passport; we can gauge the level of affection and care offered him from overseas by a lover, soon-to-be wife; and we recognize the legal codification of a relationship that was forged between two continents and pursued for nearly a decade. Though these documents fall

524

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

significantly short of providing us a total impression of an individual and his context, they nevertheless suggest the small acts that constituted elements of Sembène’s life. Indeed, the partiality of this material—a letter detached from its response, a marriage consummation with no hint of an impending divorce—allows us a different perspective of Sembène, one that confirms for us not only a sense of the fact that Sembène moved through this world with great magnitude and force, but also of how he moved alongside his work. The context within which we receive the legacy of Sembène—distanced as we are by over a decade from his world and the times which shaped his craft—is today complicated by a range of matters, personal, political, and professional, not to mention difficulties imposed by limited access to archived material. Our expressed gratitude is owed to Indiana University’s Lilly Library and the generosity of time and spirit of their staff for providing us with digital scans of the material presented here. Additionally, the extensive knowledge of Samba Gadjigo, who has committed countless hours to the preservation and continuance of Sembène’s legacy, was instrumental to the contextualization of this material.

Figure 1. Cover of Ousmane Sembène’s passport. Image courtesy of IU’s Lilly Library.

Figure 2. Page from Sembène’s passport. Image courtesy of IU’s Lilly Library.

Figure 3. Page from Sembène’s passport. Image courtesy of IU’s Lilly Library.

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

527

Figure 4. Page from Sembène’s passport. Image courtesy of IU’s Lilly Library.

Here, we get a glimpse into one of Sembène’s passports, issued on August 26, 1963. Sembène’s son, Alioune Alain, who was a dependent of Sembène, is pictured alongside his father. This important document, as a testament to transnational mobility, both situates Sembène as a citizen of Senegal while also identifying the great importance of international travel to his personal and professional life.

Figure 5. Cover of Sembène’s journal from a trip to the United States. Image courtesy of IU’s Lilly Library.

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

529

Figure 5 is the cover of a journal Sembène kept throughout his third journey to the United States. Sembène was invited by the US State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs through their International Visitors Leadership Program. Sembène received a tour of the United States that lasted a total of twenty days where he took extensive notes and documented his experiences.

Figure 6. Senegalese certification of marriage between Sembène and Carrie Moore. Image courtesy of IU’s Lilly Library.

Carrie Moore and Ousmane Sembène married in 1973 after a period of courtship from across the Atlantic Ocean. At the time, Moore was a graduate student in the French department at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her dissertation, which was completed in 1973, was titled “Evolution of an African Artist: Social Realism in the Works of Ousmane Sembène.” Moore had also written on the role of women in Sembène’s works. In the process of her research, and after Sembène’s visit to Indiana University, the two developed a love for one another that was to last for over a decade. Their correspondence with one another began in 1971 and culminated in their marriage in 1973, despite their distance from one another.

Dossier 2: Ousmane Sembène

531

Figure 7 and 8. Letter written to Sembène by Carrie Moore in 1973. Image courtesy of IU’s Lilly Library.

June 3, 1973 My Dear, I’ve tried in vain to express what I am feeling these days. Words don’t come. I’m just returning from a short stay (three days) in Chicago. Even before my arrival there, I was sad, lonely—but once there, I understood that I’m not happy anywhere without you. I saw my friends again (we play cards once a month). It’s more than eight years that we have come together like

532

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

that. I was happy to see them. But it isn’t a matter of the nostalgia that one has when you haven’t seen a friend in several months. I felt far far far from what interested them. V. did everything to distract me, but alas she has her own worries (her friend isn’t responsive as he should be to her love). In any case, I returned to Bloomington, discouraged and SAD. There, I found two letters from M. and the children and your third letter. This was a great consolation. I miss M. a lot. We get along well and we like doing things together. Each child (A., C., N., S.) and Julienne sent me a message and kisses. What pleased me the most was the sincerity and simplicity of your letter. The two of us don’t have the habit of expressing our intimate sentiments. However, we love each other a lot. I feel your love for me in the words “Mala wi”. I feel it in your desire to talk to me about your work. For that, I am grateful. I’m studying Wolof again. I want to speak this language at our home. You have to be patient with me because you know that I have a lot of will with respect to what my life will be in Dakar. Don’t be afraid of the ease with which you’re approaching Samoori. You’ve always lived with him. Which is to say that your entire political and creative approach has been systematic with respect to reevaluating the grandeur and history of Africa. Samoori will be your greatest creation. But I admit that I don’t want you to go there too soon. You have to do Xala— I’ve read three African novels (from Ghana) these days. Two by A. and one by K. They wanted to expose the corruption of the bourgeoisie, especially during the time of Nkrumah. From the point of view of style, the books are interesting. But there is an ideological pessimism that, for me, diminishes a lot of the value of these works. In addition, both authors have chosen exile. So for me they will never succeed in making the contribution they should to the development of their country. If it’s true that creation flows from the source in you these days, that’s a good thing. Work well. There’s so many things to say, so many things to do in our Africa. I admire you a lot and hope sincerely that my presence at your side will bring you something for your creativity. Towards what date are you thinking of going to Soviet Asia? Is it for Afro-Asiatic writers? That will do you good. You have to get away some from Samoori, from the house, and your work. Nijaay, I’m closing. I hope that this photo will recall for you the good memories of the sweet moments that we spent together. I love you and embrace you. your animal, Carrie Translated by Eileen Julien

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema Curated by Beti Ellerson This dossier honors the history of African women professionals in cinema, through a timeline of important manifestos, communiqués, declarations, statements, and resolutions. What directly follows is an abbreviated timeline that corresponds to the expanded timeline in the full dossier.

1. Introduction by Beti Ellerson 2. Timeline 1974

Sarah Maldoror interview with Film & TV Stockholm on Sambizanga.

1978

Research on Women and the Mass Media in Africa: Case Studies of Sierra Leone, the Niger and Egypt presented at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa at Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

1984

“Women, Communication and Development: What Perspectives for Nairobi 1985?” seminar in Dakar, Senegal, initiated by the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD).

1989

Vues d’Afrique: Colloque Images de Femmes takes place in Montreal, Canada.

1991

Statement by the African Women Professionals of Cinema, Television and Video at the twelfth edition of FESPACO in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

1992

Women and the Mass Media in Africa | Femmes et Média en Afrique Creation of the Africa Women Filmmakers Trust, Harare Zimbabwe.

1993

Remarks on the Working Group on Women in Cinema, Television and Video at the fifth FEPACI Congress, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

1995

Workshop on “Women’s Voices and perspectives in Africa Today,” at the fourteeth edition of FESPACO, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The constitution of the Pan African Union of Women of the Moving Image UPAFI (Union Panafricaine des Femmes de l’Image) is established in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

1996

RECIDAK 96: “When women of the cinema take action, African cinema moves forward.” Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe is founded.

2000

Women of the Sun launched at the Southern African International Film & Television Market, Sithengi, Cape Town.

2004

International Women’s Film Festival of Salé (FIFFS) is founded in Salé, Morocco.

2009

Massimadi, Festival of Afro LGBTQ Films and Arts is created in Montreal, Canada.

2010

Queer African Manifesto/Declaration is published from Nairobi, Kenya. Launch of Les Journées cinématographiques de la femme africaine de l’image (JCFA) in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Forum on Women in Film: Nollywood and the Dynamics of Representation held in Nigeria. Meeting of African Women Filmmakers at Goethe-Institut Johannesburg, South Africa. Manifesto developed at the Conference of African Women Filmmakers, Johannesburg, South Africa.

2011

Founding of ADAMIC (Association des Dames d’Image du Cameroun), Cameroon. Speech on “First Decade of the International Images Film Festival for Women” by Tsitsi Dangarembga at the International Images Film Festival (IIFF).

2013

Declaration at the Second African Women in Film Forum, Accra, Ghana.

2014

First edition of the TAZAMA Festival du film des femmes africaines takes places in Brazzaville, Congo. First edition of Udada Film Festival, the women’s film festival, takes place in Kenya. First edition of the festival Cinema au féminin (CINEF), presented by the Association of Congolese Women. Filmmakers in Kinshasa, Congo.

2016

Sisters Working in Film and Television (SWIFT), created in South Africa. Report published on the Launch of African Women Filmmakers Hub, Harare, Zimbabwe.

2019

Non-aligned Cinéastes  Collective Roundtable at MICA, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. #MêmePasPeur Movement at the twenty-sixth edition of FESPACO, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Women’s Reflexive Workshops of Dakar.  Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe (WFOZ) Stakeholders Report 2019.

2020

The Gauteng Film Commission on Women’s Month 2020.

African Women Professionals in Cinema: Manifestos, Communiqués, Declarations, Statements, Resolutions Beti Ellerson

D

uring the nascent period when an African cinema culture was taking shape in the 1960s and 1970s, African women were stakeholders in its development. Emerging during the era of independences, African cinemas positioned themselves oppositionally, grounded in a postcolonial gaze and a “Third Cinema” theoretical framework, countering a half century of cinema history during which Africa was constructed as the other, outside of history making and knowledge production. Hence, this emerging cinema culture, whose social, cultural, political, and economic structures embodied a Pan-African continental voice of African film professionals, had as central objective the production, dissemination, exhibition, and critique of Africancentered films. Initiatives emerging from the spirit of the time set the groundwork for the creation of cinema-specific entities, such as film festivals, federations, and film critic associations. Thus, to chart discourses of African women as makers and activists of the moving image demands a contextualization of the foundations of these developments. It necessitates as well, an understanding of continental and Pan-African histories and the wide-ranging mechanisms that created and continue to contribute to the pluralities of African cinemas. Moreover, a historical reflection on African women in cinema demands an intersectional approach, in order to understand the overlapping simultaneity of their experiences, as it relates to gender, ethnicity, and positionality, as well as postcolonial and transnational realities. Indicative of their lived experiences, many of the pioneering women emerged on the cinematic landscape from other spheres, some related to culture, while others were social and political in nature. Moreover, they have often expressed the desire to use multiple tools to relate their personal and collective histories, as well as interest in sharing, supporting, and forming linkages as a means of empowerment and of engagement. This practice of

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

537

interconnection has been the framework within which African practitioners have often functioned, and continues to the present. Hence, African women in cinema affixes to its heading, African women in film, audiovisual media, and screen culture in order to comprehend the diversity of mediums of the moving image—television, video, the Web, and present and future screen devices, which also incorporate transmedial storytelling. Similarly, the cinema-focused environments in which many African women practitioners navigate requires overseeing multiple duties and performing varied functions throughout the cinematic journey. The fluidity of these roles, while perhaps vigorous and demanding for some who are obliged to manage many at once, also provides a broader understanding, facilitates networking, and expands the possibilities of outreach. Communication as a broad category encompassing the diverse aspects of the exchange of information and ideas and culture, as a means to educate and express artistry and creativity, has been the orbit in which some of the notable pioneers of African cinema circulated. Both branches of activity have served as a training ground for the women who have set the course for the many who follow; moreover, the terrain has often been within a transnational context. Anne Mbaye d’Erneville, a pioneer in Senegalese journalism, was at the forefront of culture production in her country. At the eve of independence, she was at the vanguard of a variety of cultural bodies including a cinema culture that has laid the foundation for contemporary cultural infrastructures. Her influences in cinema culture have spanned radio, print, and television journalism, and beyond. She was one of the founders of the women’s movement in Senegal, and her pioneering feminist voice reverberated within diverse cultural milieu, notably cinema, where she has been a seminal figure in the development of the Senegalese public as cinephiles and cultural readers. The prominent place that Sarah Maldoror—French-born of Guadeloupian descent—holds as a pioneer in African cinema points to the complexities of naming and the problems of identification within the context of transnational and diasporic African cinemas. Sarah Maldoror’s life, personal and professional, has been intricately linked to Africa. Her longtime companion, Mario de Andrade, was an Angolan writer and one of the leaders of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), with whom she had two daughters. As a politically engaged filmmaker, she directed several films in Africa about the liberation struggles, including the acclaimed Sambizanga (1972, Angola-France), for which she is internationally known. Hence, her Pan-African, universal vision presents a conundrum for the classification systems that attempt to contain African filmmakers and practitioners along

Figure 1. Kenyan film director Anne Mungai. Image courtesy of FESPACO.

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

539

national designations, and this practice is becoming increasingly challenging in the contemporary era of ever-expanding African diasporic realities. Within the history of African women in cinema, the accounts of the pioneering women are indicative of the personal and professional experiences and practices of the women who follow them. They come to filmmaking for diverse reasons and practice within it for varying periods of time—some only once, for a particular purpose, regaining their chosen profession. Those from other fields connect filmmaking practices with a variety of interests, while still others are committed to using the camera as a main tool of expression. These stories also show the peripatetic nature of their cinematic practices, their connections with entities in the West, and at the same time their firm commitment to their culture, history, country, and the African continent. Moreover, their experiences relay the interdisciplinarity of their perspectives and their vision of cinema—multiple, fluid, and interchanging. A chronological review of key markers in the evolution of African women in cinema culture highlights the social, political, cultural, and economic environment that has been vital for the survival and success of practitioners and professionals in the field. Moreover, it describes the practices of African women of the moving image, who, sustained by the local, regional, continental, and global events of their time, replicated these experiences in their work. The discourse and engagements of the pre-independence movements in the 1950s set the terrain for early cultural bearers such as Annette Mbaye d’Erneville and Sarah Maldoror, who were directly involved in the meetings and discussions that were taking place among the political and cultural influencers of the decolonization movements in Africa and around the world. Hence, in the early 1960s, the era of liberation for most African countries represented a call to action as African women set out to implement these lessons learned. The 1960s was also the decade of cultural institution building and global cultural outreach, with Africa at the center of many of these initiatives, having already established roots in the Pan-African and decolonization movements, which influenced the founding of several Pan-African institutions and seminal events such the meetings of the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists, held in Paris in 1956, and the second congress, in Rome in 1959. The First World Festival of Black Arts, in 1966, put Senegal center stage as host of the event. In the same year, the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC), or Carthage Film Festival, was created in Tunisia, and in 1969, the Pan-African Festival of Film and Television of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) in Burkina Faso. These two events, and in particular FESPACO, played foundational roles in the promotion of an African cinema culture on the continent and beyond. While both are by definition Pan-African and

540

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

continental, the latter is characterized by a focus on African and African diaspora filmmaking, while the JCC also includes films from the Arab world. In 1969, the Pan-African Federation of Cineastes (FEPACI) was created. That actress Zalika Souley from Niger was among the founding members is indicative of the multifarious activities undertaken by film professionals in Africa. Hence these two institutions, FESPACO and FEPACI, formed the seminal infrastructure for an institutionalized Pan-African cinema culture. During the creation of both organizations women have performed important roles. And in the case of FESPACO, Burkinabe Alimata Salembéré played a formative role as founding member and president of the organizing committee of the first edition, and continues to hold an important place as a pioneer in the formation of a continental-based African cinema culture. The organizing committee of the second, third, and fourth editions of FESPACO were also presided over by a woman, Simone Aïssé Mensah. In 1983, as secretary-general, Alimata Salembéré oversaw the eighth edition of the festival. Hence, the establishment of a continental-based cinema culture, which was the objective of these institutions, took root during the decade of the 1960s, with women prominently situated in leadership positions. Concurrently, in the same decade, women’s movements were taking shape throughout the continent, parallel to those developing globally. The activism of the 1970s—during which the UN Decade for Women was declared in 1975—was influenced by the global women’s and feminists’ movements that evolved in the 1960s. The burst of activities in preparation for the first UN conference, held in Mexico in 1975, through the last of the Decade for Women, held in Nairobi in 1985, and beyond, with the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995, ensured that the focus on women’s issues would have a visible, long-lasting impact. Similarly, United Nations-initiated projects as well as other international NGO-focused initiatives around women and development, and in particular African-initiated organizations, were rooted in the global women-focused call to action. These initiatives included media advocacy and awareness, research regarding African women in the mass media, and films related to consciousness-raising around women’s development and empowerment. Films directed by African women have been produced under the auspices of the United Nations, as well as research on women in the mass media by African women; the study in 1978 supported by the African Training and Research Centre for Women/Voluntary Fund for the United Nations Decade for Women research series entitled Women and the Mass Media in Africa: Case Studies of Sierra Leone, the Niger and Egypt was the first such report on this theme. The African-based organization the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD), created in 1977, whose primary

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

541

Figure 2. Circa 1970. Image courtesy of FESPACO.

objectives are to encourage multidimensional development of African people and to promote the importance of indigenous, African-based research, has emphasized the importance of gender at the intersection of media and development. Under the auspices of AAWORD, the seminar “Women, Communication and Development: What Perspectives for Nairobi 1985” was organized in October 1984 in Dakar, in preparation for the next year’s UN Conference for Women. The objective was to make the participants more aware of the daily lives of women and their importance as media practitioners to engage in the communication process. Hence, to achieve this goal it was necessary to demystify, decode, and monitor biased discourses and practices regarding women in the media, to set new standards, and to outline alternative methods that reflected women’s experiences and activities. The organizational meeting was held during the seminar for the creation of APAC, the Association of African Women Professionals in Communication, who would formulate the conceptual and operational framework for the development of the strategy. Similarly, the women of the Federation of Africa Media WomenZimbabwe Chapter who attended the Nairobi conference in 1985 presented a draft of their constitution, with the aim of “advancing the cause of women media practitioners and to empower women through the media.” In addition, in preparation for the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, the Fifth African Ministerial Conference on Women, held in Dakar, Senegal, in November 1994 was organized jointly by the

542

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Senegalese government and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA). Among the activities that took place during the conference was a two-day workshop for the media sponsored by ECA, focusing on the role of the media in changing the image of African women and the potential for communication in development. Also in attendance at the meeting, the Pan-African Union of Women of the Moving Image emphasized the importance of presenting African perspectives at the international event, and that African women film practitioners and stakeholders should take the lead in the visualization of these perspectives. The international focus on women continued into the new millennium to the present, with follow-up conferences and reports. On the continental level, the African Union declared 2010–2020 the African Women’s Decade. Reflected in these international women-centered initiatives that emerged throughout the past several decades is the persistent endeavor of African women of the moving image to insist on positive, empowering portrayals of women as role models and in positions of leadership. As highlighted in the research findings, positive images of women role models could lead to an increase in women in leadership roles. This assertion was one of the main premises of the “Statement by African Women Professionals of Cinema, Television and Video” at the historic Pan-African meeting in Ouagadougou for FESPACO in 1991, which declared, For if images produced by African women do not give another view of African women’s reality, then there is a great risk that women themselves, because they are the main educators of children—the citizens of tomorrow—will not be able to show an alternative vision of the world.

