Symbolic Narratives / African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image 0851708552, 9780851708553

Citation preview

. SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES/AFRICAN CINEMA Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image

\

"• ^^

^r

*

Edited by June Givanni Introduction by Imruh Bakari

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES/AFRICAN CINEMA Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image

Edited by

JUNE GIVANNI

with an Introduction by

Imruh Bakari

palgrave macmillan

A BFI book published by Palgrave Macmillan

First published in 2000 by the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1P 2LN Paperback edition first published 2001 Reprinted 2011 The British Film Institute is the UK national agency with responsibility for encDuraging the arts of film and television and conserving them in the national interest. © Copyright British Film Institute 2000 Cover design: Bigfoot, London Set by Wyvern 21 Ltd, Bristol

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 85170 855 3 eISBN 978 1 83871 842 8 ePDF 978 1 83871 843 5

Contents

List of Contributors Preface and Acknowledgements Abbreviations

v xii xvi

Part One: Contexts 1 Introduction: African Cinema and the Emergent Africa Imruh Bakari 2 Africa, the West and the Analogy of Culture: The Cinematic Text after Man Sylvia Wynter

3 25

Part Two: Arguments 3 The Iconography of African Cinema: What Is It and How Is It Identified? Introduction Colin Prescod The Iconography of West African Cinema Manthia Diawara Respondents John Akomfrah and Asma El Bakri 4 Is the Decolonisation of the Mind a Prerequisite for the Independence of Thought and the Creative Practice of African Cinema? Introduction Ngugi Wa Thiongo The Intolerable Gift Teshome Gabriel Respondents Nouri Bouzid and Manama Hima 5 What is the Link between Chosen Genres and Developed Ideologies in African Cinema? Introduction Imruh Bakari African Cinema and Ideology: Tendencies and Evolution Perid Boughedir Respondents Idrissa Ouedraogoy Ella Shohat and Haile Gerima

79 81 90

93 97 103

106 109 122

6 African Cinema and Postmodernist Criticism Introduction Roy Armes Searching for the Postmodern in African Cinema Clyde Taylor Respondents Kobena Mercer and Bassek Ba Kobhio 7 Information Technology, Power, Cinema and Television in Africa Introduction Jim Pines Power, Cinema and TV in Africa John Badenhorst Respondents Claire Andrade-Wathins and Ola Balogun 8 Can African Cinema Achieve the Same Level of Indigenisation as Other Popular African Art Forms? Introduction Mbye Cham Commentary Ousmane Sembene Discussion Gaston Kabori Respondents Samir Farid and Cheick Oumar Sissoko 9 Audiences and the Critical Appreciation of Cinema in Africa Introduction Rose Issa Unwinding the African Dream on African Ground Tafataona Mahoso Respondents Ahmed Attia and Kwate Nii Owoo

134 136 145

153 158 176

183 185 187 191

195 197 227

Part Three: Reflections 10 Weapons of Resistance Tahar Cheriaa

237

11 The Homecoming of African Cinema Ngugi Wa Thiongo

239

Part Four: Information Appendix A Conference Structure Appendix B Conference Screenings Index

245 249 251

List of Contributors

JOHN AKOMFRAH is a founder member of Black Audio Film Collective production collective. Born in Ghana, he has lived and worked in London since the 1960s. Noted for his innovative, avant-garde style of filmmaking, his multi-award-winning documentaries and features include Handsworth Songs (1986), Testament (1988) and Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993). He has worked for several years as a freelance journalist and has lectured extensively on British Cinema and Race at the University of London and the British Film Institute. CLAIRE ANDRADE-WATKINS is a historian/filmmaker and is Associate Professor of Film at Emerson College, Boston. A second generation Cape Verdean American, she writes on francophone and lusophone African cinema in both scholarly and popular publications. Dr Andrade-Watkins has produced numerous television documentaries, including Espirito de Cabo Verde (1986), the first historical documentary on Cape Verdeans in New England. Most recently, she was assistant to the producer of Haile Gerima's 1993 film Sankofa. She was awarded a Fulbright research grant for 1995/1996 to study in Cape Verde. ROY ARMES is Professor of Film at Middlesex University, UK, where he is the Director of the Masters video programme. A prolific author, he has been writing on European cinema and latterly on Third World cinema for over thirty years. His books include Third World Film Making and the West (California University Press, 1978), co-written with Lizabeth Malkmus, and Arab and African Film Making (Zed Books, 1991). Roy Armes is currently conducting research into North African filmmaking. AHMED BAHA EDDINE ATTIA is one of Tunisia's most renowned and prolific film producers. He studied modern literature in France and film direction in Italy before working in television in Italy and in Tunisia, and eventually in film production. Over many years he worked as director, production manager, executive producer on a number of European films before setting up his own production company Cinetelefilms in 1983. He is distinguished for his support of Tunisian 'auteur' cinema, his support of some of the most prominent Tunisian directors, and the production of the films of Nouri Bouzid (Man of AsheSy Golden Horseshoes, Bezness); Ferid Boughedir (Halfaouine); Moncef Dhouib (The Sultan of the Medina); and Moufida Tlatli (Silences of the Palace) to name but a few. In 1992 he produced After the GulfTor British and Italian television which consisted of short meditations on the aftermath of the Gulf War by five Arab filmmakers. In 1992 and 1994 Attia was director of the leading Arab film festival Journeys Cin£matographiques de Carthage (ICC).

vi

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

JOHN BADENHORST is Head of Public Relations for M-NET Television in Johannesburg. Born in South Africa, he completed his postgraduate studies at the Accademia Nazionale D'Arte in Rome. He worked in education, community work and the performing arts in South Africa, Namibia and Italy before turning to public relations. Since 1991, he has organised the M-NET All Africa Film Awards, recently made open to feature films from all over Africa. IMRUH BAKARI was born in St Kitts in the Eastern Caribbean, and studied at the National Film and Television School, UK. A founder member of the film production collective Ceddo, his films include Riots and Rumours ofRiots (1981) and Blue Notes and Exiled Voices (1991). Currently a lecturer at the School of Cultural Studies, King Alfred's College, Winchester, he has worked in theatre, radio and television and is a published poet. He is co-editor of African Experiences of Cinema (1996) with Mbye Cham. BASSEK BA KOBHIO is a filmmaker and novelist. At the age of 19, he won a national short story competition, and resolved to pursue a career in literature and film. Graduating in Sociology and Philosophy from the University of Yaounde in Cameroon, he worked as a literary critic for Radio Cameroon, a school teacher and as an assistant director at the Ministry of Information and Culture. He was assistant director to Claire Denis on the film Chocolat (1987) and in 1991 directed his first feature film, Sango Malo, also published as a novel. His second feature, he Grand Blanc de Lambarene (1994), about the last twenty years of Albert Schweitzer's life, won the Special Jury prize at Fespaco 1995. OLA BALOGUN is one of the most prolific documentary and feature filmmakers in Nigeria. Founder of the independent production company Afrocult Films, his features include Ajani Ogun (1975) and Black Goddess (1978), winner of the International Catholic Film Office Prize for Best Film at the Carthage Film Festival. He is the author of several newspaper and television articles in English and French and has served as a UNESCO consultant on film and culture. In 1987, he was chosen to head a consultancy on African film production strategies by the Organization of African Unity. FERID BOUGHEDIR is a critic and filmmaker. Currently Professor of Cinema at the University of Tunis, he is known primarily for two books: African Cinema from AtoZ (OCIC, 1992) and The Cinema in Africa (tba). After working as assistant to directors such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Fernando Arrabal, he directed two award-winning documentaries on the films of French-speaking Africa and the Arab world: Camera d'Afrique (1983) and Camera Arabe (1987). His first feature film, Halfaouine (1991), was widely shown throughout Europe and was selected for the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes. Ferid Boughedir served as a jury member at Cannes in 1991 and is currently in post-production on his second feature, Un ete a la Goulette. NOURI BOUZID is a Tunisian director who studied film at INSAS (Institut National des Arts du Spectacle et Techniques de Diffusion) in Brussels and graduated with the short film Duel He worked in Tunisian television in the early 1970s, and in that same decade was imprisoned for five years for his participation in the radical group Perspectives. He subsequently worked as assistant director on many Tunisian and international films during the 1980s. Bouzid worked on the adaptation and dialogue of a number of key Tunisian films

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

vii

of the 1990s including Ferid Boughedir's Halfaouine, Brahim Babai's The Night of the Decade, Moncef Dhouib's The Sultan of the Medina and Moufida Tlatli's Silences of the Palace. His own three features, Man of Ashes, Golden Horseshoes, and Bezness, established him as a major figure in Maghreb cinema as he confronted themes and issues long ignored or evaded in Arab cinema. Since the conference, Bouzid has completed another feature, Bent Familia. MBYE CHAM teaches literature and film at the Department of African Studies, Howard University, Washington, DC, and is the Director of the University's Centre for the Study of Culture and Development in Africa. Originally from the Gambia, he was educated in his home country as well as in Senegal, France and the United States. The author of numerous publications on literature and cinema, he is co-editor of Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema (MIT Press, 1988) and editor of Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema (Africa World Press, Inc, 1992). He is co-editor of African Experiences of Cinema (1996) with Imruh Bakari. TAHAR CHERIAA is acknowledged as the founding father of Tunisian cinema. Originally a teacher of Arabic literature, he was from the late 1940s a prominent member of Tunisia's film clubs, serving as President of the Federation of Film Clubs between 1960 and 1968. After independence, Cheriaa created and became Head of the new Department of Cinema at the Ministry of Information and Culture. He devised a nation-wide film policy and created and became Head of SATPEC, Tunisia's national cinema company in 1963. In 1966, he set up the Carthage Film Festival, the first international film festival in Africa and the Arab world, serving as its Secretary-General until 1973. From 1971 until 1987, he was General Director of the Central Administration at the Ministry of Culture. Tahar Cheriaa has been a UNESCO consultant in Arab culture, broadcasting and the oral tradition (1963-74) and was Deputy General Director of Culture at the Agency of Technical and Cultural Cooperation from 1980 to 1987. He has written extensively on topics of Arab and African cinema and was the founder and director of the first magazine of film criticism in Tunisia Nawdi Cinema. He has been script consultant on several films including Med Hondo's 1987 Fatima VAuresienne de Dakar. MANTHIA DIAWARA is Professor of Comparative Literature and Film, the Director of the Africana Studies Program, and the Institute of African Affairs at New York University. Originally from Mali, he has taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara and at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr Diawara has published widely on the topic of film and literature of the black diaspora and is the author of Black-American Cinema: Aesthetics & Spectatorship (Routledge, 1993) and African Cinema: Politics & Culture (Indiana University Press, 1992). He is co-director with Ngugi Wa Thiong'o of Sembene Ousmane: The Making of African Cinema (1994) and has completed work on Pouch in Reverse (1995), a film documentary on Jean Rouch. He is working on a book on comparative Afro-modernism. ASMA EL BAKRI is a filmmaker and journalist. Before turning to filmmaking, she worked as assistant director, production manager and location manager on several Egyptian and international films, including Youssef Chahine's Le Retour de VEnfant Prodigue (1976). She made her first short film, La Goutte d'eau, in 1979 and her first feature film, Mendiants et

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Orgueilleux, the winner of numerous international awards, in 1991. She has written widely on socio-political affairs for the Arab press and contributed the photographic illustrations for Khul Khaal Five Egyptian Women Tell Their Stories (Syracuse University Press, 1982), a book by Naria Atiya. SAMIR FARID is a film critic and Professor at the Cinema Institute in Cairo. He is a prolific writer on topics of Arab cinema. In 1977, he became Editor-in-Chief of the Egyptian weekly journal El-Cinema Wa El-Finoun. He as served as a jury member on several international festivals and in 1989 was a member of the Consultative Board of the Minister of Culture. In 1981 he served as a member of the Initiating Committee of the General History of Cinema. TESHOME H. GABRIEL from Ethiopia is a Professor of Film and Television at UCLA, Los Angeles. He is the author of Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation (UMI Research Press, 1982) and, with Hamid Naficy, co-editor of Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged (Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994). Teshome Gabriel has published numerous essays on a wide range of topics, including 'Nomadic Aesthetics', 'Memory and Identity* and 'Ruin and the Other'. HAILE GERIMA is one of Africa's and African-America's pre-eminent filmmakers. A founder member of FEPACI, the Pan African Filmmakers' Federation, he is a tenured Professor at Howard University, Washington, DC. Born in Gonder, Ethiopia, he has been resident in the United States since 1975. His works include Bush Mama (1975), Harvest: 3000 years (1976), Ashes and Embers (1982) and Sankofa (1993). Haile Gerima is considered to be one of the precursors of the new African American cinema and has been instrumental in shaping some of the techniques of African cinema. He was 1995's Visiting Fellow at the British Film Institute. MARIAMA HIMA is an ethnographic museum curator and filmmaker. She is Head Conservationist at the National Museum of Niger and Director of the Regional Institute for the Training of Museum Curators. Her anthropological films include Baabu Banza (1984) and Falaw (1985), winner of the best short film at the Venice Film Festival and the EEC prize at the Fespaco Film Festival. Mariama Hima has been President of numerous cultural and development organisations in Niger and has been national representative of the Agence Culturelle et Technique (ACCT). She is Director of the Antenne de Niamey television station and has served on serveral international juries. ROSE ISSA is an adviser on contemporary arts from the Middle East and North Africa. In 1986, she launched the KUFA Gallery, the first art gallery specialising in contemporary arts from the Middle East and North Africa in London. She has collaborated with several Arab and British institutions in organising exhibitions, concerts and film festivals and is the adviser on Arab and Iranian films to the London Film Festival. She has worked with the BBC on a profile of North African women filmmakers and is adviser to the London International Festival of Theatre. GASTON KABORli is one of Burkina Faso's most accomplished filmmakers. He studied film and history in Paris and then taught at the INAFEC film school in Burkina Faso, before

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

IX

turning fully to a career as a director. He made three short documentaries before his awardwinning feature, Wend Kuuni in 1982 and the second, Zan Boko in 1988. He completed a number of fiction and documentary films for television during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and took on the significant task of Secretary General of FEPACI (the Pan African Filmmakers* Federation) for over eight years, while his own feature filmmaking career was put on hold. Eventually he set up the Cinecom production company and returned to feature production with Buud Yam in 1997, which won him the Etalon de Yennenga (the best major feature prize) at the FESPACO film festival, the same year. TAFATAONA MAHOSO is Principal Lecturer at the Division of Mass Communication, Harare Polytechnic, Zimbabwe. Educated at New York, Ohio, and Temple University, Philadelphia, he has played a prominent role in developing his country's arts and cultural policies. He has been responsible for developing the new National Arts Council of Zimbabwe and assessing the feasibility of the Zimbabwe Film and Video Association. A regular contributor to radio and television, he has served as a jury member at the Southern Africa Film Festival. His book Footprints about the Banthustan (Nehanda Publishers, 1989) was a winner of the Zimbabwe Book Publishers Award for Outstanding Book of the Year. KOBENA MERCER is an independent writer and critic currently based in London. He has lectured at the California Institute of the Arts and at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published widely on diaspora aesthetics in black cinema and is the author of Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1994). He was the editor of Black Film/British Cinema (ICA, 1998) and co-editor, with Isaac Julien, of Screen's last 'Special Issue' on race (1988). IDRISSA OUEDRAOGO studied film at institutions in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), Kiev (the Ukraine) and at the IDHEC and the Sorbonne in Paris. He worked as a civil servant in film production management, before making his first short film Poko in 1981. The winners of several international awards, his films include: Yaaba, Special Jury Prize, Fespaco 1989; Tilai, Etalon de Yennenga, Fespaco 1990 and Grand Jury Prize, Cannes 1990; and Samba Traorey Silver Bear, Berlin 1993, Tanit d'Argent, Carthage 92. Director of his own Paris-based production company Les Films de la Plaine (producers of Cheick Oumar Sissoko's Guimba, 1995) he has also worked in the French theatre, directing La Tragedie du Roi Christophe by Aim£ C£saire for the Com6die Francaise. KWATE Nil OWOO was born in Ghana and studied at the London International Film School. His documentaries include You Hide Me (1971), an anti-colonial film protesting the theft of African cultural artefacts by Western museums, Struggle for a Free Zimbabwe (Special Prize, Carthage, 1973), Angela Davis (1974) and Ouaga (1988). In 1991, he coproduced and directed the feature film Ama with Kwesi Owusu. Since 1977, he has been Head of the Media Research Unit at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. He has served as a jury member at the Carthage and Fespaco Film Festivals, and has written several articles on the history of African cinema. JIM PINES was born in Boston (MA), US, and has lived in Britain since the mid-1960s. A writer and lecturer, he has organised several film seasons and conferences. Since 1967,

X

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

he has held a number of institutional posts, including Fellow in Non-European Film and Television at the Commonwealth Institute, London (1983-4). At the British Film Institute, he has been Ethnic Film and Television Adviser (1985-7), BFI Planning Officer (1990-1) and Research Fellow (1991-2). His books include Blacks in Film (Studio Vista, 1975), Questions of Third Cinema (BFI, 1989) co-edited with Paul Willemen, and Black and White in Colour: Black People in British Television since 1936 (BFI, 1992). lim Pines is Senior Lecturer in Media Arts at the University of Luton, UK, and is co-writing a book on the impact of cable television in the UK. He is also researching into the impact of digital and multimedia technology on the non-Euro American domain. COLIN PRESCOD is an independent film and television programme maker, educator and writer. Former Head of BBC Television's African and Caribbean Unit, he became an independent producer after the Unit was disbanded in 1993. His many television documentaries include Will to Win (1993), a series on black international achievement in sport, and Out of Darkness (1992), a six-parter about contemporary African politics. The holder of a number of institutional posts, he is Chair of the Institute of Race Relations, UK, and editorial committee member of the journal Race and Class. From 1969 till 1989, he was Sociology, Political Economy and Caribbean Studies lecturer at the University of North London, UK, and in 1981 was Visiting Fulbright Professor at the Afro-American Studies Department, Syracuse University, USA. OUSMANE SEMBENE was born in Senegal and is acknowledged as the father of African cinema. After leaving school at the age of 14, he fought with the French army in the Dakar-Niger railroad strike of 1947-8. Described in his most famous novel Les Bouts de hois de Dieu/God's Bits of Wood (Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1962), the strike was an event which was to politicise him, creating the ideological tenure of his later films and novels. In 1948, Sembene stowed away to France. His experiences as a car assembly worker, docker and union leader became the subject of his first novel, Le Docker noir/The Black Docker (1956 published in translation by Heinemann, 1987). In 1962, Sembene decided to become a filmmaker, envisaging cinema as a way of widening the scope of his audience. He studied film at the Sorky Studio in Moscow. Although his first film, VEmpire Songhai> was never released, his next, Borom Sarett, became known as the first professional film made by an African. ELLA SHOHAT is Associate Professor of Film and Cultural Studies at the City University of New York. Her work has appeared in journals, including Screen, Public Culture and Third Text and has been anthologised in a number of film, cultural and feminist collections. Co-editor of the journal Social Text> she is also co-author, with Robert Stam, of UnthinkingEurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Routledge, 1994). Her co-edited volume Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nations and Colonial Perspectives will shortly be published by the University of Minnesota Press. She is editing a collection of essays on multicultural feminism, to be published by the New Museum and MIT Press. CHEICK OUMAR SISSOKO studied film at the Ecole Nationale Louis Lumiere in Paris and graduated in African History and Sociology from the University of Paris. He is Head of the Centre National de Production Cinematographique (CNPC) in Bamako, Mali. His first feature film Nyamanton {The Garbage Boys, 1986) won several international awards,

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

XI

and was followed by the critically acclaimed Finzan (1989). His third feature film Guimba was awarded the 1995 Etalon de Yennenga for Best Film at the Fespaco Film Festival. Co-director of independent production company Kora Films, he has produced his next feature, La Genese, a transposition of the Bible story of Jacob to the West African domain. CLYDE TAYLOR is Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate at Tufts University, MA. He also teaches at the Africana and Film Production Departments at New York University. He has written widely on African and African-American independent cinema and has recently completed Breaking the Aesthetic Contract: Film and Literature, to be published by the University of Minnesota Press. He wrote the script for the documentary film Midnight Ramble: The Life and Legacy of Oscar Micheaux and is the founder of the African Film Society in San Francisco. NGUGIWA THIONG'O is Professor of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University. One of Kenya's leading authors, playwrights and academics, his novel Weep not. Child was published in 1964 (and in 1967, by Heinemann) when he was 26. His works, at the forefront of the struggle for African political, cultural and linguistic freedom, include A Grain of Wheat ( Dutton, 1977), Petals of Blood (Heinemann, 1986), The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (Heinemann Educational Books, 1976), Devil on the Cross (Heinemann, 1982), 7 Will Marry When I Want to (Heinemann, 1982) and Decolonising the Mind (Heinemann, 1986). In exile from Kenya since 1981, Ngugi has lived and worked in the United States since 1989. He is the holder of several literary and academic awards and has made three documentary films: Sembene: The Making of African Cinema (1993), codirected with Manthia Diawara, Black Diamonds and Red Grapes (1986) and Africa in Sweden (1986) co-directed with Martin R. Mhando and Louis Simao. SYLVIA WYNTER is Professor Emerita, African and Afro-American Studies, Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University, USA. Born in Jamaica, she was educated at the Universities of London and Madrid, and became a writer before taking on a full-time academic career. Her plays include Maskarade, performed in Jamaica, the USA and London, and her novel The Hills of Hebron (Jonathan Cape, London; Simon & Schuster, New York) was published in 1962. Sylvia Wynter has taught at the University of the West Indies (1963-79), the University of California, San Diego (1974-7), and was visiting Lecturer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has held her dual professorship at Stanford University since 1977. The author of numerous scholarly essays, a collection of some of her work will shortly be published under the title The Ultimate Enigma: Essays towards a Unified Theory of Culture.

Preface and Acknowledgements June Givanni

The Historical Context ... in relation to political film and video practice - and especially to 'Third World' film cultures - debates about the efficacy of theory have often taken on a particularly intense moral character. Notwithstanding the genuine fear that some practitioners seem to have whenever they hear that word - theory - there are at least three sets of problems that constantly need addressing. One centres on the nature of the theories themselves and the alleged elitism of which they are often accused; another has to do with the validity of theoretical work which draws on Western critical traditions; while another focuses on the need to avoid essentialist or prescriptive paradigms against which oppositional cultural practitioners are judged and evaluated (i.e. establishing an alternative hegemony operating under the guise of 'Third Cinema'). (Jim Pines) ... rather than search for a black, Third World [or African] film aesthetics we should interrogate the Western concepts of aesthetics as such, [and] should recognise its determination through specific Western historical experiences and cultural exigencies. (Clyde Taylor) ... The history of thought, to say nothing of political movements, is extravagantiy illustrative of how the dictum 'solidarity before criticism' means the end of criticism. ... Even in the very midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for. (Edward Said) The above three quotes are taken from Questions of Third Cinema,1 the book written by Paul Willemen and Jim Pines, reporting on the Third Cinema Conference held at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1986. In that these passages all find resonance in the central debates of the Africa and the History of Cinematic Ideas conference which took place nearly ten years later, they signal the continuum of debate and discussion which this conference represents. Between those two conferences a third event took place, the Celebration of Black Cinema festival in 1988, around African, black British and African-American independent filmmaking, which was held in Boston and organised by Claire Andrade-Watkins and the CBC team; and a fourth in March 1994, when Manthia Diawara and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o at New York University organised the conference Black Cinema: A Celebration of Pan-African Film - both events raised similar issues of the relationship between theory, criticism and practice. However, at the latter event, the very heated public confrontations of the other conferences

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

XIII

were slightly muted by the separation of the speakers into panels of filmmakers (or artists) and panels of scholars, as a way around the apprehensions of the two groups towards each other. All four events shared the inescapable polemic that arises when filmmakers and film critics (or cultural theorists) meet to discuss cinemas that both groups care passionately about, from their respective disciplinary standpoints. Inevitably the 1995 conference raised questions about how effective such groups can be when they become so comfortable in their own spheres - what do they mean outside of those constituencies, either when theory has to become grounded in the filmmaker's experience or when that experience has to be subjected to analysis and criticism by theorists and critics. Such events represent moments when, as Jim Pines put it, 'the politics of conferencing [became] increasingly volatile'.2

The Conference While the Edinburgh, Boston and New York conferences were concerned with a multiplicity of regional and diasporic cinemas, the Africa and the History of Cinematic Ideas conference was wholly focused on cinema of the African continent. The conference was based on the premise that the term 'African cinema' presupposes a multiplicity of cinemas as diverse as the social, political, economic and cultural history of the continent, and of cinema itself: that these dimensions are all influential in determining the critera that are used in the creation of what might be termed 'African cinema' and that, in turn, those influences stand in a complex relation to each other and render simple categorisations of African cinema problematic. The mix of academics and film practitioners (not always mutually exclusive categories for some panellists, (see List of Contributors) was a characteristic of the conference and is very evident in this conference volume in the rich mix of styles of the presentations. Panellists were selected in relation to their professional concerns, their filmmaking, their publishing and their expertise in certain spheres. Inevitably the carefully sought balance is upset when some expected panellists are unable to attend, as in the case of filmmakers Moufida Tlatli and Ousmane Sembene, and critic Nourredine Sail. The varied constituencies and concerns, however, resulted in a rich and uneven variety of discussant papers and panellist responses - some based on academic study and pre-drafted; others anecdotal, verbal responses, reflecting practical experience and rich in history. One or two such responses, as Idrissa Ouedraogo's and Haile Gerima's, were terse and angry. Also, in some cases respondents have not necessarily directly addressed the main paper given - as in the case of Nouri Bouzid, Mariama Hima or Kwate Nii Owoo - they occasionally add new dimensions to the issue. There was inevitably a measure of overlap between the panels which were not mutually exclusive but part of the major focus of the conference as a whole; for example, Ella Shohat addresses postmodernism on the ideologies and genre panel. Nevertheless, each panel provided a different approach and perspective. The conference provided a forum for the exploration of ideas and knowledge that bring together the disciplines of cultural studies and film studies around an intersecting debate centred on African cinema. In that sense, it was an exploration and an opening up of old arguments examined in a new light. The questions posed for the conference came after careful reflection by the Editorial Group (see below), who felt there was considerable value in posing theoretical questions using concepts of modernity, aesthetics, iconography and

xiv

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

so on in a setting where filmmakers and critics are to share in debate and discussion of African cinema. A noteworthy characteristic of the conference was that it was conducted in English and French with simultaneous translation. While that translation was very competent, the fact of translation made debate around sensitive issues very difficult to conduct.

The Conference Papers This publication Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema pulls together, the papers and the panellist contributions that constituted the Africa and the History of Cinematic Ideas conference. As such it is an account of the wide-ranging and in depth discussion of some of the fundamental issues surrounding the existence of African cinema, that took place at the conference. The gathering of so many filmmakers and critics of African cinema is rare and the resulting conference is documented here to the service of all professionals, students, critics and enthusiasts of African cinema and world cinema. Part One of this volume, 'Contexts*, provides an overview of the development of the debates and issues around African cinema in Imruh Bakari's very capable and comprehensive introduction, 'African Cinema and the Emergent Africa', and Sylvia Wynter's paper, 'Africa, the West and the Analogy of Culture: The Cinematic Text after Man', an indepth and stunning theoretical proposition providing a rich tapestry onto which the questions raised in the conference could be mapped for elucidation and a higher level of understanding. Whilst there was universal appreciation of the depth and relevance of the latter speech to the conference concerns, evident and voiced in the presentations and discussions, most panellists were not in a position to respond directly to it. Professor Sylvia Wynter had very gallantly stepped in at very short notice and panellists had no opportunity to see the paper before it was presented to the conference: hence panellists (with the exception of Tafataona Mahoso who revised his paper after the conference) do not engage systematically with it. Part Two, 'Arguments', is organised as the conference panels were, with 4 panellists (5 in the case of the 'genre and ideology' panel) all addressing the same panel question. In these sections the chairperson's summary of the panel's proceedings, the discussant's paper and the respondents' contributions, which extend, concur or take issue with the paper, are presented. The discussant papers and the respondents' contributions are presented with the minimum of sub-editing. Panellists' presentations, arguments and positions taken by panellists on the issues at hand, are presented without the responses and counter-arguments offered in the open discussion of the session. However, where possible these have been mentioned in the introduction of each panel which includes any aspects of the open discussion that it was felt useful to include. In addition, Imruh Bakari's introduction to this volume presents a contextual discussion of some of the most pivotal exchanges in the conference. Nevertheless, the whole conference was recorded (audio and video) and transcripts are lodged with the BFI. The much needed moment of reflection on the conference is provided in Part Three of the book, where veteran Tunisian film critic Tahar Cheriaa and the Kenyan writer and filmmaker Ngugi Wa Thiong'o present their conference summaries and personal highlights to round off a very complex, lively and significant event. This we suspect is only the beginning of future engagement with the resonant ideas and issues of the conference.

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

xv

Three screenings were organised in conjunction with the conference: Halfaouine by Tunisian director Ferid Boughedir, which was one of a series of African titles launched on the home video market through the BFI's Connoisseur and Academy Video labels; and Le Cri du cceur, the 1994 film by Idrissa Ouedraogo who followed the acclaimed success of his previous films in Burkina Faso, with the first of two features set outside his native environment. Le Cri du cceur was set in France and attracted a lot of critical debate and discussion. Thirdly the conference was offered a preview of Rouch in Reverse by Manthia Diawara, produced by the UK company Formation Films, which presented the opportunity for the conference to include a timely film which was sure to contribute to the debate about Africa and cinema, as Rouch is known for his prolific ethnographic films on Africa.

The Contemporary Context: 'africa 95' The Africa and the History of Cinematic Ideas conference was the centrepiece of the Screen Griots programme (organised by the BFI's African Caribbean Unit) presenting the 'Art and Imagination of African Cinema'. The Screen Griots programme was itself part of the 'africa 95' national festival of art and culture. The idea of'africa 95' was launched in 1993 at the Royal Academy in London, one of the key institutions in the organisation of the festival, and the programmers of the major exhibition Africa: The Art of a Continent. The 'africa 95' festival was promoted as an unprecedented event in Britain which aimed to bring together the historical and contemporary arts of Africa in a series of programmes. British arts institutions, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the British Film Institute (BFI) all played a central role in this 'festival of Africa in Britain' which took place between August and December 1995. The festival was promoted as an 'artist-led' event. Even though the participation of African artists in all fields of the arts was evident, active institutional participation involved only organisations in Senegal and South Africa. The broad objectives of 'africa 95' were stated as follows: • The 'africa 95' season aims to draw attention to and increase knowledge and understanding in the UK of the arts of Africa today. • The season will reflect the vision of artists from Africa today and provide a platform for public debate on the arts. • The 'africa 95' organisation will provide support for the participating institutions in the development of the season. • The 'africa 95' organisation will help to facilitate ongoing communication between Africa and the UK. It will set in motion exchanges, for the benefit of artists, between universities, art colleges, artists' associations and workshop projects in locations in Africa and the UK which will continue once the season has come to a close in December 1995. As part of the 'africa 95' organisational structure an Editorial Group was convened to devise the African Cinema component of the season. This group was co-ordinated by June Givanni, head of the BFI's African Caribbean Film Unit, along with John Akomfrah (filmmaker), Colin McCabe ( Head of Research and Education Division, BFI), Keith Shire (Director of Africa at the Pictures film festival), Rose Issa (Art and Film curator), Imruh Bakari (filmmaker and writer), Lionel Ngakane (filmmaker and member of FEPACI). A series of events was agreed involving the National Film Theatre, the Barbican Cinema, regional film theatres across the UK, and projects in the Education, Television, Publishing, and Film and Video Distribution departments across the BFI.

xvi

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Acknowledgements This momentous conference could not have been possible without the financial and resource commitment of the BFI and the European Development Fund via 'africa 95'; the indispensable co-operation of the conference speakers and international guests who included Phillipe Sawadogo (ex-Secretary General of FESPACO), Mr Pape Sene (of the EEC); filmmakers Pedro Pimenta and Raoul Peck, festival director Suzy Landau; the valued contribution of conference sponsors, the British Council (Senegal, Egypt, Tunisia and Visiting Arts, London), Air Afrique, Tunisair, British Airways, Egypt Air, Tunisian Information Bureau, AGIP, BBC Television, M-NET, UNDP; the insight and dedication of the conference Advisory Group; the collaboration of the staff at the National Film Theatre, colleagues in the Research and Education Division of the BFI (especially Kathleen Luckey and Jacintha Cusack) and BFI Finance Division; and the willing enthusiasm of a host of volunteers - Delia Dolor, Vikas Morjaria, Esi Eshun, Mary Mbogoro, Karen Weir, Marina Coriolano Lykourezos, Chenaii Fyle, Chin Oke, Kim Park, Suzy Gillet, James van der Pool, Cindy Gordon and John Perchal - to all of whom we express our gratitude. In addition we would like to thank Mustapha Ouedraogo for help with translation, Kojo Boateng for the conference logo design and Colin Prescod for his helpful comments on the text; and last but not least, for their sheer hard work and commitment, conference assistants Chika Unaka and Rosemary Kelly and conference co-ordinator Gaylene Gould.

Notes 1 Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (London: BFI, 1989). 2 Ibid.