This seminal moment became the genesis of a movement. The gathering was the catalyst for the birth of an institutionalized Pan-African movement of women in cinema. Soon afterward, in alliance with the newly founded Pan-African Union of Women of the Moving Image, regional and national entities emerged or coalitions were formed with existing organizations. Twenty years later, in order to promote the works of women in cinema on a continental level, the Journées cinématographiques de la femme africaine de l’image (JCFA) was created. Launched in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, in 2010 by FESPACO, it is held in alternate years of the biannual festival. During the twenty-sixth edition of FESPACO in 2019, UNESCO put the spotlight on women and policies supporting the film sector in Africa. A high-level roundtable entitled “50 Years of FESPACO: 50–50 for Women” was held with the participation of Audrey Azoulay, director-general of UNESCO, and Madame Sika Kaboré, First Lady of Burkina Faso. The roundtable brought together women filmmakers and film distributors as well as ministers of culture from

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

543

West Africa to discuss the challenges women face in accessing funding and training opportunities in the African film and broadcasting industries. It also examined the issue of gender equality in national cultural policies and the representation of women in decision-making positions. In the past three decades a plethora of African women–initiated cultural entities have been formed both in Africa—on local and regional levels— and the diaspora. Many of these projects have as their objective the goal to promote and empower African women, others to provide positive images of Africa as a whole and to offer a showcase for film production. A selection of examples among many others: •

• •

• •

•

•

In North Africa, the International Women’s Film Festival of Salé, founded in 2004 in Morocco, has as an objective to encourage the growth of women’s filmmaking globally and facilitate the understanding of other people through their films. In West Africa, the Association of Mauritanian Women of the Image, created in 2009, brings together women in technical and artistic fields in the visual media. In East Africa, the Udada Women’s Film Festival, formed in 2014, has been an important venue for the promotion and empowerment of African women filmmakers and stakeholders and the showcasing of their work. In the region of Central Africa, the Brazzaville-based Tazama Women’s Film Festival, formed in 2015, serves as a platform for women filmmakers from the African continent to exchange, meet and share. In the Southern African region, Zimbabwe in particular, the Africa Women Filmmakers Trust (AWFT), established in 1992, highlights the importance of communication technologies as a tool for empowerment. In the same decade the Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe (WFOZ) was created with the objective to reinforce, through the medium of the moving image, a gender perspective of women’s experiences and stories. Since its inception in 2002, the Harare-based International Images Film Festival for Women (IIFF) has performed a vital role in the promotion, exhibition, and critique of films that are woman-centered and that present positive representations of girls and women.

These initiatives also attest to women’s leadership and their desire to network and coalesce with diverse international stakeholders who support their interests. In the course of a half century, throughout the continent and the African diaspora a veritable cinema culture has developed comprised

544

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

of local, regional, and continent-wide film-focused entities—not all have endured, and some remain in name only. The communiqués, declarations, manifestos, mission statements, resolutions created collectively by film professionals or individually by filmmakers, pronounced at diverse gatherings or disseminated in the medium of the time, serve variously as streams of consciousness, as calls to arms, as strategies for change, as plans of action, or simply as statements of purpose. In addition, the proceedings of these events are very useful in assessing the results and intentions at ongoing conferences and colloquia. Manifestos, meant to engage directly with the cultural interlocutors, serve as provocations to act, to challenge the status quo, to vow to change existing attitudes and structures. Mission statements and resolutions function as strategic plans, mapping visions and actions for implementation of goals and objectives. Manifestos, which often take on a radical attitude of absolute change, come and go, according to the period or the stage at which the organization enters, others remain at this entry level, or for whatever reason neither proceed to an advanced stage of development nor fulfill the promise of the initial ideas. Declarations pronounced emphatically infuse a sense of urgency, a demand for immediate action. Resolutions offer solutions to the concerns and problems raised. While some of the institutions have faded, the air of promise remains; as such, the imperative need to archive the documents produced is critically evident. And yet the promise of the digital era as a panacea to attaining a definitive history is not yet a reality, as evidenced by the many hyperlinks that are no longer active or accessible; and hence, if the Web-based source has not been archived by exterior means, the information contained there is as ephemeral as the event that took place, becoming a ghost of sorts in the annals of cinema history—known about, talked about, with vague or inexistent evidence. Compiled in the following is a selection of documents that span several decades. The desire is to represent as many regions of the continent as possible, as well as to outline the evolution of discourse on African women as image makers. At the same time, it emphasizes the critical need to historicize documents through preservation and archival practice, by all means. Created collectively or pronounced individually, these women-focused manifestos reveal the importance of addressing gender parity and women’s concerns through institutionalized structures that empower their voices and recognize their strengths. In addition, these documents show the prevalence of organized meeting venues as a means for African women to network, voice their concerns, and negotiate their place, in the same context as written manifestos and declarations with resolutions that follow. Hence, included are several reports and proceedings of conferences whose purpose is to plan, strategize, and implement goals. In addition, film festival practices encompass broader

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

545

engagements of cinema, and are perhaps some of the most important spaces in which to showcase the goals and objectives of film organizations and individual filmmakers, as well as implement them and at the same time present films and debates about them that would not happen otherwise. And with the ubiquity of social media today, visual documents in the form of video clips and slide presentations continue the call to action by visualizing ideas, concerns, and strategies for change. Hence, this selection attempts to incorporate these media as well, which together reflect the past, present, and future visions and voices of African women.

 Sarah Maldoror To make a film means to take a position, and when I take a position, I am educating people. —SARAH MALDOROR

In 1974 the journal Women and Film (nos. 5–6) featured Sarah Maldoror (1929– 2020) in three parts under the rubric “Third World Perspectives.” The series is one of the first comprehensive English-language analyses of her early works, with her reflections on her film and an interview. The volume was published shortly after the completion of her masterwork, Sambizanga, released in 1972. Excerpts from the interview by Elin Clason from Film & TV Stockholm, as well as from Sarah Maldoror’s discussion of the film, are presented here in the form of an artist’s statement, giving a glimpse of her status as forebear: Pan-Africanist, feminist, cultural producer par excellence. Her words, thoughts, and actions are echoed in so many of the subsequent manifestos, declarations, and statements pronounced by African filmmakers and organizations, and hence serve as seminal texts for the women of the moving image who follow in her footsteps.

Excerpts from the interview: I am one of those modern women who try to combine work and family life, and just like it is for all the others, it’s a problem for me. Children need a home and a mother. That’s why I try to prepare and edit my films in Paris during the long summer vacation when the children are free and can come along. . . . [Reactionary men] also say that it’s noticeable that it was a woman who made these films because they’re about women. Of course, I as a woman am interested in the problems of women. . . .

546

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

I feel that all women in principle should support [women’s organizations], even if they don’t agree on every issue, since it is women who are oppressed by men, and it is women who have to help themselves out of their situation. . . . I’m only interested in women who struggle. These are the women I want to have in my films, not the others. I also offer work to as many women as possible during the time I’m shooting my films. You have to support those women who want to work with film. Up until now, we are still few in number, but if you support those women in film who are around, then slowly our numbers will grow. That’s the way the men do it, as we all know. Women can work in whatever field they want. That means in film, too. The main thing is that they themselves want to do it. Men aren’t likely to help women do that. Both in Africa and in Europe, woman remains the slave of man. That’s why she has to liberate herself. . . . People have to be able to find out about why and in fact how, to struggle and to learn to identify those who are responsible for war. . . . My situation is a very difficult one. I make films about liberation movements. But, the money for such film production is to be found not in Africa, but in Europe. For that reason, I have to live where the money is to be raised, and then do my work in Africa. . . . I’m against all forms of nationalism. What does it in fact mean to be French, Swedish, Senegalese, or Guadeloupian? Nationalities and borders between countries have to disappear. Besides this, the color of a person’s skin is of no interest to me. What’s important is what that person is doing. . . . I don’t know what a ‘kind of audience’ is, nor could I care less. The film is about a struggle which is going on today. I made [Sambizanga] to illustrate this struggle. . . . I want to show that Africa also has a history, that Africans are not historyless savages, but that there have been many outstanding people coming out of the culture of Africa. . . . I love freedom, I won’t be told what to do by any producer who doesn’t like my subject matter. I’d rather wait the three years it would take me to scrape together the money I need. I want to make my films the way I want to make them. . . . [T]he films of other countries did not sprout up like mushrooms from the earth. In Africa there are several young people who are really talented filmmakers. We have to put an end to the lack of knowledge and the utter ignorance which people have about the special problem of Africa. . . . The most important thing is that we have to develop a cultural policy which can help us. Show to the world that such a thing as African film does exist. We have to teach ourselves to sell our films ourselves and then get them distributed.

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

547

Figure 3. Sarah Maldoror and Férid Boughedir at FESPACO 1993. Image courtesy of FESPACO.

Excerpts from the discussion of Sambizanga: In this film I tell the story of a woman. It could be any woman, in any country, who takes off to find her husband. The year is 1961. The political consciousness of the people has not yet matured. I’m sorry if this situation is not seen as a ‘good one,’ and if this doesn’t lead to a heightened consciousness among the audience as to what the struggle in Africa is all about. I have no time for films filled with political rhetoric. . . . For, not too long ago, people here believed that all that was happening in Angola was a minor tribal war. They didn’t reckon with our will to become an independent nation: could it be true that we Angolan were like them, the Portuguese . . . no, that wouldn’t be possible. . . . I’m no adherent of the concept of the ‘Third World.’ I make films so that people—no matter what race or color they are—can understand them. For me there are only exploiters and the exploited, that’s all. To make a film means to take a position, and when I take a position, I am educating people. The audience has a need to know that there’s a war going on in Angola, and I address myself to those among them who want to know more about it. In my films, I show them a people who are busy preparing themselves for a fight and all that that entails in Africa: that continent where everything is extreme—the distances, nature, etc. Liberation fighters are, for example, forced to wait until the elephants have passed them by. Only then can they

548

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

cross the countryside and transport their arms and ammunition. Here, in the West, the Resistance used to wait until dark. We wait for the elephants. You have radios, information—we have nothing. . . . Some say that they don’t see any oppression in the film. If I wanted to film the brutality of the Portuguese, then I’d shoot my films in the bush. What I wanted to show in Sambizanga is the aloneness of a woman and the time it takes to march.

 “Women and the Mass Media in Africa” Study Research conducted on African women in the media during a study visit by journalists Elma Lititia Anani (Sierra Leone), Alkaly Miriama Keita (Niger), and Awatef Abdel Rahman (Egypt) was presented at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa at Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, September 24-30, 1978. The findings were published in Women and the Mass Media in Africa: Cases Studies of Sierra Leone, the Niger and Egypt, in 1981. The results of the study were presented in the form of a content analysis of the media in the three countries under study, with conclusions and recommendations specific to each setting. In addition, an index provides detailed recommendations for strategies, applicable to Africa as a whole, to propose realistic images of women in the media and to increase and improve women’s training and employment opportunities in the African mass media.

From the introduction to the publication: If Africa is to develop as rapidly as it might, the potential impact of the mass media must be recognized. The press, radio and television can be effective instruments for promoting education, economic development, and social change. Women have an especially important role to play in the development of Africa. By its portrayal of women, the mass media can either impede or foster women’s integration in the development process. If women are portrayed only in traditional roles in the media, society’s attitudes and women’s expectations for themselves will necessarily be confined to these roles. On the other hand, if the media’s image of women reflects the full range of contributions women are capable of making to society, societal attitudes towards women will be correspondingly broadened. To date, virtually no research has been carried out on women and the mass media in Africa; this study is

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

549

the first to analyze women’s image in the media. It also documents the small number of women in policy making positions in the African media, which necessarily affects the media’s portrayal of women. Since the mass media in Africa are in their infancy, it is hoped that the implications of women’s current media image will be carefully considered by media policy makers, with a view to establishing future media policies which will foster women’s participation in the development of Africa.

 “Women, Communication, and Development“ Seminar A seminar entitled “Women, Communication and Development: What Perspectives for Nairobi 1985?” was held October 1-10, 1984 in Dakar, Senegal, initiated by the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD). Proceedings from the seminar were organized by BREDA and Association des professionnelles africaines de la communication (APAC). Reprinted from BREDA (UNESCO). Translated from the French. The Association des Professionelles Africaines de la Communication (APAC), an Association of African Women Professionals in Communication created in Dakar, Senegal, by women journalists from francophone Africa, has as objective to reaffirm the vital role of communication in the development of Africa and toward the emancipation of women.

Introduction by Marie Angélique Savané: In collaboration with the Canadian Agency for International Development (ACDI) and the International Foundation for Another Development (FIPAD) the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD) organized a seminar on “Women, Communication and Development: What Perspectives for Nairobi 1985” from October 1-10, 1984 in Dakar. The seminar was held in the context of the United Nations Conference for Women (Nairobi 1985) in order to provide African women journalists with the results of research on women and development and to establish a basis for the implementation of alternative methods of communication. It was therefore an opportunity for some thirty African women, as communicators and researchers, to reflect on key issues which impact the very foundations of their profession, and which address the image of women

550

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Figure 4. Circa 1970. Image courtesy of FESPACO.

in communication professions and how this image is conveyed to women in society. Hence, when journalism is presented as a “male” profession,” a profession “outside” [women’s purview] par excellence, according to the mental schemas conveyed by society, women will face biases and obstacles, and are locked in a “social” ghetto, which in turn sends back to society an image of passive women, excluded from places and practices of power. The purpose of the seminar was to help women professionals in communication to better understand women’s everyday experiences and their requisite participation in the communication process. In so doing, it was necessary to demystify, decode, and track biased discourses and practices in the media regarding women; in order to bring about new ethics, and redefine alternatives that would include the experiences, accomplishments, and the efforts of African women and local communities in the socioeconomic dynamics of development. The conceptual and operational framework for the development of this strategy is APAC, the Association of African Women Professionals in Communication, which held its constitutive assembly during this seminar. The outcomes of this meeting include a comprehensive account of how African women as communication professionals understand unequal “development” which excludes women. And, hence, how the male-dominated media reflect this reality, reproducing the image of a passive, antiquated world of women, without any real legal, ideological, political, or economic importance.

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

551

Beyond these questions, the collective deliberations of the gathering led to a program of action-research-popularization. This publication contains a summary of the debates, which provides an account of the contributions of the various countries, the recommendations formulated at the end of the seminar, the statutes of APAC, as well as the follow-up activities of this meeting.

 Vues d’Afrique: Colloque Images de Femmes Presented here is a summary of the event: In April 1989 the Montreal-based film festival Vues d’Afrique organized a special section devoted to African women in the visual media: Images de Femmes. The program consisted of: 1) a screening of short and feature length films, television shows, and video programs produced and directed by African women; 2) a discussion of the onscreen image of women and the influence of the media; 3) a colloquium on the role of African women in the audiovisual media which included a survey of the participants’ assessment of the current situation and their recommendations. The objectives of the colloquium were: 1) to plan specific projects for exchanges, training programs, and professional cooperation with African women to develop in the film, television, and audiovisual sectors; 2) to have an ongoing discussion between Canadian officials at the Office of Canadian Film and Television and African women film directors, technicians, and actors regarding the ways that the Office can meet the women’s professional needs; and 3) to discuss with representatives of governmental and non-governmental international cooperation agencies the ways that women’s level of participation in the audiovisual production sectors in Africa may be raised. Femmes d’images de l’Afrique francophone, compiled by Najwa Tlili (Tunisia), was one of the direct results of this 1989 meeting. The index brings together the biography and filmography of women in the cinema from “francophone” Africa, as well as a listing of other relevant contacts. Another initiative inspired by the meeting was the creation of the “Images de femmes” (Images of Women) project, from which emerged the prize “Images de femmes” offered by ACCT and presented during the annual Vues d’Afrique event.



552

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Statement by the African Women Professionals of Cinema, Television and Video This statement was created at the African Women’s Workshop held within the framework of the twelfth edition of FESPACO in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, February 25-27, 1991.

After fifty years of cinematographic production and twenty-five years of televisual production, how many women are involved? What positions do they occupy and what roles do they play? After fifty years of cinematographic production and twenty-five years after televisual realization, what images of African women are shown to women of the continent, and how much have the latter contributed in supervisory positions? After a half-century of cinematographic production and a quartercentury of televisual productions, how many pioneers are there? And where are those female pioneers and film directors who could have been in a position to give their own vision of the world? The African Women’s Workshop held within the framework of the twelfth edition of FESPACO in Ouagadougou from February 25-27, 1991 gathered together a diversity of African film, television, and video professional. They came from various African countries and frame the Black diaspora: Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Benin, Tunisia, Cameroon, Niger, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Rwanda, Congo, Morocco, and Chad. These women fulfill the functions of editors, camerawomen, directors, and producers of televisual programs, video-makers, filmmakers, distributors, television co-producers, producers, and actresses. But even after fifty years of cinematographic productions and twenty-five years of televisual production, though they fulfill various functions in cinema and television, the analysis of African women’s situation during this workshop has emphasized their insignificant number in audiovisual professions and their difficulty in getting access to training and funds. It is evident from the testimonies presented over these last three days that even when a woman wants to work in cinema and television professions she is often advised to stick to the latter because they suit her better as they require an attention to detail which is believed to be specifically part of women’s character. So half a century after the beginning of African cinema, a quarter of a century after those of television, the position of women in the various posts in cinematographic and televisual production is far from being satisfactory! Far from being up to the challenge of the third millennium.

Figure 5. Poster for twelfth edition of FESPACO, 1991. Image courtesy of FESPACO.

554

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

And if this situation continues the cinematographic and televisual industry’s growth, and even its development, could be hampered. For if images produced by African women do not give another view of African women’s reality, then there is a great risk that women themselves, because they are the main educators of children—the citizens of tomorrow— will not be able to show an alternative vision of the world. Fifty years after the beginning of cinema, twenty-five years after that of television, inequalities and obstacles still persist. In 1991, almost ten years before the year 2000, African women are still victims of pressures at their place of work, and exploited both as women and as professionals. In 1991, almost ten years before the third millennium, because they are deprived of their citizenship rights, their access to cinema and television professions remains selective, discriminatory and minimal! Nevertheless, in 1991, African professional women of cinema and television and video decided to meet in order to exchange their views, to create a framework for free expression, to elaborate an action program to speed up their integration at all the levels of the reproduction process of cinema and television. A half-century after the birth of cinema, a quarter of a century after that of television, about fifty women from various areas of the continent, fifty women of different political, religious and philosophical backgrounds united for the sake of their professional requirements to express their will to struggle unflinchingly: • •

to put forward their female vision of the world; to have a controlling position on their images.

They decided to set up a working group, a program of action, in order to continue the action of a few isolated pioneers so that in the future, in the year 2000, there are ten, fifty, a hundred … a thousand of them and more in the professions of cinema and television. They called on funding and commissioning organization from the South and the North, on institutions and associations to give their active, constructive, and collaborative support for the development of their projects. They know that a mobilization of funds, of human resources, from the South and the North, and mainly women’s determination, initiative, and responsibility may help to overcome the obstacles! The working panel is made up of the following members: Aminata Ouédraogo (Burkina Faso), director-producer; Grace Kanyua (Kenya), director-producer; Juanita Ageh-Waterman (Nigeria/London), actress;

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

555

Alexandra Akoto Duah (Ghana), actress; Seipati Bulane-Hopa (South Africa), director-distributor; Chantal Bagilishya (Rwanda/Paris), distributor; Rose-Elise Mengue-Bekale (Gabon), editor; and Kahena Attila (Tunisia), editor.

 Women and the Mass Media in Africa (Femmes et Média en Afrique), 1992, Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD) The following is excerpted from the introduction by Ayesha Imam: The research reports in this publication are products of the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD) Research Working Group on Women and the Mass Media in Africa. Studies of women and the mass media worldwide indicate a remarkable uniformity in the treatment of women in the media, whether as workers or as representations in media images and messages. But surveys of such research worldwide (for example Gallagher 1979 and 1981, Ceulemans and Fauconnier 1979) also indicate that this issue is greatly under-researched in Africa specifically. Hence the working group was constituted to fill in some of this gap. The case studies here cover a broad spectrum of issues relating to women and the mass media—from beginning to end so to speak. These issues include women working in radio and television, women’s participation in “alternative” media, images of women and gender ideologies in radio, television, and literature, women’s access to mass media as receivers of the effects of mass media ideologies on women’s consciousness, the use of non-conventional media in conscientizing women and raising women’s issues, and the evaluation of literary representation of female characters by women writers.

 Africa Women Filmmakers Trust The AWFT was created in 1992 in Harare, Zimbabwe. The following is reprinted from the AWFT website.

556

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Africa Women Filmmakers Trust uses the participatory approach in its work. AWFT believes that the participatory approach is extremely powerful in giving recognition to marginalized individuals and communities, which then generates the sense of empowerment that enables them to take action for social change.

Our Vision We envision a world in which the media is not perceived as a tool to disenfranchise any groups in society but allows and fosters participation at all levels by everyone.

Our Mission Africa Women Filmmakers Trust works to advance gender equality and justice through the use of information and communication technologies by facilitating content production and dissemination that supports girls, women and disadvantaged communities to take informed choices. Taking into cognizance that information communication technologies are a gendered tool, AWFT strives to address imbalances in the access and use of ICTs hence the adoption of the participatory approach which is empowering to its subjects, giving them a voice hence becoming protagonists of their own development.

Figure 6. Izza Genini and Alimata Salembéré. Image courtesy of FESPACO.

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

557

Our Goals Assist in the creation of more informed and empowered communities with the capacity to make individual and collective informed decisions.

Our Core Values Africa Women Filmmakers Trust believes that participatory media is effective in educating, creating awareness, movement building, and cultural expression.

 Working Group, Women in Cinema, Television and Video Workshop 1993 Remarks of Mr. Secretary General of FEPACI to the attention of the Fifth Congress on February 22, 1993, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

At the twelfth FESPACO an autonomous and specific Working Group was established at the meeting, “Women, Cinema, Television and Video in Africa.” The mandate of this working group is to accelerate the integration of professional women from all levels of the filmmaking process; since after a half century of African cinema, there is an insufficiency of their presence and representation in the film industry. FEPACI was invited to provide a suitable framework of reflection and action. The Working Group would like to use the context of the Fifth FEPACI Congress in order to draw people’s attention to women’s participation in the development of cinema and the audiovisual in Africa. The Group encourages FEPACI to employ a constructive policy for both training and ongoing collaborations. At the present, the Group urges FEPACI to accept the commitment to guarantee the material and moral rights for women professionals in cinema, television and video, as well as develop a new framework for better interprofessional relationships. Furthermore, the Women’s Working Group will soon elaborate a project for guidelines for African professionals in cinema, television and video, both women and men, which will be submitted to FEPACI. The Work Group’s request to FEPACI is to provide material and logistic support for the provisional bureau’s first meeting to be held within six

558

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

months, in order to formulate constitutive actions for the association. This is deemed necessary since at the regional and international level, the bureau’s ability to carry out concrete tasks has been seriously hampered by lack of means and the difficulties of communication. A feasibility study regarding the plans for organizing the meeting will be sent to FEPACI in the coming weeks. Guided by the same idea, which is the development of Africa through the moving image, we hope to be able to rely on your solidarity.

 Workshop: “Women’s Voices and Perspectives in Africa Today” The workshop “Women’s Voices and Perspectives in Africa Today” was held on February 28, 1995 in Ouagadougou under the aegis of FEPACI during the fourteeth edition of FESPACO. Following is a summary of the proceedings.

Introducing the proceedings of the Workshop, the Secretary General of FEPACI, Mr. Gaston Kaboré, identified the subject from a new vantage point, namely to probe the consciousness and the collective subconscious on the role of women in our current societies. He proposed an examination of mindset, which was immediately carried out by Minister Akila Belembaogo who challenged men and women regarding their collective responsibilities. While acknowledging African women’s empowerment, she hopes that their numerical importance is not reduced to a statistical question. The outcomes must be reflected in their activities, in their effective participation in integrated programs for development. Upon consensus, it was deemed necessary to accord words and actions, to highlight the perspectives and voices of women. The Workshop probed a series of crucial points that had been the subject of fruitful discussions. In turn, with a special sense of analysis, Ms. Tanella Boni described the woman’s position in our contemporary societies. Performing in a confined space, she presents herself as “a cake to be worshipped" from all sides. The Workshop therefore encouraged African women to invest in the audiovisual field with a critical approach to their role. This should consist of questioning the real virtues of our traditions and in helping to create a new society for generations to come. If African women like to be seen on the screens, if they like to be filmed, their absence behind the camera is even more apparent. And the Workshop encourages them to

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

559

train professionally in this sector in order to carve out a space for themselves on the creation, production, and distribution chain. Finally, the Workshop participants called on men and women to unite in their efforts to overcome the structural problems that place Africa on the periphery of audiovisual history.

 Pan-African Union of Women of the Moving Image (UPAFI, Union Panafricaine des Femmes de l’Image) The constitution and statutes are adopted in the meeting held from February 25–March 4, 1995 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Included here are Articles 5 and 6 of the constitution.

Article 5 The aims of the federation are: a. To bring together all African women of the moving image, without any distinction of race or religious beliefs; b. To be devoted to the development of cinema culture and the promotion of films made by women; to the improvement of the image of the African woman; to enhance the value of the African woman in the film industry; to promote African cinema and its inclusion in the fields of education; to reinforce the social, economic, and cultural independence of the African people; c. To promote the spirit of solidarity among African women film professionals, so that together, they defend their moral, professional, and political interests; d. To assist in the establishment and improvement of technical infrastructures in Africa such as: laboratories, editing facilities, sound studios, etc., and to promote the usage of the infrastructure already available in some African countries through negotiations aimed to obtain special fees, and credits in favor of boosting film production in Africa; e. To participate effectively and to assist in organizing inter-African cinema-related events; f. To seek solutions through inter-African cooperation, and offer its service in resolving any difference that may arise among its members;

560

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

g. To cooperate in undertaking film production in keeping with the spirit of actual solidarity and adopt a standard agreement on joint film production among African countries; h. To work towards the promotion, distribution, and utilization of African films throughout the African continent and the world; i. To promote an unimpeded and tax-free circulation of films by women on the continent; j. To strive at all costs to decolonize our screens; k. To encourage African and international partners to become interested in every aspect of the development of African cinema, particularly films by women.

Article 6 For this purpose, the Pan-African Union of Women of the Moving Image shall use all research resources or undertake any action. It shall in particular: a. Collect and update all documents and conduct research in all fields of interest to cinema, television and audiovisual production in general. b. May acquire movable and immovable property in the pursuit of its objectives. c. Create permanent services and hire qualified staff to fulfill administrative, financial and technical duties.

Members of the Bureau: Aminata Ouédraogo, General Coordinator; Kahena Attila, Regional Coordinator-North Africa, Alexandra Akoto Duah, Regional CoordinatorWest Africa; Chantal Bagilishya, Coordinator-Diaspora France; Anne Mungai, Regional Coordinator-East Africa; Rose-Elise Mengue-Bekale, Regional Coordinator-Central Africa; Seipati Bulane-Hopa, Regional CoordinatorSouthern Africa; Juanita Ageh-Waterman, Coordinator-Diaspora Great Britain; Suzanne Kourouma, Treasurer General.



Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

561

RECIDAK 96 When women of the cinema take action, African cinema moves forward. — FROM THE REPORT BY CHERIFF AMADOU DIOP

The following is reprinted from the report by Cheriff Amadou Diop, Ecrans d’Afrique 1 (1996).

RECIDAK, created under the auspices of the Consortium of Audiovisual Communication in Africa by Madame Annette Mbaye d’Erneville in 1990, operated independently until 1996. RECIDAK 96 would be the last version under its current form before being relocated to the Senegalese Ministry of Communication. Hence, there was a bit of symbolism in the theme of this edition: “Women and Cinema,” as if to give the women professionals of cinema the last word, as a way of taking stock of its accomplishments and envisioning the future of the industry. And above all to pay a well-deserved homage to their elder, Madame Annette Mbaye d’Erneville, whose lifetime work has been for the promotion of culture in Senegal. The level of emotion was high, as the women understood the role that they would have to play in moving African cinema forward.

Figure 7. Poster for RECIDAK 1996. Image courtesy of the author.

562

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

During the colloquy, several themes were addressed: the place and role of women in Senegalese cinema (by Oumarou Diagne); towards a sociological approach to the cinema of Black women (by Osange Silou); problematizing women’s cinematic writing as it relates to “women and cinema” (by Martine Condé Ilboudo), among others. (Ecrans d’Afrique editor’s note: the high quality of papers presented by the women in cinema deserves more attention in a special issue in preparation). At the conclusion of the seminar a resolution was proposed for the creation of a collective, entitled “women’s initiative for cinema” based on solidarity and mutual support for the completion of individual projects (scriptwriting, logistic support, exchange of information, training workshops). From this meeting comes the slogan—that has since become popular— created by the women in Dakar: “When women of the cinema take action, African cinema moves forward.” 

 Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe was founded in 1996. Included are excerpts from Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA) website on the group.

Vision A Zimbabwe that serves as a model of democratic tolerance, integrity and sustainability for its people, the region and the continent through the provision of uplifting and motivating film narrative.

Mission To strengthen the gender perspective in Zimbabwean society by narrating women’s stories and experiences, whether told by women or men, or any other gender, powerfully through the medium of film.

Objective The organization aims to increase the participation and production capacity of women locally and regionally in the audiovisual industry. It also aims to bring women’s issues to the attention of the cinema viewing and television watching public.

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

563

Figure 8. Logo for the African Women Film Makers Hub. Image courtesy of the author.

 Women of the Sun Women of the Sun (WoS) was launched at the Southern African International Film & Television Market, Sithengi in Cape Town, 1998. In late 1999, Wos needed to refocus and strategically plan its development, facilitation, and capacity building initiatives. A core group of South African women was called upon to assist to this regard. Early 2000 saw the ratification of the WoS constitution and the election of the key organization official including an executive board including with a chairperson and treasurer and began running within an organizational structure. The following overview of WoS is excerpted from Women of the Sun website, which is no longer active.

WoS is a non-profit section-21 member based resource network of African women filmmakers. It is a project-driven organization, which facilitates African women filmmakers to share their visions, skills, and experiences and to commercially exploit filmmaking opportunities. WoS was officially launched in 2000 and is established nationally in South Africa and continentally as a resource exchange network. It continually seeks to develop and partner with regional

564

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

and international programs as channels to advocate for the promotion, skills development, and the showcasing of films and skills with a specific focus on women in the film and television industry in South Africa and the rest of Africa. WoS is based in South Africa and currently has members in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Nigeria, Kenya, and mainly South Africa. Vision To be the leading agency for the advancement and showcasing of women filmmakers in Africa. Mission To proactively facilitate the increased presence of women in the film and the television industry.

Board Members Presently Women of the Sun consist of board members who are active and dynamic women who are representative of different levels of the film and television industry.

Employees Eve Rantseli who holds the position of Executive Officer, works closely with and reports to the Executive Board. Her responsibility is to coordinate the organization’s activities, and is also the director of the AWF Film Festival. Other staff members to execute and management WoS programs namely the Development Officer, the Monthly Screening & Network Officer, and volunteers are brought in as appropriate to the needs of each project.

Funding As a non-profit organization, WoS’s main source of funding is annual membership fees, grants from government departments, local and international donor organizations, and also sponsorships for different activities.

 International Women’s Film Festival of Salé Announcement of the FIFFS (Festival international du film de femmes de Salé), founded in Salé, Morocco in 2004.

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

565

The International Women’s Film Festival of Salé, founded in 2004 in a spirit of friendship and universal cooperation, aims to showcase and promote quality works with the view of furthering the development of cinematic art, encouraging the growth of women’s filmmaking globally and facilitating the understanding of other people through their films. The festival is also dedicated to women’s cinemas in order to make their innovative and creative qualities better known, and thus focuses its efforts on the international level, as a meeting place for women film professionals throughout the world. Moreover, the festival aims to stimulate women’s filmmaking in Morocco and support it by providing a recognized seal of quality.

 Massimadi, Festival of Afro LGBTQ Films and Arts Massimadi was created in 2009. The following is reprinted from their website.

Massimadi is a film and arts festival, featuring Queer and LGBTQIA people of color documentaries and movies, and promoting artists of the community.

Figure 9. Event during the ninth edition of the Massimadi Festival, 2017. Image courtesy of the author.

566

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

The Massimadi festival through the power of the arts allows a true identity construction. It created a safe space for dialogue and cultural exchange and sharing promoting self-love and the social integration of all. By spreading messages of positive examples, tolerance and dialogue where people can be confronted with realities close to having lived on the screen, it joined the major mission of the festival: Fight Against Homophobia and Transphobia. One of the goal for Massimadi is to create a unique scene for locals QPOC artists and promote their arts. Since 2009, we have hosted around fifty artists. Massimadi wants to create a single and outstanding experiment for the participants. We combine several elements so that our participants can at the same time find the key elements of a film and art festival with the quality of our projections, with unseen films and often in premier, but also with a convivial environment “like home,” which makes it possible to exchange and supports the cultural dialogue. Since 2010, Massimadi is an official event of the Black History Month and the Nuit Blanche Montréal.

 Queer African Manifesto/Declaration Written April 8, 2010, in Nairobi, Kenya. With the release of the lesbian-themed film Rafiki by Wanuri Kahiu less than a decade later in 2018, this Manifesto clearly resonates. The Kenya Film Classification Board banned the film, “due to its homosexual theme and clear intent to promote lesbianism in Kenya contrary to the law.”

As Africans, we all have infinite potential. We stand for an African revolution which encompasses the demand for a re-imagination of our lives outside neocolonial categories of identity and power. For centuries, we have faced control through structures, systems, and individuals who disappear our existence as people with agency, courage, creativity, and economic and political authority. As Africans, we stand for the celebration of our complexities and we are committed to ways of being which allow our self-determination at all levels of our sexual, social, political and economic lives. The possibilities are endless. We need economic justice; we need to claim and redistribute power; we need to eradicate violence; we need to redistribute land; we need gender justice; we need environmental justice; we need erotic justice; we need racial and ethnic justice; we need rightful access to affirming and response institutions, services and spaces; overall we need total liberation.

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

567

We are specifically committed to the transformation of the politics of sexuality in our contexts. As long as African LGBTI people are oppressed, the whole of Africa is oppressed. This vision demands that we commit ourselves to: • • •

• •

• •

Reclaiming and sharing our stories (past and present), our lived realities, our contributions to society and our hopes for the future. Strengthening ourselves and our organizations, deepening our links and understanding of our communities, building principled alliances, and actively contributing towards the revolution. Challenging all legal systems and practices which either currently criminalize or seek to reinforce the criminalization of LGBTI people, organizations, knowledge creation, sexual self expression, and movement building. Challenging state support for oppressive sexual, gendered, discriminatory norms, legal and political structures and cultural systems. Strengthening the bonds of respect, cooperation, passion, and solidarity between LGBTI people, in our complexities, differences and diverse contexts. This includes respecting and celebrating our multiple ways of being, self expression, and languages. Contributing to the social and political recognition that sexuality, pleasure, and the erotic are part of our common humanity. Placing ourselves proactively within all movement-building supportive of our vision.