Abbreviations ANC BOP TV CFA CIDC

African National Congress Bophuthatswana TV Communaute Financiere d'Afrique Interafrican consortium of cinema distribution CNC Centre National du Cinema DAT Digital Audio Tape DBS Direct Broadcast system DTSR Development Through Self Reliance EEC European Economic Community FEPACI Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers FESPACO Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou

FRELIMO Front for the Liberation of Mozambique IDHEC Institute des Hautes Etudes Cin£matographiques Mmds Multi-point multichannel distribution system NGO Non-Governmental Organisation OAU Organisation of African Unity RENAMO Resistencia Nacional Mocambicana UCLA University of California, Los Angeles URTNA Union of Radio and Television Networks of Africa WAD Women and Development

Part One Contexts

Chapter 1 Introduction: African Cinema and the Emergent Africa Imruh Bakari

African cinema at the centenary of cinema in 1995 was widely acknowledged as a cinema that was still 'embryonic even though it has contributed some major works to the universal film heritage'.1 The production of the first films which have established this cinema coincided almost precisely with that epoch when African nation-states were born, and sought to establish themselves within the arena of global politics. The founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963 marks this period. The organisation's member states incorporated the entire continent, but the agenda was arguably set by the events in sub-Saharan Africa where, with the exception of Algeria in North Africa, the most volatile and sustained anti-colonial struggles were enacted. The year 1963 also witnessed the first major film by the Senegalese Ousmane Sembene, Borom Sarret. Though not the first film ever made by an African, its significance lies in its approach to the representation of African life and society, one that was distinct from the

hitherto established empire, colonial and ethnographic films popularised by Hollywood and the cinemas of Britain and France for example. Sembene's film was also significant in terms of the alternative narrative conventions which it offered. It suggested a way of storytelling which seemed to indicate the possibility of a distinct identity and aesthetic for a new African cinema. Of paramount importance however, Sembene and his 'age mates' aimed to establish a new relationship between African audiences and the cinematic image. Over the years their intentions have been voiced at various fora, and have also been the motivation for establishing in 1969 and 1970 respectively, the bi-annual pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) and pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI). It is in this sense therefore that * African film-making is in a way a child of African political independence'.2 Since Borom Sarret the idea of an African cinema has gained momentum as a significant number of filmmakers from the diverse cultures and states of the African continent have established themselves internationally. Following Ousmane Sembene, the films of Med Hondo, Haile Gerima, Souleymane Cisse, Kwaw Ansah, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Gaston Kabore\ Safi Faye, Djibril Diop Mambety and others have become prominent among the body of work now regarded as constituting African cinema. Much has been written about these filmmakers and their films charting both their growth and their impact on world cinema. In the first instances the apparent objective was to provide some insight into the background of the filmmakers and the conditions under which the films were being produced. Angela Martin's African Films: The Context of Production exemplified this approach.3 Here the concern was to identify the filmmakers and

4

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

to locate them within an Africa which was to the international audience generally unfamiliar and incomprehensible. Martin's dossier was principally a collection of writings by various scholars who provided African perspectives on the history of the continent, its colonial experience and anti-colonial struggle, its perceptions of the media and film industry, and an indication of film production initiatives as part of the process to counter the pervasive legacy of 'underdevelopment'. Profiles of national experiences and individual filmmakers suggested a complexity beyond the scope of this publication. African cinema revealed itself as not only the 'last cinema', but also one that was sophisticated, yet paradoxical and problematic. There is no doubt that the cultural and political reality of the continent and the films produced significantly challenged and often contradicted established approaches to cinema. However, international audiences and writers within the North American and European tradition of film theory and criticism inevitably approached African film through what Teshome Gabriel has termed a 'cultural curtain'.4 The challenge was therefore to understand African cinema on its own terms, and to identify the influences and discourses at work within it. Significantly this was not a naive cinema in the sense of a naive art. The filmmakers were not returning to the origins of cinema to re-create their versions of the first Lumiere exhibitions. What was to be confronted was a sophisticated and studied use of film technology and conventions to produce films articulating the very modern experiences of contemporary African societies. The issues thrown up by African films were incorporated into debates around the wider concerns of cinema in the 'Third World'. As the ideas discussed in Questions of Third Cinema indicate,5 the notion of Third Cinema which was formulated in response to developments in Latin America was extended and utilised to provide analytical tools for advancing a critical debate on African cinema. Towards this end important contributions have been made by a number of scholars including Teshome Gabriel, Manthia Diawara, Ferid Boughedir, Frank Ukadike, Haile Gcrima, Mbye Cham, Clyde Taylor, Francoise Pfaff, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, Pierre Haffner and Guy Hennebeile. However, African cinema by its intrinsic nature remains problematic. While filmmakers continue to pursue their aspirations, they do so within the highly charged arena of Africa's political economy. What becomes apparent is the paradoxical relationships which must of necessity be negotiated between various means and ends; the filmmakers' international reputation and their domestic existence; and the radical aspirations and the diverse contemporary realities within African societies. Here is to be found 'the contested and dynamic terrain, one that is in constant flux, and continually subject to myriad internal pressures and demands as well as to the effects of a constantly changing global political and media economy'.6 In this global environment the marginalisation of Africa and African opinion is a standing order. The widespread and critical economic circumstances of African nation-states ensures that filmmakers remain collectively disempowered within their respective countries. In effect the circumstances which inform the issues of African cinema debated over the years still remain largely unaltered. There has in fact been very little positive change towards developing a viable infrastructure, providing production finance, and reaching audiences across the continent. In other words, the development of a dynamic African film culture has been acutely inhibited by the postcolonial social and economic condition. For the filmmakers therefore, the impact of conditions within Africa as well as the prevailing dominance and influence of the international film industry have become points

INTRODUCTION

5

of contention, anger and frustration. With this comes an expressed opinion that the perception and agenda of African cinema is disproportionately determined by the response and reception of African films outside of the continent. In North America and Europe in particular, the work of African filmmakers has been widely acclaimed in arts and academic circles. At international festivals such as Cannes and London, African films have maintained a significant presence. There are also a number of festivals and events, some regular, others occasional, dedicated to or featuring African films.7 While these have brought the work of important directors to international audiences, the effect on the development of African cinema has been regarded with ambiguity. One rather stark reality has been the relationship between France, through its Ministry of Co-operation Bureau of Cinema, and its former colonial territories.8 As a result of this privileged access to production finance, 'francophone' filmmakers have been able to establish a predominant presence in African cinema. After a number of relatively consistent years the unreliability of this dependency, and the inability anywhere else to establish a viable film production strategy, has placed the issues of African cinema's existence and survival in a critical light, so much so that at the centenary of cinema there was a significant body of opinion which held that 'in spite of the increasing number of African filmmakers and films, in spite of their aesthetic innovations, it is sad to observe that African cinema is at a stand still'.9 The conference Africa and the History of Cinematic Ideas took place against this background. Ironically (and some would say inevitably) the seminal inspiration was not the concerns emanating from Africa or African filmmakers, but the desire of a group of British institutions and individuals to celebrate the arts of Africa in the UK. The task of planning this cinema event was by no means an easy one. Inevitably the Editorial Group had to make evaluative decisions and develop a rationale for what was finally agreed. In the process of devising the programme it became apparent that in many ways this was a conference waiting to happen. An awareness of the predicament of African cinema came into focus. Like a giant octopus which had wrapped itself into an intriguing web, the idea of African cinema was at once challenging and uncomfortable. The challenge of reconciling the cinema experiences of Egypt, Senegal, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Ghana and Nigeria, for example, in a notion of African cinema was regarded as the inescapable point of reference for a meaningful critical and contextual framework. In grappling with these issues the idea of an African identity presented itself through the prism of the colonial legacies and cultural diversity which has shaped contemporary national identities, along with the ideas of pan-Africanism and diaspora which exist simultaneously, often in contestation. In view of the acknowledged centrality of cinema and the mass media in popular culture and contemporary society as a whole, African filmmakers have found themselves very much at the forefront of debates around these issues. Addressing African cinema in this context therefore gave the conference a prominent profile within the 'africa 95' season. With this came not only high expectations, but equally a sense of cynicism and exasperation at the idea of yet another conference/festival on African cinema. Indeed there was an awareness that similar sentiments extended to the idea of'africa 95' as a whole. The objective, however, was to devise a conference that would adequately respond to the complexity and diversity implied by the notion of African cinema. The central question of what is at stake when the words 'Africa' and 'cinema' are brought together became an important point of departure. Broad references to the seminal ideas of the Congolese scholar V. Y. Mudimbe helped to focus and shape the conference.10 Appendix A indicates the outline of

6

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

the agreed programme, its keynote speech and panels; and the rationale for the preferred approaches to the critical issues and questions. In her paper, Professor Sylvia Wynter presented what is no less than a substantial archaeology of the location of Africa within the Western tradition of philosophical ideas, and a perspective on the relationship between these and the question of African cinema. Wynter's paper Africa, the West and the Analogy of Culture: The Cinematic Text after Man (Chapter 2) is a challenging exposition and reformulation of many of the seminal ideas which have informed the ongoing debates around the work of African filmmakers. As Ngugi Wa Thiong'o observes in his reflection on the conference, the core ideas being expressed are responding to the acknowledged importance of the cinema, as an aspect of the mass media, in the contemporary world. The principal concern of Sylvia Wynter is therefore its role in securing and consolidating the hegemony of Western (Euro-American) ideology by ensuring and perpetuating the continued submission of Africa and its people to its single memory. The cinema is also a site of resistance and affirmation, thus in response to the question of what is at stake in the formulation of 'African cinema', Wynter explores not simply the oppositional location of an African cinema, but more importantly what could be termed its historically determined redemptive function. The opening clarifications are pertinent in signalling the need to interrogate the formative ideas which construct the ideological bedrock of the dominant approaches to film theory and criticism. Our attention is drawn to the taken-for-granted commonsense notions which are ingrained within even radical theories of culture and society, including I would suggest contemporary postmodern thought. Here it can be argued that the implicit logic of postmodern discourse, like other post-Enlightenment discourses, locates the African as 'Other' and as a symbol of otherness. Wynter's argument suggests that this is rationalised as a normality within the seminal notion of 'Man', within the definition and evolution of the culturally specific meaning of human society constructed in the course of the historical ascendancy of modern Western society. The idea of'after Man' therefore is employed to signify a transformative agenda, and the necessity for a new symbolic order. Hence the centrality of the cinematic text and its potential for redefining what it means to be human. One of Wynter's core assertions is that cinema should be understood in terms of its dynamic position within the cultural sphere, because of the importance of the transformative processes which must take place here. In addressing these issues from an implicit humanist perspective that resonates throughout, Wynter's ideas quite clearly suggest an affinity with Frantz Fanon's legacy. For Fanon, decolonisation involved both cultural contestation and transformation. In his essay 'On National Culture' the humanist imperative is clearly indicated by the distinction between 'national consciousness' and 'nationalism'. 11 Here he states as a concluding remark: If a man is known by his acts, then we will say that the most urgent thing today for the intellectual is to build up his nation. If this building up is true, that is to say if it interprets the manifest will of the people and reveals the eager African peoples, then the building of a nation is of necessity accompanied by the discovery and encouragement of universalising values. Far from keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it is national liberation which leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history. It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows. And this two-fold emerging is ultimately the source of culture.12

INTRODUCTION

7

For Fanon national liberation involved cultural validation and affirmation, it was equally concerned with realising a critical engagement with such things as tradition and custom. It must of necessity go beyond the parochial and find root in the more dynamic essence of people's lives. Of nationalism, he writes, 'if it is not enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into humanism, it leads up a blind alley'.13 For social theorists and revolutionary thinkers of the colonised Third World this has been understood as a call for a 'new kind of human being'. This challenge was taken up by the radical filmmakers of Latin America and Africa in particular, in defining their role as filmmakers and the function of cinema in achieving this ideal for their societies. The treatise 'Towards a Third Cinema' 14 by the Argentinians Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, was one of the responses by filmmakers to the challenge of decolonisation. The tone, though rhetorical, remains definitive in terms of the radical departure which it indicated. In relation to Wynter's agenda, Third Cinema sustains a concern with countering 'a cinema made for the old kind of human being' with one 'fit for a new kind of human being, for what each one of us has the possibility of becoming'. 15 The thought of Frantz Fanon resonates within the idea of Third Cinema and, as indicated by Teshome Gabriel, his influence along with that of the Guinea-Bissau revolutionary Amilcar Cabral is of critical importance in understanding the function and practice of the filmmaker in the current debate on African cinema. Gabriel suggests: Their theory of knowledge is the theoretical and critical nexus which serves as a necessary prerequisite for our understanding of the subtle shifts, not only in the theory of ideology, but also in the manifestation of Third World culture, as exemplified by film production. 16 In a sense Cabral, like his contemporaries who were involved in armed conflict as the mode of anti-colonial struggle, brought Fanon's ideas very directly into the realm of praxis within the problematic of Africa itself. Cabral acknowledged that: The fact of recognizing the existence of common and particular features in the cultures of African peoples, independent of the colour of their skins, does not necessarily imply that one and only one culture exists on the continent. In the same way that from an economic and political viewpoint we can recognize the existence of several Africas, so also there are many African cultures.17 The critical perspectives engendered by this African experience brought into focus not simply the central question of culture but, more pertinently, the problematic of developing relevant and appropriate 'popular culture', 'national culture', 'political and moral awareness', and a 'scientific culture' which was compatible with an awareness of 'universal culture' promoted through 'feelings of humanism, of solidarity, of respect and disinterested devotion to human beings'. 18 For Cabral, the process that suggested itself, given the colonial legacy and anti-colonial ideal, involved a 'return to the source', a 'cultural renaissance'. 19 When, for example, Clyde Taylor speaks of African cinema as 'the last cinema', 20 he is also referring to a redemptive and humanist function of that cinema within world cinema. In exploring this function further, at the Film Festival in Edinburgh in 1986 Taylor drew on earlier work by Sylvia Wynter, 21 to suggest a cinema/cultural agenda shared by all peoples, as Wynter defines them in her paper, who have been 'othered' or 'dysselected' in the formulation and evolution of'Man' as rendered in Western ideology: the peoples of African

8

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

heredity and descendance, Third World peoples, indigenous peoples, the underdeveloped, the unemployed, the homeless, et al In his essay 'Black Cinema in the Post-aesthetic Era', Taylor points out the bankruptcy of Western aesthetics and its humanist project, and makes a case for an emergent 'black cinema' which incorporates African cinema: the birth of black cinema takes place in the context of the struggle between a dying concept of the human and an emerging one. If black cinema is to evolve as a significant player in this critical historical juncture, it will do so through predications outside 'aesthetics', rewriting its version of humanity while passing through a hypothetical zero aesthetic point.22 The critical significance of this transformative and redemptive agenda is of importance for a number of reasons. In the first instance there is a need for caution by virtue of an awareness of a certain Judaeo-Christian discourse which informs some traditions of black nationalist thinking. Here can be found the notion of the 'black man' fulfilling a redemptive function in Western society through his/their suffering. It is steeped in the sentiment of biblical narrative, which legitimises suffering, oppression and, implicitly, slavery, as the necessary prerequisite for worthy elevation and acceptance within the ideological order of Western society. As a tendency within brands of liberalism, the pervasiveness of this proposition is well known. In fact Taylor provides an idiosyncratic critique of this tendency by making the rhetorical assertion that 'Blacks can only dubiously be post-modern since they were never permitted to be 'modernists' in the first place'. 23 This should not be taken lightly, but as a signal of the need for a new epistemology and symbolic codes appropriate to the needs of the apparent ideological task. It is a task often hamstrung in radical theory and criticism by the pervasive logic of the ludaeo-Christian evolutionary discourse. As secular manifestations of this discourse, the social Darwinist tendencies in Marxism, feminism and postmodernism must be considered in terms of the ways in which they have maintained what Wynter indicates in her paper as the 'constant' position of Africa. It is for these reasons, among others, that the perspective offered by Sylvia Wynter demands our attention, and is necessarily differentiated from other discourses that also claim a redemptive function for Africans and Africa diaspora culture and political activism. From the perspective offered by Sylvia Wynter, the redemptive impulse within this Judaeo-Christian evolutionary discourse is neither transformative nor humanist. It therefore has no place in the current critical debate about African cinema. Instead, Wynter is concerned with the potential for African cinema to fulfil a deconstructive role, one that would interrogate the hegemonic narratives of human experience in a Foucauldian sense, thus offering the possibility of a new 'symbolic code' and signifying a new 'order of consciousness' and a new 'mode of memory'. This is postulated as a 'Second Emergence' where the 'First Emergence' is located as the primordial moment marked in the theory of evolution when the first manifestations of human existence validated their presence in the symbolic forms of rock paintings. For Wynter this moment is of significance in as much as the evidence places 'the Origin of the human in representation rather than in Evolution'. Wynter's proposition makes a radical departure from the normalised and naturalised discourses which place 'Man' before representation as a reductive bio-evolutionary entity. In its own logic this formulation of 'man' provides the basis for the evolutionary determinism at the core of Western ideologies which are predisposed towards the validation of

INTRODUCTION

9

the notion of human culture and society which the Enlightenment thinkers offered as the highest and most desirable achievements of human genius. In terms of the regimes of consciousness and memory which this offers, there is an inevitable hierarchial 'order of knowledge' and the 'paradox of the Enlightenment' itself, identified by Taylor.24 In this sense, therefore, modernity is revealed to be not simply a triumphant arrival point, a celebration of empiricism and secularism; but equally the institutional plateau for the canonisation of racism, fascism and genocide as appropriate evolutionary routes to which those predetermined as 'Other' by the bio-evolutionary logic of the species are condemned. Wynter suggests that representation as an ideologically determined symbolic expression of being does not simply reflect existence and its ethos, but profoundly constructs and validates it. Hence, in Western culture the shift from a preoccupation with 'spiritual redemption' to 'material redemption' within the ideological discourse of the modern/postmodern order of consciousness indicates nothing more than a revision of the terms by which the 'Other' is delineated in the evolutionary discourse. Throughout the history of colonialism, undemocratic and often barbaric governance of the 'Other' has been condoned, and even encouraged as long as this served Western interests. As depicted in the quintessential British colonial film Sanders of the River (1935), the liberal (radical?) position is decidedly paternalistic and complicit with keeping the 'natives' in their place. The ideological location of the 'Other' in civilisation/modernity is therefore consistent whether the liberal rhetoric is on behalf of 'spiritual redemption' or in favour of 'material redemption'. In the former the 'world' must be persuaded that the 'natives' do have a soul. In the latter the appeal is for the encouragement of a sympathetic aid/debt culture of development. In both cases the acceptable fate/destiny of the 'Other' is a ladderlike ascendancy along the pre-determined path of 'human' evolution. In addressing the central question of African cinema and the redemptive function of the 'African and the black diaspora', Wynter remaps the debate to focus on the necessary and pivotal role of'the African' as a discourse of'Otherness' within the construct of modernity itself. As Mudimbe asserts, 'stories about Others, as well as commentaries on their differences, are but elements in the history of the Same and its knowledge'.25 By inference, Africa's relationship with, and its symbolic function within, the cinematic text is also called into question. Wynter is therefore concerned first with bringing to the forefront of the debate on African cinema an awareness of the location of 'Africa' as being 'Othered' outside of modernity, but yet fulfilling a role intrinsic to modernity's representation of itself; its construction, validation and perpetuation. Wynter emphasises that in the contemporary 'Western techno-industrial world system', the cinematic text and its symbolic codes have, and have had, a pivotal and definitive function in this process. The redemptive project in this sense, therefore, is concerned with the ways in which African cinema as a response to, and articulation of, African subjectivity inside/outside of modernity continues to redefine itself, and is distinguished in terms of the potential of its texts in the reordering of knowledge, and by implication contestation of the hegemonic power of the grand narrative of Western secular 'Man' itself. Understanding and assessing this process, however, places a colossal demand on available resources. It involves the pursuit of an 'autonomy of memory' and a 'normative consciousness' which has to be achieved within the contemporary. As it stands, the prevailing objective reality indicates that Africa's global position and profile is linked to its ability to disentangle itself from the dominant consciousness and regime of memory privileged by both Judaeo-Christian and post-Enlightenment

10

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

ideologies. How indeed 'can one fly in the face of this reality, even where one is condemned by, and in, it', as Wynter asks. Arriving at some notion of how this might be possible brings into convergence a number of concerns: aesthetic, economic, cultural and political, pertaining to the viability and possibility of an African cinema. As Wynter makes clear, this involves coming to terms with the apparent role of the dominant Euro-American cinematic text in providing African spectators with a mode of fulfilling the shared desire to be 'modern'. There is also, in the process of representing Africa, in rearticulating the global space and the African experience of that space as human subjectivity, the problem of the ideological determinism intrinsic to the technological apparatus itself. As Brian Winston notes: Photographs, cinema and television do not merely express in texts the ideology of the culture that produces them, with the possibility that other ideologies could equally easily be signified in different texts; rather, the technologies are embedded in the social sphere and are themselves an ideological expression of the culture.26 The politics of the natural and the normal are therefore equally influential in the consideration of aesthetic, economic and cultural concerns, in the processes of representation and its modes. There are no easy solutions to be offered here as Wynter observes, and as the conference proceedings show, there were indeed instances which suggested the enormity of the challenge to step outside the hegemonic discourses, beyond what Wynter understands as the inhibiting Western 'gallery of mirrors', towards 'knowing and representing the "cultural universe of Africa" ...'. With characteristic urgency the scope of Wynter's ideas and propositions reaches far beyond the conference's capacity. They, however, remain as a subliminal presence providing a critical wellspring for the debates which interrogate the paradigm of African cinema. With hindsight it is evident that Wynter's paper achieves the status of a framework canvas against which to proceed with the ongoing distillation of ideas and positions enunciated during the conference proceedings. Wynter is in fact adding her persuasive voice to the consensus which is, with growing resonance, formulating a cultural shift that is a call for what is no less than an African renaissance for the twenty-first century. One cannot escape the idea of such an emergence. Seen in this context, Wynter's 'Second Emergence' is not new in its literal meaning, but its terms of reference around the bringing into being of new symbolic codes in the necessary process of reconceptualising the history of Africa in the world places cinema and the cultural sphere at the locus of this project. The perspective offered by Wynter for the interrogation of the primordial seems intended to serve as a mechanism for unearthing the data for the proposed 'analogy of culture' which in the ideological sphere is suggested as a means of demystifying contemporary symbolic codes which are structured and which function according to the culturally specific demands of the dominant Western paradigm, and are rehearsed and enacted in cinematic texts. Renaissance in this sense loses its possible Utopian pretensions, and seems more appropriately placed in relation to a critical debate about the nature/nurture imperatives in human culture and ideological life. As with the discourse of 'redemption' identified above, the discourse of a 'renaissance' equally merits some critical attention in view of the opportunities which it may offer for the rehabilitation of the grand narrative of 'Freedom' discussed by Wynter as embodied within the pursuit of contemporary material redemption (the hegemonic Pax Americana).

INTRODUCTION

11

That such a consideration is of importance is evidenced by the inconclusiveness of the conference, as well as its uneven, contentious and controversial deliberations. Though instinctive antagonisms may be discernible, at the level of praxis the dichotomies may be much more ambiguous and bound up with the political and institutional realities within which African subjects now function in the modern global world, be the location Egypt, South Africa or Europe, Lagos, Dakar or New York. There is, therefore, the persistent reminder that what may appear as personalised conflict could well be indicative of Africa's apparent instability and volatile political culture, and symptomatic of the continent's contentious relationship with modernity. From an alternative perspective, contentious polarities may well be read as being symptomatic of the instinctive search for Wynter's new symbolic order, in which African filmmakers and their films are not only caught up, but also constitute an integral part. The struggle over 'representation' is the central issue, and Wynter's project reveals itself as being motivated to provide a theoretical and philosophical counter-discourse to both the bourgeois and Marxist discourses which frame the inhibiting parameters of the theoretical and critical debates that inform perspectives in contemporary film and cultural theory and criticism. In the final analysis Africa's task is to free itself from the domestication and bondage of the Western regime of memory, consciousness and order, within which Africa's subjectivity as a modern construct is enmeshed. At its most accessible entry point in the sphere of culture, African cinema is located at the critical epicentre of a politics of representation within the terrain of the global postcolonial world. The conference offered a unique opportunity to contribute to the mapping of this terrain. This opportune moment made it incumbent upon the organisers to have in attendance, as far as possible, all the constituent voices of the African cinema debate. It was therefore deemed necessary to have filmmakers engage with theorists and critics on each panel. Equally, while acknowledging the peculiarity and complexity of'North African' film culture and production, an engagement with this African experience was essential, in much the same way that South Africa is being acknowledged as an integral part of the African debate. To do otherwise would have been dishonest and a denial of the political culture of established pan-African organisations and institutions. What is offered in this account of the conference proceedings is not a direct response to Sylvia Wynter's paper. It is hoped that the reader will become aware of a significant corpus of work which signals an important point of departure in the history of African cinema, and its place in the history of'Africa and the history of cinematic ideas'. The dialogue represented here indicates an ongoing debate between theorists, critics and filmmakers. It takes place in their own languages -the particular language of their individual standpoint positions within both the institutions and industry of film study and production. Panel one (see Chapter 3) appropriately confronts the central thesis of Wynter's paper which stresses the importance of 'symbolic life'.27 The issue, however, is framed in terms of the question relating to the 'iconography of African cinema: what is it and how is it identified?' In other words, to speak of an African cinema implies a notion of a specific cinematic space: a constellation of symbolic codes and signifiers which defines this particular cinematic world across genres. Colin Prescod succinctly summed up the pertinent questions which bring into focus the issues of the values and criteria available and operative in the processes of making, looking at, theorising and critiquing African films; and the multiple and interdisciplinary resources which the subject demands. Manthia Diawara has been concerned in his work with understanding African cinema on its own terms. He has offered useful approaches to the analysis of narrative structure

12

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

and film form inscribed by the signifiers adopted and influenced by oral traditions and popular culture.28 At this conference the question of iconography is considered in terms of the apparent choices which filmmakers make and how these relate to the historical moment. Diawara's argument suggests the significance of the institutional context and its relationships. The principal issue at this juncture is the reception of African films within the global economy of cinema. Making reference to films made at moments across the history of African cinema, a discussion is developed noting that these films are made in response to the specific realities of particular nation-states which, by virtue of the inherent cultural contradictions, incongruity and dynamic of the situation, begin to reveal a more universal text of signifiers suggestive of an African cinematic space. Diawara also implies that while these are important to an understanding of African cinema, the aesthetics of the films may also be influenced by their reception and the expectations prevalent within the institutional context that legitimates these films in the global economy of cinema. The relationship between francophone West Africa and France is offered in evidence. On the issue of narrative and film form, Diawara's ideas indicate developments from earlier work. For example, though the category 'social realist5 remains consistent, the other earlier formulations, 'return to the source' and 'colonial confrontation',29 are more ambiguously stated as the discussion now engages with a notion of the 'postmodern'. The work of Djibril Diop Mambety is offered as an indication of this critical departure, as differentiated from the Sembene 'social realist' moment. For Diawara the postmodern in the first instance suggests an acceptance of multiple inheritances, on equal terms, each providing its own human potential. But the problems of definition and validation are equally obvious. Is Touki Bouki 'postmodern' or 'avant-garde' for example? In 1973, what could it be? These may indeed not be the appropriate questions at all. The appropriate questions and answers may indeed reside in a rearticulation of Africa's experience of modernity. Diawara implies that Mambety's iconography and narratives indicate an expansion and rearticulation of familiar discourses of those experiences usually understood in terms of the conflict between 'tradition' and 'modernity'. Mambety therefore signals the generic shift evident in more recent films where the contemporary is read through a construction of mythic narratives based on historical memory. In these texts the space occupied by the symbolic codes of both tradition and modernity are rendered as synchronous and simultaneous. The narrative discourses therefore do not call for a need to have an essential enemy or for the reinvention of one as in the dominant American popular cinema. This tendency in Hollywood films is predetermined and made inevitable according to the ideological disposition of the bio-evolutionary discourse intrinsic to the civilisation/wilderness binary which informs its popular and definitive genres. In African cinema this is rendered bankrupt and redundant. Here, 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 insinuation. The infusion of political and cultural awareness in these films not only offers a contrasting ethos to the proposals of 'modernity' but, also, attests to a complex 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 anachronisms. In fact, it recognizes that society is dynamic, that changes are

INTRODUCTION

13

inevitable, but that the investment of Euro-modernity with some kind of talismanic powers underwrites Africa's cultural enslavement.30 The tendency in African cinema, therefore, is towards exploring and reconciling the infinite possibilities simultaneously existing in both tradition and modernity. The 'postmodern' in this sense suggests an acknowledgement and validation of the 'poesis of being human' rather than the inscription of an evolutionary 'defective otherness' as noted by Sylvia Wynter.31 By way of deduction it also seems reasonable to suggest that this provides a new knowledge and an opportunity for re-evaluating African cinema in its entirety and diversity. John Akomfrah's rejoinder is cautionary in essence. It draws attention to the universalist and Utopian discourses which cling to the debate. This is important in as much as it elucidates the implications inherent in tendencies which Diawara noted. There is the discourse framed within the matrix of a cinema defined through its relationship with European institutions. There is conversely the discourse framing individual films and filmmakers as the politics of the African nation-state intrudes into the aesthetic and creative arena. Filmmakers are not necessarily willing players in either context, but are invariably involved by virtue of their location in the contemporary social experience of Africa. In both instances there is the overpowering determinism of circumstantial forces in process. The cautionary point therefore is the need for a critical and ongoing engagement with the definitive terms which enable the debate itself. Two such terms are given pre-eminence by Akomfrah, 'pan-Africanism' and 'Third Cinema'. Both are integral to the African cinema debate. The idea of 'pan-Africanism' has a complex genealogy with often paradoxical mutations across the African continent and in the African diaspora. 'Third Cinema', as the Edinburgh conference indicated, has moved beyond the rhetoric of its seminal age towards providing the critical basis for an ongoing radical political agenda, particularly in the cinemas of postcolonial cultures.32 Following Akomfrah, Asma El Bakri makes a terse contribution which, from a filmmaker's point of view, intervenes at the work-face. 'Distribution and production' are the buzz-words. It seems pertinent to emphasise that at the level of the filmmaker's day-to-day existence, the structural and institutional inadequacies of African cinema are of paramount importance. The capacity to articulate an African iconography, and for this to become a relevant part of the symbolic life of nations or peoples, where consciousness is both expressed and validated, is tied up with the very basic need for a suitable and viable infrastructure. In meeting this kind of challenge, the ideas of both pan-Africanism and Third Cinema would appear to assume a more dynamic potential, with less room for dogma and utopianism. Pan-Africanism and Third Cinema are of particular relevance because of the ways in which each foregrounds and problematises the issue of culture. Importantly, attention is drawn to the role and place of the individual as an active participant in its processes. This indeed is the essence of being human, and where this essence is denied, it can be assumed that the result is the disfigurement and denial of culture which Fanon refers to in his work as a symptom of racism. Racism is an institutional apparatus of colonialism and as such it has a significance in terms of the kinds of consciousness which it engenders. The question of decolonisation therefore is not a simple matter of wresting what Ngugi Wa Thiong'o refers to as 'economic and political space' but also, by his own assertion, 'mental space'. Panel two (see Chapter 4) considered this aspect of decolonisation. As the question is

14

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

posed, the idea of a 'pre-requisite' is provocative, not the least because at face value it assumes a certain linearity. This would conform to a tendency to understand ideas of decolonisation in terms of the colonised as moving from a state of'false consciousness' to selfhood and liberation. At the level of praxis the implications of this classical Marxist paradigm are quite critical because of the assumed passivity of the colonised and the absolute hegemony of the colonial regime. Teshome GabriePs allegorical narrative challenges this orthodoxy in a fundamental way. At a subliminal level a number of questions are raised. Most important is the question of the relevance or significance of the narrative itself. Gabriel is in a sense enacting the work of cinema in its process of recall, representation and meaning. There are pointers here concerning form, content and mediation. In terms of 'decolonisation' the critical question which lurks concerns who is the subject and what is the subjectivity to be decolonised. From the narrative sequence of events unfolds the precarious social location of the 'artist', the 'intellectual', the 'filmmakers'; in the process of interacting with, and giving voice to, the voices ('gifts') received in that interaction. It is precarious in the sense that in the process of attempting, as Gabriel wishes, to 'make the gifts meaningful and endurable', the dialectic of absence/presence (characteristic of representation itself) insists on its own significant emergence which is likely to impose new perspectives on the understanding of both colonisation and decolonisation. In Gabriel's narrative this involves the persistence of the female presence personified by his mother's symbolic offering of the evidence of his historical existence. Evidence which is otherwise forgotten or selectively recalled. For the filmmaker, therefore, the question of the decolonisation of the mind suggests itself not so much as a 'pre-requisite', but as part of what Wynter might call a 'sustained attempt' by the mediators of knowledge - the filmmaker for example — to reinscribe meaning into those intolerable gifts which are the symbols and signifiers of the African experience of being human. The two responses to Gabriel's paper reformulate this problematic in terms of their own individual experience. Nouri Bouzid is concerned with his own position as a filmmaker in an Islamic society, the specific case is Tunisia. It is one where, unlike some societies south of the Sahara, the alibi of Islam as an alien intrusion cannot be invoked. Bouzid makes a broad sweep across a number of important issues with particular emphasis being attached to representation in Islamic cultures, religious conservatism and nationalism. As part of the contemporary experience each of these demands much more critical attention than it is possible to offer here. Bouzid's idea, for example, that 'representation is forbidden by Islam' is contestable and does not account for either the popular cinemas of Muslim countries (Egypt and Iran are two cases) or the literary and artistic traditions of Islamic societies. There is also a much more complex argument to be developed here around the politics of 'looking', as well as the question of the technology, and its ideological impact and implications. Mariama Hima brings into focus the underlying issues of the transformation of social institutions. As a filmmaker this has been at the core of her formative experience. As a woman, she speaks in terms of how colonisation is both experienced and understood. The process of decolonisation is therefore illustrated in terms of her attraction to cinema, her involvement in filmmaking and film study, towards finding a space within a 'masculine world'. There is also an awareness of the global dimension of this world which is at the core of the complexity of decolonisation. Africa is a product of modernity. It is a product whose epistemology was first invented,

INTRODUCTION

15

and found its meaning in the colonial and imperial projects pursued by various powers from the fifteenth century onwards. In 1787 the colony of Sierra Leone was established. In 1803, with the defeat of Bonaparte, the Haitian Revolution triumphed. This was followed throughout the nineteenth century by the first significant efforts to articulate an African modernity as a counter-discourse to Western ethno-philosophy. Those involved in this project were among the post-slavery generation both in the 'New World' and on the African continent. Their project was a redemptive quest for 'national identity' and 'nationhood'. These objectives were codified in the ideas of 'pan-negroism' and later 'pan-Africanism', both of which revealed themselves as paradoxes defying the essentialising tendency of nationalism and the sacrosanct character of the nation-state. Pan-Africanism has provided a critical counterpoint for African cinema, and has some relevance to the understanding of 'postmodernism' in this context. As Roy Armes points out in his introduction to panel three (see Chapter 6), it is difficult and often absurd to uncritically apply Western concepts to African phenomena and historical processes. Both the ideas of modernity and postmodernity emanate from a specific historical location and human experience. In terms of film criticism, postmodernism assumes the awareness of a tradition of film theory and criticism which has been part of the development of film culture since 1895. As a body of work, it is informed by Euro-American (Western) concerns and perceptions dating back to the Enlightenment. Clyde Taylor makes clear in his paper his preoccupation with this body of work and its impact and relevance to the emergent African cinema. He is therefore able to provide an important connection between issues which emerged at Edinburgh in 1986 and the critical territory opened up by Sylvia Wynter. Taylor emphasises that within the Western discourses of modernity and postmodernity, the African presence is muted. To acknowledge its active function and independent existence is a profound disruption of the Western self-image, which both the projects of modernity and postmodernity seek to sustain. Taylor also says something much more profound about the inadequacy of an African postmodernism when he states that 'to speak of African postmodernism is to lose the agency by which African and Third World activists provoked closure on one phase of Western imperialism'.33 Implicit here is the need to avoid incorporation into the evolutionary determined Western narrative and thus perpetuate the self-negation and 'unfortunate amnesia' which occurs from an assumed, but erroneous convergence of the notions of 'postmodernism' and 'postcolonialism'. The critical approach to African cinema, therefore, remains an issue of finding a new discourse for the historical experiences of African societies. Towards this end, a working definition of 'modernity' is offered. Postmodernity, however, reveals itself to be much more problematic. Taylor explores this by way of the departures evident in African films since the 1980s. The discussion leads to the idea of a postmodernism which might be defined in terms of 'an African enlightenment', one predisposed to a corrective humanist impulse. For African cinema, the issue is an ongoing struggle for the 'soul of African cinema'. The suggestion here seems to be the need to recognise the process of constructing what I would term an African cinematic space, one indicative of the desired new order of consciousness. The implications of this will no doubt be the subject of future debate. It is instructive, however, that in response to Taylor's paper Kobena Mercer continues to signal some of the challenges to be confronted by this critical work. It is not accidental that there is a convergence between the African cinema and the cinemas of the 'black diaspora' as postcolonial

16

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

phenomena. The idea of an African cinematic space is in this sense global and diasporic. It is so because diaspora is a definitive aspect of the African experience of being human. Furthermore, as a counter-discourse, diaspora is not simply a product of the assumed rupture or dislocation caused by the Atlantic slave trade as the orthodox thinking on the subject implies. Diaspora discourse from the perspective of an 'African postmodernity' begins to speak of a long history of migratory and intercultural processes which have informed, and continue to inform, the narratives of identity that inhabit the African continent. It is at this interface that we can locate African cinema and its critical imperatives. Bassek Ba Kobhio's response to the issues precipitated by Taylor's paper brings into focus another perspective informed by the experience of being a filmmaker. His concerns call attention to the ways in which definitions and the work of critics and theorists frame products and processes, in this case films, and enable certain debates while inhibiting others. The role of criticism itself is the point of contention. As Bassek suggests, preempting later conference debates, this has a bearing on the question of audiences, particularly African audiences and their relationship with the spectrum of films which may constitute an African film culture. Importantly, Bassek is not solely responding to the postmodern debate, but also to the contributions of preceding panels and their discussions which involved contributions from those in attendance. On the whole the papers collected in this volume do not include these voices. However, the contributions of both Haile Gerima and Idrissa Ouedraogo, as respondents on panel five (see Chapter 5) addressing 'What is the link between chosen genres and developed ideologies in African cinema?', provide an insight into the kinds of passions and contentions which the conference proceedings generated. The objective of this panel was to consider what 'genre' meant in relation to African cinema. This called for some attempt to address the distinguishing features and characteristics codified in this cinema and their recognition. In doing so the inevitable convergence of form and content was made apparent, as well as the issues relating to the choices, determinant factors and ideologies being expressed. Ferid Boughedir noted the themes in African cinema and their manifestations in various films. Given the complexity of the potential or imagined audience for African films, the question of'what language shall I use in my film', as introduced by Boughedir, is premised upon an understanding of film form as determined through necessary technological and institutional negotiations which make directorial choices and preferences inevitable. The characteristics of a particular film, therefore, rely on this as much as on the 'political consciousness' and 'cultural formation' of the individual director. The 'five trends and two "cases'" discussed in this regard revisit Boughedir's earlier work in providing a methodology for analysing African films. The overview provided is significant because it indicates a historical perspective which is useful in differentiating the specific characteristics of African cinema and the formulations specific to the popular dominant cinema of the USA for example. This is necessary in order to make sense of the particular application of a term like 'genre' in the study of African films. The importance of maintaining a historical perspective in the study of African films is also emphasised in Ella Shohat's response. In a sense the views expressed here are informed by much the same concerns of earlier discussions which recognised the need for an ongoing critical relationship with the definitive terms that inform our debates and analysis. As was said in relation to 'pan-Africanism' and Third Cinema', Shohat also recognises the problematic inherent in the notion of 'Third World'. Its coinage in the context of that specific moment in anti-

INTRODUCTION

17

colonial nationalist struggles aimed at securing the nation-state inscribes it with a particular discourse. However, as Shohat points out in the contemporary postcolonial context where the binary opposition of nationalist politics and anti-imperialist struggle are no longer viable, a new inscription is necessary to accommodate the new critical thinking which the historical shift has engendered. The postcolonial experience, therefore, finds resonance in a 'post-Third Worldist' ideology and aesthetic which questions both the idea of a coherent and homogeneous national identity, and the existence of a definitive 'pre-modern' Africa. In terms of genre, therefore, Shohat suggests the need to speak of 'polygeneric tendencies', which transcend the outdated categories rooted in binary opposition. Ultimately the recognition of genres and their development is very much linked to the responses of audiences, both in terms of cultural and cognitive interaction and in the inevitable financial and production implications. Boughedir has therefore explored an important aspect of'genre' determination which relates form and content to the same institutional determinism which Diawara highlighted earlier in relation to the also related question of iconography. In Boughedir's case there is at this stage in the conference proceedings a culminated awareness of the possible ideological and political implications which the conference programme holds for African cinema as a whole. Haile Gerima's response is in this context indicative of the urgency engendered by this awareness, and the way in which its expression fuelled both debate and controversy. The central concern of his response is with the experience of the filmmaker and the question of how and under what conditions films are made. It is a concern which all the filmmakers present expressed in one way or another. Gerima's intervention brings a critical and equally ironic sensibility into play. There is a sense of exasperation being expressed and perhaps a demand for a greater recognition of material circumstances of African filmmakers. These concerns were indeed an integral part of all the conference papers, however collectively the filmmakers present seemed to express a sense of dissatisfaction at what appeared to be a lack of recognition of their day-to-day reality. It therefore seemed important for Haile Gerima to emphasise the relatively small number of films and filmmakers which constitute the African cinema. In a forum that has been principally concerned with 'ideas' and the film text itself, it was equally important to foreground in terms of practical experience some notion of the impact of decisions and priorities which provide access to film finance and facilities. Gerima's response is in part a critique of the film Rouch in Reverse directed by Manthia Diawara, which was included in the conference programme. Mariama Hima also mentioned Rouch as a figure who played a significant role in her own development as a filmmaker. This is an experience shared by other African filmmakers since the 1950s, thus confirming for some the reputation of Jean Rouch as a 'patriarch' in African cinema. Rouch, by virtue of his innovations, which have come to be known as cinema verite, is undoubtedly a significant figure in the radical traditions of world cinema and French anthropology. His work in Africa as an ethnographer and as a filmmaker, and his place in African cinema are much more contentious. It is an issue which has persisted from the earliest period of African cinema, and one on which Rouch himself has had to reflect. This is quite starkly illustrated by the encounter between himself and Ousmane Sembene in 1965. The now famous conversation which occurred is exemplified by the following exchange:

18

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

JEAN ROUCH Je voudrais que tu me dises pourquoi tu n'aimes pas mes films purement ethnographique, ceux dans lesquels on montre, par exemple, la vie traditionnelle? OUSMANE SEMBENE Parce qu'on y montre, on y campe une reality mais sans en voir revolution. Ce que je leur reproche, comme je le reproche aux africanists, c'est de nous regarder comme des insectes ... 34 (JEAN ROUCH I'd like to know why you do not like my purely ethnographic films: those in which, for example, traditional life is shown? OUSMANE SEMBENE Because a static reality is imposed, one that takes no account of its evolution. What I would take issue with, as I would take issue with the Africanists, is that we are examined like insects.) The film Rouch in Reverse therefore opened up in a very immediate and real sense the questions of the politics of representation. Manthia Diawara has taken one position in relation to the question of how to assess the role and place of Jean Rouch in African cinema. It is, however, not out of place that the film should be raised as an issue within a debate on genre and ideology. Regardless of the individual perceptions on Rouch, it should be possible to interrogate this film in the light of the critical perspectives developed and acknowledged as appropriate to the work of African cinema. What is clear, however, is that at the level of praxis, the politics of African cinema is intimately interwoven with the historical conundrum which is the legacy of colonialism. In this politics Gerima has taken the persona of the French filmmaker/ethnographer as a powerful signifier of a legacy which masquerades as an enabling factor, yet persists as an oppressive and debilitating one. Colonial conquest did produce imperialist privilege. As Sylvia Wynter might imply, this position of privilege, regardless of its apparent benevolence, may well hinder the emergence of a radical alternative to the African as a subordinate 'Other* in the evolutionary scheme of Western ideology. In the debate on African cinema, it is illustrative of the demands that are inevitably made on the individual in the processes of reconciling and negotiating the complexity of related issues and positions, be they personal or public, ideological or aesthetic, filmmaker or critic. As part of his response to Gerima's criticism of Rouch in Reverse* Diawara - in extended conference proceedings not included in this volume - indicated that some consideration had to be made for the fact that the film was screened on video format which was not first generation. This in turn complicates matters even more, as the whole issue of what constitutes the film text is brought more critically into focus. In terms of the conference agenda, it returns the debate to the issue of the technology and its ideological and aesthetic characteristics. The possibilities which exist for finding the appropriate mechanism for unlocking these entanglements most certainly rests in a critical commitment to that 'sustained attempt to free ourselves from the negatively marked representations imposed upon us, as the embodied signifiers of Man's most extreme H u m a n Others . . . \ 3 5 Panel four of the conference (see Chapter 7) illustrated how, as the twenty-first century dawns, the global cultural and political environment is being redefined. The issue of 'New Technology' does not fit easily into a debate on African cinema but, as Claire Andrade-Watkins observes, it is an inescapable reality. It is one which has already influenced the thinking on film production and cinema. Jim Pines' comments bring together a number of perspectives on the role and impact of new technologies, and raise pertinent questions concerning Africa's location within these developments. As I have mentioned

INTRODUCTION

19

earlier, all technologies arrive with their own ideological and cultural components. 'New technologies' and the possibilities of new media which are offered, are also accompanied by 'a profound restructuring of everyday life*.36 The question of how this relates to the institutional and cultural modes of African life is a subject for another forum. In the context of African cinema, however, the question is as John Badenhorst puts it, 'what new technology may mean to African filmmakers'. Badenhorst develops an argument which tends to consider cinema in television terms. In contemporary media culture there are definitely convergences between the two, but differentiation is important in recognition of the quite different demands of news and entertainment programmes as opposed to films for the cinema. This lack of differentiation and collapsing of boundaries is a characteristic of the new media technologies, which locates it firmly in the Western postmodernist frame. As a cultural phenomenon it poses attractive ideas of transcendent virtual existences beyond the contradictions and impossibilities of the 'real'. For Africa it is interesting that Badenhorst proclaims a role for new technology which seems to reconcile communication with community, information with knowledge, deregulation with democracy. Both Claire Andrade-Watkins and Ola Balogun provide responses which together strike a cautionary note. Andrade-Watkins calls into question the qualitative and structural benefits which 'cyberspace' offers. There is also a call for a critical interrogation of the idea and practice of democracy itself, which in the technological world of the new media may be predisposed to what has been termed by William Gibson as 'consensual hallucination' and the realisation of a Utopian 'anti-political ideal*.37 Balogun also provides an important shift in emphasis from the technological medium to the products which could be facilitated by its existence. Whether this solves the problems of African cinema or not is arguable, but it does refocus the debate in terms of the priorities of the African filmmakers, as opposed to 'aid' and corporate interest. The question of'indigenisation' is always a contentious one. From the perspective of the nationalist or crypto-fascist it can fuel policies of exclusivity and terror inimical to the principles underlying the question posed for panel six (see Chapter 8). Quite appropriately, Mbye Cham makes clear this focus as one concerned primarily with the structural and material conditions of existence for African cinema. Ousmane Sembene submitted a response that is as ironic as his absence and provides a provocative counterpoint to the conference proceedings as a whole. As the panel discussions revealed, there is no doubt as to the intentions and achievements of filmmakers. There is, however, an important discussion to be had about the relationship between the films, and indeed the filmmakers, and African society. Cinema may appropriately be considered as 'an evening class for the people' (a phrase coined by Ousmane Sembene), but where, how and to what effect does it occur? As Gaston Kabore outlines, the central question is about reaching the African public and, in so doing, becoming an active and integral presence in their cultural and political experience. There is without a doubt a gap that needs to be bridged between African cinema and its primary audience. Kabore sees the possibility of bridging this gap in efforts aimed at reconciling the institutional functions of the filmmaker, the critic and the audience. He speaks of a 'dynamic approach' which is already apparent in some aspects of African film culture. The approach may also be discernible as part of the lived reality, given the diversity and hybridity of African societies. As a model for 'dialogue' and co-operation, the suggestion seems to be that the 'dynamic approach* provides a basis for conscious efforts towards

20

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

realising the desired ideals for African cinema, and ending the estrangement from its public. The Burkina Faso experience is used to illustrate the potential which exists to resolve these issues in practical terms. The call is for initiatives which ask individuals, national institutions and 'nations' to realign their consciousness and actions beyond narrow and parochial interests. Cheick Oumar Sissoko takes up this point, making reference to his own experience. The debilitating effects of the lack of both infrastructure and finance does not call into question the creativity of the individual filmmaker. The global impact of African cinema is recognised as having been due to what the films produced have said about the African and equally about the human condition. There is an Authenticity', sometimes ambiguously or patronisingly acknowledged, which indicates a dynamic relationship between the film, African arts and traditions. However, the African public remains the missing component which is of paramount importance to the definition and development of African cinema. Samir Farid's response suggests another starting point for looking more thoroughly at the diversity of Africa's experience of cinema. The problematic of a popular 'national' cinema and a 'closed' market now threatened by 'American monopoly' is an interesting one. This might suggest an important consideration for inclusion in a future agenda. By his own admission, 'everything is now in question'. The overall impression from the panel, therefore, is that the issue of'indigenisation' in cinema, as in a popular art form like music, is not a marginal ethnographic notion, but a central concern in the political economy of African cinema. Just as there is a notion of the 'popular' implicit in the question of indigenisation, it is, as the general thrust of the conference debates indicated, also tied up with the question of 'audience'. This was the focus of the final panel (see Chapter 9). Rose Issa points out that at this juncture the philosophical ideas, which preoccupied the conference as a whole, were revisited and brought back down to earth. The geographical locations from which the speakers on this panel came provided, with hindsight, a pertinent account of African civil society and the contrasting politics of the popular, particularly between North and southern Africa. Once again, just as Tafataona Mahoso re-emphasised that the 'pseudouniversalisf claims of Western development were neither inevitable nor uncontestable, so too did the panel's contributions suggest a need once again for caution against African universalist claims. The pivotal thrust of this panel, however, made an important connection with Sylvia Wynter's paper which at its core was concerned with the work of the filmmaker and the role of film. Here the core concern was extended to focus on the aesthetic and ideological relevance and function of audiences. Mahoso's anecdotal and graphic contribution spoke directly to the implications of a viable and fully realised African cinema for African civil society. 'The question of cinema audiences in Africa is important because it reveals the link between cultural regulation, aesthetics and democracy or the struggle for democracy. The struggle for cultural reconstruction is a struggle for meaning and for democracy', Mahoso insists. 38 His paper therefore explores the ways in which Western philosophical regimes and epistemology inhibit this struggle and its necessary processes of 'reclamation and reconstruction'. The discussion goes on to interrogate the ways in which, in the contemporary experience of African people, governing elites in various nation-states conspire to use cinema (and television, including new technology) as convenient scapegoats for their own inadequacies. The issue here is a matter of understanding the paradox of modernity in

INTRODUCTION

21

Africa. It is one in which the imperative of the modern is zealously embraced in the project of sustaining the postcolonial status quo. As a result the African human experience, its expression and its aesthetic, inscribed as 'tradition' or as 'exotic', is considered to be of no intrinsic value beyond its use value in the global economy of the universalised notion of the postmodern world order. Hence, traditional dances may decorate state functions. They may provide the exoticism which gives the added value of African cultural authenticity to the imposed economies of tourism for example. Conversely, tradition itself may be used as a mechanism of control, regulation and censure, or as fortification for elite privilege. There is no doubt therefore that in this context the project of African cinema as affirmation and validation of African subjectivity may be rendered seditious and subversive. Considered in terms of the wider politics of culture, the struggle identified by Mahoso, which links audience, aesthetics and democracy, reveals itself in the contemporary postcolonial context to be a struggle for 'sovereignty'. The Caribbean novelist George Lamming, addressing the issue of African literature, framed the idea of sovereignty in the following terms: By 'sovereignty' I mean the capacity and therefore the intention of a people as total society to exercise control over the material base of their survival and a commitment to define their own reality. Sovereignty is therefore not possible where the majority are excluded from this process of collective control and continuing self-definition. The sovereignty of a literature cannot be guaranteed by the excellence of individual works of the imagination or the ingenuity of discourse between writers and their critics. The sovereignty of literature depends on the possession of the text by the total society, covering the most varied terrain of mediation. The text has to become familiar and an ordinary part of daily conversation.39 Lamming is here addressing the state of literature in the late twentieth-century postcolonial societies of the Caribbean and Africa. There is more than a cursory connection between this and an African cinema which is equally concerned with shifting its social identity 'from the status of exotic and eccentric scandal to that of text'.40 It is not simply demanding study and analysis, but also exposition and possession in the lives of its diverse primary audience. As the conference proceedings signified in this volume suggest, important questions need to be continually asked about the films which might constitute this text, and equally about the critics, the filmmakers and the audience, Mahoso appropriately brings these questions into focus by way of reference to specific films from southern Africa. As case studies, the films cited provide insights for the critical and often controversial issues that persist even where the motivation is well intended and, maybe, politically correct. Attention is drawn to an insidious 'genre' in African cinema, the 'development film' which, though not necessarily alone, would be symptomatic of Lamming's observation that 'intellectual distinction and social backwardness can co-exist in those who may even offer themselves as agents of change'.41 Mahoso's examples illustrate how the institutional contexts of 'aid/development' politics within which these films are produced are predisposed to editorial and aesthetic decisions which have a negative and alienating effect. The intrinsic ideological position is premised on a notion of an inherent incapacity on the part of the 'African' to contemplate or to deal with the contemporary. Alternatively, a developmental idea of the 'modern' is therefore uncritically offered as the inevitable and appropriate option. For the filmmaker the challenge seems therefore to be one of being able to recognise,

22

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

accept and engage with the 'intolerable gifts' of the African human experience. Here lies the desired empathy, the authenticity and the dynamic memory which is the seed-bed of the coherence in need of validation and affirmation. Tafataona Mahoso uses the 'circle' as opposed to the 'ladder 5 , and I would suggest in counter-distinction to the 'triangle', to symbolise this process. It also with hindsight seems to suggest a measured shift towards new epistemological ground opened up by the conference debates. As a metaphor for engagement with the African audience and the future of African society, this circle would, however, be more appropriately conceptualised as a 'spiral', ever expanding through its multi-locational dynamic in which 'the filmmaker, the critic and the audience are all communicators'. 42 It is an idea that seems to encompass the underlying critical intersections between Mahoso and the respondents on the panel, Kwate Nii Owoo and Ahmed Attia. Nii Owoo coins his response in terms of an argument for 'moral and social' responsibility on the part of the filmmaker, while Attia provides some insight into strategies for winning audiences and co-opting them as allies against state censorship. Together they complement Mahoso's exposition, and particularly in the case of Attia where North Africa presents a specific reference point, issues for future debate begin to emerge with urgency. An obvious entry point is the need to develop the subject of African audiences as an area of study. Nii Owoo asked the question directly: 'how well do we know our audience?' Following on, he suggests that the significance of exploring this question has a critical bearing on 'form and content'. Mahoso's discussion on the southern African films indicated where a major part of this significance may reside. He noted that, in spite of the weaknesses of many films, they still attract favourable audiences, and concludes that 'the fact that people come to see a film does not itself prove that the film is great'. 43 Attia's account of the popularity in North Africa of films considered to be radical and transgressive, also suggests a critical approach in recognition of the dynamic circle paradigm, which engages with how various texts are experienced and used in specific social contexts. The critical ideas relevant here resonate from Manthia Diawara's 'resisting spectatorship' and the developments of this notion by African-American feminist critics like bell hooks, 44 who propose that black female spectators for example 'do more than resist. We create alternative texts that are not solely reactions'. 45 Hence in response to even radical films, audiences may well engage with the text in a way which subverts both the filmmaker's intentions and the dominant social institutions, even where the former is in opposition to the latter. Aberrant readings of film texts are part of the process of cinema. As the popularity of Hollywood films makes clear, however, in the absence of 'indigenous' cultural signifiers, audiences use their ingenuity to reinscribe the available symbolic codes in ways which validate and affirm their own subjectivity. The idea of audiences recognising themselves in films is therefore not enough, and is in need of a critical reappraisal, in terms of a consideration of how identities and indeed subjectivities are constituted as acts of sovereignty. Sovereignty, George Lamming suggests, threatens 'the custodians of independence in post-colonial societies'. 46 These societies encompass the terrain of African cinema from which the twenty-first century challenges Africa to emerge. In conclusion the urge to return to Sylvia Wynter is compulsive. Together with the other contributions, this volume of Symbolic Narratives is offered as a map of ideas which present a compelling agenda for African cinema.

INTRODUCTION

23

Notes 1 Gaston Kabore (ed.), Africa and the Centenary of Cinema (FEPACI/Presence Africaine, 1995) p. 17. 2 Mbye Cham in I. Bakari and M. Cham (eds), African Experiences of Cinema (BFI, 1995), p. 1. 3 Angela Martin, African Films: The Context of Production (BFI Dossier Number 6, 1982). 4 Teshome Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World (UMI Research Press, 1982); and Gabriel, Teaching Third World Cinema, Screen, vol. 24, no. 2, 1983. 5 Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (eds), Questions of Third Cinema (BFI, 1989). 6 Cham (note 2 above), p. 3. 7 FESPACO, Burkina Faso; Journees Cinematographiques de Carthage; Southern African Film Festival (SAFF), Zimbabwe; Milan African Film Festival; Pan-African Film Festival, Los Angeles; New York African Film Festival, New York; Planet Africa Toronto International Film Festival; Vues d'Afrique, Montreal; Africa at the Pictures, London. 8 See Claire Andrade-Watkins, 'France's Bureau of Cinema - Financial and Technical Assistance 1961-1977: Operations and Implications for African Cinema', in I. Bakari and M. Cham (eds), African Experiences of Cinema (BFI, 1995). 9 Gaston Kabore, Africa, p. 81. 10 See V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (Indiana University Press, 1988) and The Idea of Africa (Indiana University Press, 1994). 11 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Penguin Books, 1963), p. 199. 12 Ibid., p. 199. 13 Ibid., p. 165. 14 Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, 'Towards a Third Cinema', in Michael Chanan (ed.), Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema (BFI, 1983); also in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods, vol. 1, (University of California Press, 1976). 15 Ibid. 16 Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World, op. cit., p. 14. 17 Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches ofAmilcar Cabral (Monthly Review Press, 1973), p. 51. 18 Ibid., p. 55. 19 Ibid., pp. 57-69. 20 Clyde Taylor in Rene> Tajima, Journey across Three Continents: Film and Lecture Series (Third World Newsreel, 1985). 21 Clyde Taylor refers to Sylvia Wynter's 'The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism', Boundary 2, Spring/Fall, 1984: 19-70. 22 Clyde Taylor, 'Black Cinema in the Post-aesthetic Era', in Pines and Willemen (eds), Questions of Third Cinema, p. 97. 23 Ibid., p. 108. 24 Ibid., p. 93. 25 Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, p. 28. 26 Brian Winston, Technologies of Seeing (BFI, 1996), p. 39. 27 See Wynter (Chap. 2). 28 For example, Manthia Diawara, African Cinema (Indiana University Press, 1992); also Diawara's contribution to Pines and Willemen (eds), Questions of Third Cinema. 29 See Diawara, African Cinema, Chap. X for a discussion on these categories. 30 Jude Akudinobi, 'Tradition/Modernity and the Discourse of African Cinema', IRIS, no. 18, Spring, 1995.

24

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

31 See Wynter (Chap. 2). 32 See Pines and Willemen, Questions; Roy Armes, Third World Film Making and the West (University of California Press, 1987); Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism (Routledge, 1994); Teshome Gabriel, Third Cinema and his various writings. 33 See Taylor (Chap. 6). 34 As part of a special issue on Jean Rouch an account of this conversation is reprinted as 'En 1965 entre Jean Rouch nous regardes comme des insectes', CinemAction, no. 81, 1996. 35 See Sylvia Wynter (Chap. 2). 36 Fred Johnson, 'Cyberpunks in the White House', in Jon Dovey (ed.), Fractal Dreams New Media in Social Context (Lawrence & Wishart, 1996). 37 See Kevin Robins, 'Cyberspace and the World We Live In', in Jon Dovey (ed.), Fractal Dreams. 38 See Chap. 9. 39 George Lamming, 'Literature and Sovereignty', in Anne V. Adams and Janis A. Mayes (eds), Mapping Intersections - African Literature and African Development (African World Press, 1998), pp. 258-9. 40 Ibid., pp. 257-8. 41 Ibid., p. 257. 42 Mahoso (Chap. 9). 43 Ibid. 44 See Manthia Diawara, Black American Cinema (Routledge, 1993), for these perspectives on 'spectatorship'. This volume includes cBlack Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance' which also appears in Screen, vol. 29, no. 4, 1988; and 'The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectatorship', also published in bell hooks, Black Looks (South End Press, 1992). 45 Ibid., p. 128. 46 George Lamming, 'Literature and Sovereignty'.

Chapter 2 Africa, the West and the Analogy of Culture The Cinematic Text after Man Sylvia Wynter

Introduction My proposed title, 'Africa, the West and the Analogy of Culture: The Cinematic Text after Man' differs in two respects from the one listed in the conference programme ('Africa, the West and Cultural Analogy: Film after Mankind*). With respect to the first, not 'Cultural Analogy* but 'the Analogy of Culture'; to the second, not 'after Mankind' but 'after Man' - that is, 'The Cinematic Text after Man'. The two are linked, and I thought that I would make use of this fortunate error to explain my title. Why 'Man'?, to take the second first. 'Man' is not the human, although it represents itself as if it were. It is a specific, local-cultural conception of the human, that of the JudaeoChristian West, in its now purely secularised form.1 Its 'Other* therefore is not woman, as I hope to show. Rather because Man conceives of itself, through its Origin narrative or 'official creation story' of Evolution,2 as having been bio-evolutionarily selected, its 'Other* and 'Others* are necessarily those categories of humans who are projected, in the terms of the same Origin narrative, as having been bio-evolutionarily dysselected - i.e. all native peoples, and most extremely, to the ultimately zero degree, all peoples of African descent, wholly or partly (i.e. negroes), who are negatively marked as defective humans within the terms of Man's self-conception, and its related understanding of what it is to be human.3 Whatever our culture or religions of origin, all of us in this room, because educated in the Western episteme or order of knowledge which is based on the a priori of this conception of the human, Man, must normally know the world, even when most radically and oppositionally so, from this perspective. It is because of the shared nature of this perspective, one that, as Michel Foucault pointed out, is founding to all our contemporary disciplines,4 that we can all understand each other - that is, as long as we remain within the terms of this conception, and the field of meanings to which it gives rise. But what if we were to move outside this field? Outside its perspective or reference frame? The idea behind the phrase and the title 'after Man' is to suggest that the function of the cinematic text for the twenty-first century will be to move outside this field, this conception, in order to redefine what it is to be human. In addition, because Man further defines itself as homo oeconomicus, in the reoccupied place of its pre-nineteenth-century conception of itself as homo politicus (political man), as well as in that of its originally matrix feudal-Christian conception of itself as homo religious (religious man), its 'Other*, or signifier of alterity to this sub-definition (and therefore the analogue, at the level of the economic system, of natives/negroes at the overall level of our present cultural order, and its societal

26

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

'form of life'), is the category of the Poory i.e. the jobless and semi-jobless; as well as, in terms of the global system as a whole, the so-called 'underdeveloped' countries of the world. While because economic Man is optimally defined as the Breadwinner (with the working classes thereby being defined as the secondary Breadwinners to the middle classes, specifically to their investor upper class), 5 the 'Other' to this definition is, logically, the category of the jobless, semi-jobless Poor, together with that of the underdeveloped countries, both of which are made to actualise the negative alterity status of defective Breadwinners. The central thrust of the 'after Man' of my title is therefore to propose, given the role of defective Otherness analogically imposed upon the peoples and countries of Africa and the black diaspora by the representational apparatus of our Western world system, central to which is that of its cinematic text, that the challenge to be met by the black African, and indeed black diasporic, cinema for the twenty-first century will be that of deconstructing the present conception of the human, Man, together with its corollary definition as homo oeconomicus; to deconstruct with both, the order of consciousness and mode of the aesthetic to which this conception leads and through which we normally think, feel and behave. This cinema will therefore be compelled, as it has already begun to do, if still tentatively so, to reinscribe, in Clyde Taylor's phrase, 6 and thereby redefine, the human on the basis of a new iconography. One that will take its point of departure from the First Emergence of fully human forms of life, as an Emergence that was to be later attested to by, inter alia, the convergent explosion at multiple sites of the rock paintings of some 30,000 years ago, including that of the Grotto Apollo of Namibia; 7 as an explosion whose dynamic moving images bear witness to the presence of the representational apparatus inscripting of their 'forms of life', of their culture-specific modes or poeses of being human 8 . This hypothesis, as one which places our origins in Representation rather than in Evolution, and thereby redefines the human outside the terms of its present hegemonic Western-bourgeois conception as a purely bio-economic being which pre-exists the event of culture, would, of course, call for a new poetics. This poetics, I propose, would be that of the human as homo culturans/culturata, that is, as the auto-instituting because self-inscripting mode of being, which is, in turn, reciprocally enculturated by the conception of itself which it has created; the poetics, in effect, of a hybrid nature-culture, bios/logos form of life bio-evolutionarily preprogrammed to institute, inscript itself, (by means of its invented origin narratives up to and including our contemporary half-scientific, half-mythic origin narrative of Evolution), as this or that culture-centric (and, as also, in our case, class-centric) genre of being human. Why, 'The Analogy of Culture'? I have adapted the concept from Isaac Newton. As Amos Funkenstein points out, in the wake of the fifteenth-century voyages of the Portuguese around the hitherto believed to be unroundable bulge of West Africa and of their landing on the shores of Senegal in 1444, as well as of that of Columbus across the hitherto believed to be non-navigable Atlantic Ocean, and of his landing on a Caribbean island in 1492; as well, too, in the wake of the 1543 publication of Copernicus' 'Of the Revolution of the Spheres,' 9 Newton, like all scientists of the seventeenth-century, found himself empowered to make a new demand on the basis of the new image of the Earth and conception of the cosmos to which both the empirical voyages and Copernicus' astronomy had led.10 In place of the traditional acceptance of an Earth ostensibly divided into habitable and inhabitable regions (as it had been held to be in the orthodox geography of Europe before the voyages), or of a universe divided by an ostensibly ontological difference of substance between the incorruptible perfection of a celestial realm which moved in harmoniously ordered circles,

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

27

and its Other, the degraded, fallen realm of an Earth fixed and motionless at the centre of the universe as its dregs, (as it had been held to be in pre-Copernican astronomy), 11 the new demand was that all nature should now be seen as being homogenous, uniform and symmetrical. For the same laws of Nature, Newton had argued, could now be seen to apply to heaven and earth alike, and in Europe as in America. So that on this premise, a new order of knowledge based on the gradual acceptance that the same kind of matter built all parts of the universe as it built all parts of the earth, as well as that all matter was indeed governed by the same causes or forces, could now be elaborated; one that could now permit human observers to extrapolate, from the constant qualities of bodies that are found to be within the reach of our experiments, to all bodies whatsoever, seeing that the analogy of Nature is always consonant with itself.12 The point of the phrase 'the analogy of culture' is, therefore, the following: that, in the same way as Newton had argued, on the basis of the premise of laws of Nature, that one could extrapolate from knowledge of the processes of functioning of the bodies nearest to us, in order to infer what had to be those of the bodies furthest from us, we too could now, on the basis of a projected new premise of laws of culture which function equally for the contemporary culture of the West as they have done for all human cultures hitherto, make use of the analogy of culture in order to gain insight into 'the basic principles of understanding' of the Western cultural body. 13 That is, of the body of which we are all, as Western educated subjects, necessarily always already socialised, and therefore, in Fanonian terms, sociogenetic subjects. 14 Further, that we should be able to gain such insight into these principles on the specific basis of the analogy of the processes of functioning of the cultures of traditional Africa, as the cultures which alone exist in a continuous line of descent with the Event of the First Emergence of the human out of the animal kingdom. 15 And therefore, out of, as Ernesto Grassi proposes, the purely organic level of existence where behaviours are induced by genetic programmes, to a new and third level of existence, which is that of our uniquely human forms of life; as one whose behaviours are instead primarily motivated by the Word, whether that of the Sacred Word (as in the case of the Dogon's Nommo,16 that of Judaeo-Christianity, that of Islam) or that of the objective Word of Man. In effect, by what Grassi further defines as the linguistically inscribed governing codes, which when neurophysiologically implemented can alone enable us to experience, be conscious of ourselves as, human subjects. 17 Further, that these codes do so by the enacting of correlated clusters of meanings/representations able to mediate and govern - ('Meaning', David Bohm points out, 'affects matter' 18 ) - if in always culturally relative terms, the biochemical reward and punishment system of the brain which functions in the case of purely organic forms of life, to directly motivate and demotivate the ensemble of behaviours 19 that are of adaptive advantage to each species. 20 Yet how exactly, in the case of humans, does the mediation by the verbal governing codes and their clusters of meaning, their recoding of the behaviour-motivational biochemical reward and punishment system specific to purely organic forms of life, take place? What are the laws that govern their mediating and recoding function? My proposal here will be that the traditional (i.e. pre-Islamic, pre-Christian) cultures of Africa are the 'cultural bodies' best able to provide us with insights into what the laws that govern this mediation, and, thereby, our behaviours, must necessarily be. Specifically, in the case of our contemporary Western world system, to decipher what must be the governing code and its related, representation system (including centrally that of the iconography of the Western cinematic text), which now functions to induce our present global collective

28

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

ensemble of behaviours - doing so on the basis of the analogy of culture premised to be, like the analogy of nature, always consonant with itself.