End!

 Les Journées cinématographiques de la femme africaine de l’image (JCFA) Launched in 2010, the JCFA is held in alternate years of FESPACO in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The following is from the initial announcement of the JCFA.

The cinematographic event is dedicated to film and audiovisual professionals. It was born from the results of several enthusiastic parties coming together: African Women Professionals of the Moving Image, the Pan-African Festival of Cinema and Television of Ouagadougou (FESPACO), other partners and particularly the Burkinabe government.

568

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

During the first edition, film screenings, a visual, audio and editing workshop, panels and exhibitions offer the opportunity to discuss issues related to the film and audiovisual profession of the African woman of the moving image.

 Women in Film Forum: Nollywood and the Dynamics of Representation The African Women in Film Forum “Nollywood and the Dynamics of Representation,” was held in Nigeria, June 16-17, 2010. The following is reprinted from the press release announcing the event.

There is a noticeable trend in the Nigerian film industry (popularly called Nollywood). The women in the films come as wicked, manipulative, loose in morals, diabolic, and inferior to the men. It is a familiar pattern: the women are hardly ever their own person; they are there to serve the men and their lives revolve round their marriage and children. If they head corporations, they either inherit it or stole it from someone. Generally, the roles of women in films are hardly ever psychologically empowering. To correct certain negative impression created in our movies on the womenfolk, a two-day forum tagged, “Nollywood and the Dynamics of Representation” holds at the Colonades Hotel, Ikoyi. The event which begins on June 16th and ends on the 17th 2010, is packaged to facilitate a gender dialogue geared to telling more empowering and inspiring stories about African women, as opposed to one or two dimensional portraits that trail our movies, said the organizers. Mrs. Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi, Executive Director of the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDP), organizers of the event, said the forum which is being put together in collaboration with Lufodo Productions, owned by veteran actor, Olu Jacobs and his wife, Joke Silva, will bring together industry practitioners at home and in the diaspora, including executive producers, directors, actors, scriptwriters, scholars, public intellectuals, culture and gender activists, amongst others. The ADWF group said that from their experience of working on women’s rights issues on the African continent, it is becoming clear that there is a need to start thinking of new ways of changing behaviors and attitudes that undermine women’s rights, and which inhibit women from achieving their full potential: “It is recognized that one of the critical sites of oppression

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

569

and violence against women in Africa is that of popular culture, expressed through popular music and film.”

 Meeting of African Women Filmmakers at Goethe-Institut Johannesburg, South Africa, 2010. This announcement was first published in filmcontact.com.

From September 1–4, 2010 two events at the Goethe-Institut will focus on professional women in the African film industry. In Arts Work: Meeting of African women filmmakers from September 1-3 (on invitation only), twenty-five women filmmakers from sub-Saharan Africa will explore chances and challenges for women in the film world and steps to be taken to strengthen their voices. During an open forum on September 4, the public is invited to join the discussion at the Goethe-Institut from 10–1pm. The events take part in conjunction with the Women of the Sun Film Festival, the First African Women Film Festival to take place in South Africa. “The film industry is a very challenging sector where women are still underrepresented worldwide,” the filmmaker Marie Ka from Senegal wrote. The meeting of the filmmakers marks the beginning of a series of platforms, with the objective to improve the intra-African exchanges and professional situation of women artists and women working in the cultural sector titled “Arts Work.” The project is interested in the situation of female artists, their limitations and possibilities, their access to resources, their acknowledgement or lack thereof—in brief: the gendered aspects of making or breaking. For the first women’s platform in September, the Goethe-Institut has invited successful filmmakers who contribute actively to change the working patterns in their field and in their country. Their biographies and their experiences, their goals and ideas are the starting point of the two-day meeting, which also represents the beginning of joint activities. Among the speakers e.g. the known Fanta Regina Nacro director and producer, culture scholars and filmmakers Christina von Braun and Beti Ellerson, director of the Centre for the Study and Research of African Women in Cinema. The meeting was developed together with the filmmaker and film curator Dorothee Wenner.

570

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Arts Work: Open Forum Saturday, September 4, 2010: 10 am to 1 pm (public) “To Screen and Be Seen: Female Perspectives on Filmmaking in Africa” Goethe-Institut Johannesburg, 119 Jan Smuts Avenue

The audiovisual industries on the African continent are undergoing dramatic changes. The digital revolution has led to the dawn of a new filmmaking era that opens up opportunities for filmmaking in Africa. Increased African audiences for films that are screened on a variety of platforms, mean more filmmakers, including women, will enter the industry in the coming years. What are the perspectives and challenges for women in this traditionally male dominated field? What lessons can be learned from experienced women of the craft? What impact will an increased number of women behind the camera and in decision making positions have on films yet to be made? What stories shall be told and how? Will choices of genre and aesthetics be affected? Finally, how are African women filmmakers claiming their space and with what vision? These will be some of the discussion points during the open forum at the Goethe-Institut. This public forum will be following a two-day meeting of twenty-five African women filmmakers and guests with the objective to strengthen the intra-African exchanges and presence of women filmmakers on the continent. In partnership with the Women of the Sun Film Festival, and with so many important voices from the African film industry present, we want to use the occasion to engage in an open discussion about operating as a woman in the film industry. The forum participants come from all over sub-Saharan Africa. The forum will be moderated by the filmmaker and programmer of the Berlinale Dorothee Wenner and film curator June Givanni.

 Manifesto: Conference of African Women Filmmakers Johannesburg, South Africa, September 3, 2010 Signed by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), Beti Ellerson (USA), Seipati Bulani-Hopa (South Africa) The meeting to ratify the manifesto was held at International Images Film Festival for Women (IIFF) 2010, in Harare, Zimbabwe with delegates from Africa and European countries.

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

571

Having met at the Goethe Institute Johannesburg, at the Conference of African Women Filmmakers held from the 2nd until the 5th of September 2010; Having deliberated on the continued misrepresentation and underrepresentation of women in general, and in particular of African women worldwide in the moving images media; Recognizing our exclusion as a group from a fair share of the resources of all natures that constitute the means of representation in the medium of moving images in all its forms; Recognizing that the media represent a social voice and position of authority so that that which appears in the media is socially empowered and that which does not appear in the media is socially disempowered with the result that mainstream moving images media works to continue the subjugation of women, and particularly of African women; Acknowledging the platform availed to us by the Goethe Institute, Johannesburg, this meeting of women film practitioners requests all national cultural ministries and all national public broadcasters on our continent, and the Commission of Culture in the African Union to take appropriate steps, in conjunction with representative structures of African Women Film practitioners (such as UPAFI—Pan African Women in Film and its affiliated membership bodies,) as well as regional bodies (such as Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe) to hold consultations aimed at putting into place mechanisms to implement, with critical and urgent considerations, this manifesto. This manifesto, drafted on this day of September 3, 2010, states the following: 1. That African women film practitioners be availed of a 50% privilege of all public and private development, production and distribution resources, including human resources invested in moving images media in all their forms on the African continent. 2. That all broadcasting content, whether private or public, conform to a 50% woman-determined content protocol through the setting up of gender desks, and through other strategies, in all public and private broadcasters on the African continent. 3. That all official decision-making bodies concerned with broadcasting, whether public or private and in whichever capacity, initiate strategies with the ultimate aim in the foreseeable future of membership consisting of 50% women in these decision-making bodies.



572

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

ADAMIC (Association des Dames d’Image du Cameroun) Founded in 2011, ADAMIC has as its objective to promote and empower Cameroonian women in cinema. The following is excerpted from the press release first published on the African Women in Cinema blog.

I. Presentation of ADAMIC ADAMIC (Association of Cameroonian Women of the Image) is a group of dynamic young women filmmakers working for the development of Cameroonian cinema made by women in particular. We are a group of talented and devoted Cameroonian women filmmakers who have come together as an association, to provide the opportunity for women to

Figure 10. Logo for the Association of Cameroonian Women of the Image. Image courtesy of the author.

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

573

professionalize as practitioners, in almost all sectors of cinema (production, directing, acting, cinematography, decoration, sound, makeup, costumes and administration, etc.).

II. Context of Its Creation For a very long time Cameroonian women were not accorded the place to demonstrate their talent in the cinema, as this profession was deemed to be for men only. And often the women who did enter ended up leaving or settling elsewhere. Those who entered the national television training school paid huge sums for their training in order to be recruited for employment. For those who were not chosen and those who were self-trained were motivated to find work as best they could. Moreover, for a woman to find an internship on a film set was a rare feat. Faced with this concern, the Goethe Institute under the leadership of Mrs. Irene Bark opened its doors by offering training workshops specifically for women. This allowed us to professionalize ourselves. It is in this context that with the support of the Goethe Kamerun Institute, during the Mis Me Binga Festival, a group of talented and dedicated women set up ADAMIC.

III. Objective of ADAMIC • • • • • •

to support and train women interested in cinematography, scriptwriting, filmmaking, film distribution, and other professions in cinema, marketing techniques for their projects; to strengthen the capacities of Cameroonian women filmmakers; to professionalize the Cameroonian women’s film sector; to train the diverse stakeholders in cinema; to promote Cameroonian film production in general and women in particular; to explore broadcast channels for our film productions.



574

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

International Images Film Festival for Women (IIFF) 2011 At the closing ceremony of the tenth edition of the International Images Film Festival for Women (IIFF) in 2011, Tsitsi Dangarembga, founder and outgoing director, reflected on the festival's first decade. Following are excerpts from the speech, given on November 26, 2011, Harare, Zimbabwe, and first published on the African Women in Cinema blog.

It’s been ten intense years of struggle. Ten intense years of insisting that there is a place for women, women of color African women, Zimbabwean women, in this industry that is so often closed to us. Ten years of sometimes having to throw tantrums to drive the point out. It has also been ten amazing years of sisterhood . . . The idea of a woman’s film festival came to mind because gender is really one of the components of film that we need to look into very closely to see how films are affecting our world, and affecting our behavior, especially our behavior in gendered relationships. So I pitched the idea to a couple of people . . . One of the people that I pitched the idea to was Jackie Cahi. . . . And Jackie was one of the people who really accompanied me on the journey along with Doreen Sibanda, and Soukaina Edom . . . Together we would sit in each other’s houses and drink tea and plot and plan. We did manage to start the festival in 2002. That year we had six films from Zimbabwe—one 35mm film. And that festival in 2002 was made possible because of two women at the British Embassy at that time, Grace Mutandwa and Sophie Honey, and the Belgian ambassador at that time, Madame Fankinett. And there have been other women in diplomatic missions and organizations who have been able to lend a hand. This has been the case really since it began. We have had the former German ambassador to Zimbabwe, Karin Blumberger Sauerteig. There was Madame Baherle from the French Embassy, there was Kari Thorsen from the Norwegian Embassy, so it has been such a pleasure to see women supporting other women . . . The French Embassy continues to support us. The Embassy of Iran has been a big supporter with wonderful films. And then there have been the men who have been supporting us . . . We are moving more and more to engaging with men, as there are a whole bunch of young women who are very confident that they can handle the technical aspects, they are going all over the world telling people about what we have been doing . . . Then UNWOMEN (formerly UNIFEM) came on board to recognize another initiative, the Ndichirimupenyu Awards which honor women’s achievements, which was another idea that came out of IIFF. The idea of IIFF is also to be a celebration of womanhood, in the narrative, in life, and in other forms of art. We have also had poets to IIFF, we have had

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

575

dancers, we have had musicians. Over the years it has been an amazing journey and I just want to say thank you to everybody. . . . It is not easy to run a festival like this for ten years; it really is an achievement. We are the first women’s film festival on the continent. There are some that have tried to take place and become professional. Most of them do not manage to become regular, but IIFF is the oldest; we have really tried to bear the torch for women’s filmmaking . . . This year we worked for eight months without a single penny in our pockets. But we said, “we are going to make this happen.” I hope that people are not going to take the work of this film festival as the normal reproductive unpaid labor of women. I hope people are going to realize that our work does have a commercial value and to recognize that commercial value as the works of other festivals are also recognized . . .

 Declaration at the Second African Women in Film Forum Done in Accra, Ghana on September 25, 2013, on behalf of all participants. Written by Nanahemaa Awindor (Ghana), Beti Ellerson (USA), and Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe).

Having met at the African Regent Hotel, Accra, at the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF), Second African Women in Film Forum held September 23–25, 2013, on the theme “Creating compelling social justice content for film and television.” Having deliberated on the state of African women in African filmmaking today and: 1. Recognizing the funding challenges and disparities faced by African women filmmakers in sourcing funding for our work; 2. Acknowledging the need to develop our capacity in writing for the big screen or television in order to tell our stories; 3. Recognizing the need for increased collaboration between ourselves in order to produce successful and competitive products; 4. Reaffirming the need for continuous capacity building and enhanced skills transfer to foster the above products; 5. Increasingly aware of the need to harmonize our diversity in the field of cultural production with respect to language and other factors; 6. Reaffirming the need to enhance distribution and exhibition opportunities for our projects;

576

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

7. Deeply concerned that the media represent a social voice and position of authority so that that which appears in the media is socially empowered; 8. That which does not appear in the media is socially disempowered with the result that mainstream moving images and media work to continue the subjugation of women, and particularly of African women. We, the participants resolve to: Found a Pan-African organization of African Women Filmmakers that is action oriented and product oriented that will commit to: 1. Alleviate the funding challenges experienced by African women filmmakers;

Figure 11. Logo for African Women Development Fund (AWDF), who convened the African Women in Film Forum in 2010. Image courtesy of the author.

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

577

2. Develop the capacity of African women filmmakers to write for the big screen or television in order to tell their stories; 3. Encourage the collaboration between African women in order to produce successful and competitive products; 4. Enhance capacity building and skills transfer in the area of production; 5. Harmonize our diversity in the field of cultural production with respect to language and other factors in order to enhance our production capacity for the big screen and television; 6. Enhance distribution and exhibition opportunities for our projects; 7. Always recognizing, and as far as possible, working with other institutions with a track record in the above fields as they apply to African women; Charge AWDF to: 1. Facilitate the formation of the above-mentioned body of African women filmmakers by facilitating a meeting of representatives, [i.e., selected interested individuals] within the ensuing six months; 2. Facilitate the creation of a database of resources of African women in film for African women in film, also taking into account such resources that already exist; 3. Facilitate our capacity building processes in the above-mentioned areas; 4. Support the setting up of a revolving fund to assist African women filmmakers in their work. We acknowledge AWDF and its partners for their support. We appreciate the interest and involvement of AWDF and staff in the activities of the program.

 TAZAMA Festival du film des femmes africaines, Congo-Brazzaville, Congo The first edition of the African Women Film Festival Tazama took place from January 6-12, 2014 in Brazzaville, Congo. The following is reprinted from the Tazama website, written by the Festival Director, Claudia Haidara-Yoka.

Figure 12. Poster for the second edition of the Tazama African Women Film Festival from 2015. Image courtesy of the author.

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

579

Tazama Festival was created with the idea of gathering women filmmakers from the African continent and offering a new platform for exchanges, meetings and inputs. The singularity of this Festival lies in its ability to bring together women who are willing to serve a cause: Fighting Cancer in Africa. Tazama, which means to see, in Swahili, makes us think about how compulsory it is, for African artists to get together and encourage the efforts of non-profit organizations that already exist in Africa. To see as in to witness a plague and contribute to its eradication. A Festival has an audience and women filmmakers are carrying strong messages.

 Udada Film Festival The first edition of the women’s film festival of Kenya was held in October 2014. The following is excerpted from press release of call for films.

The mandate of the Udada Film Festival is to: • Facilitate interaction between women filmmakers; and women filmmakers and their audiences; • Support and encourage women involved in film production; • Increase the exposure of new works written and/or directed by women • Showcase women’s work to the Kenyan and international film industry for future ventures; • Provide opportunities for professional development; • Provide a marketplace for industry. In essence, a reverse trade mission providing local filmmakers and producers access to the national and international film industry; • Develop and offer youth programs to develop the next generation of filmmakers. The Festival week also features workshops, forums and face-to-face meetings for filmmakers and producers. The Forum focuses on the business of filmmaking while the Festival celebrates international works by women.



580

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Festival Cinema au féminin (CINEF) Presented by the Association of Congolese Women Filmmakers from June 10–14, 2014 in Kinshasa, Congo. The following is reprinted from the press release.

The first edition of Cinema au féminin (CINEF) will be launched under the theme “Empowerment of Congolese women through its initiatives for development.” The theme will be developed during a seminar in which stakeholders in the cultural arena are invited to take stock of the current state of culture in DR Congo. The five-day festival will include screenings of films by Congolese women and a production and scriptwriting workshop—facilitated by Monique Mbeka Phoba. The L’Association des femmes cinéastes congolaises, AFCC (The Association of Congolese Women Filmmakers) is working to ensure the success of this first edition of the festival which will take place from June 10–14, 2014. The idea for this event came about from the realization that there are still too few Congolese women in the world of cinema, while each in her own corner attempts to carve a space in the profession. And yet filmmaking is above all a team effort. Members of the AFCC decided to join together in order to promote their work. Hence the festival aims to increase the number of women in this sector and facilitate the production and distribution of their work. Moreover, by organizing this festival, the filmmakers also want to have their talents recognized nationally and internationally. The expected results of this festival include: raising the consciousness of Congolese women of the importance of moving image professions; encourage the Congolese government, private, national, and international organizations to invest in cinema and audiovisual sectors. The network of women in cinema and the audiovisual has been created and a permanent framework is established in order to promote dialogue and exchange between them. Hence this appeal to women—in the name of equality—to embrace the cinema and audiovisual professions.

 Sisters Working in Film and Television (SWIFT) Sisters Working in Film and Television (SWIFT) was conceptualized during the 2016 Durban International Film Festival. The following is reprinted from SWIFT website.

Figure 13. Logo for Sisters Working in Film and Television (SWIFT). Image courtesy of the author.