The Argument The cinema and its new iconographic language made their first appearance on 28 December, 1895, some one hundred years ago. On that day, the brothers Lumiere showed their first film in Paris. A decade or so before, in 1884, and in the wake of a meeting by the dominant Western powers in Berlin, the scramble for Africa by western European nation-states began in the context of an accelerated process of colonisation. This process was to fully incorporate the peoples of black Africa, and indeed of Africa as a whole, into the industrial era as an appendage to, and mere logistical extension of, the Western techno-industrial world system. By 1897, as Ukadike points out in a recent book, the film titles of succeeding Lumiere films had begun to define the role that the representation of an Africa, stigmatised with exoticism as the backdrop landscape for innumerable Tarzan figures confronting African 'natives' and African primates that were indistinguishable from each other, was to play in the modern Western cinematic text.21 For the new medium of cinema was itself to play a, if at that time still limited, role in the legitimation of the incorporation of Africa into the Western imperial system in post-slave trade terms. New, because this was not the first encounter of Africa and an expanding West. Some four and a half centuries before the birth of the cinema, in the early decades of the fifteenth-century, what was to become the Western world system had been first put in place in the wake of two voyages. These voyages were to transform the history of the species. The first was that of the Portuguese ships and their eventual rounding of what had been for Europeans the hitherto believed to be unroundable Cape Bojador on the bulge of West Africa, followed by the Portuguese landing, in 1444, on the shores of Senegal. Their, at first, forcible initiation of a trade both in gold and in slaves was to be at the origin of today's black African diaspora. The second voyage was that of Columbus across a hitherto also believed to be non-navigable Atlantic Ocean and his landing on an island in the Caribbean in 1492. This voyage was followed by the West's expropriation of the lands of the Caribbean and the Americas. The accelerated slave trade out of Africa by several European countries provided the forced labour for the West's development of large-scale commercial agriculture in these newly expropriated lands. The Western world system was therefore to be initiated on the basis of the bringing together of three hitherto separate worlds, their peoples and their cultural spheres: that of Europe, that of Africa, and that of the indigenous populations of the Western hemisphere. It was out of this bringing together that today's Caribbean and the Americas, like modernity itself, were to be born.22 In his recent book The Idea of Africa, V. Y. Mudimbe makes a seminal point which allows us to correlate these three dates, that of 1444, that of 1884, and that of 1895 - that is to say, the landing on the shores of Senegal, the scramble for Africa, the birth of the cinema - and to do this within a reconceptualisation of the past from a world systemic perspective that is central to the argument I want to make here.23 His new book The Idea of Africa, Mudimbe tells us, is both the product and continuation of his by now classic The Invention ofAfrica?* This is so in two ways. First, The Idea of Africa asserts that there are natural features, cultural characteristics and probable values specific to the reality of Africa as a continent, which serve to constitute it as a totally dif-

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

29

ferent civilisation from those of, say, Asia and Europe. Secondly, The Idea ofAfrica goes on to analyse the ways in which Africa, as well as Asia and Europe, have been represented in Western scholarship by fantasies and constructs made up by scholars and writers since Greek times, 'From Herodotus onwards', Mudimbe writes, the West's self-representations have always included images of peoples situated outside of its cultural and imaginary frontiers. The paradox is that, if indeed these outsiders were understood as localised and far away geographically, they were none the less imagined and projected as the intimate and other side of the European thinking subject... In any case, since the 15th century, the idea of Africa has mingled together new scientific and ideological interpretations with the semantic fields of concepts such as primitivism and savagery. The geographic expansion of Europe and its civilisation was then a holy saga of mythic proportions. The only problem - and it is a big one - is that, as this civilisation developed, it submitted the world to its memory.25 This latter point is the central thesis that I want to put forward in this paper. There are, therefore, two central proposals here. The first is that if, as Mudimbe suggests, with the development of its post-medieval civilisation, the West seemed to be sanctioned by, and to produce, terrible evils that only a mad person could have imagined, including 'three remarkable monstrosities — the slave trade, colonialism and imperialism at the end of the eighteenth, and throughout the nineteenth fascism and Nazism in the twentieth',26 this is so because the West was to be itself submitted to the same memory to which it would submit the rest of the world. It was to be that same memory that would lead, on the other side of the equation, to equally unimaginable achievements in many fields. These achievements included, centrally, the field of technology out of which the cinema was to emerge. It would include also Western Man's and, by proxy, the humans', first footfall on the Moon, together with the audiovisual communications revolution and, today, the computer-driven information systems that now circle the globe. The paradox here is that all of these technological revolutions have increasingly served to more totally submit mankind to the single Western and, in Clifford Geertz's term, 'local culture' memory that has made it all possible; that in effect has made our gathering here today, with all of us in this room, being able to understand each other, conceivable. Unimaginable evil, therefore, side by side, with the dazzling scientific, technological and other triumphs. The second proposal is that if no other medium was to be more effective than that of the cinema in ensuring the continued submission to its single memory of the peoples whom the West has subordinated in the course of its rise to world hegemony, no other medium is so potentially equipped to effect our common human emancipation from this memory, from, therefore, in Nietzsche's terms, the prison walls of its world perception,27 or, in Marx's, from its ideology;28 or in mine, from the culture-specific order of consciousness or mode of mind of which this memory is a centrally instituting function.29 This memory, I shall propose here, is the memory of the 'Man' of my title; that, therefore, of a specific conception of the human, the first secular or degodded (i.e. detached from its earlier millennial anchoring in the realm of the supernatural) conception of the human in history. The memory, therefore, of a mode of being human that had been unknown, as Foucault points out, before its invention by European culture in the sixteenth century, if in a then still partly religious form.30 In the nineteenth century, however, as he also shows, this conception was to be inscripted in a purely secular, because biologised,

30

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

form by the then new, 'fundamental arrangements of knowledge' put in place by the matrix disciplines of economics, biology, philology. By, therefore, the arrangements that we have inherited, along with, in Mudimbe's terms, their ground or epistemological locus and conceptual modes of analysis or paradigms,31 as the model/paradigms through which, as Western or Western-educated filmmakers and scholars, we normally know, and represent, even where oppositionally so, the social reality of our contemporary world.32 The central problem here is that if, as Foucault noted, Man was invented in the terms of a specific culture, that of sixteenth-century Europe, the anthropologist Jacob Pandian also reminds us that this new mode of identity was to be a direct transformation of the identity of Christian, that is, of the matrix identity of medieval Latin Christian Europe.33 Now, the implication of the fact that the identity of Man is a transform of Christian, is not normally graspable within the terms of our disciplines, through whose reference frames we know and represent reality. This is so because, while the medieval public identity of Christian was easily identifiable as belonging to a specific religious creed and system of belief, and therefore to what Lyotard calls a 'Grand Narrative of Emancipation',34 the parallel linkage is not normally seeable in the case of Man as the now purely secularised variant of Christian. Rather, instead of the reality of Man's existence being recognised as a culture-specific mode of identity which functions within the terms of a secular belief system or Grand Narrative of Emancipation, that is itself the transformed analogue of the religious belief system and Origin Narrative of feudal-Christian Europe, Man is conceived of as an acultural mode of being. As one, therefore, whose ostensible pre-given and biologically determined 'human nature' is supposed to determine the behaviours that collectively lead to a social reality that is then represented as the way things are in themselves, the way they will have to be, with this representation then serving a teleological purpose. For how can one fly in the face of a reality, even where one is condemned by, and in, it?

The Dealt Cards, the Paradox of the Appeal of Mass Commercial Cinema and the Conference Organisers' Question In the 1987 film Saaraba by Amadou Saalum Seek of Senegal, a group of disillusioned youngsters argue amongst themselves. 'The White man', says one, 'points out the direction and others must follow.' 'Don't you know', says another resignedly, 'that the cards have already been dealt?'35 While although it might indeed be suspected that these dealt cards were from decks that were always already stacked, given that we are always already inserted in this reality, the problem we confront is that Man and the all-pervasive nature of what Heidegger defines as the understanding of the human's humanity that it embodies, so engulfs us, that we are unable to question this reality. Since it is precisely our present understanding of our humanity, the way we conceive ourselves to be human, that induces us to bring this reality into being by means of the collective behaviours that this understanding motivates; in effect, behaviours induced in the terms of the specific order of consciousness and mode of memory to which such an understanding and conception leads. So how are we to contradict this reality? Call in question its always already dealt cards, its stacked deck? If we are to do so, we must first understand that it is because of this ontological dilemma that the commercial cinema of Hollywood and India has had such spectacular success with mass audiences in Africa and the diaspora. In that the global reach

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

31

and mass appeal of the cinematic dream factories of Hollywood's commercial cinema, in particular, directly derive from their ability both to provide an illusory escape from our present mode of reality, and at the same time to reinforce it. For they provide the escape in the very terms of the memory and understanding that gave rise to this reality in the first place; terms in which its celluloid heroes and heroines are shown, in the end, to succeed, against all odds, in mastering our contemporary reality. The paradox here is that it was, and continues to be, the systemically negative experiencing of this empirical reality by the vast majority of the individual spectators whose real lives are prescriptively lived according to ways in which the cards are dealt, that then makes the escapist fantasies of Hollywood into a necessity rather than a luxury. In that, it is because the experience of their real-life reality is such a persistently harsh and unfulfilled one for the cinema's mass audiences, that the fantasy of escaping from it becomes an urgent consumer need. This is so, given that in the wake of the West's secularisation of Christian as Man, and with the world system that it would bring into existence, being based on this transformation, an increasing loss of the guarantees that had been provided for, in all earlier 'forms of life', by the realm of the sacred, of the supernatural, would come to be experienced. Hence, as Heidegger noted, the emergence of the intensified form of insecurity that characterises and motivates the modern human and that now continually brings individuals and groups into conflict with their fellows36 since all of us are driven, because of the unceasing competition to which this insecurity has led, to manipulate both nature and each other in order to ensure our own certainty and well-being. Such behaviours should not, however, as Heidegger further points out, be interpreted in the usual terms: that is, as being due to the political and personal ambition of individuals as Machiavelli would have had it, or to the universal desire for biological self-preservation, as Hobbes would have interpreted. Rather, these behaviours should be seen as being directly caused by our present understanding of mankind's humanity, and the subsequent attempt of all men, all women, of all of us, to realise it; the attempt of all of us, to realise being in the terms of contemporary modernity and of its techno-industrial mode of reality, to in effect, be modern, be Man. 37 The mass appeal of contemporary commercial cinema is therefore due to the formulaic way in which Hollywood's dream factories reinforce the desire for being in the terms of Man's modernity, and therefore in the terms of our present understanding of mankind's humanity, with their middle class heroes - and, now increasingly, heroines - attaining to this quest in the face of great odds, thereby enabling the mass spectators to participate vicariously in their celluloid triumph, however illusory this triumph must necessarily remain for them. Hence the paradox that while at the level of empirical reality we all remain submitted to a memory, that of Western bourgeois Man, and to the logic of its stacked deck and dealt cards which dictates that any such concrete realisation on the part of the masses, and thereby, on the part also of the majority of the peoples of Africa, must continue to be thwarted, at the same time, these very masses are being drawn by means of cinematic fantasies and their plot-lines, into the consumer-producer network of contemporary techno-industrial civilisation. That is, into the civilisation that is increasingly bringing to an end the long agrarian era of mankind in which African civilisations, for example, had grown and flourished. In consequence, since it is through these Hollywood model cinematic texts that all the world's peoples are being induced to aspire to realise being, however vicariously, in Westernised terms, to be Man, and to be modern, the success of commercial cinema with its up-to-the-minute re-enacting of the ideal techno-industrial lifestyle

32

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

and optimum behaviours defining of the human within the terms of our present understanding of our humanity is ensured. This widespread success of mass commercial cinema, and the paradox that it poses for an emergent African cinema, is one of the major issues that the organisers of this conference have posed. How, they ask, are the filmmakers of black Africa to confront and deal with the dichotomy which seems to definitely separate the possibilities of a commercialised mass appreciation of African cinema, and of African cinema as a valued cultural art form? What if, as they further suggest, the either/or choice of commercial mass success, on the one hand, or of seeking to produce a cinema of aesthetic force and cultural integrity on the other hand - what if this would call for the elaboration of a new conceptual ground?38 Would such a new ground not have to be one which, in my own terms, moves outside the parameters of the memory of Man> as the memory to which we are at present submitted? Outside its understanding of our humanity?

The Birth of a Nation, Resisting Spectators, and the Issue of Consciousness/Memory as an Issue-in-ltself: The Cinema and World Outlooks To address this issue, I shall bring in two other significant dates from the early history of the cinema, and of the Western cinematic text. The first date is that of 1915, the year in which D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation was first screened. This year also saw the emergence of black Americans as, in the terms of Manthia Diawara, a 'group of resisting spectators'.39 The paradox here was that Griffith's innovations, as far as the art of cinema was concerned, were far-reaching, and would set the pattern for many techniques of cinema that were to follow. Indeed, the aesthetic force and power of Griffith's technical innovations would lead filmmakers of the stature of an Eisenstein not only to hail him as one of the genuine masters of the American cinema - i.e. 'a magician of tempo and montage'40 - but to be also deeply influenced by the new techniques in the series of masterpieces that Eisenstein was himself to conceive and direct. In terms of content, however, while the film Birth of a Nation provided a symbolic charter that not only unified North and South after the Civil War, but laid the basis of the eventual integration of AngloAmericans with the diverse immigrant European ethnic groups, it did so on the basis of a racial identity that could only be sustained by the symbolic, conceptual and empirical exclusion of black Americans, as a people of African descent, whether unmixed or mixed. The integration of North/South Immigrant/Anglo-America was therefore to be effected by means of the creation of a powerful new stereotype, that of the black American male. This stereotype was that of the violent, sensual, 'big black buck' bent on assaulting white men and raping white women;41 and thereby of 'miscegenating' the 'racial purity' of the hegemonic population group of European hereditary descent. As a result, if, as Michelle Wallace points out, the film had set out to justify the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan by giving a tailored version of Reconstruction's impact on the South,42 its screening was also to be a watershed in what might be called the history of consciousness of black America.43 For its screening set off the process by which black Americans, like black peoples everywhere, would gradually come to recognise that the issue of consciousness, although a secondary and epiphenomenal issue for all forms of Western thought (including the oppositional thought of Marxism and feminism), was to be the issue specific, as Aime Cesaire was to write in 1956, to the uniqueness of the problem of black

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

33

people; as an issue and a problem that could not therefore be made into a subordinate part of any other issue or problem. 44 Here Manthia Diawara's analysis of the narrational units of the film, including those in which the brutal black character Gus attempts to rape the white Little Sister, who jumps off the cliff to escape him, later dying in her brother's, the Little Coloners, arms (with the Little Colonel thereby justly punishing Gus, by organising his vigilante execution by the Ku Klux Klan), reveals why this film was to evoke such deep outrage on the part of black American viewers, and to make them into one of the earliest groups of actively resisting spectators. 45 As Diawara further comments, the black spectator, confronted with such a scene, is placed in an impossible position. Drawn by the storyline to, on the one hand, identify with the white Little Sister as victim, feel grief for her, as well as desire vengeance against Gus, on the other, the black spectator was also compelled to resist the thematic representation of the black man as a dangerous, atavistic threat. The film's systemic negative marking of the black male (played in blackface by a white actor), would therefore, Diawara writes, lead black Americans not only to lobby for laws banning racial slandering, but also to begin the production of their long line of movies called "race movies" \ For in this context, the name 'race movies' signified not only that black Americans had recognised the need to fight their battle against racial subordination in the new language of the cinema itself. It also signified the widespread recognition that Griffith's film had confronted black Americans with an issue specific to them as a group, one that would have to be fought in the terms of a countericonography to that of Griffith's. Above all, that this would have to be done not as an 'ethnic group, 46 but rather as a group that had been conceptually and aesthetically constituted, within the terms of the now globally hegemonic culture of the West, as the signifier of alterity or Otherness, both to post-abolition America as it now reinvented itself in the terms of its being a white nation, as well as, at a global scale, together with all peoples of African descent, as Other to Man;47 a group whose members are thereby made to experience themselves as the deviant Other to being human within the terms of Man, within the terms of the memory, and order of consciousness therefore to which they/we were, and are still now, submitted. This takes us to the cinema of black Africa. For although, as Ukadike points out, France had banned the showing of Griffith's film, Birth of a Nation in order not to offend its black colonial troops and the elite of its African colonies, 48 the same issue that had been raised by black America's response was to be raised by black African filmmakers in the wake of political independence, as an issue also experienced as being urgentiy specific to them. This issue, even where it remained as a subtext of their films, had to do with the reality of a hegemonic Western memory and its order of consciousness, as one to which, even after political independence had been won by social and military struggles, they still found themselves, as an educated elite, submitted; perhaps, even more so, after independence. 49 For in the same way as the black American, in order to identify himself/herself as a middle class American, postabolition, had been compelled to negate not only his/her physiognomy, but the stigma of any African cultural characteristics that had been brought in on the slave ships across the Middle Passage, equally, post-independence filmmakers of black Africa found that in order to identify themselves as middle class men or women, they too had to deny, to be aversive to, the reality of their original cultural reality as a reality negatively marked and represented as backward, primitive and savage. They too found that, as in the case of Birth of a Nation, no other medium would so blatantly force them to a choice of options as would the new medium of cinema, as deployed by the formulaic stock fare of the Western cinematic text; nor so

34

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

forcibly remind them not only that after the struggles by which political independence had been won, the issue with which they were and are still confronted is that of the Sisyphean issue of the memory of Man, of the prison walls of its world perception or order of consciousness, but also that 'independence' went and goes beyond the 'political', beyond even the economic in order to touch upon the question of representation, the representational apparatus, and of the culture-specific memory and mode of consciousness which it institutes. 50 The second date is memorable in the above context. In 1925, after having absorbed the influence of Griffith's, the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein screened a film that is still recognised as one of the dozen or so best films ever made. That film was Battleship Potemkin.51 Combining aesthetic force with a mass appeal to its Russian audience, the film, because it was made in the context of the still creative dynamism that had followed in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution, and therefore in the context of the projection of a new counter-identity to that of Man, that of the proletarian, could now count upon a new kind of spectator. 52 Indeed the film was to be one of the central means of the ongoing transformation of memory, and therefore of consciousness, on whose basis post-revolutionary Russia was being put in place. Further, a central part of the film's aesthetic power and effectivity came from the fact that Eisenstein, as a Marxist, former engineer and now filmmaker, was fully aware of the potential power of the cinema and of cinematic techniques to either further enslave humankind or emancipate it from the dictatorship of memory, orders of consciousness or, in Marxian terms, of ideology, that have hitherto induced all subordinated groups to acquiesce in their, in our, own subordination; of the power of the cinema and of cinematic techniques, in effect, to engage spectators on one side or the other of the battle now being waged in the central intellectual cum aesthetic frontier and war zone of our times. That is, the battle, on the one hand, for our continued enslavement, as humans, in however seductive a guise, to our hitherto, heteronomously instituted orders of consciousness, and on the other, for the full emancipation, and therefore autonomy, of our always, culturally relative and symbolically coded modes of mind: 53 the autonomy, therefore, of the phenomenon of consciousness by means of which alone we can subjectively experience ourselves as human. 5 4 In 1946, in the wake of the eagerly awaited ending of World War II, Eisenstein wrote: The cinema is 50 years old. It has vast possibilities that must be used, just as in the age of modern physics the atom must be used for peaceful purposes. But how immeasurably little the world aesthetics has achieved in mastering the means and potentialities of the cinema.55 At the height of the war, he continued, 'his dream and hope had been that when peace came, a victorious humanity would use its liberated energies to create new aesthetic values, to attain new summits of culture'. With peace, however, not only had the splitting of the atom and the use of the nuclear bomb which followed it brought new problems for mankind, but the cinema itself had failed to realise its potential promise. Why had this been? 'It was not', he writes, 'only because of a lack of skill, of enthusiasm. It was because of striking conservatism, routine, aesthetic escapism, in the face of the new problems set by every new phase in the rapid development of cinematography.' And the central issue here was that, while we have no reason to doubt our capacity to solve these problems, 'we should always bear in mind that it is the profound ideological meaning of subject and content that is, and

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

35

will always be, the true basis of aesthetics and that will ensure our mastery of the new techniques'. So that, in 'this context, the means of expression would serve the medium for a more perfect embodiment of more lofty forms of world outlook ...' 56 For Eisenstein, writing just after the war and caught up in the enthusiasm which had followed on Soviet Russia's heroic part in the defeat of Hitler's Germany, and therefore of the fascist threat that his victory would have entailed, such a new and lofty world outlook could only have been that of Communism. Yet, Eisenstein himself had already, since the 1930s, as has been now revealed, begun to find himself persona non grata with Stalin; and even though partly rehabilitated after one of his films had been banned in 1935, he still found himself outside the innermost party circles. Other filmmakers who were in ideologically correct grace with the party leadership had therefore begun to preside over what was to be the decline of the Soviet cinema from the ideo-aesthetic standard set by Eisenstein.57 From our 1990s' hindsight perspective, and in the wake of the total collapse of the Soviet Union and of its satellite spheres (including those African states whose variant one-party states had also been loosely based on the theoretical framework of a Stalinist Marxism), it is clear that Eisenstein's wished-for 'lofty world outlook' was not to be that of Communism.58 Instead with the defeat of the Marxist theoretical challenge, and its postulate of a 'proletarian' counter-identity, the outlook of Man remains intact. While given the disappearance of the Soviet Union and, with it, that of its alternative memory, that of Man is now all-pervasive as it penetrates every nook and cranny of a world that has been recently defined by one writer as a 'Mac world' - Macintosh and McDonalds.59 What has remained constant is the position of Africa. Although no longer militarily and politically colonised, Africa, nevertheless, as the projected continent of origin as the extreme form of the 'native Other' to Many retains its position as the bottom-most world, the one plagued most extremely by the contradictions that are inseparable from Man's bourgeois conception of being human. Given that under the weight of the consciousness, memory and world outlook to which this conception gives rise, no other continent must as prescriptively find itself enslaved to the unending global production of poverty which is the necessary underside of the this-worldly goal of Material Redemption from Natural Scarcity, and therefore, of the no less unending production of wealth that is the correlate of Man's optimal self-definition as homo oeconomicusy and Breadwinner. In that if we see our present this-worldly goal of Material Redemption as the secular form of the otherworldly goal of Spiritual Redemption that had been central to the Grand Narrative of Emancipation founding to the religion of Judaeo-Christianity, and therefore to the civilisation of Western Europe, in the same way that the matrix goal of Spiritual Redemption had been generated from that narrative's inscripting of the human as a being enslaved to Adamic Original Sin, with his/her redemption only therefore made possible by adherence to the behaviours prescribed by the Church, as the only behaviours able to realise the hope of Eternal Salvation in the Augustinian City of God, then our present biocentric and optimally economic conception of the human can also be recognised as having its historical origin in the intellectual revolution of lay humanism. That is, in the latter's invention of the identity of Man in the place of the identity of Christian, if at first only in a hybridly religious and political form that at the end of the eighteenth century was to be reinvented in a now purely secular, because biologised, form.60 This, at the same time as this ongoing secularisation of identity, the matrix behaviour-motivational other-worldly goal of Spiritual Redemption, would also be transumed into this-worldly ones, the first, political, the second, from the end of the eighteenth century on, economic.61

36

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

This may, at first, seem startling. Yet once we recognise that the 'cultural field' in which we all now find ourselves is that of Clifford Geertz's 'local cultural' of the West and, therefore, that of the Judaeo-Christian culture for which the behaviour-motivating schema and Narrative of Emancipation as originally formulated by St Augustine continues to function, 62 if in a now purely secular and transumed form, two consequences can be seen to follow. The first is that our present behaviour-motivating systemic goal of economic growth, development, i.e. or of Material Redemption, can now be identified as a logical transformation of the original matrix Judaeo-Christian goal of Spiritual Redemption. While the founding Augustinian postulate of the source of evil as being sited in mankind's enslavement to Original Sin can also be seen to have taken new form in the discourses of Malthus and of Ricardo (where it became translated into that of our enslavement to Natural Scarcity),63, as well as in the new cosmogonic schema of Darwinism, in the reoccupied place of the Biblical Genesis and of its Adamic Fall. In these latter discourses and cosmogonic schema, the source of evil now came to be sited in humankind's postulated enslavement, not now to Original Sin, but rather to the random and arbitrary processes of bioevolutionary Natural 'selection' and 'dysselection' 6 4 -with all peoples of African descent wholly or partly thereby being, in consequence, lawlikely inscripted as the ultimate boundary marker of non-evolved, dysselected, and therefore barely human, being. This, in the same way as in the medieval order of Europe, the unroundable Cape Bojador had marked the limits of Christian being, and had thereby functioned as the boundary marker of the habitable regions of the earth enclosed in God's providential Grace, so that beyond its limits, the then believed to be non-habitable regions of the Torrid Zone (i.e. the zone which included today's sub-Saharan Africa) could be made to attest to the chaos that ostensibly threatened all those areas of the earth supposed to be outside that Grace; 65 and that analogically threatened any Christian whose behaviours moved outside the prescribed pathways laid down by the Church. In the same way, therefore, as within the terms of the Malthusian/Ricardo order of discourse, both the nation-state categories of the jobless or semi-jobless Poor, together with the global category of the 'underdeveloped' countries of the Western world system, (with their most extreme marker being the nations of Africa as well as other black nations such as Haiti), are logically postulated as being outside the 'grace' of Natural Selection because intended by Evolution to be expendable; 66 with their condemned fate threatening all those who move outside the behavioural pathways prescribed by the Western bourgeois order of words and of things. The issue of consciousness or memory, the issue of Eisenstein's world outlook, can here be seen to take on a central significance, in the context of the related issue of the representational apparatus of the West, including centrally that of its cinematic text. Since what becomes clear is that although behaviour-motivational postulates such as Original Sin, Natural Scarcity and Genetic dysselection, or dysgenesis,67 and the system of representations to which they give rise, are 'true' within the terms of this field, and are, as such, 'facts' for our present order of consciousness, outside the terms of our present secular cultural field they no more exist than the ritual practices of circumcision/clitoridectomy of traditional non-monotheistic Africa existed as desirable marks of honour outside the religio-cultural fields to which they belonged-and in residual cases, still belong. 68 The proposal here, therefore, is that outside of the terms of our contemporary culture, neither Natural Scarcity nor Original Sin (nor indeed natural abundance) exist, seeing that since these are conceptions that are 'true' only within the terms of what is the now purely secularised culture of the Judaeo-Christian West, as the field that prescribes, inter alia, the

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

37

role of Africa both within the scholarly and cinematic texts, as well as within the socioeconomic structures of our present world system. So that, if within the logic of the matrix medieval Grand Narrative of Emancipation of Christianity and its system of representation, it had been the category of the leper with its leprosy which, proscribed outside the gates of the medieval town as the ostensibly actualised icon of his/her parents* sexual lust, 69 and thereby as proof of mankind's represented enslavement to Original Sin, that had legitimated the call for freedom to be conceived in terms of Spiritual Redemption, it is now the poor and jobless category - Marx's lumpen proletariat, Fanon's Les damnes de la terre70 who must remain proscribed in the ghetto and shanty town archipelagos of the First, Third and Fourth Worlds, and in the ultimate world of Africa. Since it is this category that now serves, within the terms of Mans secular Narrative of Emancipation, as the actualised icon, of humankind's threatened enslavement to Natural Scarcity in the reoccupied place of its post-Adamic enslavement to Original Sin. Given that it is the dually represented and concretely produced presence of the categories of the jobless Poor and of the 'underdeveloped' peoples, as signifiers of genetically dysselected humans, who as defective Breadwinners are unable to master Natural Scarcity, which imperatively prescribes that freedom be imagined in terms of Material Redemption. With the new telos or goal of 'economic growth' and development' and its metaphysics of productivity thereby coming to orient the behaviours of subjects socialised to experience freedom as freedom from enslavement to material, rather than as earlier to spiritual, want. 71 In consequence, in the same way as in the matrix narrative of the Judaeo-Christian West, freedom, and the behaviours necessary to achieve it, had been represented within the terms of the theocentric identity of Christian as that of attaining to Eternal Salvation in the other-worldly City of God, or civitas Dei, so freedom for us, and the behaviours to secure it, have come to be imagined within the terms of the biocentric identity of Man, as that of attaining to the American Dream in the civitas materialis (the Material City) of the suburbs of the global bourgeoisie; within the terms, therefore, of our present world outlook, as enacted inter alia, in the Western cinematic text. If all this seems too sweeping, let me refer you to the near-home example of the successful manipulation of our present cultural systemic goal of Material Redemption by the highly successful policies of Margaret Thatcher. To cite Stuart Hall's 1988 analysis of this phenomenon: 'Thatcherism', he wrote, has put in place a range of different social and economic strategies. But it has never for a moment neglected the ideological dimension. Privatisation, for example, has many economic and social payoffs. But it is never advanced by Thatcherism without being constructed ideologically ('Sid', the 'share-owning democracy' etc.). There is no point in giving people tax cuts unless you also sell it to them as part of the 'freedom' package.72 Thatcher's 'freedom package' would not have sold, however, if it had not been couched within the deep-structure terms of our present 'cultural field' and its Grand Narrative of Emancipation, as in Saussurian terms the parole of a langue in whose logic the ideal of mastering Natural Scarcity can only be made to function as a behaviour-motivating ideal, if its Lack, the failure to master Natural Scarcity, continues to be actualised in the systemically produced global categories of the Jobless/Homeless Poor, as well as of the 'underdeveloped worlds'. This in the same way as in the medieval order of western Europe, the ideal of Spiritual Redemption and of Divine Election to Eternal Salvation had depended for its per-

38

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

formative urgency on the actualised example of the failure on the part of the leper's parents to master their enslavement to the carnal lust of Adamic Original Sin; as the sign of this failure, of its 'disease of the sour was embodied in the condemned figure of the leper proscribed outside the gates of the medieval towns.

Black African Cinema, the Untheorised Thematic of Poverty, the Issue of Consciousness, and the 'Freedom Package' From the earliest films of post-independence Africa, beginning with Ousmane Sembene's Borom Sarret in 1963, the theme of poverty, as portrayed in the sharply coded contrast between urban poor and urban rich, divided, in Fanon's terms, between both the settlers' towns and the towns of the new African elites, on the one hand, and the natives' towns and the towns of the postcolonial poor, 73 on the other, has remained as a pervasive horizon text of black African cinema. While in spite of the fact that the thematic of poverty, unlike the thematics of labour proper as well as of gender, has not been theorised, its portrayal in black African cinema has consistently drawn attention to the reality that the global production of poverty is no less a constant of our contemporary world system than is the production of wealth, even where the implications of their dialectical relation have not been explored. 74 For as Zygmunt Bauman has noted, contemporary intellectuals, whether liberal-capitalist or Marxist, have remained incapable of theorising the issue of the category of Jobless Poor, as well as that of the category of the New Poor (i.e. people stuck in low-wage and temporary, casual jobs). This in spite of the fact that the latter category, (whose members are called 'temps' in the USA) is now a rapidly increasing one given the spread of technological automatisation, and the subsequent transformation of a large number of lifetime jobs complete with seniority status and benefit packages into part-time benefitless ones. 75 The persistence of the joblessness/poverty thematic not only in black African cinema, but as centrally in that of the black diaspora-in the by now classic films, The Harder They Come (1972, Perry Henzell) as well as Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989)-has nevertheless begun to make it clear that the systemic reproduction both of the increasingly endemically jobless category, as well as that of the temporary labour category of the New Poor, is the lawlike consequence of the accelerated automatisation of the 'high-tech'/consumer stage of capitalism as the enforcer of the, now fully globalised, Material Redemption notion of human freedom; of the globalisation, therefore, of the this-worldly goal of Thatcher's 'freedom package'. A useful analogy here is provided by C. L. R. James's 1948 analysis of the widespread phenomenon of the Gulags or forced labour camps that had been put in place in the Soviet Union, as well as in its satellite spheres in eastern Europe. James's parallel point here was that the phenomenon of the forced labour archipelagos was the lawlike consequence of the Soviet New Class bureaucracy's notion of human freedom. 76 In that once the Party bureaucracy or Nomenklatura had come to install itself as a new ruling class, it had been able to legitimate this only by redefining socialism's notion of human emancipation and autonomy, in terms that made it isomorphic with the nationalisation of the means of production, under the total control of the Party: as a notion of freedom that had then functioned to legitimate the dictatorship of the New Class bureaucracy over the real-life proletariat or working classes in whose name they had seized power. James's point that it was the notion of freedom 77 as redefined by the New Class or Party Nomenklatura that was a central determinant of the institution of the Gulag, and of the internment in these forced labour archipelagos, of any or all groups or individuals

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

39

suspected of being recalcitrant to, or of sabotaging of, the overriding goal of accelerated production based on coilectivised agriculture, processes of industrialisation directly controlled by the Party and an overall centralised command economy, can be applied to our own notion of freedom or freedom package', 78 in terms of the telos or supra-ordinate goal of Material Redemption. Since it is the imperative of this overriding goal that has led, for example, to the situation in which, with the dismantling of the barriers of racial apartheid that had for so long existed in South Africa (as well as some 30 years before, with the dismantling of the US form of racial apartheid), a new form of now purely economic apartheid has come to reoccupy the earlier socially segregated form. 79 With this shift, because it was linked to widespread processes of automatisation, having lead lawlikely to the accelerating expansion in South Africa, in the USA, in Britain, Brazil and indeed all over the world, of the category of endemically jobless inner-city ghettoes, favelas, jobless shantytown archipelagos, together with the prison-industrial complex that is their extension, as the criminalisation and incarceration of the poor and jobless, and, centrally, that of the young black male, now rapidly expands. 80 At the same time as their systemic 'damnation' was to become a central thematic of the black African and black diaspora cinematic text. Here again, the issue of consciousness or memory and, with them, the imperative of redefining the notion of freedom emerges. In South Africa, for example, Stephen Biko, had he still been alive, would not have been surprised by the shift from a primarily socio-racial system, of apartheid to a primarily socio-economic one. This is because the notion of freedom for him had not been either the issue of free market capitalist 'development', as the path to Material Redemption, or, as for the then neo-Marxist ANC, that of the path of socialism defined by an economy based on the nationalisation of the means of production. Rather, for Biko, the issue had been centrally one of consciousness, and therefore of the imperative need of any subordinated group to first of all secure its autonomy from the memory or normative consciousness in whose terms its members are both socialised and at the same time, prescriptively subordinated; 81 of whose putting and keeping in place, the subordinated are thereby always in the long run accomplices, and with the ending of their subordination, therefore, necessarily calling for an end to be put to all such forms of complicity, for an uprising against their/our 'normal' order of consciousness. Since Biko's death, and the parallel domesticating of the Black Consciousness Movement, both that of South Africa as well as that of the US in the 1960s, the issue of consciousness as a central issue - that is, the issue of blacky indeed, of native consciousness, as a potentially alternative consciousness to that of Man's - has been marginalised. 82 The difficulty here has to do with the conception of consciousness that underlies the dominant Western theories of our time, whether those of the status quo or those which are radically oppositional. 83 In the paradigm of liberal humanism, for example, which is based on what an African scholar, I. B. Sow, has identified as the 'theoretical fiction' of a purely biological and therefore non-changing human nature, 84 the mind is the brain. 85 Indeed, consciousness has also been defined within the logic of our present understanding of what it is to be human, by the DNA discoverer and Nobel Prize winner Crick, as being merely 'a pack of neurons.' 8 6 While for the counter-discourse of Marxism, consciousness, because labelled as ideology, and as such, as a merely superstructural or epiphenomenal effect of the economic mode of production, cannot be recognised as an issue in its own terms, any more than the correlated issues of race or of poverty and Joblessness can be seen as issues in their own. Here Mudimbe's point, that all oppositional movements, including that of the most extreme Afrocentrism, and indeed that of Marxism and of feminism, must necessarily think