582

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Sisters Working in Film and Television (SWIFT) was conceptualized during the 2016 Durban International Film Festival. Women making films and television (both locally and internationally) came together to address common concerns, share experiences, support, and inspire one another. All in attendance strongly expressed the importance and need of an organization that works toward uniting, engaging, and advocating for women, in essence, one that ensures that women are given a voice in the industry. This was the inception of the organization SWIFT. •

•

• • •

SWIFT is a voluntary non-profit organization committed to empowering women working in the film and television industry by building institutional strength through mass membership and forging partnerships with relevant stakeholders and organizations. SWIFT champions equal opportunities for women in a historically male-dominated industry and prioritizes equal opportunities for historically disadvantaged women in a historically white-dominated sector. SWIFT recognizes the intersectionality of women’s experiences both in front of and behind the camera, and advocates for gender and race parity throughout the industry. SWIFT supports professional development, mentorship, and networking opportunities for its members. SWIFT members are united by common cause and work together to promote and enable transformation so that screens in South Africa and worldwide may reflect all voices and a true diversity of perspective.

 Report on the Launch of African Women Filmmakers Hub The following is reprinted from Wild Track, no. 22 (September 2016), a newsletter published by Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA), Harare, Zimbabwe.

“Women taking part in film is a democratic issue. It’s about balancing the narrative that has been predominantly male as well as balancing perspective and owning the narrative,” said Kudzai Chimbaira, at the launch of African Women Filmmakers Hub, held in Harare on September 2, 2016. A day before the fifteenth edition of the International Images Film Festival (IIFF) wrapped up, African women from eight different countries,

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

583

came together to map a way forward for their equitable inclusion in the continental industry. The vehicle for this is the African Women Filmmakers Hub, a Pan-African platform designed to increase African women’s production capacity and presence in film. The project is the brainchild of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa. A diverse group of filmmakers from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Ghana were present at the meeting. Participants all agreed on one point, the need for African women to claim their space in the film industry. The women in the room were all talented, competent, and well accomplished in their chosen craft, however they have all faced the same roadblocks in this male-dominated industry. The meeting provided them with a safe space where they could share experiences working in the industry on the continent with male counterparts who refuse to acknowledge their abilities. Overseas, the only roles available for them were those of refugees and prostitutes. Those who worked as directors and writers were all expected to tell stories that reinforce stereotypes. As African women they have been constantly confronted with the double jeopardy of being female and black. Participants shared experiences of racism, sexism, and body shaming. After standing against this they are ready to be, “radical about claiming this space.” One participant spoke about the positive stories of women being constantly buried away. More often than not these stories are replaced by negative narratives that continue to undermine the place of women in history and society. The filmmakers at the hub were all committed to challenging the misrepresentation in the film industry to allow women to tell their own stories and experiences. The African Audiovisual Cinema Commission (AACC) also came into focus during the meeting. The commission since its inception in April 2016 has been silent on gender issues and the representation of women. The absent voices of women stakeholders in film was noted as a big cause for concern and participants agreed to draw a statement to the African Union. In the statement they asked the AU to align the commission with Agenda 2063 by ensuring the equitable inclusion of women. The statement was read at IIFF 2016’s closing ceremony by Matrid Nyagah from Kenya. Mapping a way forward, the hub resolved to address the shortage of skills on the continent through mentorship programs, master classes, and training workshops. Coproductions and production of short films will be done in the countries represented, which will go a long way in balancing the narratives of African women. To ensure representation of all the regions a steering committee was selected. The committee will be chaired by Kenya with Senegal serving as deputy. Mini-hubs will be set up in all the three regions.

584

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

The African Women Filmmakers Hub is a celebration of women, a challenge to perceptions, stereotypes and a move to change the politics that place African women at the bottom of the food chain. All members of the hub made a commitment to uphold the values of feminism in all the work to be undertaken. This ground-breaking project was made possible by the Ford Foundation.

 Non-Aligned Cinéastes Collective Roundtable The roundtable took place at MICA (Ministère du Commerce, de l’Industrie et de l’Artisanat), Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, February 27, 2019. The following is reprinted from the press release.

Reasons for this round table FESPACO celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year. An important anniversary for a Pan-African festival that, in the eyes of the world, represents a whole continent. Fifty years is a lot! It proves that cinema in Africa is at the heart of a vast and diverse culture. While we are proud of this existence, we ask ourselves a question: Why hasn’t the Etalon de Yennenga not yet been awarded to a woman? For the past two years, the world of cinema has been debating issues that concern the gender inequalities of the profession. There was the Weinstein affair, the #MeToo movement, followed by other debates at the Cannes Film Festival, with the signing of a charter. What about Africa?

Theme of the Round Table: The Place and Role of Women in the African Film Industry To probe issues regarding the diversity of today’s cinemas as it relates to the question of gender and feminist struggles. To share ideas regarding image education and the different training program put in place for filmmakers. The  Non-aligned Cinéastes  Collective advocates  a cinema for the re-appropriation of our stories where we talk to us, about us, among us. Our Collective questions a certain economy of production that has adapted to this fragile independent cinema, this cinema-vérité, from local, to personal stories.

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

585

Our écriture responds to the desire to directly capture our reality and to transmit a certain truth, a way to pose the problem of reality using cinema as the vehicle to act. For the fiftieth anniversary of the festival we wish to honor and also give voice to women filmmakers through this round table, with the speakers below:

The speakers: Hortense Assaga: Journalist and moderator of the round table Nadège Beausson-Diagne: Actress, singer, and columnist Rahma Benhamou El Madani: Director and producer (Morocco) Rahmatou Keita: Director (Niger) Grace Loubassou: Institutional Relations at Canal + International Mariette Monpierre: Director (Guadeloupe) Pascale Obolo: Director and curator (Cameroon) Alimata Salembéré: TV Director June Givanni: Pan African Cinema Archive (London) Xolile Tshabalala: Director, actress, and producer (South Africa)

Who are we? Our collective “Non-Aligned Cineastes” is an association of women filmmakers, which has existed for three years. This collective is an association whose mission is to support diversity, gender parity and better representation, and a greater percentage of women’s involvement in the international film industry. The objective is to break “a form of isolation” by creating links, tools, moments of solidarity, pooling resources, knowledge, best practices, and network, sharing these skills on a digital platform. The collective organizes thematic meetings and events related to the film industry: conferences, screenings, trainings, festivals, broadcasts . . .), we also do image education in schools and women’s prisons. Giving visibility to rarely screened independent films by broadcasting, distribution, production. The Non-Aligned Filmmakers Collective is affiliated with the NYC-based Film Fatales.



586

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

#MêmePasPeur Meaning “Nothing to Fear,” the #MêmePasPeur movement, inspired by #MeToo, transpired at the twenty-sixth edition of FESPACO, in Burkina Faso, 2019, specifically as the women of Africa and the Diaspora bear witness. The following is reprinted from press release.

Figure 14. Poster for the fiftieth anniversary of FESPACO in 2019. Image courtesy of FESPACO.

Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

587

#MêmePasPeur  [loosely translated “nothing to fear”], the movement opposing the violence against women in the African and Caribbean cinema industry, was launched at the Panafrican Film Festival in Ouagadougou (FESPACO) during the conference on the place of women in the film industry in Africa and the diaspora organized by the Non-aligned Women Cinéastes Collective. The voices of the actresses have been liberated, telling about the sexual assaults of which they have been victims. “Le collectif Cinéastes non-alignées,” CCNA (The Non-aligned Women Cinéastes Collective) and “Noir n’est pas métier” (Black is not my profession) are calling for the boycott of the series Le Throne directed by Tahirou Tasséré Ouédraogo in competition at FESPACO 2019. During the conference organized by CCNA on the theme “the place of women in the film industry in Africa and the diaspora,” Azata Soro, second assistant director to Burkinabe director Tahirou Tassere Ouedraogo, testified about the aggression that she suffered by the director during the shooting of The Throne series. Azata Soro told us that following a dispute, the director insulted her, hit her, broke a beer bottle, and slashed her face; an 8-centimeter scar remains visible on her cheek. The filmmaker has been tried and convicted for these acts, but by no means has he been renounced by the profession. In fact, The Throne is part of the official selection in competition for this edition of FESPACO, and is supported by TV5 Monde. It is ethically unacceptable that this film was selected by FESPACO, as part of the fiftieth anniversary of the festival. We demand that The Throne be excluded from the competition so that the Festival management and the entire profession signal a strong and empathetic gesture of support against violence and sexual harassment and abuse experienced by women in the African film industry. We invite you to sign the petition and distribute it as widely as possible. (Follow this link for the petition in French: https://www.change.org/p/cineastesnonalignees-gmail-com-détrônerle-trône-la-série-en-compétition-au-fespaco-2019.)

Pascale Obolo, vice-president: The purpose of this round table organized by the Non-aligned Women Cineaste Collective was to offer a “Safe Secure Space,” that is to say, a space where one may speak in complete confidence and without animosity, in order to question and to share our common experiences in the film industry in Africa and the diaspora. This meeting was a great success and a breakthrough for women in our film industry. The very poignant words of actress Nadège Beausson-Diagne set off a spontaneous free-flowing discussion among other women in the room.

588

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

Within this context the #MêmePasPeur movement [loosely translated as “nothing to fear”] was created during this event. The Non-aligned Cineastes spontaneously launched an online petition for the withdrawal of the film The Throne in competition at FESPACO, in a direct response to the earlier physical attack of the film’s director on the 2nd assistant director Azata Soro. Thanks to this petition we obtained our objective: the withdrawal of the series from the festival selection. In addition, TV5Monde pulled the film from its broadcast schedule, and Orange Studio cancelled Season 2 of the series The Throne. We are delighted to have created a “liberation of the voice” movement in Africa in the African film industry. After the #MeToo movement in the United States, #BalanceTonPorc in France, #MêmePasPeur now exists in Africa.

 Women’s Reflexive Workshops of Dakar The meeting of the first edition of the Ateliers Reflexives Féminins de Dakar, March 19–24, 2019. The following is reprinted from the Sabbar Artistiques website.

The Women’s Reflexive Workshops in Dakar aims to contribute to the emergence of the multidisciplinary cultural initiatives in which women occupy a central place. Many prominent Senegalese and international women (artists, academics, lawyers, activists, and political decision-makers) have been invited to reflect and exchange. The inaugural themes of this event will focus on the post-1968 revolutionary struggles and feminist struggles and their contribution to building the identities of black woman around the world. The program of this event presents discussion panels, workshops, exhibitions and openings as well as a cycle of film screenings. Through various cultural spaces in Dakar, in a spirit of openness and cooperation between the cultural actors of the city, the Women’s Reflexive Workshops of Dakar will be eager to see the emergence of new perspectives for Afro-feminism.



Dossier 3: African Women in Cinema

589

Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe (WFOZ) Stakeholders Report 2019 WFOZ seeks to eradicate violence against women and girls through mainstream women’s audiovisual narratives in marginalized urban and rural communities. The following is excerpted from the introduction of the report.

This report summarizes the findings of the project by Women Film Makers of Zimbabwe (WFOZ) on Eradicating Violence against Women and Girls through mainstreaming women’s audiovisual narratives in marginalized urban and rural communities. The methodologies adopted for this analysis included surveys and interviews. Films that involve violence against women and girls were sought and screened in different communities, followed by discussions. The films were used as tools to gather information in the communities’ understanding of VAWG as well as to raise awareness on issues and impacts of VAWG. A monitoring and evaluation exercise that measures changes before and after the screenings was also carried out. The purpose of the report is to share information gathered from communities engaged to prevent and obtain feedback on how WFOZ methodologies can be used in the future.

 The Gauteng Film Commission on Women’s Month 2020 The following is reprinted from the press release.

The Gauteng Film Commission (GFC) today launches the month-long Women’s Month 2020 program. The program will mostly showcase the work and efforts of women in the film and television sector in Gauteng, using virtual platforms across popular social media channels from August 10–31, 2020. The program is being launched during a very difficult period, when the country is under a restricted lockdown due to the global Covid-19 pandemic. In South Africa, we have witnessed the difficult circumstances and challenges faced particularly by women—the gender-based violence as well as food insecurity among other realities. Under the theme “Generation Equality: Realizing women’s rights for an equal society now” the South African government has highlighted this year’s focus for Women’s Month as gender-based

590

COLONIAL ANTECEDENTS

violence and discrimination, the advancement of the rights of women and girls in the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres of life. South Africa commemorates Women’s Month in August as a tribute to the more than twenty thousand women who marched to the Union Buildings on August 9, 1956, in protest of the extension of Pass Laws to women. It is following on this premise that the GFC has brought in partners to commemorate Women’s month this year. The program will explore issues faced by women in the industry, and solutions will be discussed in virtual activities, delivered mostly by women, namely a virtual roundtable series, women empowerment lecture with City Varsity and an Online Women Film Festival. “Reflecting on how women came together in 1956 to fight an unjust system, we have also brought in a variety of stakeholders to work with in executing this program. We have partnered with City Varsity who will run the virtual empowerment masterclasses delivered by women lecturers, we also have Netflix onboard, a global media company that has made available relief to the distressed industry—they are providing a once off, short-term emergency relief grant to below-the-line workers who are usually hired on a freelance basis, are paid hourly wages and currently have most of their work put on hold,” said GFC’s Desmond Mthembu.  The program has pulled more than thirty film and TV industry practitioners and will engage on issues ranging from sexual harassment in the sector, diversity, decolonizing spaces to women empowerment. All activities will be virtual and will be delivered through the GFC’s social media platforms.

Notes Portions of this dossier are drawn from Beti Ellerson, “African Women in Film, the Moving Image, and Screen Culture,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (2016).

Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abbot and Costello Meet Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 109 Abdelhakim, Meziani, 188 Abderrahman, Mohamed, 222 Abéga, Rémi, 12 Absa, Moussa Sene, 274, 281 Abu-Assad, Hany, 455 Abusuan, 426 Achebe, Chinua, 218, 299, 372 ACP countries, 255 Acquah, David, 146 actualités, 467 Adejunmobi, Moradewun, 412, 414 Adorno, Theodor, 37 Afigbo, A. E., 371 Afolayan, Junle, 451–52 Africable, 412 Africa for the Future, 287 Africa on Film and Videotape, 1960–1981, 233, 337 Africa on Film: Myth and Reality, 71, 81 Africa Magic, 412 Africa Paradis, 285 Africa Women Filmmakers Trust, 533. See also Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe African Affairs, 124 African Cinema, 322 African cinema: key dates, Colonial Period, 419–24; Decolonization with Independence, 424–37; Market Economy and Individualization, 437–47; Aesthetic Renewal and Digital Revolution, 447–59 African Cinema and Europe, 288 African Cinema society (CINAFRIC), 435 African Committee of Filmmakers (CAC), 252 African Conference in London (1958), 116, 118, 222 African Daily, 109 African Experiences of Cinema, 276

African Federation of Film Critics (africine.org), 250, 451 African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics, 271, 281 African Film Studies: An Introduction, 415 Africanity, 2, 8, 52 “Africanization,” 127, 128, 130 African News, 109 African Queen, The, 85, 350 African Studies Review, 414 African Union, 214, 252, 256, 258, 262, 265, 450 African Women Filmmakers Hub, 563, 582–84 African Women Filmmakers Trust (AWFT), 533, 541, 555–57, 575 African Women Professionals of the Moving Image, 567 African Women’s Development Fund (AWDP), 568, 576–77 Africultures, 250 Afrique 50 / Africa 50, 2, 31, 150, 422, 502 Afrique je to plumerai / Africa I Will Fleece You, 3, 279, 394–96 Afrique sur Seine / Africa on the Seine, 2, 3, 145, 196, 205–06, 236, 271, 406, 409, 424, 453, 485 Afro-American Film (AFRAMdistribution), 429 After Winter: Sterling Brown, 183 Ageh-Waterman, Juanita, 554 Agency for Cultural and Technical Cooperation (ACCT), 429 Ahmad, Aijaz, 360 Aidoo, Ama Ata, 300 A Idade da Terra / The Age of Earth, 334 Ain El Ghazel / Gazelle’s Eyes, 237 Air Condtioner, 228 Akloh, Ben, 250 Akomfrah, John, 281

592 Akudinobi, Jude, 8, 306 Alagba, 310 A la recherche du mari de ma femme / Looking for My Wife’s Husband, 222 Alassane, Mustapha, 196, 205, 206, 217, 244, 407, 454, 500 Al Azima / The Will, 422 Aldgate, Anthony, 88, 89, 94 Aldrich, Robert, 155 Al Fajr / The Dawn, 216 Algerian Cinematography Center (CAC), 428 Algerian L’Office National pour le Commerce et l’Industrie Cinematograpique (ONCIC), 332 Algerian National Film Center (CNCA), 428 Algerian Republican Provisional Government (GPRA), 32 Algerian War of Independence, 31, 185, 504 Algeriée en flammes / Algeria in Flames, 32 Algiers Charter on African Cinema (1975), 14, 255, 276 Al Grito de este pueblo, 189 Al-haram / The Sin, 31 Ali, Fettar Side, 188Ali Zaoua, 222, 450 Alice in Wonderland, 397–38 Allouache, Merzak, 222, 229, 434, 447 Alsino and the Condor, 332 Althusser, Louis, 388 A Luta continua / The Struggle Continues, 245 Alyam Alyam, 344 Amal, 230 Amarger, Michel, 11 Amari, Raja, 230 Ambassadrices nourrières, 272 Ambigous Adventure, 488 Ameur-Zaïmèche, Rabah, 228 Ammara, Abhedllatif Ben, 172 Amoussous, Sylvestre, 285 An Aesthetics of Hunger, 186 Andrade-Watkins, Claire, 11 Anglo-Turkish Treaty of 1838, 27 Ansah, Kwaw, 220, 278, 441 Anthills of the Savannah, 372 Aouré, 196, 205