40

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

themselves within the 'ground' of the contemporary epistemological locus of the West and its conceptual models of analysis, even where they contest some of its surface structure premises, 87 enables us to see why our present understanding of Man and its biologised conception of being human must lawlikely block recognition of the issue of memory, of consciousness, as being the primary issue of our times. Rather, so powerfully pervasive is the 'theoretical fiction' of our fixed biological human nature that, although, as Antonio de Nicolas points out, it is clear, given the diversity of human religions, as well as of human cultures, that men and women have 'never been any one particular thing or had any particular nature to tie them down metaphysically', and that, instead, we become human only by means of the conceptions (i.e. theories) of being human that are specific to each culture, 88 there is stubborn resistance to the recognition that it is these conceptions that encode, as the anthropologist John Davis points out, each culture's criterion of 'what it is to be a good man and woman of one's kind', 89 as the criteria of optimal being that motivate us to attain to the representation of symbolic life that they encode, and which is the only life that humans live.90 It is here, therefore, that the centrality to human orders of representational apparatuses, including that of the cinematic text to our contemporary own, becomes apparent. For if, as Antonio de Nicolas points out, we are enabled to live and actualise these conceptions of being human, and therefore to be conscious of, to experiencebeing in their culture-specific terms, only because of our capacity to turn theory into flesh, and into 'codings in the nervous system', this process of transmutation can be effected only by means of the system of representations in whose terms we are socialised as subjects, since it is these that function to 'tie us down metaphysically' to each culture's criterion of what it is to be human. Hence the paradox that our present purely biologised conception of being human, that is, its 'presentation' of the human on the model of the natural organism (as this model is elaborated, Foucault shows, by our present 'fundamental arrangements of knowledge' and their disciplinary paradigms), 91 does indeed so serve to 'tie us down' metaphysically to its 'theoretical fiction' of 'human nature'. At the same time as its biocentric strategy of identity, its representation of the human as a purely biological being who pre-exists culture, the Word, has come to both reoccupy and displace, at the global public level of a now economically rather than religiously organised reality, the formerly dominant theocentric strategies of monotheistic identity, 92 whether that of Judaism, JudaeoChristianity or of Islam. And, to effect, thereby, the ongoing displacement or the politicising of these religious identities as, in its time, Islam - as Sembene chronicles one instance of in his film Ceddo (1976), 93 - had displaced and reoccupied the traditional religions of Africa and their then local polytheistic and essentially agrarian strategies of identity, self-conception and therefore consciousness. 94 In the film Ceddo, Sembene visualises the clash that took place between the polytheistic strategies of the indigenous religions, and the monotheistic strategies of a then incoming Islam. In the battle of consciousness and thereby of being that had then ensued, Sembene portrays how the 'people of Ceddo', defined in terms of alterity as people from 'outside the spiritual circles of Mohammed', had fought and resisted the Muslims who attempted to convert them, doing so in order to remain faithful to their traditional mode of being, their millennial memory and mode of consciousness. As Sembene wrote in his synopsis of the film: At the beginning of the Islamic expansion, the people who hesitated to accept the new religion were called 'Ced-do,' that is 'people from outside,' outside the spiritual circles of

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

41

Mohammed. They were the last holders of African spiritualism before it became tinged with Islam or Christianity. The Ceddo from Pakao resisted the Muslims who wanted to convert them, with a suicidal opposition. Their wives and children drowned themselves in springs in order to remain faithful to their African spirituality.95 However, while Sembene canonises the struggle in Ceddo in epic terms, he also shows, in other films, that all such orders of consciousness, world outlooks and the memories of different traditions and cultures can also outlive their usefulness. At the end of another film, Emitai (1971), (the god of thunder), for example, he also suggests that the consciousness and memory of such traditional religions may also have outlived their usefulness; that they too must give way to a new consciousness. Consequently, in an episode of the film, he shows how, in the wake of the Diola villagers' defeat by the French, a defeat that leads them to begin to question the old religion, the Spirits threaten the chief that if he ceases to continue to believe in them, he will die. Yes, Sembene has the chief answer, he will die, but they too will die with him. 96 Sembene's point here is that the Spirits exist because of the chiefs and the Diola villagers' collective belief in them, in the same way as, in my own terms, 'Man (and its purely biologised self-conception) exists because of ours. My major proposal therefore parallels that of Sembene's Emitai - that is, that a new conceptual ground for African cinema will call for our putting an end to our present conception of being human. In that, in the same ways as in Emitai, the Spirits had existed only as a function of that traditional Agrarian conception of being, and therefore because of the collective belief held by the people and chief of the village in that conception, so our present Western bourgeois or ethno-class, techno-industrial conception of being Man exists only because of our collective belief in, and faithful adherence to, its now purely secular or desupernaturalised/degodded criterion of what it is to be good man or woman of our kind. 97 Only because, in other words, of our continued subordination to the memory and order of consciousness to which this conception/criterion gives rise; to, in effect, its notion of the 'freedom package' as Material Redemption, rather than as freedom from the mode of memory and world outlook which induces us to conceive of freedom in the terms oi Marts conception of being. How then shall we reimagine freedom as emancipation from our present ethno-class or Western-bourgeois conception of freedom? And therefore, in human, rather than as now, Man's, terms? The fundamental question then becomes: can a new conception of freedom, defined as that of attaining to the autonomy of consciousness and, thereby, of autonomy with respect to the always culture-specific self-conception in the terms of whose governing codes of symbolic life and death and their respective criteria we are alone enabled to realise ourselves as specific modes of the human, provide us with the new ground called for by the conference organisers? And, thereby, with a new post-liberal and post-Marxian Toffy world outlook' able, as Eisenstein noted, to provide the 'profound ideological meaning of subject and content' as the true basis of an aesthetics able to transcend the opposition between the consumer escapism of the mass commercial cinema, on the one hand, and on the other African cinema's realisation as a culturally valid art form of force and power? As one, however, based on a new conception of freedom able to move us not only beyond that of Man's 'freedom package', but also beyond those of Man's oppositional sub-versions,-that of Marxism's proletariat, that of feminism's woman (gender rights), and that of our multiple multiculturalisms and/or centric cultural nationalisms (minority rights), to that of gay liberation (homosexual rights), but also as a conception of freedom able to draw them all

42

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

together in a new synthesis? 98 One in which the 'rights' of the Poor/jobless and increasingly criminalised category to escape the dealt cards of their systemic condemnation will no longer have to be excluded? These questions take me to the crux of my proposal with respect to Africa, the West, and the analogy of culture; with what could be, therefore, the role of African cinema both in the deconstruction of our present memory of Man, its order of consciousness, and their reconstruction in the ecumenical terms of the planetary human. This is the new ground to which IVe given the name of 'the Second Emergence'. My further proposal here is that it was with the challenge of this new ground with which black African cinema was, like black American cinema earlier, but even more comprehensively so, confronted from its inception.

The 'Colonial' or the 'Ontological' Rationale? The 'Gallery of Mirrors' of the Western Text and African Cinema towards the Second Emergence 'We've had enough', Pfaff cites Sembene as saying 'of feathers and t o m - t o m s ' . " The central impulse behind the beginning of filmmaking in post-independence Africa was indeed, as Ukadike points out in his recent book on black African cinema, the common concern of the filmmakers 'to provide a more realistic image of Africa as opposed to the distorted artistic and ideological expressions of the dominant film medium reflecting (to borrow from Erik Barnouw's terminology) the attitudes that made up the colonial rationale'. 100 For the exoticised and 'primitive' celluloid stereotypes of Africa which had been coterminous with the birth of the medium of film (specifically colonial films such as Congorilla (Martin Johnson) in 1932, an ostensible documentary, seen from an explorer-cum-anthropological perspective, as well as Sanders of the River (Zoltan Korda) in 1935 and in 1937) had consistently provided a distorted view of 'natives', portraying them as 'ingenuous, outlandish, somewhat mysterious beings who were nevertheless loyal and grateful to the Europeans for coming to guide and protect them'. 101 This had, therefore, been a world outlook which, in spite of the presence of Paul Robeson who played the role of Bosambo, that of an 'enlightened' native chief subservient to Sanders the powerful representative of the British government, had 'served to portray all the peoples of Africa in terms which legitimated the colonising redemptive mission of the Europeans'; in secular redemptive terms, therefore, rather than, as in the earlier case of the missionaries, Christian redemptive terms, in which the polytheistic 'natives' had been primarily seen as heathens, pagans, and practitioners of idolatry, waiting to be brought into the only true because monotheistic path of spiritual salvation. 102 A key point emerges here - that of the constancy of the representation. For although the term postcolonial is now widely used to indicate an Africa in which the anti-colonial struggles waged during the 1950s and 1960s have resulted in political independence for Africa, with an end being put (except for South Africa, until very recently) to the political supremacy both of the colonial powers as well as of their settler-colonisers, in spite of the fact, also, that a wide range of films by post-independence African filmmakers have been produced, the representational role of Africa in the basic plot line, iconography and matrix narrational units of the Western cinematic text, although modernised and updated, and, in the case of the film Congo (1995, Frank Marshall), even gone high tech, remains the same.

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

43

In all such films these representations of Africa, whether as an exotic backdrop against whose landscape of indistinguishable wild game, primates and African natives, Europeans work out their destinies as the central characters of a love triangle (as in Out of Africa (1985, Sydney Pollack)), or as the backdrop for American adventurers and speculators who seek the industrial diamond mines of a vanished civilisation guarded by terrifying and speciallybred intelligent grey-skinned gorillas, at the same time as an American linguist having taught a young gorilla to speak and use sign language has nevertheless come all the way to return her to her native wilds and to her own kind (Congo)>m rearticulate themselves. In these films, we therefore see revisualised, if now in partly feminist guise (for example, in Out of Africa the Scandinavian baroness heroine copes with her ne'er-do-well aristocratic husband as well as with a white hunter lover, manages her coffee-farm single-handedly, and builds a school to teach the native children to read having convinced the native chief (shades of Bosambo!) that reading is a good thing!) the same constants. In effect, from Sanders of the River to Out of Africa, and from King Solomons Mines (1937, Robert Stevenson) to Congoj the reality of the African continent and of its varied peoples is made to conform to a lawlikely prescribed pattern. What is more, it is made to do so both before political independence and after political independence; both before the emergence of an independent black African cinema, and after the emergence of such a cinema; both during the colonial era and after the colonial era. Can we therefore speak here, as does Barnouw, of merely a colonial rationale as the causal factor which determines the lawlike production of these representations? What if we are here dealing, more profoundly, with a kind of rationale that can be no more seen to exist as an 'object of knowledge* within the terms of our present mainstream order of knowledge (which as Foucault points out was put in place at the end of the eighteenth and during the nineteenth century by Western thinkers), than, as he also points out, in the earlier pre-nineteenth-century classical order of knowledge, the concept of 'life as a biological phenomenon could have been seen to exist within the logic of the then discipline of natural history* What if this rationale, which I shall tentatively title the ontological rationale or the rationale of the symbolic code, is a rationale that opens us onto the issue of consciousness as an issue in its own terms? One therefore that opens up to a new 'ground' beyond the ground of 'Man, beyond its purely biologised conception of being human, of human being? The proposal here is that the systemic nature of the negatively marked (mis)representations of Africa, Africans, as well as of all diasporic peoples of African descent (indeed of all the non-white, non-Western, and therefore 'native' Others), by the signifying practices not only of the cinematic texts of the West, from the exoticised Africa of the Lumiere Brothers in 1896 to Black Gus in Birth of a Nation, from the explorer ethnographic documentary Congorilla to the 'Third World' ethnographic film Reassemblage (1983) by Trinh T. MinhHa, 104 from the backdrop of Africa in Sanders of the River to that in Out ofAfrica, the Africa of King Solomon's Mines and of Tarzan to that of the nauseous sentimentality of Gorillas in the Mist (1988, Michael Apted), to that of the recent Congo, should be seen as being due, not to a colonial rationale, but more far-reachingly to an ontological rationale, of which the colonial rationale is but one variant expression. That, further, this ontological rationale is that of the governing code of symbolic life and death, together with the related understanding of Man's humanity that is specific to the Tocal culture' of the Judaeo-Christian West in its now purely secularised and bourgeois variant; in effect the code of Man, and therefore of the h u m a n in its Western bourgeois, or ethno-class expression.

44

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

In addition, the further proposal here is that if it is the rules generated by this code that govern the representations of Africa and peoples of African descent as well as of all other 'native' non-white peoples, doing so outside the conscious awareness of their Western and Westernised filmmakers, these are the same rules that have led Western as well as African and other non-Western scholars trained in the methodologies of the social sciences and the related disciplines of our present order of knowledge (or Foucauldian episteme) to systemically know and 'represent' Africa by means of parallel symbolically coded discourses that were first identified by Aime Cesaire in his Discourse on Colonialism,105 and later by Edward Said in his book Orientalism.106 To thereby know and 'represent' Africa through what is, as K. C. Anyanyu cites Roger Bastide, 'an immense gallery of mirrors which only reflect the image of our (Western and Westernised) selves, our desires or our passions ... [through] mirrors which deform'. 107 While, if as Mudimbe proposed in The Invention of Africa, both the world view of autocentric Africa and that of 'African traditional systems of thought' rather than being known and represented 'in the framework of their own ratio nality\ have hitherto been known and represented, by both Western and Western-educated African analysts, 'by means of ... conceptual systems which depend on a Western epistemological locus', it would suggest that not even we ourselves, as African and black diaspora critics and filmmakers can, in the normal course of things, be entirely freed from the functioning of these rules; and, therefore, from knowing and representing the 'cultural universe of Africa' through the same Western 'gallery of mirrors' which deform - even where this deformation is effected in the most radically oppositional terms which seek to challenge rather than to reinforce the deformation. How then can we free ourselves from our own subordination to the ontological rationale of Man, to its symbolically coded 'gallery of mirrors' and distorted yet rule-governed representations? In 1976, K. C. Anyanyu proposed that we can be enabled to break the academic (and by extrapolation, the cinematic) mirrors that systematically misrepresent the reality of the African cultural universe, only if we seek to cognitively grasp 'the basic principles of understanding of both African and Western cultures'. 108 Yet given that, as Mudimbe reminds us, it is precisely in the terms of the 'mirror' of this latter culture, and therefore of its 'epistemological locus', 109 that whatever our cultures of origin, we have been educated as academic, filmmaker and critic subjects, how can we cognitively grasp the 'basic principles of understanding' through which we now normally know and represent not only the African 'cultural universe', but also our own Westernised 'cultural universe', outside the terms of these basic principles of understanding themselves? How can we come to know what these 'basic principles of understanding' are outside the terms of their own selfrepresentation? Would this not call for the effecting of a radical discontinuity not only with the deepest levels of Western thought (as Foucault argues Marxism has been unable to do), 110 but with all human thought hitherto - including that of traditional African 'cultural universes' within the framework of their own rationality? Doing so in order to ensure the effecting of a transculturally applicable mode of discontinuity which I have defined as that of the Second Emergence? This is the point of my attaching to my paper a photograph of a rock painting from Namibia in southern Africa discovered in a cave,111 and which has been dated approximately some 28,000 years before the present. It is the same time-frame (i.e. some 30,000 years ago), therefore, that John Pfeiffer identifies as the time-frame of the 'creative explosion' of the human species when an extraordinary series of rock paintings convergently blossomed at multiple sites throughout the world. 112 In this context, and with respect to

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

45

the rock painting from Namibia, I want to emphasise a central suggestion that was put forward at a 1987 FESPAC Conference by the African scholar Theophile Obenga. In referring to the intellectual revolution of Renaissance humanism by which the lay intelligentsia of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe had laid the conceptual basis of the West's five centuries of global expansion, triumph and conquest, leading to the single history of secular modernity that we ail now live, if severely unequally so, Obenga argues that they had been able to do so only on the basis of a central and fundamental strategy. This strategy had enabled them to move outside the limits of their then hegemonically religious medievalChristian world, in effect, outside the limits of its 'epistemological locus', and order of consciousness, in order to reconceptualise their past in new terms. These terms had been afforded the Renaissance intellectuals by their strategic return to their pagan Greco-Roman intellectual heritage, as well as their revalorisation of a heritage whose system of thought had been either domesticated by the theology of medieval Christianity or stigmatised by it. It had therefore been on the basis of their new reinterpretation of their past that they had been enabled to effect the intellectual revolution of humanism, and to thereby give rise to the new image of the earth and conception of the cosmos that were to be indispensable to the emergence and gradual development of the natural sciences, as a new mode of human cognition.113 And as centrally, to also give rise to an epochally new, because secularising, conception of being, Man, as a post-religious and gradually desupernaturalised or degodded mode of the subject, at the public level of identity of the then emergent modern European state.114 On the basis of this analogy, Obenga had then proposed that if the intelligentsia of Africa are to bring an end to the ongoing agony of the continent, they also will find themselves compelled to reconceptualise the history of Africa, as outside the terms of our present 'epistemological locus' and its 'cultural universe'; and to do so by going back to the First Emergence of the human out of the animal kingdom, and then to the full flowering of the consequence of this First Emergence in the Egypt of the Pharaohs.115 However, while the tendency hitherto, given the 'great civilisation' syndrome of contemporary bourgeois scholarship, has been to focus on the latter aspect of this reconceptualisation of the history of Africa, I should like us to focus instead on its earlier and most dazzling, its most extraordinary, phase, that is, the phase of auto-hominisation, as a phase in which the history of Africa uniquely converges with the origin of the human; and thereby with the origin of its history as a uniquely hybrid (because nature/culture) form of life. Ernesto Grassi further identifies this phase as that of the moment in which a specific species effected the rupture that brought to an end the earlier subordination of its behaviours to the genetically-coded 'directive signs', and therefore to the subordination characteristic of purely organic life; and entered instead into the realm of the sacred Logos or Word, where its primary behaviours as a social being were now to be oriented, instead, by the 'directive signs' of a specifically human code, that - in my own - terms, of the governing code of symbolic life and death, specific to each culture.116 Grassi's thesis here is that the emergence of the human out of the animal kingdom, its rupture with the closed circles of purely biological life, had been impelled by the fact that the genetically coded 'directive signs' ordering of the behaviours of purely organic species were no longer sufficient to necessitate the new behaviours that were indispensable to the survival and reproduction of our uniquely human, because verbally inscriptea\ mode(s) of being. One can add here that because it was for these now verbally inscripted beings - ones therefore transformed from being purely biological males/females into hybridly biological and cultural men/women, husbands/wives^ fathers/mothers^ sons/daughters, brothers/sisters,

46

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

undes/nephewsy aunts/nieces and son on - that the genetically coded 'directive signs' of purely organic forms of life would have proved insufficient, it was for them that the rupture of the First Emergence, that is, from total subordination to the hegemony of the genetically coded directive signs that necessitate the behaviours of purely organic life, would have become imperative. T h e insufficiency of the pre-verbal code', Grassi wrote in this context, is the immediate presupposition of the function of language, for here we are confronted with the distinctly human phenomenon of the absence of an immediate code. This absence of an 'immediate code' therefore not only points to the insufficiency of the biological code for this new language-capacitied form of life, but also reveals something else. This is the entry of a power that dissolves the unity of life, a power whose hidden and yet effective strength is that upon which the origin of a new 'code'- the human code- and world depend. While with this entry of 'human spirituality' life receives a completely different meaning compared to the biological world. ,17 Both the absence of an immediate code and the new behaviours for which genetic codes could no longer provide the appropriately motivating 'directive signs', are due to the paradoxical nature of the evolutionary route taken by our species. For humans, who normally should have lived like other primates in the very small closed societies for which they are genetically programmed, found that because of the prolonged period of helplessness of the human infant after birth, they needed larger societies based, like those of the social insects, on a division of tasks, which could enable them to co-operate as insects did, as an indispensable requirement for their species survival and reproduction. 118 If, in the case of the social insects, however, the kind of kin-recognising altruism needed for this co-operation was ensured by the evolutionary route that the insects had taken, one in which the necessary degrees of co-operative eusociality had been determined by what biologists define as their high degree of genetic kin relatedness, this had not been so in the case of humans, and of the evolutionary route that they/we had taken. 119 Since humans, as members of the primate family, are genetically programmed to be competitive rather than co-operative, and to normally display altruism only towards a small group of more or less immediate kin. In consequence, if they were to be able to display the behaviours needed to live in large complex societies, and to transcend the narrow limits of their genetically programmed kin-recognising behaviours (given that, as biologists argue, the intra-species* socially cohering modes of eusocial altruism displayed by all forms of organic life is primarily dependent on the sharing of genes, i.e. I'm altruistic to you because you share the same genes with me, and if I help you, even at the expense of my own life, this is because the genes that you pass on will be the same as mine, thereby fulfilling my own reproductive imperative), 120 some other mechanism would have to be called into play. Human forms of life, therefore, if they were to be enabled to display a more generalised and inclusive level of kin-recognising altruism, would both have to effect a break with the purely genetic determining of altruistic behaviours, and to replace this with a new culturally motivated mode of altruism based on symbolic, rather than on purely genetic, degrees of conspecificity or of kinship. This would therefore have to be a new mode of cultural kinship, and of intra-group altruism, one now induced and necessitated by the Word, by the Sacred Logos, and by the overall religio-cultural field to which the 'directive signs' of the Word, and its governing code of symbolic life, give rise. In effect, therefore, the life that we call human, as one which 'receives

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

47

a completely different meaning' compared to the one that organic species receive from the biological world,121 cannot pre-exist what Grassi calls the 'human code' (one that I have defined as being, on the basis of a proposal by Peter Winch that symbolic forms of life are the only lives that humans live, the governing code of symbolic life and death). I use the term 'inscription' here, in the context of Derrida's proposed grammatology, but in the extended sense, going beyond Derrida's itself, of our always self-instituting or self-inscripting, and therefore culture-specific, modes of being, of experiencing ourselves as, human. In this context both the rock paintings of Namibia and the 'creative explosion' identified by Pfeiffer as having taken place in multiple sites of the world, both African and extra-African, could themselves be seen as an even later phase of the initial forms of writing or of hominising self-inscription (Nietzsche's 'tremendous labor of man upon himself) by means of which Grassi's rupture was effected - ones of which that writing on the flesh, which is the rite of initiation and of circumcision, would have been an early and central form. Anne Solomon notes in this context, in a 1996 Scientific American essay entitled 'Rock Art in Southern Africa', that 'rock paintings' which are found all over southern Africa and which were made by the ancestors of today's San peoples 'not only attest by their wide range to the vast areas once occupied by the ancient San', but also 'encode the history and culture of a society thousands of years old'. To accompany her essay, Solomon published a photograph of the contemporary San engaged in a dance, side by side with the rock painting of what is probably a portrayal of the initiation rite, as it attained to women. Indeed, as she further notes, the rock paintings on one of her research sites consisted 'overwhelmingly of images of women'. While this 'unusual prevalence', she goes on, 'not only suggests that some locations may have been ritual sites used only by women perhaps in connection with female initiation', it also proves that it can no longer be assumed, as has commonly been done, that 'art' (and the self-instituting self-inscripting processes of that, the 'tremendous labor' of the human upon itself)* that 'art', like ritual, enacts, was 'solely a male , 123

preserve. I would like, in this context, to bring the 'analogy of culture' proposal of my title together with Obenga's proposal that we return conceptually to the origins of human life in Africa, to its emergence out of the animal kingdom, doing so in order to reconceptualise the history of Africa, in terms outside those of our present order of knowledge. For if, as Grassi proposes, the question that confronts us with respect to the human code is the question of how exactly it is structured,124 then Newton's concept of the analogy of nature always consonant with itself suggests a way in which it can be done. In that it enables us to extrapolate to the idea of the analogy of culture always consonant with itself so that by inverting the terms of Newton's argument that given that the laws of nature function in the same way for all parts of the universe in the same way, we can therefore be able to infer from our knowledge of the 'bodies' nearest to us what the processes of functioning of the bodies furthest from us must necessarily be,125 we could postulate the following: that it is precisely those 'cultural bodies' whose institutions are far older than ours and therefore the furthest in time, as are the traditional cultures of Africa, that can provide us with two central insights, one general, one specific. The first insight is with respect to the question as to how the code is structured; the second is with respect to the rules which govern the functioning of the code in our contemporary case, as well as to the nature of the terms of this code - to the terms of its ontological rationale, and, therefore, of the 'basic principles of understanding' that such a rationale generates.

48

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

To develop both of these I make use of a further insight provided by a traditional African culture, that of the Sara of Chad, as discussed by the ethnologist Lucien Scubla in the context of his hypothesis with respect to the central role of the imagery of spilt blood, as the analogue of that of menstrual blood in the ritual ceremony of initiation or of symbolic birth, of traditional Africa. For the Sara, Scubla points out, the meaning of the ritual of initiation is based on a binary opposition between two kinds of 'birth', i.e. 'natural' birth of which the women are the bearers, and 'cultural' birth of which only the men can be the 'procreators'. Because, for them, it is only through the second birth that full humanhood can be attained, the function of the ritual is to transform beings who are 'animals with a human vocation' into humans. So that where, for the cultural belief system of the JudaeoChristian West in its now purely secularised form, degrees of'true' humanhood are equated with one's ostensible degrees of bio-evolutionary selectedness, with the scale of humanness therefore being based on the binary code of eugenicity/dysgenicity, for the Sara, true humanhood is attained to through the processes of cultural socialisation. One of the high points of this process, the ritual of initiation, is therefore represented as analogous to the transformative process of cooking. Where in the latter process, the men who are hunters give the 'raw meat' that they have killed to the women who then render it edible for human consumption, in the transformative process of initiation or of symbolic birth as it pertains to males, the women hand over the 'raw' male adolescents to the men so that they can be ritually killed and 'engorged' by the ancestors in order to be mimetically reborn, through a series of ritual ordeals, as members of the clan.126 Central to this transformative process, therefore, is a value-principle which is drawn by the Sara between the positively marked blood spilt by the male either as hunter (the blood of the hunt) or as sacrificer (the blood of sacrifice), and its founding, yet binary analogue, the menstrual blood of the female. This is therefore a value-principle that is central, in my own terms, to the enacting of Grassi's governing code. Both of the former, i.e. the blood spilt by the hunter and the spilt blood of sacrifice in the religious rites presided over by the men, are therefore positively marked as signs of symbolic life-giving activity. They are thereby valorised as 'cooked' or 'true' life as contrasted with the 'raw' or 'uncooked' life given birth to by the women. And although Scubla does not discuss this aspect, the ceremony of female initiation presided over by older women should function according to the same principle of value-transformation. My proposal here is that the institution of initiation or of symbolic birth should be seen in the terms of the Sara's conception, as one of the matrix social inventions founding to all human 'forms of life', to, therefore, their poesis of being, and correlated modes of symbolically coded, rather than genetically programmed, eusociality; 127 the invention, therefore of their conspecific identity as, in the case of the Sara, 'members of the clan' rather than as members of a biological species or sub-species. In this context, the institution of initiation based on the semantic charter 128 or morphogenetic fantasy129 of the binary code of symbolic life/biological life, and the value-principle enacted by its positive/negative series of representations, can therefore be recognised as a central hominising mechanism by means of which what Antonio de Nicholas defines as the transmutation of genetic into symbolic identity, of theory (the conception of being human) into fleshy is effected.130 By means of which, therefore, the now initiated young male adolescent is enabled to phenomenologically experience himself as the symbolic conspecific of those initiated and socialised with him in the terms of the same code; with this new experiencing of the self thereby inducing him to display altruistic co-identifying behaviours towards his age-group peers, within the terms of a mode of eusociality, that is, that of the clany as a mode of eusociality which, like that

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

49

of our contemporary nation-state mode of conspecificity, is culture-systemically, rather than genetically, ordered.131 In other words, the order of the social, as Scubla further points out, is itself'born' from the spilt blood of the religious sacrificial rites presided over by the men. Since it is this rite which marks the passage from the order of purely biological life, negatively marked as the sign of'sterile' disorder in the Origin myths of traditional societies (as in the case of a Dinka Origin myth as well as of an Amerindian myth of the origin of tobacco that Scubla gives as examples), to the order of human societies that is founding to our uniquely symbolic 'forms of life'. While, as he further shows, an indispensable condition of this 'founding' is that the negative/positive binary opposition pointed to by the Sara of Chad between, on the one hand, the biological or 'natural' life given by the women (whose signifier is that of the image of menstrual blood} and, on the other, the 'cultural life' or symbolic birth given to by the men (whose analogical macro-signifiers are the blood spilt by the hunter and, even more centrally, by the spilt blood of the religious rite of sacrifice), must be lawlikely kept in place and maintained at all levels of the specific social order and 'form of life'; as is also the case, therefore, with respect to the systemic nature of the negatively marked representation of black Africa and of the peoples of black African descent, by the scholarly, cinematic, and social texts of the contemporary West. This symbolic coding imperative is clear in the two examples that are given by Scubla, that of the Dinka origin narrative and that of the tobacco origin myth of the Tereno Arawaks, but perhaps at its most transparent in the latter. In the latter's plotline, as Scubla shows, a woman who is a sorceress, attempts to poison her husband with her menstrual blood (the symbol of biological life/birth). Warned by his son, the husband goes in search of honey, mixes it with the embryos of a pregnant snake which he has killed, and gives it to the woman to eat. Eating it, she is transformed into a man-eating ogress. While chasing her husband to devour him, she falls into a pit and dies. Where she dies and spills her blood, a hitherto unknown plant, the tobacco plant, sprouts up from the ground. Her husband collects the leaves, cures them, then ritually smokes them in the company of his male peers (who are collectively, in the terms of the myth, the procreators of 'true' symbolic life as against the 'mere' biological life given birth to by the women). As they ritually smoke, the smoke ascends as incense to the gods. The constant here is that the plotline of the narrative can be seen to pivot on the same system of negatively/positively marked representations, whose binary evil/good oppositions will be performatively enacted as the passage of disorder to order in the ceremony of symbolic birth that is founding to traditional societies. 'The woman', Scubla writes, is accused of poisoning her husband with her menstrual blood. The myth then leads from menstrual blood which flows downwards - a natural privilege of women but a privilege marked negatively, to the tobacco smoke which rises upward as the cultural privilege of the men which is marked positively; that is to say from the signifier ofprocreation to the signifier of religion.132

The transformative passage in both narrative and ritual ceremony is therefore one from the signifier of the procreation of biological life (in whose terms behaviours of bonding altruism are restricted to their genetic limits), to the signifier of the cultural 'procreation' of symbolic life (in which degrees of bonding altruism will be induced and motivated by the new 'directive signs' of the narratively inscribed code). Here the representation system of the myth,

50

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

together with the cooked/raw^ tobacco smoke/menstrual blood code of symbolic life and death that it enacts, functions, as the parallel drawn by the Sara reveals, according to the same negative/positive opposition on whose basis the ceremony of symbolic birth presided over by the male 'procreators' is effected. Since it is by means of both that the subjects of the order are induced to experience their biological being in symbolically coded terms, and to thereby transfer allegiance and kinship loyalty from their genetic to their culturally instituted conspecifics; from the siblings of the 'womb' to those of the clan. In our own case, to those of the class, of the nation-state, of the ethno-religious group, the 'race'. From here the imperative nature of the way in which the representation of biological identity must be negatively marked at all levels, since it is this negative marking that induces the aversive behavioural response on the part of the subjects of each order, to the otherwise overriding imperative of their genetic identity. 133 This, at the same time as the positively marked representation of their 'artificial' identity serves to induce desire for, and allegiance to, the culture-specific criterion of being which it encodes. For the Sara of Chad, therefore, the category of the life to which the women give rise had to be as negatively marked (i.e. as 'brute' or 'raw' life) as was the sign of menstrual blood of which the woman is the bearer in the Tereno myth, given that both must now function as signifiers of symbolic death; of 'sterility' to the 'fecundity' of symbolic life. Looked at transculturally, the image of menstrual blood can be identified as the image enacting of the Origin model of Procreation that is specific to societies of the agrarian era whose polytheistic religions had divinised Nature and the natural forces. Its macro-image of Origin was, 134 however, to be increasingly displaced by the rise of the monotheistic religions whose new Origin model of Creation would, by its degodding or de-divinising of nature, replace the menstrual blood Origin signifier with those of the macrotextual signifiers - as in the case of Original Sin - of their respective faiths. As Scubla's analysis of the Tereno myth therefore makes clear, the binary value opposition between order/full being, and the lack of full being (i.e. the positively marked tobacco smoke rising upwards) and disorder (i.e. the negatively marked menstrual blood flowing downwards), enacts the ontological rationale of a code in which the category of women are the bearer/signifiers of 'raw' biological life, and that of meny the procreators/creators of 'cooked' symbolic life, or culture. This, however, should not be seen as an effect of what we have come to define as 'patriarchy', and thereby interpreted in terms of the feminist paradigm as an empirical opposition between 'men' and 'women'. Rather, what is at issue here is an opposition that makes use of the physiological difference between the two sexes in order to inscript and enact Grassi's governing code in agrarian polytheistic terms. 135 This in the same way as, I shall propose here, in our contemporary industrial order, and thereby in the terms of the now purely secularised variant of the Judaeo-Christian culture of the West, the physiognomically different categories of two population groups, that of, on the one hand, the Indo-Europeans, and of, on the other, the Bantu-Africans, are deployed as the central means of the enacting of the governing code instituting of our present conception of the human, Man. With Africa thereby having to be represented in the terms of this code, by both the cinematic and scholarly texts of the West, as the abode and origin of the Human Other. This, at the same time as all peoples of African descent must be negatively represented, within the logic of our present conception of being, Man> as 'brute' or 'uncooked' life, as contrasted with the 'cooked' or symbolic life signified by the West, and embodied in all peoples of Indo-European descent, who must therefore be canonised as such by means of a positively marked system of representation.

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

51

Whether within the terms of the pre-Industrial Origin narratives of Africa, as well as in that of the Amerindian myth of the origin of tobacco, or in that of the Origin model of Evolution or 'Official Creation Story' 136 of the contemporary techno-industrial culture of the West, the negatively marked categories - that of the Woman of the first two, and that of the peoples of African descent of the third - are imperative to the process by means of which the governing code of symbolic life, and its verbally inscripted 'directive signs', can be made to override the directive signs of the biological aspect of human 'forms of life' and modes of being. That is, as an aspect which, although the indispensable condition of our experiencing ourselves in culture-specific terms of this or that mode of the human, must itself be systemically devalued, by being negatively marked. Given that if, as the linguist Lieberman points out, the human is defined by two levels of conspecific altruism - that of the organic level determined by our degrees of genetic kinship, and that of a 'more generalised level'137 determined by our culturally instituted modes of symbolic identity, it is only by the latter's overriding of the 'directive signs' of the former that our experience of being human both as symbolic I and as a we based on symbolic, and therefore artificial, modes of kinship, can be enabled. An example: soldiers who fight today's national wars and who must be prepared to die in defence of the flag might very well be tempted, as individuals, by the genetic imperative to save themselves. Yet given the enculturation process of school and home, and the social order in general, the genetic imperative is so automatically overridden that it can scarcely be heard. When, in addition, Bosnian Serbs fight and kill Bosnian Muslims or vice versa, or when Tutsis kill Hutus or vice versa, 138 therefore, they do so as subjects enculturated in the terms of their specific group identities. It does not matter that, as in the case of the Tutsis and Hutus, they all speak the same language; - the positivism of linguistic identity is not the issue here. Rather, the issue is that of narrative representations, of the symbolic identities to which they give rise, and of the systems of domination and counter-domination to which their respective group narcissism impels them. 139 Given that such identities and modes of symbolic kinship/non-kinship are experienced by their socialised subjects in no less cognitively and affectively closed, and therefore narcissistic, a manner, than are the purely genetically determined modes of conspecificity of organic species. The fundamental hypothesis of our proposed new conceptual ground and world outlook, therefore, is that if the ritual ceremony of symbolic birth as conceptualised by the Sara of Chad enables us to grasp the mechanisms by which Grassi's governing code was and is structured and inscripted as the condition of the First Emergence (and thereby of the instituting of human 'forms of life' as a hybridly bios/logos^ nature/culture level of existence), it also enables us to understand the nature of the price that had to be paid for the rupture effected by such 'forms of life' with the genetically determined 'directive signs' that motivate and necessitate the behaviours of purely organic life. This price, one that explains, inter alia, the lawlike nature of the 'gallery of mirrors'/representation of Africa and of all peoples of African descent in the scholarly and cinematic texts of the West, is that of our having to remain hitherto subordinated to the 'directive signs' generated from the narratively inscribed codes of symbolic life and death, signs which now function to motivate and necessitate our human behaviours in the terms of culture-specific fields defined by the self-referentiality of the code; and, thereby, by the cognitive and affective closure to which this self-referentiality leads. How, nevertheless, is this motivation of behaviours by the negative/positive representations and/or 'directive signs' of Grassi's code concretely effected? The answer lies in the

52

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

recent discovery by biologists and neuroscientists of what they identify as the opiate biochemical reward-and-punishment system of the brain; and of the ways in which this system functions as the centrally directive mechanism which serves to both motivate and necessitate the behaviours of all organic species. As Avram Goldstein explains in a recent book, for all forms of organic life, a species-specific opioid system functions to signal reward on the one hand, and punishment on the other. In all cases, the feel-good reward signal is effected by the euphoria-inducing chemical event which, as Goldstein argues, is an event that is probably defined by the activating of beta-endorphinsy while the feel-bad punishment signal is induced by the activating of dynorphins. cWe can therefore speculate', he continues, that the reward systems function to drive adaptive behaviors the following way: They signal 'good' when food is found and eaten by a hungry animal, when water is found and drunk by a thirsty animal, when sexual activity is promised and consummated, when a threatening situation is averted. They signal 'bad' when harmful behavior is engaged in or when pain is experienced. These signals become associated with the situations in which they are generated, and they are remembered.140 Here we approach the central role played by negatively/positively marked representations, as in the case of the menstrual blood/tobacco smoke representations of the Chadian narrative, or as in that of the Africa/Europe binarily opposed iconography of Western cinematic texts, in the artificial motivation systems that drive human behaviours. For if the reward system is central to the genetic motivation system (or GMS), by which the animal learns to seek what is beneficial and to avoid what is harmful', and, therefore, by means of which, the behaviours appropriate to each species are lawlikely induced - 'This delicately regulated system', Goldstein continues, 'was perfected by evolution over millions of years to serve the survival of all species, and to let us humans experience pleasure and satisfaction from the biologically appropriate behaviors and situations of daily life'ul - nevertheless, as the biologist Danielli proposes, in contradiction to Goldstein in this respect, there is a fundamental difference in the case of the humans. For not only are the behaviours to be induced here intended to be culturally rather than biologically appropriate behaviours, but in the case of the humans, Danielli suggests, where the altruistic behaviours essential to social cohesion must be verbally semantically induced, it is discursive processes (i.e. Origin narratives, ideology or belief systems) and their respective systems of negatively/positively marked representations which serve to activate, in culturally relative and recoded termsy the functioning of the human biochemical reward and punishment mechanism, thereby motivating our always culture-specific ensemble of behaviours. 142 With the consequence that the kind of 'generalised altruism' needed as the integrating mechanism of each social order must be as consistently 'rewarded' through the mediation of positively marked representations as must be the criterion of symbolic life, whose no less positive marking functions to induce in the order's subjects the desire to realise being in the terms which also makes possible the display of kin-recognising behaviours towards those socialised into subjectivity in the same terms as themselves; those with whom each J constitutes a symbolic We. Each such criterion of the normal subject can itself be realised and experienced as a value-criterion, however, only through the mediating presence of the negatively marked category which is made to embody the signifier of symbolic death, in terms that are the antithesis of those of normal being; as the category, therefore of deviant Otherness or of Difference from which the bonding principle of Sameness or 'fake' similarity is generated.

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

53

If, therefore, every human mode of being and its 'form of life* is instituted about a governing code or representation of symbolic life (the TSRU) and death (the MBFD), which then functions to regulate in verbally recoded terms the functioning of the opiate reward and punishment systems of the brain, thereby enabling our human behaviours to be governed by the learned or acquired motivation system (AMS) specific to each 'local culture', then the behaviours so induced are everywhere behaviours appropriate to the specific code instituted by each cultural system and its founding Origin narrative. In consequence, where for all purely organic species, it is the biochemical event of reward and punishment which directly motivates and is causal of each species' ensemble behaviours, the fundamental distinction for human forms of life is that it is the culture-representational event which motivates and is causal of (by means of the functioning of the opiate reward/punishment system which it verbally recodes) our uniquely human behaviours. 143 The issue of the systemically negative representation of Africa in both the Western cinematic text as well as in the scholarly text can therefore be recognised as a function of the enacting of the governing code of symbolic life and death, which is instituting of our present criterion/conception of being Man, and thereby of the basic principles of understanding of our contemporary global culture - that of the West in its bourgeois and biocentric conception. While, since in the case of all human forms of life, it is the representational event (as in the case of those given rise to by the Western cinematic text) which gives rise to the biochemical event (whether to that of the beta-endorphin event activated by the positively marked representation of Man as iconised in the signifier of the IndoEuropean physiognomy, or that of the dynorphin event activated by the negatively marked representation of Man's Human Other, 144 as iconised by the Bantu-type physiognomy of peoples of African descent), 145 then the calling into question and countering, by the African cinematic text, from Sembene onwards, of these dynorphin-activating representations of Africa and of the peoples of African descent is a calling into question of the governing symbolic code enacting of Man; and therefore of our present ethno-class conception of the human, Man, itself. Yet, however, a calling into question that has necessarily remained tentative and provisional, since having to be carried out within the terms of our present 'epistemological locus'; and thereby, outside as yet a conceptual ground in whose reference frame or world outlook human 'forms of life', together with their respective governing codes of symbolic life and thereby of symbolic kinship and eusociality, will be able to exist as 'objects of knowledge', and to be thereby fully theorisable. 146 This in very much the same way as biological life itself would only come to exist as an 'object of knowledge' and be thereby theorisable, as Foucault points out, only within the then new conceptual ground elaborated by the 'fundamental rearrangements of knowledge' that took place at the end of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth; as a rearrangement which provided the new episteme or order of knowledge needed to inscribe our present 'figure of Man', together with the ethno-class conception of the human as an evolutionarily selected and purely biologised being which, ostensibly, pre-exists the culture and governing code that can alone inscript and enact it as such a mode of being human. We can therefore put forward the following hypotheses: that ruling groups in all human cultures, including our own, are ruling groups to the extent that they embody their respective cultures' optimal criterion of being, or code of symbolic life; that therefore the great transformations in history are always transformations of the code, of what it means to be human, and, therefore, of the poesis of being and mode of symbolic conspecificity, of which the code is the organising principle; a transformation, therefore, of the always symbolically

54

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

coded modes of consciousness integrating of our human orders and their forms of life. In this context if, as Jacob Pandian notes, with the West's reinvention, beginning in the sixteenth century, of its matrix religious identity, Christian, in two variant forms of Man (the first hybridly religio-secular, the other purely secular), it was to be the population group of African descent who were to be made into the physical referent of the Human Other to its second and purely secular because biocentric form, then the systemic negatively marked representations of this population group and of its continent of origin, Africa, can now be recognised as ones that are a lawlike function of the enacting of our present conception of being human, of its governing code and ontologicai rationale. That, therefore, the 'gallery of mirrors' representations of Africa and of African-descended peoples as signifiers of Genetic Dysselection/Defectivity, and thereby of symbolic death in the cinematic and scholarly texts of the West, are, as lawlikely a function of our enacting of our present evolutionarily selected conception of being human, Man, as the negatively marked representation of the Woman (as the bearer of the macro-signifier of menstrual blood or of symbolic death), was a function of the enacting of one variant of the 'lineage' conception of being human of traditional polytheistic Africa. Further, on the basis of the related hypothesis that there are laws of culture which function for our contemporary order as they have functioned for all human 'forms of life' hitherto, we can now postulate that the systematically negative misrepresentations of Africa made by the Western cinematic text is the lawlike effect of the fact that, within the terms of our present governing code of Man, Africa and all peoples of African descent, wholly or partly, have been made to take the signifying place of the Woman, and thereby made to actualise the code of symbolic death - of the 'menstrual blood always flowing downwards', the MBFD, if in the new and secular terms of Genetic Dysselection/Defectivity.147 Here too, Scubla's point adapted from Rene Girard, that traditional orders see themselves as being born from ritual sacrifice148 - with the blood of sacrifice being a re-enactment of the image of the menstrual blood - enables us not only to note that it is from the 'sacrifice' of the woman's death from which the tobacco plant grows, but also to recognise the imperative nature of the keeping in place, by all cultures and their modes of being human, of a value hierarchy between the representation of symbolic life (TSRU), on the one hand, and of death (MBFD), on the other; this as the condition of the subject being motivated to desire to realise him/herself in the terms of his/her symbolic rather than biological identity. 149 Here, Pandian's observation with respect to the way in which our present identity, that of Man, is a transumed variant of Christian,150 enables us to identify an analogical parallel. This is that the systemic misrepresentation of Africa and of peoples of African descent, by both the Western cinematic text and the 'gallery of mirrors' of contemporary scholarship, is as lawlikely effected as, in the scholarship and religio-aesthetic system of Latin Christian Europe, the category of the laity, and therefore of the lay intelligentsia, had been negatively marked as the embodiment of symbolic death, i.e. of mankind's postulated enslavement to Original Sin, as contrasted with the positively represented category of the clergy as the embodiment of the Redeemed Spirit. In that, while in the terms of the Christian Origin Story, and its correlated Grand Narrative of Emancipation, the clergy had freed themselves by means of their voluntary celibacy from their negative legacy of Original Sin (as a legacy represented as having been transmitted in the wake of Adam's Fall, through the processes of genital procreation), the category of the laity had not. The intelligentsia of the latter were, therefore, because of the nature of their fallen flesh, represented as incapable of attaining to any certain knowledge of reality except through the mediation of the theological paradigms

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

55

of which the clergy were the guardians. In consequence, given that these paradigms were themselves tautologically based upon the founding premise which legitimated the ontological and therefore the knowledge-hegemony of the clergy - i.e. the premise of mankind's enslavement to Original Sin from whose negative consequences only the voluntarily celibate clergy had been freed - the cognitive closure to which they gave rise was a closure that was to be brought to an end only by the intellectual revolution of humanism. By, that is, the reciprocally ontological and epistemological revolution effected by the lay intelligentsia of Renaissance Europe against the then hegemonic medieval-Christian and theocentric conception of being, and thereby against their own negatively marked representation as bearers of the fallen flesh (MBFD) enslaved to Original Sin. As a conception of being that they were to deconstruct, only by means of their revalorised reconception of lay status, and their narrativisation and invention (beginning with Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man) of'Man' and its Origin.151 If we note that at the end of the eighteenth and during the nineteenth century the Origin of Man was again renarrativised, this time in the cosmogonic terms of evolution, as that of a bio-evolutionarily selected being on the model of a natural organism in the reoccupied place of Christianity's divinely created being in the image of God, a central recognition can be made with respect to the 'epistemological locus' which came into existence pari passu with this renarrativised Origin and its biocentric conception of being; as the locus that we have inherited. This recognition, one hinted at by Foucault at the end of his The Order of Things, is that our present disciplinary discourses and their respective systems of positively/negatively marked representations are the very practices by means of which our contemporary Western bourgeois criterion of being human, together with its nation-state mode of symbolic conspecificity, as well as the global order or world system which is the indispensable condition of their reciprocal existence, are produced and reproduced. Here the biologist Danielli's proposal that Marx's statement that religion (and therefore religious discourse) is 'the opium of the people' is a statement that needs to be taken literally> and indeed, is one that can be extended to the secular belief system or ideology, 152 specific to our contemporary order, leads to the following conclusions. First, that the struggles waged with respect to the issue of representation (whether by Diawara's 'resisting spectators' of black America or by filmmakers of Africa who from Sembene onwards set out to counter and challenge the West's representations of Africa, in the immediate wake of political independence) can be recognised as struggles over the modes of consciousness to which our contemporary secular belief system or ideology gives rise. Second, that the role of all such orders or modes of consciousness generated from belief systems, religious or secular, is to integrate human orders, at the same time as they also serve to legitimate the social hierarchies, role allocations and the distributional ratios of the goods and the bads ('the way the cards are dealt'), the structuring of each such order, as well as the imperative of social cohesion. 'When Marx', Danielli wrote, said that 'religion is the opiate of the people,' he spoke with greater accuracy than he realised. The ... decline of religion .., [has] ... tended to transform society so that we could now say that 'Ideology is the opium of the people.' What none of us has realised until the last few years is t h a t . . . unless society provides mechanisms for the release of endogenous opiates, i.e., for activating the IRS (the internal biochemical reward and punishment system internal to the brain) ... social cohesion is lost and collapse ... may be imminent. 153

56

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Danielli's seminal point here is that because all human societies as well as their structuring hierarchies are primarily held together by the discursive practices of culture-specific theologies/ideologies able to induce cohesion in the terms needed by each order for its stable reproduction (in effect by the discursive practices which institute each order's field of consciousness), it is only by means of such practices, ones able to make the inequalities of each order seem just and legitimate, and as the way things are and have to be to their subjects, that the social cohesion of each such order can be maintained. Seeing that, without such discourses, together with their positively/negatively marked, and thereby symbolically coded system of representations (whether that of the Origin narrative of Chad or that of our own Origin narrative of evolution as enacted in the Europe/African binary representations of the Western cinematic and scholarly texts,) 154 human forms of life as the culturally instituted, and sociosymbolic systems that they are, cannot be brought into existence and stably replicated. In effect, our modes of being human cannot pre-exist the Word, and thereby, the meanings/representations which the Word generates, given that it is by the latter's activation of the reward and punishment system of the brain in the terms of each culture's governing code of symbolic life and death, that we alone can experience ourselves as human. In effect, that we can come to exist in our respective phenomenological universes which function as parallel languaging universes to those of the purely biological, doing so in the terms of each such universe's culturally instituted mode of memory, of consciousness, of mind. It is, therefore, only in relation to these phenomenological universes of our human 'forms of life' (as universes that cannot paradoxically exist as Objects of knowledge' within the terms of our present episteme, its purely biologised conception of being, and the specific universe to which this biocentric conception gives rise) that we can be enabled to grasp the dimensions of the inventiveness of institutions such as that of initiation/symbolic birth, as well as of the foundational narratives and their complex religious belief systems; the inventiveness, therefore, of their respective Words, whether in the case of the millennially existent polytheistic religions such as that of the Dogon peoples, where the Word (Nommo) is conceived of as 'the beginning of all things', 155 or in the far later monotheistic religions, from Judaism's Single Text, to Judaeo-Christianity's Catholic ritual of transubstantiation effected by the priest's utterance of words, to the sculpted word of the Islamic Koran. That in addition, we can be also enabled to grasp the no lesser degree of inventiveness that was at work in the West's forging of the secular belief systems or ideologies, beginning with that of the discourse of civic humanism elaborated by the lay revolution of the Renaissance civic humanism, and re-enacted as that of a new form of biological and/or economic humanism, in the nineteenth century; both as the ideologies by means of which the West, as a function of its epochal 'killing' of God, was to replace and/or marginalise all earlier Words, together with their religious conceptions of being human, with its single increasingly homogenising and secular or degodded conception, that of Man. As a conception, however, in the logic of whose Word, or governing code, its positive/negative system of representations, and thereby of the memory, and order of consciousness which they inscript and institute, the continued subordination and impoverishment of Africa and its peoples, as well as of the peoples of its diaspora, is always already prescribed - the cards as dealt within the terms of its 'official creation story', of evolution, as they would have been dealt for the category who embodied the negatively marked category of biological or 'raw' life (the MBFD), 156 within the terms of the traditional 'official creation story' (on the model of Procreation rather than of evolution) of Chad - of its Word, its mode of memory, of consciousness, of being human.

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

57

Conclusion Mudimbe's thesis as to the way in which the West, since the fifteenth century, has submitted the rest of the world to its memory, when linked to the hypothesis of the existence of laws of culture, and thereby of the analogy of culture always consonant with itself, reveals that the phenomenon that Marx and indeed Danielli identify as ideology,157 is a phenomenon of the same order as the phenomenon described by Evans-Pritchard in the case of the Azande, a traditional people of Africa's Sudan, when he encountered them during the first decades of the twentieth century. What Evans-Pritchard says of the Azande, and of the cognitively closed nature of their culture-systemic memory and order of consciousness, can therefore be seen to apply, if in different terms, to the culture-specific memory and order of consciousness of Man, and to the nature of the symbolically coded systems of representations by which this memory/consciousness is inscripted. 'I have attempted', he wrote, to show how all their beliefs hang together, and were the Azande to give up faith in witchdoctorhood, he would have to surrender equally his faith in witchcraft and the oracles. In this web of belief, every strand depends upon every other strand. An Azande cannot get out of the meshes because it is the only world he knows. This web is not an external structure in which he is enclosed: it is the very texture of his thought, and he cannot think that his thought is wrong.158 This leads us therefore to the conclusion that there is, today, no misery being experienced by contemporary black Africa and its peoples, nor by the peoples of its diaspora, nor by the peoples who belong to the global and transnational category of the jobless and semi-jobless inner-city ghettos and shanty-town archipelagos, together with their prison-extensions, that is not due (as is also the ongoing pollution and degradation of the planetary environment)159 to the following causal factor: that the way we collectively behave on our present reality, doing so in the terms of a world outlook based on our belief in the purely biological nature of the human, constitutes the very texture of our own thought, and that, like the Azande, we too cannot, normally, think our thought wrong. More precisely, think that our thought is true only within the terms of the local but now globalised and purely secular variant culture of the Western bourgeoisie, in the cognitive closure of whose symbolically coded system of representations and order of consciousness we are as enclosed, as the condition of the enacting of our present poesis of being, Man, as were the Azande, as the condition of the enacting of theirs; as would have been, and still residually are, the subjects of the traditional order of Chad, as the condition too, of the enacting of their own. On the basis of the analogy of culture always consonant with itself, we can therefore put forward the following hypothesis: that if the governing code of symbolic life and death is a transcultural constant, then all our behaviours, including that of our contemporary order (and specifically those of the systemic and negatively marked representing of black Africa, its human hereditary variation, and indigenous cultural systems, by the Western cinematic and scholarly texts), must be as relative to it as, at the physical level of reality, time and distance are relative to the constant of the speed of light. Further, that because as observers of our social realities we are always already socialised as subjects in the terms of the governing code which prescribes the collective behaviours instituting of the reality that we observe, then the predicament in which we, like the Azande, find ourselves (i.e. that we cannot normally think that our thought is wrong, and must necessarily remain, normally, 'trapped in the circularity of a self-referential paradox')160 is a culturally lawlike predicament.161

58

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

This Azande-type predicament was the unstated question that shadowed a 1992 symposium which dealt with the issue of the relation between mind and brain, consciousness and neurobiology. Against the view of mainstream neuroscientists that the mind is the brain, Jonathan Miller proposed that mind or consciousness, while implemented by the neurobiological processes of the brain, is not itself a property of these processes; that we cannot therefore use the same methods by which we have become acquainted with the brain (i.e. the neurosciences), to become acquainted with consciousness, with the mind. And therefore, with the Vernacular languages of belief and desire' through which alone we can, as human, know what it's like to be us (an I, a we); 162 in effect, through which alone we can phenomenologically be in the terms of each order's mode of symbolic birth. If, therefore, we define consciousness as a property of the correlation between the governing code of symbolic life and death (as inscribed by the Origin narratives founding to each human 'form of life') and, therefore, between its positive/negative marked system of representations and the opiate or biochemical reward-and-punishment system of the brain, with the former, the code, always determinant of the states of the latter, then finding a method by which to get acquainted with consciousness would call for the event of a Second Emergence. That is, for a rupture with the cognitive closure and circular self-referentiality of our symbolically coded orders of consciousness whose culture-specific 'directive signs' now function to induce our, thereby still heteronomously ordered, behaviours. Seeing that it is only by means of such a new rupture that we can, as a species, be empowered to govern the governing codes of symbolic life and death which have hitherto governed and still govern us, thereby necessitating our behaviours in pre-determined and code-specific ways. This, in the same way, therefore, as with the singularity of the First Emergence, we had, as a condition of our realisation as a new form of life, effected that initial rupture with the directive signs of the genetic codes that necessitate the behaviours of purely organic life; with this initial rupture then determining that as humans we were to experience ourselves in symbolically coded terms - even where, as in our own case, we verbally define ourselves on the model of a natural organism, and are thereby induced to experience ourselves as the purely biological beings that we inscript, 163 define ourselves to be. The ethnologist Asmarom Legesse proposed in 1973 that it is only the liminal categories of human orders (i.e. categories made to embody the signifier of deviant alterity and, thereby, of symbolic death to the criterion of being, of each culture's 'normal' mode of being), who, in attempting to free themselves from their systemic role of ontological negation, can free us all from the prescriptive categories of the circularly self-referential modes of memory or orders of consciousness, whose function is to integrate human orders,' 64 on the basis of the represented symbolically, rather than genetically, determined conspecificity of their subjects. If, in consequence, the West's intellectual revolution of humanism as spearheaded by the then liminal category of the laity was, with its revalorising conception of the human in the secular terms of Man, over against its theologically defined hopelessly fallen status, to make possible, on the basis of its new and correlated premise of autonomously functioning laws of nature, the rise of the natural sciences and, thereby, human knowledge of its physical and organic levels of reality in their objective existence, this new mode of cognition was, however, to remain an incomplete and half-fulfilled one. This given that, as Aime Cesaire pointed out, it remains unable to make our human worlds, as worlds instituted by the Word, by Origin narratives and representations, intelligible,165 and therefore to provide knowledge of our phenomenological universes as a third level of reality, outside the symbolically coded terms of their order-enacting cognitive closure and circular self-referentiality.

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

59

This, I propose, is where our liminal status, as filmmakers and intellectuals, provides us with a cognitive advantage, which parallels, in new terms, that of the lay intelligentsia of Renaissance Europe. In that any sustained attempt to free ourselves from the negatively marked representations imposed upon us, as the embodied signifiers of Man's most extreme Human Others, by the 'gallery of mirrors' of the Western cinematic and scholarly texts, will necessarily impel us towards the realisation of Aime' C£saire's proposed new science of the Word, as one that, he argued in 1946, was imperatively needed to complete the natural sciences. If, that is, we are to gain knowledge of our human worlds, specifically of the contemporary global order of reality in which we all now find ourselves, as it is;166 rather than in the behaviour-motivating terms in which it must be known by its subjects, as the indispensable condition of its own stable reproduction as such an order of reality. Knowledge, therefore, of the governing codes of symbolic life and death and their basic principles of understanding which lawlikely prescribe the ensemble of behaviours, cognitive, imaginative and actional, by means of which all human orders, including our own, are brought into existence as living systems; codes which therefore determine, through the cards they deal, the overall effects, both good and ill, to which each such ensemble of behaviours will lead. The concluding thesis here, therefore, is that it is only such a projected new science (one that Heinz Pagels was also to call for in 1988 in his book The Dream of Reason: The Computer and the Sciences of Complexity,167 when he suggested that we should now set out to breach the barriers between the natural sciences and the humanities in order to put our 'narratively constructed world and their orders of feeling and beliefs under scientific description in a new way') 168 that can provide us with a method by which to get acquainted with the functioning of our symbolically coded orders of consciousness, of mind, as the neuroscientists have found a natural-scientific method by which to become acquainted with the processes of functioning of the brain. That can thereby make accessible to us the basic 'principles of understanding' of the contemporary culture in which we find ourselves, as principles that determine our own 'gallery of mirrors' representation in the circularly self-referentiality of the Western cinematic and scholarly texts: our representation, within the terms of our present culture's conception of the human, as the Human Other to Man and the actualisation of this negated role of alterity at the level of empirical reality, as well as at the level of our always already socialised consciousness. 169 Meaning, the physicist David Bohm pointed out, is being}70 Because meaning, which is able to regulate matter (including, centrally, the biochemical opiate reward-and-punishment system of the brain), is that which defines us as humans, any fundamental change in our affairs calls for a profound change in meaning and thereby in the order of consciousness which it structures; 171 cinematically speaking, a profound change in representations, iconographies. One that can move us towards the transformation of our present purely biologised understanding of what it means to be human, and towards the redefining of the human as the uniquely cultural and thereby bios/logos mode of being that it is. With such a redefining being made possible only by the proposed reconception of Africa's history as a history inseparable from the Event of the First Emergence, and thereby from the origin of being/behaving human, not in evolution, which gave rise only to the biological condition of our being able to experience ourselves as this or that mode of the human through the mediation of our self-instituting inscription; 172 this latter as witnessed to both by the initiation iconography of the San rock paintings, as well as by the 'creative explosion* of some 30,000 years ago that took place convergently throughout the world. 173 While it is this

60

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

challenge to our present culture's biocentric Origin narrative of Evolution and the reimagining of human origin in the terms of its autopoesis or of its self-instituting as this is effected in the inscripted modes of being human to which each culture gives rise, that, I suggest, alone can provide a 'loftier' because transculturally applicable 'world outlook', able to serve as the basis for a fully realised black African cinema in the new millennium; and, thereby, as the new conceptual ground called for by the organisers of this conference. 174 If the novelistic text and its medium, print, was the quintessential genre/medium by which Western Man and its then epochally new, because secularising, Renaissance 'understanding of man's humanity' was to be inscribed and enacted, 175 the cinematic text, conceptualised in terms outside those of our present biocentric understanding, will be the quintessential genre of our now de-biologised conception of the human; the medium, I propose, of a new form of 'writing' which reconnects with the 'writing' of the rock paintings of Apollo Namibia, some 30,000 years ago, and beyond that, with the origin of the human in that first governing code of symbolic 'life' and 'death', about which, in the wake of the species' rupture with purely organic life, all other human forms of life were to enact their/our poeses of being, together with the self-organising social systems to which each such poesis gives rise. In the place of print, therefore, the cinematic text, and its audiovisual spin-off, the texts of TV/video, as the medium of the new iconography of homo culturans as a self-instituting mode of being, in the reoccupied ground of homo oeconomicusy and therefore, of the human represented and culturally instituted, in ethno-class or Western-bourgeois terms, on the model of a natural organism. Black African cinema, by the unique nature of the imperative which it confronts of having to interface and grapple both with the fundamentally Neolithic nature of its traditional indigenous cultures and their founding mythical narratives as well as with that of the global techno-industrial culture of the contemporary West together with its founding Grand Narrative, 176 has already prefigured this mutation of the Second Emergence in many of the elements of its iconography, of its thematics. To take one example. In Amadou Saluum Seck's Saaraba (1988) 177 , the narrational units show the hero of the film, newly returned to Senegal from his university education in the metropolitan centre, France, having to come to grips with a central dilemma. This dilemma is that none of the three cultural systems and their respective belief systems or creeds (two religious, one secular) that have come to coexist in a now postcolonial reality are capable of resolving the pressing problems of contemporary Senegal. These three are that of the indigenous, once autocentric, polytheistic religious system of neolithic agrarian Africa, that of the still theocentric monotheism of Islam, and that of the West as the biocentric secular creed in whose order of knowledge the hero has been formally educated. The inability of all three to resolve the ongoing crisis situation are shown in a series of episodes. In one episode, one of the characters, a herdsman, finding his livelihood threatened by the drought which kills off his cows one by one, turns to the local witchdoctor for help. The drought continues, in spite of the witchdoctor's efforts; the cows still die. The ultimate remedy then proposed by the witchdoctor, that he ritually sacrifice his daughter, is only averted by the character Demba, who stops the herdsman just in time by enabling him to recognise the futility and unthinkability of such a remedy. 178 In the central sequence of episodes, the hero who, as a Muslim has returned from his studies in Europe in order to find his 'roots' and to turn his back on the machine civilisation of the West, is shown as everywhere encountering the chaos that the secular Western 'remedy', i.e. its policies of economic development, has brought to Senegal. Beset on all sides by the crowd of beggars, and traumatised by the spectacle of the large numbers

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

61

of the jobless poor on the margins of the wealth and luxury of a now increasingly materialistic urban elite, the hero is shown as having to recognise that his 'roots' are not the answer, that the 'remedy' cannot be found there either. For the traditional answers of Islamic theology cannot tell him how to deal with an increasingly degodded world, nor how to escape the pervasive technological tentacles of the West, together with its remorseless displacement of all other 'forms of life', its ongoing homogenisation of belief, desire, consciousness. Nor, however, can the secular creed of the West, with its reasons-of-the-economy ethic, any more solve the problems of Senegal's swarm of beggars as well as of its endemically jobless, educated young people who turn to drugs to alleviate their despair, than can the religious belief cum ethical systems of traditional Africa or of Islam. Instead the plotline of the film suggests that it is the very programme of industrial development (as spearheaded by the bribe-taking politician and by the hero's wealthy businessman uncle), intended as the 'cure' for Senegal's ills, that, by its very dynamic, leads to the rapid expansion of the archipelagos of the jobless, filled with peasants violently uprooted from the land, the village and from their millennial agrarian way of life. The very dynamics therefore of the secular Western creed's understanding of man's humanity and, therefore, of a remedy based on a specific notion of freedom, one imagined as Material Redemption from Natural Scarcity in the reoccupied place of the matrix Judaeo-Christian behaviour-motivating notion of human freedom as that of Spiritual Redemption from Original Sin. The only way out of a no-win situation therefore seems to the hero to lie in the Utopian challenge to the creeds of all three, a challenge which is carried in the film by the semi-mad mechanic Demba. In the same way as the disillusioned jobless young people of the hero's generation listen to the messianic utopianism of Bob Marley's reggae - its musical form returned, via technology and reversing the Middle Passage to Africa from the also jobless shanty-towns of the diaspora179 - the hero goes off with Demba, riding on the back of his motorbike, in quest of the Utopian place of traditional Wolof culture called Saaraba; as a place sung about in traditional songs and imagined as a place, free from misery, full of plenty, where people celebrate every day. Demba is shown, at first, imagining Saaraba in technological terms as a land where machines do all the work as he has heard happens in Europe: the bright glittering lights of the city at night seen from the top of a hill seem to him to be its very epitome. However, a car crash wrecks the bike and injures him severely. Unable to accept that this is the end of his quest, Demba at first angrily turns on the hero, knocking him over a cliff, where he barely hangs from the edge. In saving his friend's life at risk to his own, the now dying Demba reimagines Saaraba, in terms of a new ethic that moves beyond the limits of all three creeds (two religious, one secular), their particularistic inscriptions of being human, and respective 'truths'; beyond Man, and the dystopic world, made, (because represented) in its image. 180 'The human', he tells his friend, 'needs his fellow human. If you fight for that, you'll find Saaraba'/Utopia.1*1

Notes 1 See Clifford Geertz's book of essays Local Knowledge for the definition of contemporary Western culture as a 'local culture', 'one of the forms that life has locally taken' (p. 16). Luc de Heusch had earlier defined this culture as one which, whatever the changes in its mode of production and social systems, continues to be governed by the 'reference point' of the

62

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Judaeo-Christian religion and symbology. See for this Luc de Heusch, Sacrifice in Africa, p. 206. For the definition of contemporary Western culture as the purely secularised form of the matrix Judaeo-Christian religious culture of feudal-Christian Europe, see Sylvia Wynter, '1492: A New World View'. See also her essay, 'Columbus'. 2 See for this term Philip Johnson, Darwin on Trial 3 In his book Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History, pp. 126-7. M. G. Gillespie cites Heidegger's point that our contemporary behaviours are driven by our present understanding of man's humanity and our attempt to realise ourselves in the terms of this understanding. 4 Michel Foucault, in his The Order of Things. 5 While J. G. A. Pocock shows the way in which the Renaissance discourse of civic humanism redefined the originally religious subject of medieval Europe as optimally homo politicus or political citizen (see his essay 'Civic Humanism and Its Role in AngloAmerican Thought' in this collection of essays, Politics, Language, and Time. pp. 80-103, as well as his later book The Machiavellian Moment), he nevertheless oversees the way in which the new nineteenth-century discourse of liberal or economic humanism was to redefine the political citizen as homo oeconomicus and optimally Breadwinner (with woman's complementary role being that of homemaker). 6 See Clyde Taylor's essays, 'We Don't Need Another Hero' and 'Black Cinema'. 7 See, for a general analysis of the rock paintings of Namibia, Harold Pager, Rock Paintings. See specifically pp. 25-31 for a discussion on the relation of the rock paintings to 'intensive ritual activities'. 8 The term is used to emphasise the 'made' or constructed nature of the criterion of being that is enacting of the code of symbolic life in a binary opposition with the negatively marked anti-criterion of symbolic death. 9 The Latin title was De orbis Revolutionibus. 10 See, for this, Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, n. 22, p. 29. Contemporary interpretations of the significance of the Copernican thesis with respect to the position of the earth unfailingly interpret it in modern terms, laying the emphasis on the decentring of earth and therefore of the human. Taken in its own Renaissance humanist terms, however, Copernicus' feat lay in the fact that he broke down the binary opposition between the heavens as the realm of Redeemed Perfection, and the earth as the sinful abode offallen man, thereby revalorising the latter, and asserting the homogeneity of substance between the two realms on whose basis the hypothesis of laws of nature was made possible. See, for this, Kurt Hubner, The Critique of Scientific Reason. 11 Ferdinand Hallyn, The Poetic Structure of the World and Sylvia Wynter, 'Columbus'. 12 Funkenstein, Theology, p. 29, n. 22 and p. 91. 13 See, for this, K. C. Anyanyu, The Studies of African Religions. 14 In Black Skins, White Masks, Fanon made the proposal that the reflex behavioural aversive responses of his black patients could not be an individual problem, that besides the ontogenetic unfolding of the human individual there are also the processes of socialisation (or sociogeny) by which he or she is enculturated as a subject. The response was therefore due to the terms in which the black is socialised as a subject of the cultural order of the West. 15 See Theophile Obenga's essay, 'Sous-Theme', in which he defines the history of Africa as coterminous with the emergence of the human out of the animal kingdom. 16 Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmeli.

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

63

17 The central thesis is that we realise ourselves as specific modes of the subject, and therefore of the human, only through the always culturally instituted field of meanings/representations, by means of which we are enabled to experience what it is like to be a specific subject; that is, through the mode of subjectivity into which we are socialised to be human. Hence the paradox that while our being human is implemented by the physiological processes of the body, the experience of being human is both a property of, and relative to, the criteria of being that are instituted and enacted by each cultural system or 'form of life'. 18 See David Bohm's interview with Omni magazine, January 1987 p. 74. 19 See, for this, Avram Goldstein, Addiction: From Biology to Drug Policy. 20 In his book Neural Darwinism, Gerald Edelman proposes that organic species classify and know their environment in the terms of the behaviours that are of adaptive advantage to each species. 21 See Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Black African Cinema, p. 32. This indistinguishability of Africans and primates in Africa in the representational apparatus of the Western cinematic text was, and is, generalised from the premise that the human exists in a pure continuity with organic species, and that Africans mark the dividing line, as the least evolved humans, between primates and the 'normal' because highly evolved human, as this normalcy is embodied in Indo-europeans. 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

See, for this Sylvia Wynter, '1492'. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System and Wynter, '1492'. See Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa, p. xiv. See also his The Invention of Africa. The Idea of Africa, p. xv. Ibid., pp. xi-xii. See, for this, Nietzsche's 'On Truth and Falsity', p. 83. See, for a discussion of Marx's concept of ideology in this context, Paul Ricceur's essay 'Ideology and Utopia'. Ricoeur's extension of the concept of ideology beyond that of false consciousness to that of a 'shared horizon of understanding' which functions as, so to speak, the template of social organisation, when linked to Nietzsche's concept of world perception as the rule-governed way by means of which humans know their reality, according to a specific standard of perception (as a bird, for example, knows its reality according to a species-specific standard), is crucial to the hypothesis that I put forward here. That is, that the phenomenon of consciousness, of Mudimbe's 'memory', which still remains undiscovered by neuroscientists, should be seen in the terms of Marx's concept of ideology redefined in Ricceur's terms.