Index Apache, 154–55. See Robert Aldrich Appadurai, Arjun, 284 Arab and African Filmmaking, 320 Arab, The, 24 Arendt, Hannah, 385 Argentina Mayo, 189 Aristotle’s Plot, 285, 287 Armah, Ayi Kwei, 372 Armes, Roy, 5, 72, 77, 184, 185, 192, 320–21, 370 Arrow of God, 300, 302 Ashes & Embers, 183, 240 Association des Dames de l’ Image du Cameroun (ADAMIC), 534, 572, 573 Association of African Directors and Producers (ARPA), 451 Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD), 535, 540–41, 549, 555 Association of African Women Professionals in Communication (APAC), 541, 549, 550–51 Atanarjuat / The Fast Runner, 292 Atlantique / Atlantics, 3, 227, 457 Atilogwu, 310 Atkinson, Michael, 451, 482 Auberge rouge / The Red Inn, 152 Au pays dogon, 422 auteur, 166, 392, 415 Avec Vent du Nord / Northern Wind, 230 Aveh, M. Africanus, 11 Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès / Being Twenty in the Aurés Mountains, 33 AWF Film Festival, 564 Awotele, 414 Ayouch, Nabil, 222 Bâ, Cheikh Ngaïdo, 257 Baamum Nafi / Nafi’s Father, 229 Baara / The Porter, 241, 242, 435, 436, 518 Babalola, Olabiyi, 302 Babenco, Hector, 331 Babu, Ayuko, 250 Badrakhan, Ahmed, 422 Bague du roi Koda, La, 205 Bakari, Imruh, 12, 276 Baker, Houston A., Jr., 303–04 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 62, 358

Index Bakupa-Kanyinda, Balufu, 252, 257 Balandier, Georges, 139 Balewa, Saddik, 373, 379 Ball in the Dust, 441 Bal Poussière / Dancing in the Dust, 276, 284, 442 Bamako, 3, 226, 283, 451 Bangré, Sambolgo, 11 Banjo, 505 Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment, 118 Bantu Minor, 109 Barakat, Henry, 31 Barek, Meryem Benm, 230 Barlet, Olivier, 2, 3, 7, 9, 11, 12, 250, 272, 286, 287, 354 Baroncelli, Jacques de, 20, 77, 156, 422 Barravento / The Turning Wind, 331 Bassori, Timité, 429, 454 Batouala, 215 Battleship Potemkin, 511–12 Baudrillard, Jean, 295 Bazin, André, 44, 48 Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, The, 372 Behanzin, Jacque, 212, 255 Behi, Ridha, 220 Bekolo, Jean-Pierre, 12, 27, 272, 274, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 287, 288, 373, 451 Bellal, 142 Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 472 Belton, John, 61 Benedek, Laslo, 151 Bengal Brigade, 151 Béni, Alphonse, 187, 198–99 Benjamin, Walter, 297 Bergmann, Kristina, 27 Bernheim, Michel, 20 Berrah, Mouny, 31, 32 Berthomieu, André, 146 Bertucelli, Jean-Louis, 393` Beti, Mongo, 216, 371 Bettinson, Gary, 414 Beye, Ben Diogaye, 242–43, 408, 518 Beyond the Plains, 340 Bhabha, Homi, 201, 361 Bicycle Thief, The, 514 Bididi, Henri-Joseph Koubi, 283 Big Game Hunting in Africa, 83

593 Bioscope, African, 5; birth, 102–06 Bira, Abraham Haile, 258, 260 Birth of a Nation, 83 Birri, Fernando, 7, 186, 187, 188–89, 195, 490 Bishop, Terry, 77 Black African Cinema, 275 Black Atlantic, 1, 13 Black Camera, An International Film Journal, 4, 11, 411, 414 Black Film Center / Archive, 485 Black Light, 445 Black Love, 199 Black Panther Party, 199 Black Shack Alley, 203 Black Skins, White Masks, 8, 206. See Frantz Fanon Blackburne, K. W., 115, 151 Bloodettes, The, 451 Blue Nile Film, 412 Bobo, Jacqueline, 79 Boetticher, Budd, 151 Bohanan, Paul, 82 Boisson, Pierre, 149 Bonetti, Mahn, 250, 258 Bongolo, 423 Bongo, Omar, 471 Borgnis-Desbordes, Gustave, 137 Boro, Aïcha, 228 Borom Sarret, 2, 169, 186, 188, 196, 200, 205, 217, 236, 242, 274, 426, 453, 469–70, 487 Bouamari, Mohamed, 193 Boubou Cravate, 205 Bouchareb, Rachid, 225 Boughedir, Férid, 6, 7, 11, 19, 24, 73, 169, 175, 223, 276, 277, 317, 390, 547 Boujemaa, Hinde, 228 Boukman, Daniel, 239 Boulanger, Pierre, 39 Bouret-Aubertot, M, 60–61 Bouzid, Nouri, 222, 438, 451 Boy Kumasenu, The, 130, 144 Brahim, Youssef Ben, 259 Brando, Marlon, 472 Brazza ou l’ éopée du Congo / Epic of the Congo, 17, 20 Brecht, Bertolt, 218

594 British Film Institute, 115 British Nationality Act (1958), 124 Bronx Barbès, 273 Bryce, Jane, 12 Bulane-Hope, Seipati, 6, 211, 256 Bulletin du Conseil Economique, 60 Bureau du cinéma (Senegal), 192 Burke, Timothy, 38, 51 Burkina Faso, 51, 142, 170, 172, 203, 212, 218, 222, 234, 243, 253, 255, 258, 259, 264, 266, 278, 284, 286, 287, 322, 331, 395, 412, 445, 457, 482, 500, 506, 534, 535, 539, 554, 559, 586 Burn, James, 5 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 83 Burton, Julianne, 189, 325 Bush Mama, 183, 240 Buud Yam, 3, 447, 448 Bye Bye Africa, 3, 4, 50, 225 C’était il y a quatre ans / It was four years ago, 196, 453 Cabral, Amilcar, 185, 337, 510, 511 Cabascabo, 217, 407 Callegari, Gian Paolo, 151 Camara, Cheick Fantamady, 281 Camara, Mahamed, 283, 284 Caméra d’Afrique, 200 Cameroun, Kenneth, 39, 41–42 Camp de Thiaroye, 205, 278, 322, 353, 441, 494, 495, 518 Camus, Albert, 489 Canal +, 412, 459; subsidiary, A+, 412 Canes, George, 318 Cannes Film Festival, 170, 216, 225, 251, 256, 258, 262, 434, 438, 452, 584; transitional organization council (TOC), 258, 259, 260, 261, 262 Caristan, Robert, 145 Carstairs, C. Y., 127 Carthage Film Festival (CFF), 6, 170, 172, 187, 200, 218, 248, 249, 251, 253, 258, 262, 263, 264, 428, 429 438, 447, 454, 457, 459, 539 Castro, Fidel, 185 Catholic Film Commission, 155 CAV, 32

Index Ce Kasarmu / This Land is Ours, 373, 374, 376, 379, 380–81 Cecilia, 333 Ceddo, 205, 238, 333, 434, 475, 482, 495, 502, 518 Center for Film and Media Studies (South Africa), 413 Central Office of Information (COI), 115, 116, 124, 126 Centre du Cinema Marocain, 199 Centre national du cinéma algérian (CNCA), 192, 428, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, 188–89, 207–08n15 Césaire, Aimee, 193, 200, 215, 227, 239, 452, 466, 497, 513 Chabrol, Claude, 274 Chahine, Youssef, 225, 237, 422, 425, 447 Cham, Mbye, 11, 276, 279, 293, 390 Chaplin, Charlie, 180 Champreux, Jacques, 288 Charcoal Burner, The, 193 Chef!, 205 Chergui, El, 219 Cherif, El Hachimi, 188 Cheriaa, Tahar, 218, 237, 264, 251, 263, 428, 454–55, 482 Chevalier, Laurent, 288 Chikly, Albert Samama, 22, 23, 24, 34, 237, 419, 420 Child of Resistance, 240 Children and the Cinema, 154 Chocolat, 273 Christian-Jaque, 165 Chronique des années de braise / Chronicle of the Years of Fire, 172, 192, 216, 278, 344 Chuquiago, 334 Churchill, Winston, 117 Cineastes d’Afrique Noir, 244 Cinema au féminin (CINEF), 535, 580 Cinéma Colonial, Le, 39 cinema novo, 186, 337 Cinema, Politica e a Estetica do Inconsciente, 337 cinema shacks, 110 Cinémathèque africaine (Ouagadougou), 441

Index Cinematograph Exhibitions Board of Control, 148 Cinemotograph Ordinance, 155 Cissé, Souleymane, 2, 27, 174, 201, 219, 220, 223, 225, 226, 241, 246, 250, 252, 253, 297–98, 301, 350, 352, 356–57, 430, 436, 438, 516 Cissokho, Cheikh Omar, 451, 455 Civilisation Europeenne en Afrique, 58 Clando, 3 Clarté, 55 Clawson, Patrick, 28 Cluny, Claude Michel, 32 Code Noir, 202 Code Phoenix, 286 Cohen, William B, 54 Cold War, 46 Collectif Cinéastes non-alignéas. See Nonaligned Women Cinéaste Collective Collywood, 288 Colonial Cinema, 123, 125 Colonial Cinemagazine, 116, 119, 123, 124 Colonial Film, 4; formations 4–136 Colonial Film Unit (CFU), 5, 73, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 146 Colonial Ministry, 45 Colonial Misunderstanding, The, 283 Colonial Month, 116, 119–21 Colonial Office, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 122, 124–25 Colonial Office Information Service, 151 COMACICO, 46, 142, 147, 173, 234, 429, 430, 433, 454 Come Back Arica, 425 Commission Fédérale de Contrôle Cinématographique (CFCC), 48, 59, 61, 63 Communist Manifesto, The, 504 Communist Party: French (PCF), 46,452, 502, 504, 510, 512, 513; US, 513 Concerto for an Exile, 171 Conde, Maryse, 204 Confederation General du Travail (CGT), 452, 502 Congress of Algiers (1975). See FEPACI Congress of Negro Writers and Artists (1956), 15

595 Conrad, Joseph, 489 Consortium Intersafricain de Distribution Cinematographique (CIDC), 173–74, 220, 222, 252–54, 255, 263, 438 Consortium of Audiovisual Communication in Africa, 561 Constantine, Eddie, 140 Contes des mille et une nuits / Tales of the Arabian Nights, 23 Contra’s City, 197–98 Convention People’s Party (CPP). See Kwame Nkrumah Cooper, Gary, 139 Coppet, de Marcel, 44 Coppola, Francis Ford, 334 Corps étranger / Foreign Body, 230 Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), 413 Coulibaly, Daniel Ouezzin, 138 Cowboiadas, 140 Crofts, Stephen, 74, 75 Cuban Revolution, 185–86, 187 Culler, Jonathan, 306 Cultural Charter of Africa, 14 Curling, Chris, 318 Curtis, Michael, 151 Daily Mirror, 123 Dakan / Destiny (Camara), 284 Dakar Censorship Board, 155 Dakar Cine-Club, 156 Dakar-Jeunes, 55 Damas, Leon, 215, 239 Daratt, 226, 286 Dash, Julie, 303 Dassin, Jules, 151 Daughters of the Dust, 303 Davanture, Andrée, 437 Davis, Bridgett, 12 Davis, Peter, 25, 26 Dawn, Marpesa, 271 Dawn of the Damned, The, 428 Daybreak in Udi, 77–78 Death and the King’s Horseman, 300, 372 Death of Rasalama, 422 Décembre, 192

596 Declaration and Resolutions of the Conference of Independent African States, 14 Declaration and Resolutions of the Fifth Pan-African Congress (selections), 15 Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, 13, 14–15 Declaration Second African Women in Film Forum, 575–77 De Duras, Claire, 508 Defoe, Daniel, 489 De Gaulle, Charles, 44, 46, 186, 344 De Latour, Éliane, 273 Delavignette, Robert, 37–38, 41, 48, 50–54, 58, 63 Demarchelier, Jacques, 147 Denise, Claire, 273, 288 Deren, Maya, 49 D’Erneville, Anne Mbaye, 537 Des étoiles / Under the Starry Sky, 230 De Sica, Vittorio, 191 De Turégano, Teresa Hoefert, 283, 287 Deus e o diabo na terra do sol / Black God, White Devil, 186, 333 Dia, Mamadou, 55, 205, 229 Dia, Urbain Makhouri, 205 Diagne, Oumarou, 562 Dibango, Manu, 153 Di Cavalcanti, 333, 334 Diakité, Moussa, 187 Diallo, Boubacar, 199, 286, 287 Diallo, Nafissatou, 142 Diao, Claire, 11, 250 Diawara, Manthia, 11, 72, 153, 184, 271, 272, 273, 278, 279, 280, 286, 293, 322, 323, 324, 325, 370, 451, 499, 513 Dieux sont tombés sur la téte, 25 Dikongue-Pipa, Jean Pierre, 172, 281 Diop, Baba, 258 Diop, Birago, 499 Diop, Boubacar Boris, 518 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 481 Diop, Djibril, 197, 206 Diop, Makéna, 12 Diop, Mati, 3, 227, 457 Diouf, Abdou, 255, 256, 257, 260, 262 Dipio, Dominica, 413 Djeli, 174, 220

Index DOCKANEMA Festival, 258 Documentaire de Création, 412 Donald Duck, 180 Dossier brulant, 286 Doucouré, Amadou, 154 Dovey, Lindiwe, 11, 414 Dreams, 292 Drum, 86, 451 Drum Magazine, 414 Dry White Season, A, 319, 324 DStv, 412 DuBois, W. E. B., 510 Duparc, Henri, 274, 276, 283, 284, 426, 441, 442, 445 Dupré, Colin, 11 Durban International Film Festival, 437 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 326 Eagleton, Terry, 304 Easy Rider, 355 Écaré, Désiré, 205, 244, 273, 283, 438 Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), 542 Economic Council for French West Africa, 61 Ecrans d’Afrique, 562 Ecrans Noirs Festival, 447 Eddine, Ibrahim Ezz, 143 Eden, Martin, 505 éDuvivier, Julian, 2 Eisenstein, Sergei, 56, 512 Eke, Maureen, 8 Ellerson, Beti, 11; curated Dossier 3, 536–90 Elliot, T. S., 298 Ellison, Ralph, 239 Eloy, 189 Elton, Ray, 130 Elungu, Pene, 388 Emitaï / The Angry God, 204, 278, 340, 347, 353, 430, 495, 510 Enfield, Cy, 151 English, John, 140 Enquête au paradis / Investigating Paradise, 229 Epic of the Congo, The, 20 Escuela Filmica Boliviana, La, 189

Index Essaïda, 220 Estas Sao as armas / These Are the Weapons, 245 Et la neige n’était plus / And the Snow Was Gone,, 454 Evans, Gareth, 125 Evans, Harold, 127 Eyimofe / This is My Desire, 227–28 Ezra, 453 Ezra, Elizabeth, 44 Faat Kiné, 284, 450, 495 Fabio, Cheryl, 12 Fad Jal, 219, 242, 340 Faeno, 189 Fall, Youma, 260 Falling into Theory, 307 Famished Road, The, 300 FAMU (Prague), 32, 192 Fanon, Frantz, 8, 184, 185, 193, 200, 201, 205, 206, 237, 239, 245, 315, 329, 491, 493, 494, 512; Fanonian, 332 Farewell, My Concubine, 292, 302 Farid group, 32 Fatwa, 457 Fawzl, Husain, 142 Faye, Safi, 172, 178, 179, 182, 219, 242, 244, 283, 284, 340 Federation of Caribbean Audiovisual Professions (FeCAVIP Manifesto), 15 Federation Panafricaine des Cineastes (FEPACI) / Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers, 6, 170, 187, 195, 197, 198, 200, 201, 203, 211, 212, 213, 218, 219, 222, 251–52, 253, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 276, 277, 281, 350, 429, 434, 438, 451, 461, 540, 557–58; FEPACI TV, 213 Félicité, 3, 227, 231, 457, 458 Femme d’images de l’Afrique Francophone, 551 “Femme Noire” (poem), 494 Fernandel, 139 Festival du film des femmes africaines (TAZAMA), 535 Festival of Black Arts (Dakar), 249 Fevers, 455

597 Fifth Amateur Film from Overseas France Competition (1958), 144 Film and Photo Bureau, 73 Film in Colonial Development, The, 127 Film Language, 388 Films Pierre Cellier Dakar, 59–60 Fils maudit, Le, 425 Final Communiqué of the First Frontline Film Festival, 203 Finye / The Wind, 2, 174, 220, 241, 253, 438 First Cinema, 392, 395–96 First Festival of Negro Artists (1966), 185 Flash of the Spirit, 296 Fleur de sang, La, 205 Floyd, George, 231 Fonds d’ aide àl’ industrie cinématographique / National Endowment for the Film Industry (FODIC), 192, 199 For an Imperfect Cinema, 332 Forest, Claude, 2, 3, 9 Foucault, Michel, 296 Four Feathers, The, 86 Fradique, 228 Franc, Le, 326 Francophone Commonwealth,186 Freire, Paulo, 195 FRELIMO, 425 French Colonial Archives, 54–53 French New Wave, 271, 495 Friends, 225 Frindéthié, K. Martial, 184 Fund for the Promotion of the Film and Audiovisual Industry (FOPICA), 450, 455 Fureur au poing. See Alphonse Béni Gabin, Jean, 21 Gabonese Cinema Center (CENACI), 434 Gabriel, Teshome, 8, 34, 237, 238, 293, 305, 318, 319, 320, 322, 323–24, 325, 387, 390 Gadjigo, Samba, 9, 449, 451, 482, 524 Gamboa, Zéze, 12 Gance, Abel, 23 Ganda, Oumarou, 171, 217, 244, 281, 288, 407, 431, 454 Garbo, Greta, 180