29 Since I shall be arguing that all human orders are born from a founding Origin narrative, memories, whether mythic, theological or historical, all take their point of departure from the conception of a shared origin. This origin then serves to structure the consciousness or mode of mind integrating of the specific order. 30 See his Order of Things, p. 386. See also Wynter, '1492'. 31 See The Invention of Africa, p. x. 32 Ibid., p. ix. 33 See, for this, Jacob Pandian, Anthropology and the Western Tradition, pp. 2-11. 34 See Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. 35 The film Saaraba was made in Senegal by one of the younger generation of directors. 36 Cited by Gillespie, Hegel, p. 127. 37 Ibid., pp. 126-7.

64

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

38 See the statement of purpose that was sent out to participants by conference organisers. Tn that sense' they wrote 'it will be an explanation of new ground rather than the proposal of hard and fast conclusions, and an opening up of debate rather than an exercise in making African cinema.' Letter of 6 July, p. 2. 39 See his essay 'Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance', in Diawara, Black American Cinema, pp. 211-20. 40 See Herbert Marshall's Introduction to Sergei Eisenstein's Immoral Memories, p. ix. 41 See Michelle Wallace in her essay 'Race, Gender and Psychoanalysis', p. 257. 42 Ibid., p. 260. 43 For Marxism, the issue of consciousness is a superstructural effect of the mode of production; for feminism it is an effect of patriarchy. 44 See his open letter to Maurice Thorez - Lettre a Maurice Thorez. 45 Diawara, Black American Cinema, pp. 212-14. 46 Ibid., p. 213. Where as Diawara makes clear the black-faced villain Gus is racially defined as Other to the white hero and heroine. 47 See, for this, Pandian, Anthropology and the Western Tradition, pp. 1-3. 48 Ukadike, Black African Cinema, p. 32. 49 The term 'neocolonialism' was the attempt to come to terms with this fact - if in neoMarxist, and thereby still culturally Western, terms - by radical politicians/thinkers such as Nkrumah. 50 This issue of consciousness and of its 'prison walls' has also been raised in the film Sankofa (1993) by Haile Gerima, but in cultural nationalist terms. Cultural nationalist because Gerima sees the issue as that of a false consciousness, which needs to be corrected, rather than of a culture systemic consciousness, which because it is the condition of all our present 'form of life' needs to be transformed, together with the overall system and mode of subjectivity (one in which we are all enculturated and socialised) that gives rise to this consciousness. 51 See, for this, David Mayer, Eisenstein's Potemkin. 52 As Eisenstein wrote in his autobiography, Immoral Memories. 'The boy from Riga became famous at twentyseven. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford came to Moscow to shake by the hand the boy from Riga who had made Battleship Potemkin (p. 8). Eisenstein tells in his autobiography also of how powerfully the film Battleship Potemkin resonated with members of the working classes (i.e. of the proletariat) all over the world (p. 65): And then to reap the fruits of your fame: To be invited to Buenos Aires for a series of lectures. To be suddenly recognised in the remote silver mines of the Sierra Madre, where the film was shown to the Mexican workers. To be embraced by unknown, wonderful people in the workers' district of Liege, where they screened the film in secret. To hear Alvarez del Vayo's account of how, back in the time of the monarchy, he himself had sneaked a print of Potemkin into Spain for a showing in Madrid. Suddenly to learn in some Parisian cafe, where you happen to share a little marble table with two dark-skinned Sorbonne students from the East, that 'your name is very well known to us in . .. Java'! Or, on leaving some little garish roadhouse, to receive a warm handshake from a Negro waiter in recognition of what you have done in films. 53 In a recent essay by David Chalmers, 'The Puzzle of Conscious Experience'. 54 The proposal here is that it is only through our symbolically coded, and thereby culturally instituted, orders of consciousness that we can experience ourselves as human, i.e. as

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

65

hybridly bios and logos, gene and word, organic and meta organic. See, for the thematisation of this premise, Sylvia Wynter, 'The Pope Must Have Been Drunk'. 55 See his Notes of a Film Director, p. 7. 56 Ibid., p. 7. 57 The collapse of Communism, at the end of the 1980s, was inseparably linked to the formulaic degeneration of the aesthetics of social realism under the weight of the ideological imperatives of the New Class or Nomenklatura. In a longer version of 'The Pope Must Have Been Drunk' essay I draw the parallels between the belief system of witchcraft in traditional agrarian societies and that of Natural Scarcity in our contemporary techno-industrial own. The central parallel or law is that both witchcraft and Natural Scarcity (or for that matter the earlier Judaeo-Christian construct of Original Sin) function as 'socially significant causes' (see Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic) which calls for a specific kind of intervention to be made (i.e. witchcraft to be cured by ritual practices, Natural Scarcity to be cured by economic policies or remedies): interventions that thereby prescribe the behavioural pathways that are to be followed by the order as the condition of its own stable replication as a 'form of life'). As Ukadike points out, a central problem with African films of the 1980s which deal with traditional African ritual practices and beliefs such as witchcraft (i.e. films such as Idrissa Ouedraogo's Yaaba (1989)) is that while it can be said that these films are now penetrating the world market, 'there seems to be a movement away from the political use of the film medium, which addresses and relates to authentic cultures and histories, toward a concern with film as an object of anthropological interest'; in effect, a tendency to 'employ the same Western ethnographic conventions that have historically worked to emit the understanding of Africa's sociocultural formations' (Ukadike, Black African Cinema p. 248). The proposal of a new conceptual ground which sees practices like ethnomedicine, witchcraft and clitoridectomy (a ritual practice centrally portrayed by Sissoko in Finzan (1990)) as behaviour-regulating practices that function according to the same laws as does, for example, the ethno-discipline of economics and its 'socially significant cause' of Natural Scarcity (in the reoccupied places of Original Sin), to motivate our contemporary ensemble of behaviours, would enable African filmmakers to deal with those issues without any risk of their being received by mass spectators as 'exotic' ethnographic material relevant only to the West's Others; would therefore avoid the dangerous trap of magical realism into which Latin American fiction fell. 58 In his autobiography, Eisenstein makes it clear that for him the 'world outlook' of Communism was the world outlook alone able to achieve what he called the 'single idea, single theme, and single subject' of his work - that of the 'achievement of (human) unity', Immoral Memories, p. 259. The collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union was, however, to disprove this hope. 59 Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Random House/Times Books, 1995). 60 My central proposal in the address is that although our biological makeup is the 'condition' of our being human (and therefore the nature or bios aspect of our being) we experience ourselves as human only in the verbally inscribed part of our cultures, whether religious or secular. We are theoretic hybrids, both gene and word, nature and culture. 61 See Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 552. 62 See Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints. 63 See, for this, Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pp. 127-36, 220-5.

66

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

See also Gary Gutting's Michel Foucaulfs Archaeology and his analysis of Foucault's deconstruction of Ricardo's and Marx's belief-construct of Natural Scarcity. 64 The use of the concept 'dysgenic pressure' by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in their recent book The Bell Curve is a contemporary expression of the neo-Augustinian premise of mankind's enslavement, not now to Original Sin, but rather to hereditary dysselection for low IQ. 65 For Zygmunt Bauman's concept of Conceptual Otherness, see his Modernity and the Holocaust 66 See, for a further development of this concept, my essay Ts Development a Purely Empirical Concept?' 67 See Herrnstein and Murray, The Bell Curve, pp. 348-68 68 Within the ideological terms of feminist theory, which sees gender as an acultural concept, it cannot be recognised that clitoridectomy is one form of the construction of gender, just as the keeping of middle-class white women to the role of homemaker (until the revolt of feminism) is the contemporary bourgeois form of this construction of gender, of being. Hence the paradox of Sissoko's otherwise excellent film Finzan which remains, in this respect, entrapped in feminist ideology which defines clitoridectomy in terms of feminist culture as 'genital mutilation'. This is not a plea for the continuation of this practice now that we live in quite another world; rather both clitoridectomy and the contemporary feminist description of it as 'genital mutilation' should be seen as belonging to culturespecific fields and only 'true' and 'meaningful' within their respective fields. See also Ukadike, Black African Cinema, pp. 271-5 for a discussion of this issue. 69 See Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination. 70 See the title and theme of his The Wretched of the Earth. 71 Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 221, points out that while before the West's institution of the modern age, human beings had always known material want, this want had never before this been 'generalised to reality as a whole'. This generalisation was to be fully realised, of course, with Ricardo's construct of Natural Scarcity on whose rhetorical a priori the discipline of economics was to be based. 72 In his essay 'The Toad in the Garden', p. 274. 73 In The Wretched of the Earth, p. 274. 74 Marxism of course saw poverty only as an effect of the exploitation of the labour-power of the working classes, and therefore consistently defined the Poor as the liminal or Other category to the working classes, thereby accepting the bourgeois criterion of optimal being/behaving as that of breadwinner/breadwinning. Other recent -isms, feminisms, multiculturalisms, gay liberationism, ignore the issue both of the poor and of the social subordination of the working class. Only liberation theology theory with its preferential option for the poor thesis and Fanon's polemic on behalf of the lumpen i.e. the rural/shanty-town afro proletariat of the Third World, have attempted to deal with poverty as an issue in itself. 75 See Bauman's Legislators and Interpreters. 76 In his prescient and prophetic series of lectures published as Notes on the Dialectics, pp. 129-36,211-23. 77 Ibid., pp. 129-36. 78 The point here is that the conception of the 'freedom package' of Material Redemption then functions, in the terms of artificial intelligence theorists, as the supraordinate goal

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

67

about which our contemporary behaviours are motivated. See Jaime Carbonell, Subjective Understanding. See also Sylvia Wynter, '1492'. 79 The ongoing explosion of black 'crime' in South Africa (see the New York Times, 12 Dec. 1995) testifies to the new form of economic apartheid which has incorporated the black South African middle classes into the horizon of expectation of white middle-class privilege, with the large majority of the expendable jobless having to resort to crime as their avenue of 'advancement'. The prison system has therefore reoccupied the outsider place of the earlier segregated black world. 80 A global pattern has begun to emerge, whether in the case of the death squads in Brazil in the case of street children (see Gilberto Dimenstein's War on Children), or in the USA with the high rate of intra-black male violence and murder, as well as the high rate of police brutality resulting in the death of suspects taken into custody. 81 See his J Write What I Like. 82 That is the consciousness of alterity to Man as a conception of being, and 'form of life', as that of the working class is, in the Marxian paradigm, that of alterity to the employer and investor class within the terms of an economic mode of production as the determinant factor. Here the conception of being, in a sense the politics of being, replaces the mode of production as the determinant factor. Since ruling groups are legitimated as ruling groups to the extent that they embody their respective social order's criterion of being - and therefore of behaving. This then legitimates their control of the means of material production. 83 See Jonathan Miller's summary of this position in his brief essay 'Trouble in Mind'. 84 Cited by Mudimbe in his The Invention of Africa, p. 168. As Sow states, We are not persuaded that when looked at carefully the specific object of social sciences is the study of one universal h u m a n nature given a priori, because we do not know if such a human

nature exists concretely somewhere. It may be that human nature (of human being in general, natural human being, etc.) is a theoretical fiction of general philosophy, or then, the activist generalisation of a limited concrete experience.

85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

Mudimbe gives the citation as Psychiatrie dynamique Africaine (Paris: Payol, 1977), pp. 250-5. Miller, 'Trouble in Mind' and Chalmers, 'The Puzzle'. In The Astonishing Hypothesis. In his The Invention of Africa, p. x. See Antonio T. de Nicholas, 'Notes on the Biology of Religion'. See his book Exchange: Concepts in Social Thought (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). The concept that the only life that humans live is our represented symbolic life is Peter Winch's. See his essay 'Understanding a Primitive Society'. Foucault, The Order of Things. Hans Blumenberg analyses the implication of these theocentric strategies, i.e. strategies based on the premise of an Aristotelianised Unmoved Mover God, who had created the world and mankind purely for the sake of His own Glory, rather than with any special consideration for man. This God could therefore arbitrarily intervene to alter his creation, ensuring that humans could not depend upon the regularities of functioning of nature in order to know the rules according to which nature functions. The intellectual revolution of humanism was to challenge and change this conception of God and of his non-caring relation to an ostensibly contingent/mankind. See his The Legitimacy. See also Wynter, 'Columbus'.

68

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

93 Ceddo was made in 1976. 94 The premise here is that 'consciousness' is generated from each order's governing selfconception or governing code. See, for a conception of the specificity of the reflexive thought of the agrarian era of mankind as distinct from our techno-industrial order, Harold Morowitz, 'Balancing Species Preservation'. 95 Cited by Francoise Pfaff in The Cinema ofOusmane Sembene, p. 166. See also Ukadike's discussion of Ceddo in Black African Cinema, pp. 182-5. 96 See PfafY, The Cinema ofOusmane Sembene, p. 147. 97 An identity, that of the West's 'Man', that unlike the earlier matrix identity, 'Christian', and indeed like all earlier cultural identities, hitherto, had not been guaranteed by being mapped onto the realm of the gods, or the supernatural, i.e. a secular identity. 98 The strategic manoeuvre by each group of their isolated -ism in their group-interest has confined the intellectual revolution of the 1960s to a reformist, and still hegemonically middle-class, role. I have adapted the pun, sub/version, from Lemuel Johnson's essay, 'Abeng: (Re) Calling the Body in (to) Question'. 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

115 116 117 118

119 120 121 122 123

Pfaff, The Cinema, p. 43. Ukadike, Black African Cinema, p. 3. Ibid. See Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa. Here again the indistinguishability of apes and African natives is subtly yet systemicaUy insisted upon. Made in 1982. See, for a discussion of this, Ukadike, Black African Cinema, pp. 54-7. Published by Monthly Review Press, New York, 1972, trans. Joan Pinkham. Published by Pantheon Books, 1978. See Anyanyu, The Studies of African Religions. Ibid. See Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa. See his The Order of Things. See also, for this, Gary Gutting's Michel Foucault's Archaeology. In Obenga, unpublished paper. See his The Creative Explosion. In Obenga, unpublished paper. That is, of the optimal subject as political citizen whose first loyalty is to the state in its post-medieval conception. See, for this, Pocock, 'Civic Humanism in Anglo-American Thought' in his Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 85-95. In Obenga, unpublished paper. In his book Rhetoric as Philosophy, pp. 104-10. Ibid., p. 110. See Donald T. Campbell, 'On the Genetics of Altruism' and 'The Two Distinct Routes beyond Kin Selection to Ultra-sociality: Implications for the Humanities and Social Sciences', in The Nature of Pro-Social Development: Interdisciplinary Theories and Strategies, ed. Diane L. Bridgman (New York: Academic Press, 1982). See for this Campbell. See also Philip Wright, Three Scientists. Campbell, pp. 133-7. Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy, p. 110. See Nietzsche, The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 495. See Anne Solomon, 'Rock Art'. See also Sylvia Wynter, 'Genital Mutilation'.

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

69

124 Grassi, op. cit., p. 108. 125 See Funkenstein, Theology, n. 22, p. 29 and p. 91. 126 See his 'Contribution'. 127 The term is used by biologists and applied to species like the bees who are able to coexist and collaborate on the basis of their genetically programmed degrees of kinship. 128 See, for a definition of the term, Pierre Maranda, 'The Dialectic of Metaphor'. 129 Gregory Bateson uses this construct in his Of Mind and Nature. 130 De Nicholas, 'Notes'. 131 With culture rather than biology therefore being the 'ground' of human being/being human. See, for a further discussion of this, Sylvia Wynter, 'The Pope Must Have Been Drunk'. 132 Scubla, Contribution', p. 120. 133 The etiology of the reflex self-aversion displayed by Fanon's patients which led him to the hypothesis that human subjects are always socialised (sociogenetic) rather than purely ontogenetic or biological subjects, is to be found here. See his Black Skins, White Masks. 134 A recent book by Judy Grahn, Bloody Bread, and Roses, bears out this hypothesis with respect to the central role of the macro-representation of menstrual blood in human cultures. 135 136 137 138

139 140 141 142 143

144

Harold Morowitz, in his essay, 'Balancing Species Preservation'. The term is from Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial Lieberman, Uniquely Human. See, for a discussion of both the traditional and the contemporary identity systems of Rwanda and Burundi, by means of which the Tutsis have asserted their dominance over the Hutus, Rene Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi. See ibid., p. 155, for his discussion of the role of the Karinga drum in the assertion of the traditional dominance of the Tutsis over the Hutus. Goldstein, Addiction. Ibid. In his essay, 'Altruism'. See in this context the book by Wade Davis, Passage of Darkness. Davis's analysis of the functioning of zombification as a sanction system by the Bizerta secret society of Vodun, and his discovery of the chemical substances used by the houngans to effect zombification, provides a scientific rather than ideo-ethnographic insight into the traditional cultures and religions of Africa from which Vodun is derived. Not only does it bear out Basil Davidson's thesis that African religions should be seen as the embodiment of the behavioural norms which had facilitated the expansion of black peoples across the African continent but he makes a critical point that enables us to identify the parallel function of the systemically negatively marked representations in the cinematic and scholarly texts of the West - this point is that it is not the chemical event which gives rise to the phenomenon of zombification but the cultural belief system (in effect the representation Event) which activates the functioning of the biochemical event (pp. 244-62). Note that the Other here is not simply black men or women, but the line of hereditary descent of which they are the expression. Since it is the latter's negative marking as a dysselected line of hereditary descent that enables the self-representations of the bourgeoisie as a ruling class, with their right to rule being based on their eugenic (rather

70

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

than as in the case of the aristocracy of its noble) line of descent. See in this context Daniel Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics. 145 See, for illustrations bearing out this point, George Mosse, The Final Solution. 146 See, for this concept, Foucault's 'The Order of Discourse'. 147 As the laity had been made to signify the Fallen Flesh to the Redeemed Spirit of the clergy. This belief system has been given contemporary expression in Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve. 148 149 150 151

Scubla, 'Contribution', pp. 105, 134. Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy, pp. 108. Pandian, Anthropology, pp. 2-3. See the edition translated by Charles Glenn Wallis and published by Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, New York, 1965. 152 James F. Danielli, 'Altruism'. 153 Ibid., pp. 91-2. 154 These representations can therefore be recognised as symbolically coded ones as had been those of the pre-Copernican representations of the earth as fixed and motionless at the centre of the universe as its dregs, because it was the abode of fallen mankind. 155 See Marcel Griaule, Conversations. 156 The terms of course were first widely used in scholarship by Levi-Strauss and refer to the distinction between the being of culture (the cooked) and the being of nature (the raw); the socialised vs. the unsocialised. The concept of the ritual cooking or socialisation of the child is common to many African cultures. See, in this respect, Eugenia W. Herbert, Iron, Gender and Power. 157 See also Paul Ricceur's further development of the Marxian concept of ideology in his essay 'Ideology'. 158 In Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic. 159 See, for this, A.J. Michael, Planetary Overload. 160 See, for a discussion of this, Fernandez Amesto, The Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years (New York: Scribner, 1995). 161 See, for this hypothesis, Sylvia Wynter, 'The Pope'. 162 See his essay 'Trouble in Mind'. 163 See Foucault, The Order of Things. 164 See his book Gada. 165 In his essay Poetry and Knowledge. 166 See Nicholas Humphrey, A History of the Mind. 167 Published by Simon & Schuster, 1988. 168 Ibid., p. 319. 169 The central point here is that because the role of alterity must be expressed at the level of empirical reality, the distribution of the bads and goods of the order must function so as to replicate its signifying role at the level of the social system - i.e. it must be expressed in the dominance structure and status hierarchy of the order. 170 In his interview with Omni, January 1987, p. 74. 171 Ibid., p. 74. 172 See John Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion, pp. 11-15. The point here is that human being is defined by a specific ensemble of behaviours that are unique to the properly human species. As Brenda Fowler points out in a recent New York Times review of James Shreeve,

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

71

The Neanderthal Enigma, some 40,000 years ago the archaeological record shows a sudden marked change: A wealth of new tools appear, as do, for the first time, examples of symbolic expression, in the form of the Venus figurines and cave-paintings. It is here, most paleoanthropologists now agree, that we first recognise human beings as they are today. Fowler also cites a major point made by Shreeve in which he argues that it was the ability of the Cro-Magnon peoples to 'mate outside the immediate social group resulting in alliances that laid the ground for cultural innovations' and that defined the latter as properly human. My argument stands his on its head. It was the 'cultural innovations' that enabled the human transcendence of the limits of genetic kinship, defining of being human. See Fowler's review, p. 21. 173 See Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion, pp. 11-13, 119-33. 174 In this new 'world outlook' what we humans 'produce' would be recognised as being not primarily our economic systems, but rather our 'forms of life', our respective modes of subjectivity and of sociality. What Marx defined as 'social relations of production' and saw as a function of economic production would therefore be turned on its head. Instead economic production would be seen as a function of the production of the social structure of relations by means of which we are instituted and integrated as culturespecific and always symbolically coded subjects. 175 See Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, Print Culture. 176 If, as Mudimbe cites Claude Levi-Strauss, 'the most important scientific discoveries on which we are still living - the invention of agriculture, the domestication of animals and the mastering of edible plants and their integration in human cultures - took place during periods dominated by mythical narratives' (see Mudimbe, Parables of Fables: Exegesis Textuality, and Politics in Central Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 97), my proposal here is that the techno-industrial civilisation of the West and its discoveries were brought about within the context of the secular Origin Narrative of Evolution. 177 Saaraba was produced in Senegal in 1987-8. A video version of the film has been put out by the Library of African Cinema. The languages used are Wolof and French, with English subtitles. 178 Given that the cultural reality in which these agrarian behaviour-motivating beliefs had been viable had now deserted both the herdsman and the witchdoctor. One that, in another epoch, as Basil Davidson notes, had served to motivate the behaviours needed for the expansion across and settlement of African peoples. See his Black Man's Burden. Here again a new conceptual ground that would have enabled the herdsman's proposed sacrifice of his child (within the terms of the traditional African belief system in which nature is still divinzed and the 'drought' can be cured by the sacrifice of what the herdsman most loves, his child), to be seen as paralleling the 'sacrifice' of the uprooted jobless masses in the West's secular belief system, one in which being is biologised, would have further de-exoticised traditional African ritual practices by identifying them as one form of the culture-systemic belief systems by means of whose 'programming languages' our human behaviours are lawlikely induced/motivated. See, for this, Wynter, 'The Pope'. 179 The popular messianic religion of Rastafarianism had its origins from the 1930s onwards in the endemically jobless shanty-towns of Kingston, Jamaica. See Malika Lee Whitney and Dermot Hussey, Bob Marley.

72

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

180 The proposal here is (i) that the earlier political ethic which had had its origin in Machiavelli's reasons of state was replaced during the nineteenth century with a new economic ethic, i.e. reasons of the economy, which functioned in the same absolute terms as the earlier reasons of state ethic had done; (ii) that all human cultures are instituted about the reasons of a specific ethical imperative encoded by their founding narratives or belief systems. 181 In this context, Heidegger's concept of our present understanding of the human, as one in which each man must be brought into conflict with his fellows, causes the closing narrational unit of the film - in which Demba, after first attacking the hero in his disillusionment, in the wake of an accident, and pushing him over a cliff, holds on to him, and desperately grapples to save him, dying as he does so - to be in a direct challenge to this understanding and therefore to its bourgeois notion offreedom or 'freedom package', as being Material Redemption from Natural Scarcity. This is the notion of freedom from which we shall have to emancipate ourselves.

References Films Griffith, D. W. The Birth of a Nation (1915; Film Preservation Associates, 1992). Seek, Amadou Saalum. Saaraba (Senegal, 1987-8).

Anyanyu, K. Chukwulozie. The Studies of African Religions, (Dakar: OMNA, 1976). Bateson, Gregory. Of Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E. B. Dutton, 1974). Bauman, Zygmunt. Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity, and Intellectuals (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). Biko, Stephen. J Write What I Like, selection edited by Alfred Stubbs (Oxford: Heinemann International, 1978). Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. B.W. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). Bohm, David. Interview with Omni, January 1987. Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Campbell, D. T. 'On the Genetics of Altruism and the Counter-Hedonic Components in Human Culture', Journal of Social Issues, vol. 28, no. 3, 1972: 21-37. Carbonell, Jaime. Subjective Understanding: Computer Models of Belief (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1981). Cesaire, Aime. Lettre a Maurice Thorez, 3rd edn. (Paris: Presence Africaine, n.d.). Poetry and Knowledge, trans. James Arnold, in Lyric and Dramatic Poetry 1946-82 by Aime Cesaire, ed. and trans. Clayton Eshelman and Annette Smith (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, Caraf Books, 1990). Chalmers, David. 'The Puzzle of Conscious Experience', Scientific American, Dec. 1995: 80-7. Crick, Francis. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Scribners, 1994).

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

73

Danielli, James F. 'Altruism and the Internal Reward System or The Opium of the People', Journal of Social and Biological Sciences, vol. 3, no. 2,1980: 87-94. Davidson, Basil. The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (New York: Times Books, 1992). Davis, Wade. Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). Diawara, Manthia. Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993). Dimenstein, Gilberto. War on Children (London: The Latin-American Bureau, 1995). Dixon, Thomas Jr. The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1970). Edelman, Gerald. Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (New York: Basic Books, 1987). Eisenstein, Elizabeth. Print Culture and Enlightenment Thought (Hanes Foundation, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1986). Eisenstein, Sergei M. Immoral Memories: An Autobiography, trans. H. Marshall (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1983). Notes of a Film Director (New York: Dover Publications, 1970). Potemkin (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1972). Evans-Pritchard, Edward. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic in among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937). Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). The Wretched of the Earth, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963). Foucault, Michel. 'The Order of Discourse' [1971], trans. Ian McLeod, in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1973). Fowler, Brenda. Review of James Shreeve The Neanderthal Enigma: Solving the Mystery of Modern Human Origins, Sunday New York Times Review of Books, 17 Dec. 1995, p. 21. Funkenstein, Amos. Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983). Gillespie, Michael. Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Godelier, Maurice. The Mental and the Material: Thought, Economy, and Society (London: Verso, 1986). Goldstein, Avram. Addiction: From Biology to Drug Policy (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1994). Grahn, Judy. Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World, with foreword by Charlene Spretnak (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993). Grassi, Ernesto. Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (University Park and London: Penn State University Press, 1982). Griaule, Marcel. Conversations with Ogotemmeli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). Gutting, Gary. Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Hall, Stewart. 'The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists', in Marxism and

74

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Nelson Cary and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988). Hallyn, Ferdinand. The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler (New York: Zone Books, 1990). Herbert, Eugenia W. Iron, Gender and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 1993). Herrnstein, Richard and Charles Murray. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: The Free Press, 1994). Heusch, Luc de. Sacrifice in Africa: A Structuralist Approach (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). Hubner, Kurt. The Critique of Scientific Reason (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Humphrey, Nicholas. A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). James, C. L. R. Notes on the Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1980). Johnson, Lemuel. 'Abeng: (Re)Calling the Body in(to) Question' in Out of the Kumhla: Caribbean Women and Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990). Johnson, Phillip. Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1993). Kelves, Daniel. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1984). Legesse, Asmarom. Gada: Three Approaches to the Study of African Society (New York: The Free Press, 1973). Le Goff, Jacques. The Medieval Imagination, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Lemarchand, Rene. Rwanda and Burundi (London: Pall Mall Press, 1970). Lieberman, Philip. Uniquely Human: The Evolution of Speech, Thought, and Selfless Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Lyotard, Jean Francois.. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, foreword by F. Jameson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Madsen, Roy Paul. The Impact of Film: How Ideas Are Communicated through Cinema and Television (New York: Macmillan, 1973). Maranda, Pierre. 'The Dialectic of Metaphor: An Anthropological Essay on Hermeneutics', in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. S. R. Suleiman and I. Crosman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). Mayer, David. Eisensteins Potemkin: A Shot by Shot Presentation (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1972). Michael, A. J. Planetary Overload: Global Environmental Change and the Health of the Human Species. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Miers, Suzanne and Igor Kapytoff, (eds) Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977). Miller, Jonathan. 'Trouble in Mind', Scientific American, Sept. 1992: 180. Mirandola, Pico della. On the Dignity of Man and Other Essays, trans. J. W. Miller (Indianapolis, New York, Kansas City: Bobbs-Merrill, 1940). Morowitz, Harold. 'Balancing Species Preservation and Economic Consideration,' Science, vol. 253, AAAS, 16 August 1991.

AFRICA, THE WEST AND THE ANALOGY OF CULTURE

75

Mosse, George. The Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1976). Mudimbe, V. Y. The Idea of Africa (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994). The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988). Nicholas, Antonio T. de. 'Notes on the Biology of Religion', Journal of Social and Biological Structures, vol. 3, April 1980: 219-26. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans, and ed. William Kaufman (New York: The Modern Library, 1968). 'On Truth and Falsity in the Ultra-Moral Sense', trans. A. Muge, in The Existential Tradition, ed. Nino Languilli (New York: Doubleday & Co., Anchor Books, 1971). Obenga, Theophile. 'Sous-Theme: La Pensee africaine et la philosophie dans une perspective de renouvellement', unpublished paper presented at a symposium organised by FESPAC, Dakar, 15-19 Dec. 1987. Pagden, Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origin of Comparative Ethnology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Pager, Harald. The Rock Paintings of the Upper Brandenberg, in Africa Praehistorica series: monographs of African Archaeology and Environment, compiled by Tilman Lenssen-Erz, ed. Rudolph Kuber, Part 1, Vol 1 (Koln: Heinrich-Barth Institut, 1993). Pandian, Jacob. Anthropology and the Western Tradition: Towards an Authentic Anthropology (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1985). Pfaff, Francoise. The Cinema ofOusmane Sembene: A Pioneer of African Film (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984). Pfeiffer, John E. The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry into the Origins of Art and Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). Pocock, J. G. A. Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (I960; Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989). The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Political Tradition. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). Ricoeur, Paul. 'Ideology and Utopia as Cultural Imagination', in Being Human in a Technological Age, ed. D. M. Borchert and D. Stewart (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1979), pp. 107-25. Scubla, Lucien. 'Contribution a la theorie du sacrifice', in Rene Girard et le probleme du mal, ed. M. Deguy and Jean-Pierre Dupuy (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1982). Solomon, Anne. 'Rock Art in Southern Africa', Scientific American, Nov. 1996: 106-12. Taussig, Michael. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). Taviani, Paolo Emilio. Columbus, the Great Adventure: His Life, His Times, and His Voyages (New York: Orion Books, 1991). Taylor, Clyde 'Black Cinema in a Post-Aesthetic Era', in Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen. (London: BFI, 1989), p. 90. 'We Don't Need Another Hero: AntiThesis on Aesthetics', in Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema, ed. Mbye B. Cham and Claire Andrade-Watkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 80-5. Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1984).

76

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank. Black African Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). Wallace, Michele. 'Race, Gender and Psychoanalysis in Forties Film: Lost Boundaries, Home of the Brave, The Quiet One\ in Black American Cinema, ed. M. Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993). Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (London: Academic Press, 1974). Whitney, M. L. and Dermott Hussey. Bob Marley: Reggae King of the World (Kingston, Jamaica: Kingston Publishers, 1989). Winch, Peter. 'Understanding a Primitive Society', American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. I: 307-24. No further details available. Wright, Philip. Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information (New York: Times Books, 1988). Wynter, Sylvia. 'Columbus and the Poetics of the Propter Nos\ in Discovering Columbus, ed. D. Kadir, Annals of Scholarship; An International Quarterly in the Humanities and Sciences, vol. 8, no. 2 (Detroit, IL: Wayne State University Press, 1992). '1492: A New World View', in Race, Discourse, and the Origins of the Americas, ed. V. L. Hyatt et al (Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1995). ' "Genital Mutilaton" or "Symbolic.Birth"? Female Circumcision, Lost Origins, and the Aculturalism of Feminist/Western Thought', in Colloquium; Bridging Society, Culture and Law in Case Western Law Review, vol. 47, no. 2, winter 1997: 501-52. 'Is Development a Purely Empirical Concept? Or Is It also Teleological? A Perspective from "we the underdeveloped" ', in Prospects for Recovery and Sustainable Development in Africa, ed. A. Y. Yansane (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996). 'The Pope Must Have Been Drunk, The King of Castile a Madman: Culture as Actuality and the Caribbean Rethinking Modernity', in The Reordering of Culture: Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada in the Hood, ed. Alvina Ruprecht and Cecilia Taiana (Ottawa, Ontario: Carleton University Press, 1995). 'Rethinking "Aesthetics": Notes towards a Deciphering Practice', in Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, ed. Mbye Cham (Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 1992).

Part Two . Arguments

Chapter 3 The Iconography of African Cinema: What Is It and How Is It Identified? INTRODUCTION Colin Prescod

According to Sylvia Wynter (see Chapter 2), transformation of the symbolic code is at the centre of a radical planetary move to what she calls a 'second (human) emergence', a changed platform for the twenty-first century with cinema at the centre of the shifts to the new iconography of this coming age. She also argues that this is a moment in which Africa can and will participate, vitally. From this conspectus, the critical and creative issues for black, African and African-related cinema are not merely around 'form' and 'aesthetic' but also and pre-eminently around 'consciousness', i.e. memory, ideology and cultural meaning. The questions of iconography are caught up in this imperative in a way, prior to, larger than and subsuming of the ethnic authenticity of iconographic innovation or intervention. Here the tasks of (a) de-colonising the mind, and indeed the word and act, and (b) bringing a distinctive (African) revisioning to the human project (s), local and global, are joined. Both tasks equally urgent, entwined and competing: one political, the other imaginative, and vice versa! In plain terms, the questions of debate are: what is art/cinema for?; what is the point/role of film criticism?; what is the relation between 'art' and 'worked objects'?; how does the artist/filmmaker's dream and language play off against the expectations and demands of audiences?; who canonises the film work - the African audience(s) or the nonAfrican Euro-American, art movie house intellectuals? In Africa, the received wisdom is that art has always functioned complexly, and 're-creationally\ for and in work, play and meditation. African cinematographers, who now join the ranks of what Mudimbe calls 'specialists of memory', take on therefore the duty to 'create, invent and transform, yet they also faithfully obey their vocation and responsibility to transmit a heritage, record its obsessions, and preserve its past'. 1 Manthia Diawara (see pp. 81-9) was concerned to locate the 'sites' or historic contexts (imperialist, neo-colonialist, postcolonial) of the production of African cinema - in order to know the contradictions out of which and within which African filmmakers do their work. Taking West African cinema specifically and tracing a line from the 'socialist realism' of Sembene Ousmane (Borom SarreU 1963), through the 'magic realism' of Djibril Diop Mambety (Touki BoukU 1973), to the new griot narratives of the mid-1990s (Cheick Oumar Sissoko (Guimba: un tyran, une epoque, 1995), Dani Kouyate {Keita, Vheritage du griot, 1995), Drissa Toure (Haramuya, 1995), Manthia (a) distanced himself from the notion of an authentic African film language, (b) rejected the invocation of aesthetic specificities based on the Euro-spawned constructs of the African nation-states, and (c) warned against

80

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

the re-emergence of a particular, changing European over-determination of the products of African filmmaking. Neither of the two respondents took up the dread and doubt themes as framed by Manthia Diawara. Asma El Bakri (see p. 92) made a call to celebrate and appreciate the 'transformational' responsibility of African filmmakers in spite of the historical, economic, political and ideological spectres that haunt the paradigms of theoretical analysts. She matter-of-factly pointed out that these undoubtedly real and difficult conditions of production, distribution and exhibition in the continent, simultaneously, restrict and impel the imaginative interventions of filmmakers from Carthage to Cape Town. Those whose work it is simply get on with it. John Akomfrah (see pp. 90-1) gently confronted any crude arguments against an interest in the aesthetic specificity of African cinema. Refusing to be cowed by the philosophical quagmire of authenticity, he insisted that the project of recovering the elements of African cinema from the gloss of rhetorical categories like 'Third World' or 'pan-Africanism' is urgent. Since, even as African filmmaking continues, there is a need to recognise the particular history of African cinema.