598 García Espinosa, Julio, 7, 186, 187, 332 García, Jean-Pierre, 250 García Marquez, Gabriel, 310 Gardies, A, 390 Gare centrale, 425 Garga M’ Bosse, 172 Gasmelbari, Suhaib, 228 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr, 307 Gaumont, 22, 459 Gauteng Film Commission (GFC), 589–90 Gawana, Madame, 214 Gaye, Diana, 230 Geertz, Clifford, 386 Gender Terrains in African Cinema, 413 General Organization of Egyptian Cinema, 29, 31 Genesis, 279 Genini, Izza, 556 Genova, James E, 5 Gerima, Haile, 36, 240, 241, 246, 272, 303, 306, 390, 393, 400, 452; formation, 178–81 Getino, Octavio, 34, 186, 187, 323, 329, 392, 429 Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC), 424 Ghoula, El, 192 Gide, André, 420 Gilroy, Paul, 284, 287 Givanni, June, 12, 250, 258, 262 Glass, Philip, 502 Gledhill, Christine, 84–85 Glover, Danny, 12, 250 Godard, Jean-Luc, 217, 239, 274, 334, 343 Gods Must Be Crazy, The, 25, 26, 27, 424 Godzich, Wlad, 307 Goerg, Odile, 6 Gollywood, 446 Gold Coast Film Unit, 125, 128, 129, 130–31 Gomes, Flora, 2, 225, 441 Gómez, Sara, 332 Gomis, Alain, 3, 226, 227, 231, 455, 457 Gorky, Maxim, 512 Goethe-Institut, 569–70, 573 Gouma, 344 Goumbé, 140

Index Graham, Sean, 129, 130, 132, 144 Great Depression, 45 Griaule, Marcel, 422 Grierson, John, 77, 115, 126, 127, 129, 130 Griffith, D. W., 83 Griot, 278, 279, 356, 390, 401, 452, 518 Groupe africain de cinéma, 145, 485 Guelwaar, 3, 285, 445, 479, 495 Guerdjou, Bourlem, 3, 447 Guernica, 298 Guerra, Ruy, 245 Guevara, Che, 239, 337 Gugler, Joseph, 184 Guild of African Directors and Producers, 252, 257 Guillen, Nicolás, 185 Guimba, the Tyrant, 205, 263, 446 Gusfield, Joseph R, 373 Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás, 7, 186, 325, 348, 490 Gutsche, Thelma, 100 Hacking, Ian, 386 Haffner, Pierre, 390 Haggard, H. Rider, 350 Hakkar, Amor, 3 Hales, Gordon, 115 Halfaouine, 223, 445 Hama, Baba 455 Harb, Talaat, 28 Harlan, Veit, 149 Haroun, Mahamat-Saleh, 3, 225, 226, 230, 251, 450, 452 Harris, R. W., 125 Harris, Sue, 44 Harrow, Ken, 185, 218, 277, 353, 354 Harvest: 3000 Years, 183, 240 Heidegger, Martin, 366, 385 Heller, Agnes, 387 Hemingway, Ernest, 452 Hennebelle, Guy, 25, 244 Heremakono, 3, 227, 450 Heritage Africa, 278, 441 Higgins, John, 388 Higson, Andrew, 74 Hinden, Rita, 122 Hitchcock, Alfred, 226 Hollywood, 5, 20, 24, 29, 30, 62, 74–75, 76, 83, 100, 141, 232, 236, 237, 241, 254,

Index 274, 292, 298, 318, 321, 322, 324, 325, 330, 331, 386, 388, 511 Home of the Brave, 152 Hondo, Med, 2, 6, 42, 168, 172, 201, 204, 205, 216, 238–39, 240, 241, 246, 252, 278, 332, 351, 441, 445 Hood, Gavin 451 Hopper, Dennis, 355 Hors-la-loi / Outside the Law, 225 Houssein, Djiboutian Souad, 257 How a British Bull Dog Saved the Union Jack, 83 How Long, 245 Howson, H. M. K., 126 Hugo, Victor, 228 Hunebelle, André, 152 Huston, John, 151 Hyenas, 225, 325, 326, 444, 445 Ibekwe, Chinweizu, 488 Ibrahim, Abbas Fadhil, 30 Ifa, 310 Ilboudo, Martine Condé, 562 Illuminations, 297 IMAGINE Film Institute, 4, 12 Immacolata e Concetta, 191 In-Laws, The, 340 Indigènes / Days of Glory, 225 Indigenization Decree, 431 Indochina, 504 Inheritance, The, 193 Inland, 226 Inspecteur Sory, le Mamba, 286 Institut des hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (IDHEC), 145, 199, 409 Institute for Film Studies (INAFEC), 435 Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), 514 Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA), 562, 582–84 Instituto Cubano de Arte y Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), 332 Instituto de Cinematográphico Bolivian, 190 Institut Supérieur de l’Image et du Son / Ecole de Studio (ISIS-SE), 12 Institut Supérieur des Métiers de l’Audiovisual, 412

599 Inter-African Cinema Distribution Consortium (CIDC), 433, 435, 437 Inter-African Film Production Centre (CIPROFILM), 253, 433, 435, 438 International Arab Film Festival of Oran, 435 International Festival of Tours, 169, 236 International Film Festival of Cairo, 435 International Images Film Festival for Women (IIFF), 534, 543, 574–75 International Organization of La Francophonie (OIF), 256, 258, 262, 429, 452 International Women’s Film Festival of Salé, 564–65 Intisar al-chabab, 422 Invisible Man, 239 Irobi, Esiaba, 8 iROKOtv, 412 Ivana, Imunga, 274 Jacquin, Maurice, 147 Jeancolas, Jean-Pierre, 42 Jeune Afrique, 252 Jeune Societe National de Cinema, 172 Jeyifo, Biodun, 306 Jom / Dignity, 219, 243, 244, 253 Journal of African Cinemas, 414 Journal of Nigerian Theatre and Film Studies, 414 Journée cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC). See Carthage Film Festival (CFF) Journées cinématographiques de la femme africaine de I’image (JCFA), 534, 542, 567–68 Journey to the Sun, 318 Joyce, James, 298 Jud SüB / SüB the Jew, 149 June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive (JGPACA), 258 Ka, Marie, 569 Kaboré, Gaston, 2, 3, 8, 9, 11, 203, 222, 223, 243, 251, 253, 255, 256, 263, 265, 279, 319, 373, 395, 447, 448, 455 Kaboré, Sika, 542 Kaddu Beykat / Letter From My Village, 219, 242

600 Kahiu, Wanuri, 230 Kaige, Chen, 292 Kalabari, 310 Kaled, Mache, 188 Kamwa, Daniel, 205, 281, 283 Kane, Cheikh Hamidou, 206, 226, 488 Kane, Jacques Mélo, 145, 236 Kane, Mohamadou, 280 Kanyua, Grace, 554 Karmen Geï, 284, 285 Kateb, Mustapha, 192 Keita, Ibrahim Boubacar, 263 Keïta! L’Héritage du griot / Keita! Voice of the Griot, 279, 446 Keita, Modibo, 469 Keith, J. L., 107 Kemp, Tom, 27 Kente, Gibson, 245 Kenyan Film Corporation (KFC), 428 Kenya Film School, 412 Kenyatta, Jomo, 511 Kérékou, Mathieu, 256 Khan, Mehboob, 142 Khayati, Khémais, 29, 30 Khleïfi, Michel, 441 Khlifi, Omar, 216 Kini & Adams, 225 King Solomon’s Mines, 85, 93, 350 Kiss of the Spider Woman, The, 331 Kobhio, Bassek Ba, 373 Kodo, 218 Kola, Mamadou Djim, 252 Kollasuyo Group, 189 Kongi’s Harvest, 299 Korda, Zoltàn, 70, 77, 86 Koudou, 238, 243 Kourouma, Ahmadou, 216, 226 Kouyaté, Dani, 12, 279, 283, 446 Kracauer, sigfried, 49–50 Kramo-Lanciné, Fadika, 174, 220 Kratz, Corinne, 371 Kung Fu films, 141 Kunuk, Zacharias, 292 Kurosawa, Akira, 292 Laafi, 205 La Bataille du rail / The Battle of the Rails, 137, 148

Index La Battaglia di Algeri / The Battle of Algiers, 2, 185, 428, 509 La Belle, la brute et le berger, 286 Lacan, Jacques, 387, 388 La Fille de Carthage / The Girl from Carthage, 24 L’ Afrique littéraire et artistique, 414 Laila, 143, 237 Lakhdar-Hamina, Mohamed, 32, 33, 209n42, 216, 278, 428 Lamizana, Aboubakar Sangoulé, 500 Lamour, Dorothy, 140 Lamy, Benoit, 324 Landau, Paul 39–40 Language and Cinema, 388 La Noire de… / Black Girl, 170, 236, 271, 278, 285, 427, 428, 453, 487, 492, 493, 495, 500, 513–14 La Pirogue, 3 Larkin, Brian, 101 Laskri, Amar, 216 Last Grave at Dimbaza, 245, 318 Last Supper, The, 344, 345 Latham, G. C., 72 La Trace / The Trace, 220 Laurel and Hardy, 139 Laurence of Arabia, 34, 165 Laval Decree (1939), 43–44, 48, 149, 216 Laye, Camara, 205, 216 L’ Aventure ambiguë / Ambiguous Adventure, 206, 226 La Vie est belle / Life is Rosy, 284, 324, 373, 375, 376, 377, 379 La Vie sur terre / Life on Earth, 225, 226 Lazarus, Neil, 278 Lean, David, 165 Le Destin (Chahine), 225, 447, 449 Le Devoir de violence / Bound to Violence, 216 Le Docker Noir / Black Docker, 491 Lelièvre, Samuel, 272 Le Loup d’or de Balolé / Balolé, The Golden Wolf, 228 Le Malentendu colonial, 3 L’ Enfant maudit / The Cursed Child, 216–17 L’ Enfant noir / The African Child, 205, 216

Index Lenin, Vladimir, 491, 494 Léopoldville Censorship Board, 152 L’ Esclave Blanche, 47–48 L’ France, 226 L’ Herbe sauvage, 426 L’ Heroïque Embuscade, 45–47 L’ Home de cendres / Man of Ashes, 222, 438, 440 L’ Homme du Niger / The Man from Niger, 20, 77, 156, 422 L’ Oeil vert (collective), 437 L’ Or des Younga, 286 Le Retour de l’aventurier / The Return of an Adventurer, 217, 407 Les Bicots-Negres, vos voisins / Dirty Arabs, Dirty Niggers Your Neighbors, 172, 205, 239, 433 Les Bouts de bois de Dieu / God’s Bits of Wood, 238, 299, 371, 453, 481, 486, 507, 509, 512 Les Cinémas africains, 25 Les Cinq gentleman maudits / Five Cursed Gentleman, 20 Les Filles au soleil, 199 Les Maîtres fous, 271 Les Mecs, les flics el les putains, 199. See Alphonse Béni Les Paysans noirs, 5, 48, 50–55, 56, 57, 61, 63 Les Saignantes / Those Who Bleed, 285 Les Soleils des indépendances / The Suns of Independence, 216 Les Statues meurent aussi / Statues Also Die, 150 Let’s Talk Grandmother, 441 Letters From My Village, 178 Lettre Paysanne, 172 Littin, Miguel, 332 Living in Paradise, 3 Lodge, John, 47 London, Jack, 452, 505 London Film Festival, 258 Lone Ranger, The, 140 Loti, Pierre, 20 Love Brewed in the African Pot, 220 Lucía, 333, 345 Luitz-Morat, 20 Lumière, 19–20, 419 Lumumba, Patrice, 239, 511

601 Luxor African Film Festival (LAFF), 258 Ly, Ladj, 228 Maanouni, Ahmed, el, 240 Mabanckou, Alain, 226 Mabrouk, Néjia Ben, 220 Macbeth, 397 Macfarlane, Pascoe, 318 MacNeice, Louis, 130 Maherzi, Lotfi, 32 Mahfouz, Naghib, 422 Mahmoud, Mahmoud Ben, 12, 24, 457 Mahomo, Nana, 245 Maison jaune, 3 Malcolm X, 239 Maldoror, Sarah, 2, 178, 179, 240, 241, 272, 273, 277, 278, 417, 431, 533, 537, 545, 547, 548 Malkmus, Lizbeth, 72, 77, 320, 370 Mamba, 286 Mambéty, Djibril Diop, 2, 206, 220, 225, 226, 285, 298, 325, 326, 350, 352, 354, 355, 356, 431, 441, 445, 447; Djibril Diop Mambéty Cine Club, 264 Man From Cocody, 165 Mandabi / The Money Order, 197, 205, 331, 407, 410n6, 453, 477, 487, 506 Mandat, Le, 171,429 Manifesto: Conference of African Women Filmmakers, 14 Manthan / The Churning, 334 Mapantsula, 446 Marché International du Cinéma Africaine (MICA), 584–85 Marian, René, 215 Marrakech International Film Festival, 437 Marseillaise, 149 Martin, Michael T., 1, 10, 11, 282, 485 Marzano, Nicolas, 186 Marx, Karl, 200, 452, 491, 504; Marxism, 505, 509–10, 512; neo-marxist approaches, 315, 317, 318, 321, 325, 351, 352, 359, 360, 381, 384, 388, 400 Maseko, Zola, 451 Massacre in Lace, 150 Massimadi Festival of Afro-LGBTQ Films and Arts, 565–66

602 Mattar, Walid, 230 Maynard, Rchard A., 71, 81 Mbembe, Achille, 201 M’Bengue, Majhmout, 156 McFeely, Gareth, 141, 147 McKay, Claude, 502, 505 Méfiez-vous des blondes / Beware of Blondes, 152 Megherbi, Abdelghani, 22, 32 Mektoub, 222 #MêmePasPeur Movement, 535, 586 Memmi, Albert, 185, 193, 200 Men in Africa, 77–78 Men of Two Worlds, 93 Mensah, Simone Aïssé, 540 Merbah, Lamine, 188, 193–94 Mersah, Charles, 211, 257, 258, 260 Mestman, Mariano, 187, 191 Metz, Christian, 57, 388 Mexico: The Frozen Revolution, 346 Mgbejume, Onyero, 72 Micky Mouse, 180 Midsummer Night’s Dream, 397 Military Drill of the Kikuyu Tribes and Other Ceremonies, 83 Miller, Christopher, 350, 358 Misérables, Les, 228 Misr Studios, 28–29 Missionaries in Darkest Africa, 83 Mississippi Masala, 389 Mister Johnson, 86, 87, 95 Mitterand, François, 63 Mogotlane, Thomas, 446 Mohamed, Bensalah, 188 Mohamed, Jan, 79 Mohamad, Tazi Ben Abelouahed, 199 Moi Titwba soiciére noire de Salem, 204 Moi, un noir / I, A Negro, 140, 217, 271, 425 Moolaadé, 309, 451, 456, 4495, 506, 516, 517, 518; making of, 482–83 Moore, Carrie Dailey, 509. See also Ousmane Sembène Moore, Cornelius, 12 Morrison, Herbert, 117 Mortu Nega, 2, 441 Moscow Film School (VGIK), 219 Mossane, 243, 284, 285

Index Mother, 512 Mother India, 142 Motion Pictures Export Association of America (MPEAA), 171, 173, 429 Motion Pictures Producers Association (MPPA), 233 Mouramani, 196, 453 Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), 431, 537 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 503 Mr. English at Home, 115 Mudimbe, V. Y., 315–16, 378 Mueda: Memorial and Massacre, 245–46 Muller, Benoit, 259 Mulvey, Laura, 78 Muna-Moto, 172 Mungai, Anne, 538 Murphy, David, 8, 281, 285 Mweze, Ngangura, 450 My Aunt Nora, 334 My Name is Tsotsi, 451 Mystery of the Black Jungle, The, 151 Naficy, Hamid, 391 Nair, Mira, 389 Napoléon, 23 National Cinema Institute (INC), 434 National Film Office of Côte d’Ivoire (ONAC-CI), 452 National Liberation Front (FLN), 32 Ndeysaan, The Price of Forgiveness, 279, 284, 285 N’Diangane, 172, 243 Ndiaye, Katy Lena, 228 N’Dour, Youssou, 502 Nee-Owoo, Kwate, 244 Négritude, 15, 44, 55, 185, 219 Nelson, Cole, 10, 523–24 neorealism, 206 Neruda, Pablo, 452 Network of African Exhibitors and Distributors (REDA), 457 New Direction in Documentary, 127 Ngangura, Mewze, 281–82, 283, 284, 286, 287, 324, 373, 374, 377 Niamey Manifesto of African Filmmakers, 14, 174–75, 202, 220, 246, 276, Niang, Sada, 6, 9, 449, 451

Index Nigerian Film Unit (NFU), 129, 130–31 Nigerian Footballers in England, 116, 124 Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), 428 Night, The, 445 Nkrumah, Kwame, 148, 509–10, 511, 532 Noble, George, 125, 129–30 Noble, Peter, 71 Nollywood, 199, 266, 281, 288, 445, 534, 568; “New Nollywood,” 451–52 Non-Aligned Movement, 490 Non-Aligned Cinéastes Collective, 584–85, 587–88 Notcutt, L. A., 72 Noura rêve / Noura’s Dream, 228 Nous aurons toute la mort pour domir / We’ll Have All Death to Sleep, 239 Nous deux France, A. See Désiré Ecaré Novel of a Colonial Soldier, 20 Nsibidi, 8, 296, 298–99, 301–02, 303, 306, 307, 309, 310 Nua, 193 Nujoma, Sam, 25–26 Nyerere, Julius K., 340, 510 OCAM, 253, 425 Office des actualités algériennes (OAA), 192 Office de la radio et television françaises (ORTF), 192 Office national du cinema et de l’industrie cinématoraphique (ONCIC), 192–93, 428 O’Healy, Aine, 191 Ojaide, Tanure, 372 Okri, Ben, 300 Old Man and the Medal, The, 371 O Leāo de Sete Cabeças / The Lion Has Seven Heads, 337 Olukunga, Ibrahim, 199 Omar Gatlato, 222, 346, 434 On a le temps pour nous / Time Is on Our Side, 228 Once Were Warriors, 292 One Nation, Algeria, 31–32 One Way or Another, 332 On the Wire, 389 O Pavo organizado / The People Organized, 245

603 O Pays, Mon Beau People, 510 Open Water, 286 Onikoyi, Tunde, 413 Organization of African Unity (OAU), 169, 252, 426, 450 Orike, 310 Osadebay, Dennis Chukwude, 372 Ospina, Luis, 331 Ouagadougou Youth Movement, 154 Ouédraogo, Aminata, 554 Ouédraogo, Carole, 269, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369 Quédraogo, Idrissa, 27, 221, 222, 224–25, 226, 251, 263, 273, 282, 283, 284, 286, 322, 438, 441, 451 Ourika, 508 Ousseini, Inousa, 173, 220, 244 Overseas Cinema Commission, 53 Oyono, Ferdinand, 371 Pabst, Georg Wilhelm, 47 PAIGC, 431 Palcy, Euzhan, 319 Pan-African Cultural Manifesto (1969), 14 Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO), 3, 4, 6, 10–11, 12, 170,174, 203, 211, 212, 213, 214, 218, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 256, 257, 258, 259, 262, 263, 264, 272, 303, 390, 411, 413, 415, 416, 417, 429, 431, 434, 435, 437, 438, 441, 445, 446, 447, 450, 451, 455, 458, 480, 533–34, 535, 553, 539, 542, 552, 553, 557, 558, 567, 584, 586, 587, 588; MICA, 438 Pan-African Film and Television Fund (FPCA), 255–56, 257, 258 Pan-African Film Festival, 251 Pan-Africanism, 2, 15, 187, 218, 252, 254; birth of cinematographic pan-africanism, 249–51, 255, 262, 263, 264, 267, 281, 509, 510 Pan African Union of Women of the Moving Image (UPAFI), 534 Paris, c’est Joli, 244 Parmar, Pratibha, 319 Pasifika, 1, 13, 14 Path of Thunder, 302

604 Patrouille à l’ Est, 216 Paul Robeson Award Initiative (PRAI), 12 Peck, Raoul, 273 Peloton d’exécution / Resistance, 146, 148 Pépé le Moko, 21–22 Pequeno illusion, 189 Perez, Rios, 187 Pétain, Henri Philippe, 46 Petty, Sheila, 11, 285, 288, 306, 370 Peuple en marche / The People on the March, 32 Pfaff, Francoise, 12, 77, 239, 278, 286, 380 Pheto, Molefe, 245 Phoba, Monique Mbeka, 6 Picasso, Pablo, 298 Pimenta, Pedro, 258 Pinay, Antoine, 63 Piron, Pierre, 72 Piscicelli, Salvatore, 191 Pixote, 331 Plages éternelles / Lifelong Beach, 152 Plunders, The, 193 Plus Grande France, La, 44 Podi sangui, 225 Poirier, Léon, 20 Poisier, Georges, 46 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 2, 428, 509, 516 Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (PMLA), 241 Pour ceux qui savent, 186 Pramio, Alexandre, 2 Première history du cinema et du théâtre africains, 145 Price of Forgiveness, The, 450 Presence Africain, 158, 414, 468 Proctor, Elaine, 225 Progress in Kojokrom, 129–30, 131 Proposed Establishment of an All-African Cinema Union, 14 Propps, Vladimer, 391 Quartier Mozart, 284, 285, 373, 375–76, 377, 379, 380–81 Queer African Manifesto / Declaration, 14, 534, 566–67 Queimada! / Burn!, 509, 516 Quine, W. V. O,, 385

Index Raberojo, Rhilippe, 422 Rachedi, Ahmed, 32, 33, 192 Rada, Ricardo, 189 Raeburn, Michael, 25, 340 Rafiki, 230 Rahil, Frank, 83–84 Raiders of the Lost Ark, 34 Ramaka, Joseph Gaï, 12, 282–83, 284 Ramparts of Clay, 393 Ranger, Terence, 372 Rassamblement Démocratique Africain, 147, 151 Rassamblement du Peuple Française (RPE), 147 Real Life of Domingos Xavier, The, 241 RECIDAK, 561–62 Reddick, Lawrence, 71 Regnault, Felix, 2, 419 Régnier, Georges, 5, 48 Rennals, Martin, 125 Research in African Literatures, 414 Resistance to Theory, The, 307 Resnais, Alain, 2, 150 Resolutions of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting (Algiers, 1973), 276, 490; committee 1, 2, 15, 187–89, 193, 490 Revolución, 189 Reynolds, Glenn, 118 Rhoads, Diana Akers, 372 Rice, Tom, 5 Richards, Jeffrey, 88, 89, 94 Rififi, 151 Rih rabani / Divine Wind, 229 Rios, Humberto, 189, 190 Riot in Cell Block 11, 151 Rites of Spring, 298 Road, The, The, 299, 300, 302 Robeson, Paul, 87, 91, 232; prize, 252, 441 Robinson, Edward G., 140 Robson, Mark 152 Rocha, Glauber, 7, 186, 329, 333, 334, 337, 489–90 Rodney, Walter, 193 Roeg, Nicholas, 355 Rogosin, Lionel, 425 Rohmer, Eric, 274 Romance, Viviane, 47

Index Rome plutôt que vous / Rome Rather Than You, 226 Rorty, Richard, 399 Rouch, Jean, 140, 146, 217, 244, 271, 288, 319, 396, 422, 425, 454 Rue princesse, 445 Ruelle, Catherine, 12 Rumeur publique / Public Opinion, 152 Rushton, Richard, 414 Saar, Mamadou, 236 Sadoul, George, 246, 272, 273, 512 Said, Sayed, 30 Saidou, Conte, 55 Sankara, Thomas, 44 Sala-Molins, Louis, 202 Salambéré, Alimata, 11, 258, 259, 261, 540, 556 Saleh-Haroun, Mahamet, 3, 225, 230, 251, 286 Salut couisin, 447 Samba Traoré, 286 Sambizanga, 2, 178, 240, 245, 272, 278, 345, 431, 533, 537, 546–48 Samb-Makharam, Ababacar, 218, 238, 252, 253, 263, 430, 454 Sam le Caid, 286 Samuelson, Sydney, 125, 130, 132 Sanaa Journal of African Arts, Media, and Cultures, 414 Sanders of the River, 69, 70, 75, 77, 86–95, 232–33, 421 Sango Malo, 373, 376, 377, 379, 380–81 Sanjinés, Jorge, 189–90, 195 Sankofa, 183, 303, 393, 396, 400 Sanogo, Aboubakar, 11 Sanou, Daniel Kollo, 197 Sarr, Mamadou, 2, 3, 145 Sarraounia, 2, 278, 441 Sarzan, 197 Satan rouge / Red Satin, 230 Saul, Mahir, 11, 12 Sawadogo, Boukary, 9, 415 Screaming Man, A, 452 Screen, 388 SECMA, 234, 431 Second Cinema, 392

605 Second Congress of Negro Writers and Artists, (Rome, 1959), 146, 185, 425 Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC 77), 13 Second World War, 40, 45, 47; influence of, 107–08, 186, 196 Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), 147 Sejnane, 172 Sellers, William, 125, 146 Sembène, Ousmane, 2, 3, 7, 9–10, 11, 42, 163,169, 171, 172, 186, 188, 189, 196, 197, 201, 204, 205, 213, 26, 217, 218, 219, 232, 234, 236, 238, 241, 246, 248, 251, 257, 263, 271, 277, 278, 281, 284, 285, 286, 288, 298, 309, 319, 322, 325, 331, 333, 344, 350, 351, 352, 353, 354, 357, 371, 377, 407, 408, 417, 426, 427, 428, 429, 430, 434, 441, 445, 449, 451, 453, 455, 458, 479, 480, 482, 489, 490, 496, 498, 501, 503, 505, 506, 507, 509, 510, 513, 514, 515, 517, 518, 519, 523–24; “Africa Project,” 452; Alioune Alain (son), 489, 501, 527; with Carrie Moore (wife) correspondence, 529–32; “cinema as evening school statementl,” 460–62; dossier 2, 449–532; gallery, 523–32; interview with filmmakers of Sembène!, 485, 486–522; legacy to FESPACO, 451–57; Ouagadougou statement, 463–78; poem to Tahar Cheriaa, 459; tribute to Sembène, 479–84 Senegalese Cinematic Censorship Board, 150 Senghor, Leópold Sédar, 55, 215, 452, 494, 499 Série noire à koumbi, 286 Sey Seyeti / One Man, Many Women, 242 Shadi, Ali Abu, 29, 30 Shadow of the Earth, 334, 340, 344 Shaka, Femi Okiremuette, 3, 5, 42, 49, 55 Shaw, Alexander, 77 Shelby, Tommie, 280 Shepperson, Arnold, 8 Sherzer, Dina, 21, 42–43 Shiri, Keith, 250, 258, 262

606 Siam, Mohamed, 230 Sidibe, Mamady, 286 Siegel, Don, 151 Signifying Monkey, The, 303 Silences of the Palace, The, 223, 446 Silou, Osange, 562 Silverman, Jason, 10 Simba, 93 Sindiély, 407 Sissako, Abderrahmane, 3, 225, 226, 227, 229, 251, 281, 283, 450, 451, 455, 516 Sissoko, Cheick Oumar, 259, 260, 261, 262, 279, 446, 516 Sisters Working in Film and Television (SWIFT), 14, 535, 580, 581, 582 Sithengi, 214 Slavin, Davide Henry, 20, 38, 39–41, 42 Slim, Ala Eddine, 228 Smihi, Moumen, 219 Sobchack, Thomas, 85 Société africaine de culture, 468 Société d’exploitation cinématographique africaine (SECMA), 173, 429, 430, 454 Société d’importation, d’exploitation et de distribution cinématographique (SIDEC), 433, 437 Société de participation cinématographique africaine (SOPACIA), 173, 431, 433, 437 Société des auteurs africains, 468 Société nationale de cinéma (SNC), 431 Société nationale voltaïque du cinéma (SONAVOCI), 430, 470 Sofia, 230, 286 Solanas, Fernando, 7, 34, 186, 187, 195, 323, 329, 392, 429, 490 Solas, Humberto, 333, 490 Soleil des hyènes / The Hyena’s Sun, 220 Soleil, Le, 451 Soleil Ô, 12, 172, 239, 332, 430 Soma, Ardiouma, 10 Soria, Oscar, 189 Sorkin, Marc, 47 Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, La, 2 Soyinka, Wole, 11, 225, 299, 300, 306 Spence, Louise, 38, 39, 41, 51–53, 71, 81 Spotlight on the Colonies, 121

Index Stam, Robert, 38, 39, 41, 52–53, 71, 81 Star Times, 412 Statement by the African Women Professionals of Cinema, Television, and Video, 14, 203, 542, 552 Stoneman, Rod, 11 Studio RIF (Realizzazioni Industriali Fotocinematographiche), 58–59 Stoller, Paul, 297 Stravinsky, Igor, 298 Suleman, Ramadan, 181 Sun Never Sets, The, 87 Sur les formes traditionnellas du roman africain, 280 SWAPO, 26 Sylla, Yacouba, 147 Tahar Cheriaa Cine-Club, 264 Tales of the Arabian Nights, 23 Talking About Trees, 228 Tamahori, Lee, 292 Tansi, Sony Labou, 222 Tarzan movies, 58, 81, 82, 83, 180, 350, 420; Greystoke, The Legend of Tarzan, 82, 85 Tarzan, the Ape Man, 85; Tarzan’s Savage Fury, 151 Tasuma, 197 Taylor, Charles, 399 Taylor, Clyde, 7, 293 Tazama African Women Film Festival, 578, 579 Tazi, Mohamed Abderrahman, 193 Teaching African Cinema, 415 Teguia, Tariq, 226 Television Academy (Ethiopia), 412 Temple, Shirley, 180 Téno, Jean-Maria, 3, 12, 205, 272, 279, 281, 283, 394–95 Teoría y práctica de un cine junto al pueblo, 190, 195 Terminal Sud / South Terminal, 228, 229 Terra em transe / The Earth Trembles, 186, 333, 334 Tey / Today, 455 Teza, 3, 452, 454 Thackway, Melissa, 12, 184, 204, 277, 285

Index They Don’t Wear Black Tie, 334, 340, 344 Thiam, Momar, 206 Thief of Bagdad, The, 143 Things Fall Apart, 299, 372 Thiongo, Ngugi Wa, 184, 193, 295, 306, 371 Third Cinema, 6, 8, 187, 318, 323, 351, 353, 359, 392–96, 397, 400, 536; Towards a Third Cinema, 15, 195, 429; critical theory, 334–35, 336; phase 1, 330, 335; phase 2, 330–32, 335; phase 3, 332–336 Third Republic, 45–46 Thompson, Robert Faris, 296–97 Thorez, Maurice, 513 Throne, The, 588 Tilaï / The Law, 224, 225, 284, 285, 443, 445 Timbuktu, 3, 229, 455, 456 time form, 49 Timité, Bassori, 258 Tire dié, 188–89 Tlamess / Sortilege / Spell, 228 Tlatli, Moufída, 223, 446 Tlili, Najwa, 551 TOC. See Cannes Film Festival Todorov, Tzvetan, 79–80 Tolbi, Aziz, 193 Tomaelli, Keyan G., 8, 21, 24–25, 258, 293 Touki Bouki, 2, 219, 220, 234, 235, 326, 350, 351, 352, 354, 355, 356, 361, 431, 432 Touré, Ahmed Sékou, 184, 468, 510, 511 Touré, Mamadi, 196, 453 Touré, Moussa, 3 Toureur, Essomba, 287 Tourjansky, Victor, 23 Traque à Ouaga, 286 Traore, Mahama, 172, 243 Trengove, Johan, 230 Trenker, Luis, 45–46 Truffaut, François, 274 Tshwane Congress, 211 Tsotsi, 105 Tuaregs in Their Country, 83 Tully, Montgomery, 130 Turégano, Teresa Hoefert de, 11 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, 151 Twenty Years of African Cinema (Caméra d’Afrique), 252

607 Uakti, 502 UCECAO, 252 Udada Film Festival, 579 Ukadike, Frank, 184, 204, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 279, 286, 293, 305, 306 Ukamau, 189, 190, 195 Ulysses, 298 Un enfant noir. See Alphonse Béni Un été à La Goulette / One Summer in Goulette, 24 Un homme qui crie / A Screaming Man, 225 Un homme quí crie, 3 “Une Culture Africainè,” 55 Une Saison en France / A Season in France, 230 UNESCO, 258, 262, 406 Union africaine de cinéma (UAC), 173 Union génerale cinématographique (UGC), 173, 220, 431 United Nations, 47; Charter, 346; Statistical Yearbook, 234 Uprooted, The, 193 Uys, Jamie, 25, 26 Vaincre pour vivre, 199–200 Van Lierop, Robert, 245 Vaughan, J. Koyinde, 158 Vautier, René, 2, 31–32, 33, 51–52, 150, 192, 244, 422, 426 Vehi Ciosane, 197 Venice International Film Festival, 251 Vent des Aures / The Winds of the Aures, 170, 216 Verre cassé / Broken Glass, 226 Vichy France, 45 Vieira, Luandino, 241 Viewer’s Dialectic, The, 325 Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou, 2, 3, 4, 8–9, 145, 146, 163, 196, 205–06, 236, 257, 263, 271, 273, 287, 288, 406, 408, 426, 453, 485 Visages de femmes / Faces of Women, 273 Visconti, Luchino, 191 Visit, The, 326 Vivre au paradis, 447 Vues d’Afrique, 551

608 Waati, 225 Wade, Mansour Sora, 12, 279, 283, 450 Warrior Marks, 319 Wasteland, The, 298 Wassef, Magda, 29 Wayne, John, 139, 180 We Were Strangers, 151. Wedding in Galilee, 441 Weep Not Child, 371 Wend Kunni / The Gift of God, 2, 222, 223, 243–44, 253, 279, 319, 321, 322, 331, 395, 447 Wenders, Wim, 302 Wenner, Dorothea, 11, 569 West African Research Center (WARC), 501 West and the Rest of Us, The, 488 West Indies, 239 Western Nigerian Television (WNTV), 425 Wilder, Gary, 44 Williams, Eric, 193 Williams, Patrick, 285 Wilmington 10—U.S.A., 183 240 Wind of the Aurès, The, 428 Wings of Desire, 302 Wings of the Hawk, 151 Witney, William, 140 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 195, 392 Wolof, 406, 407 Woman Ouolove, A, 2 Womb in the Heart, The, 302

Index Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe (WFOZ), 534, 535, 589 Women of the Sun (WoS), 563–64 Women’s Reflexive Workshop (Dakar), 588 Wound, The, 230 Wretch of the Earth, The, 512 Wright, Basil, 130 Wright, Richard, 452 Xala / Spell of Impotence, 172, 186, 278, 279, 299, 334, 350, 351, 352–54, 356, 361, 431, 479, 495, 511, 512, 516, 532 Yaaba, 322 Yam Daabo / The Choice, 221, 222, 438 Yeelen, 2, 223, 297, 298, 299, 301, 302, 350, 351, 352, 356–57, 439 You Hide, 244 Zacks, Stephen A., 8, 305 Zan Boko, 373, 376, 377, 379, 380 Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF), 447 Zee TV (India), 412 Zima, Clarisse, 201 Zimbabwe International Film Festival, 258 Zobel, Joseph, 203 Zohra, 23–24 Zran, Mohamed, 220 Zuhur El Islam / The Dawn of Islam, 143 Zulu’s Heart, The, 83 Zyl, Van John, 27

For Indiana University Press Emily Baugh Editorial Assistant Tony Brewer Artist and Book Designer Brian Carroll Rights Manager Gary Dunham Acquisitions Editor and Director Anna Francis Assistant Acquisitions Editor Brenna Hosman Production Coordinator Katie Huggins Production Manager David Miller Lead Project Manager/Editor Dan Pyle Online Publishing Manager Michael Regoli Director, Publishing Operations Brandon Spaulding Journals Production Manager Stephen Williams Marketing and Publicity Manager Jennifer L. Witzke Senior Artist and Book Designer