THE ICONOGRAPHY OF WEST AFRICAN CINEMA Manthia Diawara In this paper, I intend to discuss West African cinema with which I am most familiar, having followed its development for more than fifteen years. My theories on the cinema owe their genesis to a scrutiny of the modes of production of West African films, the specificity of the cultural and political relations between France, which has produced the largest number of West African films, and francophone countries, and the relation between West African cinema and other modes of popular culture such as music, theatre, oral literature and sport. I am interested in structures and the relations between them; the historical context that affects these structures, and the position the artist chooses to occupy inside these structures. I hope that some of what I say about West African cinema can be applied to southern African, North African, or Indian cinema. However, I do not believe that there 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. I believe that 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. For reasons that I will explain below, I also reject aesthetic specificities based on the parameters of the nation-state. The emergence of the EEC as a super European nation-state is as significant to the structure of African cinema as any consciousness of ideological or cultural identities. For example, the offices of the EEC have begun to erode France's power to sustain bilateral economic, political and cultural relations with francophone Africa, which guaranteed the steady production of a certain kind of African film. The role of the Ministere de la Cooperation has recently been shifted to the French Ministere des Affaires Etrangers which is in closer contact with the EEC. To save face, France has often attempted to integrate francophone Africa into the political culture of the EEC by shifting projects for African development from Paris to Brussels, the EEC capital. On the surface, this strategy does not immediately challenge the older brother image of France in Africa, or the structure of Franco-African relations. Furthermore, it reproduces francophonie at the European level by enabling France to play the role of ambassador between Europe and Africa. This is no small gain in view of the fact that Germany, the United Kingdom and France are all jockeying for linguistic dominance in the EEC. It is in this vein that several cultural institutions and filmmakers in francophone Africa, who used to rely only on the French Ministere de la Cooperation to produce their projects, now turn to the EEC as an important complementary or alternative source. African filmmakers and theatre producers now travel to Brussels as often as they travel to Paris, and as a result there are more and more festivals of African cinema produced with EEC money in different European and African cities. Francophone artists now make connections through the EEC with its member countries (like Germany, Switzerland, Italy and the United Kingdom) that are eager to feed their television programmes with multicultural products.

82

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Now what is the EEC doing to African cinema? Well, France and the EEC together, in a way, put African cinema in a slot which prevents it from becoming cinema. That is, African filmmakers, by entering the multicultural structures of Europe and the United States, take the slots of anthropological films on television and in the theatres. People go to see African films as realities about Africa, instead of seeing them as films. The structure of the nation-state in Africa also places obstacles in the way of African cinema. As the fin de siecle draws nearer, it becomes clear that the nation-state, for which many Africans still fight, kill and die, is no longer viable as a cultural and economic unit. With the nation-state as the paradigm of political, cultural, and economic development, Mali, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Gambia and Senegal are pushed into a competition against one another over the production and ownership of the 'authentic' West African film, music and culture. The national passion is built around soccer matches, musicians, athletes, filmmakers and writers that the nation appropriates. But the nation-state is built in such a way that Malians define their belonging to Mali through an opposition to other nation-states in the same region. You can see examples of this, like when Souleymane Cisse's Yeelen (1987) wins a Grand Prix at Cannes: the whole Mali Government goes to the airport to meet him, including the President. So they appropriate, in that sense, the film as a national banner, and this happens to other African countries as well, where the nation appropriates the filmmaker. Similarly, countries that are predominantly Islamic find national unity by identifying with Arab nations that are successful through the grace of Allah, and against Christian demons and imperialists. Christianised Africans, on the other hand, think that they have a monopoly on modernity, and find unity in labelling Islamic Africans as backward nations. Clearly West African filmmakers and artists are the losers when their films are confined to just one country. For example, Sunjata Keita, emperor of Mali, whose story was recently the subject of a film, Keita (1995) by the Burkinabe director Dani Kouyate, is claimed both by Guinea and Mali as their ancestor. To survive in the postmodern world dominated by new regional economic powers and information systems, West African states, too, must adopt a regional imaginary and promote the circulation of goods and cultures which are now sequestered or fragmented by the limits imposed by the nation-states. What is urgent in West Africa today is less a contrived unity based on an innate cultural identity and heritage, but a regional identity in motion which is based on linguistic affinities, economic reality and geographic proximity, as defined by the similarities in political and cultural dispositions which are grounded in history and patterns of consumption. For example, it ought to be possible to draw a new map of West Africa with the Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Mali, Senegal, Guinea-Konakry, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Gambia forming a region without frontiers, with Dioula (also known as Bambara, Mandinka and Wangara), English, French, Hausa and Yoruba as the principal languages of films and other cultural and economic products. Now what kind of African cinema do I see in this? I think Professor Sylvia Wynter was right in linking African cinema to the independence movement, and in looking at the iconography of African films. It is indeed possible to look at a symbolism that is developed through the attempts by filmmakers, artists and writers in Africa to insert themselves in the national struggle.

THE ICONOGRAPHY OF AFRICAN CINEMA

83

Borom Sarret and the Aesthetics of West African Cinema African cinema added its first stone to the architecture of world cinema in 1963 when Sembene Ousmane directed Borom Sarret, a social realist account of the tale of two cities in Dakar (Senegal). Sembene's discovery was that film could be used to give Africa back its dignity, just as it had been used by colonialist and racist films to destroy the image of black people. The quest for dignity in Borom Sarret reflects the culture and politics of the independence movements of the 1960s, with Ghana and Guinea as the most illustrious examples. Sembene evinces a critique of post-independence regimes such as Senegal which, in his view, had failed to include men like the borom sarret (the cart driver) in the modern state in Africa. There are several examples of notable African films which enfold in their narratives the discourse of dignity, self-reliance and the failure of African governments to uphold these values. Souleymane Cisse's Finye (1982) and Sembene's Guelwaar (1993) make the most compelling arguments for social change and renewal of the struggle for independence and dignity. In the 1960s, mass education was part of the independence movements which presented schools as the road to Africa's development and self-determination. People felt that the meaning of independence lay in the possibility of everyone having admission to free schools, unlike colonialism which denied access to education. School therefore became a necessary symbol of national sovereignty, and students who fought to keep their institutions from deviating from their original purpose were the new national heroes. In Finye there is a classical deployment of narrative depicting students struggling for selfdetermination, democracy and equal right to education. The film tells the story of Bah and Oumou, two high school sweethearts, from different classes. Oumou's father is a member of the ruling junta and governor of the region. Bah lives with his grandparents in an impoverished section of the city; his parents were presumably killed by the junta. The conflict involves the elite, powerful enough to buy exams and procure scholarships for their children to study abroad, and the masses, who are victims of educational reforms. Naturally O u m o u passes her exam, while Bah and other students with similar backgrounds fail, leading to the creation of a student movement to protest against the military dictatorship. The film ends with the mobilisation of the whole country and the international press behind the students. Bah dies a national hero, while a civilian governor replaces the colonel. Souleymane Cisse's Finye, inspired by the many student strikes in francophone Africa, has become a prophetic film which continues to influence youth movement against neocolonialism and military dictatorships in West Africa. A few years after the film was released, a student leader by the name of Cabral was killed by the soldiers in an attempt to break a strike. The name Cabral was, incidentally, borrowed from Amilcar Cabral, the revolutionary leader of Guinea-Bissau who was assassinated by the Portuguese army. Cabral, the student, like his namesake in the liberation struggle, and like Bah, the character in Cisse's film, has become a martyr who inspired other Malian students to continue the struggle until the military is defeated. By 1992, democracy had finally arrived in Mali after a bloody confrontation between students, supported by their parents and other social groups, and the military. It was just like in Finye. The plot of Guelwaar revolves around conflicts between Muslims and Christians over the corpse of Pierre Henry Thioune Guelwaar, a Christian and political activist, who is mistakenly buried in a Muslim cemetery, and must be exhumed and given a proper Christian burial. It turns out that Guelwaar was killed because he exposed the negative effects of international aid on his country, and incited people to rebel. For Sembene the political culture

84

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

in Africa has become so dependent on aid that it has lost the capacity to reproduce anything but a generation of beggars. In a controversial and powerful scene, the film contrasts two philosophies of life, both viewed negatively for different reasons, in order to show how the dignity and self-determination of Africans have been compromised. On the one hand, there is begging and receiving aid which is practised by all, from the leadership in Africa to the homeless in the streets. On the other hand, there is prostitution which enables young women to support themselves and their families. The film argues that even prostitution is nobler than receiving international aid because the former involves exchange and agency while the latter fosters dependency and passivity. This is a new thinking in so far as it changes the cultural significance of begging in predominantly Muslim and animist West African societies where beggars are seen as humble and honest people, and as intermediaries between God and those who want to absolve themselves from a sin. At the end of the film, a group of young people inspired by the statements of Guelwaar stop a truck full of sacks of flour donated by international organisations, and spill the flour on the road rather than let it reach its destination. When an elderly man tells them that it is a sacrilege to pour food on the ground, Guelwaar's wife replies that what really constitutes a defilement of culture is to continue receiving this aid from foreigners. With Guelwaar, Sembene returns to Utopian narratives of self-determination which he explored in such early novels as Opays mon beau peuple and Les Bouts de bois de dieu,2 and which he later abandoned in his films in favour of the criticism of post-independence regimes, satire and socialist realism. By describing itself in the generic as a legend of the twenty-first century, Guelwaar draws attention to the African fin de siecle when the youth will break away from old paradigms of Afro-pessimism and take their destinies into their own hands. The grammar of Borom Sarret still influences West African cinema. There are exceptions as exemplified by the magical realism of Yeelen (Souleymane Cisse, 1987), the postmodern collage of Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambety, 1973), the cinema of minimalism (few words and precise gestures) of Tilai (Idrissa Ouedraogo, 1990), or even the historical genre as attempted by Sembene himself in Ceddo (1976); but, until recently, these films only shook the genre and did not break it. The 'Sembenian' cinema, a vision of the world struggling between tradition and modernity, continued to dominate African cinema like the trees that hide the forest, at least until recently. Between Sembene's cinema and that of Ciss£, Diop Mambety and Ouedraogo, there are social problem films which put into play the themes of Afro-pessimism: the plight of children in Africa, the spread of AIDS, the devaluation of the CFA (Communaute Financiere d'Afrique) currency, female genital mutilation and other forms of oppressing women in Africa, corruption and alienation of Africans from their own 'true traditions', racism and damage to environment. Many of the films were made on order for European institutions which thrive on portrayals of Africa's tragic situation, but possess little understanding or desire to meet people on their own ground. Crucially, the majority of these so-called films are merely television reportage that deals with subjects that may need public exposure, but does so in a way that does not advance the language of African cinema. Problem films treat Africans like objects that the director speaks for, and not as subjects with different desires regardless of their social conditions. Understanding the small differences between human beings and following them with a camera, however, is wherein lies adventure at the end of the block, i.e. the discovery of the power of human beings, cinema tout court

THE ICONOGRAPHY OF AFRICAN CINEMA

85

Beyond Borom Sarret: Mambety the Postmodern With only three films, Touki Bouki, Hyenas (1992) and Le Franc (1995) which won the award for best short film award at FESPACO '95, Djibril Diop Mamb&y's cinema poses the most serious challenge to Sembenian socialist realism and the Utopian narrative of independence. In Diop's oeuvre, too, we are positioned in front of a window looking at Dakar, the narrow and intimate streets of the Medina, the metropolitan centres of the Plateau, the beaches, and the spots under the baobab trees. Some of the characters, like Aminata Fall, are in all three films, playing more or less the same roles. Another strength of Diop's cinema is that it draws its inspiration from music and other films, creating a resemblance and intertextuality between his mise-en-sc&ne and those of Western and B-movies. This kind of cinema appeals to me because I grew up in Africa at the time when we were independent; we had the spirit that we could do anything, that we could change the world, and we were both traditional and we were modern, we were reading Sartre but we were also listening to James Brown, and we were linking all these ideologies as equal ideologies, as opposed to the ideal realism of Sembene's time, where they wanted to create the 'New Man' in the Fanonian sense, and this New Man was to be cut off from culture in many ways. Touki Bouki enters the history of African cinema as the first avant-garde film. People often describe it as a film that is enjoyed on the formal level and moves away from the pronounced didacticism of African cinema of the 1970s. Centred around the adventures of two young people, Mory and Anta, who go back and forth between the Medina (slums of Dakar) and the Plateau (city centre), Touki Bouki uses as its mode of narration repetitions of scenes, dream sequences, association of contrasting spaces and sounds, and digressions. There are shots which look like still photographs that make allusions to scenes in the American Western genre, and that distract the spectator from attempting to organise the film into a linear story. The film is also remarkable for its rendering of erotic sequences, and its emphasis on scenes that are playful. A close look at Touki Bouki, however, reveals a preoccupation with certain themes and formal devices that are familiar in African cinema. The oral tradition, the conflict between tradition and modernity, and the representation of the sacred are, for example, some of the narrative elements deployed in the film. Touki Bouki, which literally translates from Wolof as 'the trip of the hyena', is adapted from a West African folktale about the adventures of the hare and the hyena. Similar to the black American folktale about 'Brer Rabbit', these African tales cast the hyena and the hare (symbols of human beings) in difficult situations (usually famine or a problem that no one can solve), and create a series of trips at the end of which lies the solution of the difficulty. In Touki Bouki Mory and Anta dream of travelling from their village near Dakar, where they are oppressed by poverty and the pressures to conform to their aunt's stringent rituals. They want to go to Paris where they will walk down the boulevards of Montparnasse and Pigalle. Mory dreams of becoming the master of tricksters in Paris, and returning to Dakar with his spoils. Then, Anta's aunt who is nagging him now, would be singing his praises as he hands out money to her. The importance of money in shaping people's will is also emphasised in Hyenas and Le Franc. As Mory and Anta set out for their journey, the soundtrack plays a Josephine Baker tune which keeps repeating 'Paris! Paris!' To get money for the transportation, Mory first tries to outsmart a gambler, to whom he loses. This sequence digresses into a scene with Mory and a policeman. The scene has all the elements of a confrontation between cops and robbers. The second attempt at finding money involves the robbery of a suitcase from a company of wrestlers. This, too, fails but not before it turns into a sequence from horror films. Finally,

86

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Mory and Anta decide to visit a homosexual friend of Mory whom they plan to rob. This time, they succeed in securing money, some clothes and a fancy car. The sequence turns into a fantastic scene in which Mory first takes off his clothes and stands up in the car to wave at an imaginary crowd, imitating presidents who wave at crowd from their limousines. Then we see Mory and Anta dressed like Bonnie and Clyde as the car takes them to the presidential palace, and to the aunt's place where she sings and dances for them. Touki Bouki rejects the didacticism of many African films in favour of a playful use of parody and irony. Certainly the 'crimes' committed by Mory and Anta in order to buy their tickets parody the hustles that many Senegalese go through to immigrate to France. By casting Mory, standing naked in the limousine, in the role of a politician, the film also parodies political campaigns in Africa in which the leaders hide the 'naked' truth from the people. There is an intertextuality here between Touki Bouki and other political films, like Xala (1974) and Finye, which also point out the hypocrisy and the impotence of African leaders. In Touki Bouki, Mory is the narrator. We see most of the scenes from his perspective; he is his own griot. We see him construct himself as the master trickster against the card player and against the homosexual. Certain scenes describe him as 'a rebel without a cause', he is different from the other guys, and like a black and white picture, he always looks melancholic, distant and romantic. Mory and Anta, through their construction of themselves as icons of a new generation, and imitation of characters in American B-movies, remind the viewer of the heroes of such new wave classics as Moi un noir (Rouch, 1959) and A bout de souffle (Godard, 1959). The question of postmodernity is posed in Touki Bouki as an attachment to the past, with the nobility of traditional customs serving as guide to Mory and Anta in the modern world. It is in this regard that one might say that the film ends like traditional griot narratives. When Mory hears the horn of the ship sailing to France, it reminds him of the bellowing of his bulls; he refuses to get on the ship (symbol of modernity and alienation), and runs towards the Medina (symbol of tradition and authenticity). Thus the film reaches closure by restoring him to the safety of tradition. It is interesting that Mory leaves Anta behind on the boat; usually, the woman stays behind while the man goes and gets 'modernised' in Europe. The film includes other interesting mediations between tradition and modernity. The appearance of Mory and Anta defies clothes and behaviour expectations both in Westernised and traditional settings. Anta's haircut and her jacket make her look like a boy, while Mory's costume and acting construct him as a figure who combines the Fulani shepherd and the Western hero. People in the Medina criticise Mory and Anta for being Europeanised, and hence, irresponsible, shameless and evil; while people in the city see them as 'nativists', hippies and communists. The film uses the two characters to blur the boundaries between the Medina and the Plateau. As they go from one space to another, it becomes clear that there is the modern in the traditional, and vice versa. Furthermore, as they stand in one place, their dress or their acting reveal the signs of the other place. Several shots of the Medina, for example, show the tall buildings of the Plateau in the background. Mory's bike itself symbolises the Plateau as it moves down the uncharted paths of the Medina. The boundaries between what is Western and what is traditional are further confused in Touki Bouki by Mory's use of his bike. Mory transforms the bike into a sacred object, or a fetish, when he uses it to take the place of the cows he is losing rapidly to modernisation. The film opens with a young boy riding a bull in front of a pack of cows. The next shot shows a modern slaughterhouse where the throat of a cow is being graphically slit. Then we see Mory riding a bike which is decorated with a skull with dried cow horns attached to

THE ICONOGRAPHY OF AFRICAN CINEMA

87

the handle bars. A bronze sculpture representing Muslim symbols, including the Crescent, is attached to the back saddle. The film depicts Mory's relationship to the bike as similar to the Fulani shepherd's relationship to his cows. In one scene, Mory rides the bike among cows, and, like a cowboy in a Western, uses a rope to noose the bike. A European 'hippy* who hurts himself riding the bike calls it 'a beautiful beast'. The central themes in Hyenasy Le Franc and Touki Bouki are the nobility of tradition in conflict with the temptations produced by money, and the restoration of the characters to a moment of glory and authenticity. In all three films, Diop Mambety deploys a narrative style which is more grounded in magic realism than in the verisimilitude language of Sembene. The three films derive meaning from their relation to one another, their intertextuality with B-movies, and their rewriting of the 'Sembenian' topics. I will now turn to Le Franc by Djibril Diop Mambety to finish this discussion of Diop Mambety's cinema. Le Franc also takes place in Dakar, after the devaluation of the CFA currency. Francophone Africa from Dakar (Senegal) to Douala (Cameroon) was rocked by the devaluation, which left people feeling the impact every hour, every day, and every month. In the urban areas, where small entrepreneurs, the middle class and the underclass conglomerate, the devaluation, commonly referred to as 'devalisation', is like a cholera epidemic in a dry Harmattan season. The price of gasoline has doubled as have the prices of other imported goods. In Dakar, there are more beggars in the streets. The middle class itself is devalued and pushed out of the centre of the market place, joining the underclass on the margins, and leaving restaurants, movie theatres and clothing stores to tourists. The devaluation is a phenomenon of what is known today as structural adjustment in the Third World, or retrenchment and down-sizing in the factories and offices in the developed world. Structural adjustment programmes affect people in Senegal, in Mexico, just as they affect people of colour and women in the United States and Europe. Le Franc uses the backdrop of devaluation as the base of its story, and enfolds some of the most fantastic and magic realist moments in African cinema. Marigo, the protagonist of the film, is a musician whose congoma or accordion is confiscated by his landlady, Aminata Fall, because he is unable to pay the rent. The lottery is his only chance to win his instrument back and to rise above misery. He plays and wins, but he does not want envious eyes to see him removing the winning ticket from behind the poster of his idol on the door of his room. He removes the door and travels across town with it, all the way to the ocean. On his way, on top of a bus, sitting on his door frame, he dreams of repossessing his congoma and conquering the world while playing it. He also has visions of Aminata Fall, a symbol of American capitalism in Africa, who sings his praises now that he has become rich. Aminata Fall emerges, bigger than life, speaking a hybrid of Wolof, French and American English, before bursting into a blues song that echoes a catalogue of hits from Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith to Billie Holiday. The references to money, capitalism and the good life as symbolised by music and clothes are so surreal that they create an African sublime. The film uses strong colours: jet Senegalese black, red, green and yellow which are the favourite colours of people in the streets, and blue which is the colour of the sky, the ocean, but also the plastic garbage bags that cover the ground for miles.

West African Cinema Today Three new films at FESPACO '95 - Guimba by Cheick Oumar Sissoko, Keita: The Heritage of the Griot by Dani Kouyate, and Haramuya by Drissa Toure" - invest storytelling with a

88

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

breath of fresh air, enough to defamiliarise the Sembenian paradigm. Guimba and Keita have in common a reliance on West African storytelling devices: the use of the griot, and digressions to link the main story to the present situation. Guimba opens with a modernday griot playing his stringed instrument, called ngoni, by the side of the river Niger, and reciting the epic of Guimba the Tyrant. Then the camera pans left on the water, revealing the world of Guimba, where the costumes are arresting and the architecture magnificent. The characters for the most part are bigger than life, leaving behind the social problems films in which the characters are smaller than the spectators. Guimba, the winner of the Grand Prix, reminds the spectator of Souleymane Cisse's Yeelen, but, this time, there is a well-dressed plot with more conflicts, more costumes and a display (Djenne and Timbuktu styles of architecture) of fortress doors, walls, interiors of houses and rooftops. Both Yeelen and Guimba are based on the last Bambara and Dogon empires in the nineteenth century before the French colonised the region. During that time, the hunter societies, called the Donzons, were the most dangerous warriors because they had mastered the secrets of the wilderness as well as those of civilisation. Their words had the power to take life away from the living, to stop time, or to render themselves invisible. Cisse in Yeelen and Sissoko in Guimba suspend their notions of disbelief, and let their cameras meet with these Bambara and Dogon mythologies. Both films, in this sense, are poetic, magical and layered with symbols. Guimba is about power, how people will not willingly share it, and how it blinds those who hold it. It is a metaphor of African dictatorships of the post-independence era. The film tells the story of a tyrant king by the name of Guimba who kills his enemies, throws them in jail or sends them into exile. He is so fearsome that his hat always covers his eyes, like the 'General-Presidents' for life who wear dark glasses, and entertain themselves by watching other people suffer. In other words, Guimba is about the tropical fascism which has plagued Africa for the last 30 years of independence. Guimba educates his dwarf son to succeed him by repeating to him that power is not to be shared, and that it always has to be exhibited in order for people to respect it. Guimba's problems begin when he chooses a fiancee for his son. Before the marriage, Guimba's son realises that he likes the mother of the bride better because of her more shapely buttocks. The father then decides that he will marry the daughter himself, while the son will marry the mother whose husband is sent to exile. It is at this point that the oppressed people send for a saviour from the hunters' group to come and deliver them from Guimba. A magical confrontation ensues with a re-enactment of Bambara war scenes, stylised gestures and a deployment of words as weapons. Keita: The Heritage of the Griot also deploys the technique of the griot as the basis for telling its story. The discovery of the griotic style of narration, a device of storytelling long known to people of West Africa, has enabled the directors of both Guimba and Keita to reach wider audiences at FESPACO, and to fascinate spectators with elevated forms of the Mandinka and Bambara languages of which the griots are considered the guardians. Keita, a very simple story about the education of children in contemporary Africa, takes on an epic dimension when the director connects the life of the protagonist to that of Sunjata Keita, emperor of old Mali in the thirteenth century. This is 'griotism' in African storytelling because everyone's fate is tied to everyone else's, and to history. It is as if, for a moment, our lives depend on the outcome of the films. Keita opens with an old griot who suddenly appears in a modern African family to teach the young son the history of his ancestors. The plot enfolds when the eye of the camera slowly merges with the griot's voice

THE ICONOGRAPHY OF AFRICAN CINEMA

89

which clashes with the education the boy receives at school. Modern education in Africa contains very little African history, especially at the lower level where French and English are emphasised at the expense of African languages and cultures. Both the teacher and the boy's mother try to remedy the situation, but it proves contagious as the boy narrates the griot's teachings to other children in the class. By locking the griot into a complicity with the camera and against the francophone system of education which forces the African children to forget a part of their past for every word learned in French, the film clearly states that there is a split in the identity of modern Africans. This is definitely a controversial statement, but one that will meet with many sympathetic ears both in Africa and elsewhere in the wake of Afrocentric education. The Jury in Ouaga awarded Keita the Oumarou Ganda prize for best first film by a director, but criticised it for relying heavily on the griot to tell Sunjata's story, instead of showing it on the screen as did Guimba. But there are advantages to Keita7s narrative strategy which distances the spectator from the spectacle in the Sunjata epic, and emphasises the conflict between the griot and the school teacher, thus putting into context the tragedy of modern education in Africa. Haramuya, on the other hand, derives its originality from the deployment of non-linear and multiple stories about modern African cities. Drissa Toure's Haramuya, with its misten-scene of several characters and stories occupying the same space without connecting their lives, reminds us of Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993). Haramuya is set in Ouagadougou, a city with rising unemployment, Muslim fundamentalism, juvenile delinquency and more motor bikes than anywhere else in West Africa. The film focuses on bike thieves, corrupt civil servants and Lebanese businessmen, religious fundamentalists, drug dealers, prostitutes and the CFA currency devaluation. It provides a glimpse of the Ouagadougou that one does not see during FESPACO. Perhaps for this reason, it was severely criticised during the festival for not being able to tell a coherent story. But there are no coherent stories in the lives of city dwellers; there are contradictions instead, people who use the same streets for different purposes. The pleasure of Haramuya does not lie in closure, which the critics expected from the film, but in such moments as when the fundamentalist school teacher has one of the pupils mistakenly deliver a bag of marijuana to the sheep for their feed. In conclusion, FESPACO '95 was saved by these films. It is unfortunate that what began with a pan-African spirit is becoming more and more nationalistic. Even the awards emphasise the movement towards nationalism as the winning films become symbols of national pride and signs of cultural superiority over the countries that did not win. This situation has unwittingly created the basis for ethnocentrism, not to mention tribalism, in a region that is desperately in need of larger markets for the films than the ones celebrated by the nation-state. The devaluation of the CFA currency, like other structural adjustments which caused states to close factories and lay off people, should have turned people against the nationstates as well; the colonial boundaries adapted by independent states only serve to divide families on each side of the borders. Equally, they limit markets, and prevent the universalisation of dynamic African cultures beyond one nation-state. Unfortunately African cinema at FESPACO activates more passion for nationalism among the people. The devaluation has induced some to call for their country's second independence from France, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Let's hope that the new African cinema, too, will embrace pan-Africanism over nationalism.

RESPONDENTS John Akomfrah I want to take this opportunity to sketch out a possible talk which, if I ever get it together, I might give one day. This skeleton of that talk is in part rejoinder to Manthia Diawara's paper (see pp. 81-9), but is also an attempt to think through some of the things that came out of my interview with June Givanni on African cinema. 3 I want to use this sketch as a strategic manoeuvre in the ongoing debate on African cinema and its aesthetic specificity. It seems to me perfectly possible that in the search for symbols, narratives and icons, a search conducted in an English frame, one could write a cautionary article entitled 'African Film Criticism and the Perils of Universalism'. This article would try, on the one hand, to understand why a desire for pan-Africanism, as a structuring ideal, may not be the useful Utopian ideal that some films have aimed for in 'African' cinema, useful as it might seem, for precisely the kinds of reasons that Manthia mentioned. The continent currently produces a variety of cinemas, all of which are claiming the title of African cinema. For this reason the films they produce have as their ideal, either at the point of reception or at the point of production, the desire to speak a language of universality. Let's take, for example, the 'problem films' that Manthia has mentioned. These films clearly don't set out necessarily to have the specificity of a regional focus, but their reception has been with the implicit assumption that they talk for all of Africa. Neria (Godwin Mawuru, 1993), for instance, sets out to be about the rise of AIDS in Zimbabwe, and yet both its construction and subsequent reception assume that what you're watching is a transparent picture of a universal, continental problem, the problem of the spread of AIDS. In an over-earnest drive for a pan-African gloss, what should have been an interesting regional variant on a continental theme ends up instead as a woolly morality tale without a local resonance. The most successful films which work with a broadly panAfrican agenda appear to me to be ones in which the general and the particular operate in a state of creative tension. Where the local is jettisoned in the name of an ahistorical African universal, the result, like Neria> is without enduring merit. There lies the first obstacle that a pan-African film or the search for such a film needs to overcome. If the first problem has principally to do with how pan-Africanism is deployed as a rhetoric in filmmaking, the second seems to me to be about the screening and reception of African films. I would argue that within the anglophone world, a pan-African ideal was never possible until very recently because the films which we had weren't known principally as African films; they were sold instead as part of a larger package of Third World films, a package overdetermined by a set of impulses and gestures which precluded the possibility of pan-Africanism as a preferred cultural option. Those gestures were, I would say, simultaneously manichean and relativist. African films made by, for example, Sembene, as they were distributed in the UK, weren't known as African films, but rather as illustrations of a Third World radical filmmaking practice. They had a presence as part of a package of political films. So the desire to wrestle them from that rubric of 'Third World cinema' was useful, and the usefulness of the label 'pan-African' was that it allowed for that possibility, granting by implication some specificity to films buried under a deluge of preconceptions

THE ICONOGRAPHY OF AFRICAN CINEMA

91

within that T h i r d World', within what in retrospect was an equally universalist framework. The difference between the 'Third World' and 'pan-African' was that at least the latter guaranteed a particular, a local, a specific setting. So the shift, to me, was an imperative one. It had to be done because filmmakers like Sembene deserved better; but also because the concept of Third World cinema simply can't be sustained any more. There are a number of reasons for this. Some are to do with the collapse of exhibition of that kind of cinema, the collapse of the politics which underpinned it, and irony of ironies, because of an equally specious universalist agenda which went with it: the idea that if you saw a film from Chile and it told you about how to organise, and you saw one from Africa which told you how the village works, you could put those things together and you came out with a political and cultural programme which then could be implemented wherever you were - it didn't matter, Guinea, London, Paris ... usually Paris. I think the question of aesthetic specificity of African filmmaking, which the notion of pan-Africanism tries to foreground, is an important search, because it wrestles films like Sembene's Ceddo away from what seems to me to be a dying 'Third World' model, and these films have to live, they have to have some way of being watched. There is a problem, clearly, as I said, with an unspecified pan-Africanist model, but it seems to me that you can't stop that search, even at the cost of essentialism, or at the cost of appearing to be reifying the cinema through some language of authenticity. These will be minor problems in the face of what seems to me to be the central problem: If 'African' cinema came into the anglophone frame as a culturally specific set of filmmaking practices within the Third World rubric, then it wouldn't matter; the search for what it's made up of wouldn't matter. You would just say, 'These are the elements which make up African cinema: we are not saying they are authentic, we're not saying they are reducible to African cinema, but this is what African cinema brought into the mix.' I don't believe that that has ever happened. 4 Certainly within the anglophone frame, I never went to any screenings where Ceddo, for instance, was shown with Solanas's Hour of the Furnaces (1968), where anybody said, 'Hang on, chaps, let's talk about what really happened in Ceddo which was separate from what was supposed to be happening in Hour of the Furnaces' That never happened, as far as I'm concerned. And it seems to me that, in so far as that's the condition of existence that now structures African cinema, we cannot by implication avoid the debate on aesthetics because that is what unlocks the broader debate on that cinema's specificity. This is what we're here to talk about: even at the risk of what might appear to be politically unacceptable end results, the desire to find that specificity is absolutely crucial, if only to rescue that history of African cinema. You know, if you make Yeelen, you don't have a problem, but anything which existed before Yeelen in the 1980s has that problem; it's part of a much more woolly baggage of Third World cinema. I think the desire to then rescue those pre-Yeelen films through the notion of Third Cinema, equally became problematic, because Third Cinema dropped the universalist impulse but it kept the radical one; it dropped the manichean one and it kept the relativist one, and the assumption is that if you kept those two together it would make that package work. But we know, for all kinds of reasons, that that package doesn't work any more. So the search for iconography, or the search for aesthetic specificity, has to go on.

92

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Asma El Bakri I would like to quickly develop two main points. I'm not going to develop any theory, I'm just going to discuss distribution and production in the African continent as a whole. Manthia talked about what France has given to help African cinema and Third World cinema, through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We heard during the last film festival in Cairo, December 1994, from Mr Dominique Wallon, who was the head of the CNC (Centre National du Cinema) in France, of an impending danger, not only from the European Economic Community (EEC), but also from America. He said, during the press conference, that there is pressure on the French government to stop aid to the Third World. So even this very small amount of assistance that we have is in danger of being stopped at any time. What is very strange about this situation is that in Egypt, we do have a very old tradition of cinema. For the last 70 years now we have produced films. We used to produce 120 films a year but in 1995, we produced only twelve films. We always talk about the legacies of colonialism and imperialism, but sometimes we should talk also about the dictatorships of our countries across the whole continent of Africa. Dictatorships become fascistic and eventually give birth to fundamentalism, from which a lot of our countries now suffer, from Algeria to Egypt to Sudan, and recently also in Libya. Of course, we can also say that we have inherited the bad legacies of colonialism and imperialism, and all the '-isms' possible, but someone has to say, 'Well, now we have to stop and look at ourselves'. Always it's the fault of the other and it's never our fault. Why, for instance, don't we have any interchange of films between Africa north and Africa south of the Sahara? You can come to Cairo - you will never see an African film there, and the same is true of most North African countries, except during festivals. These films are treated like museum pieces, and if you don't go to the festivals you are never going to be able to see them. They are never shown at the cinema, they're never shown on TV, and they are not available on video either. In conclusion, this is the problem of distribution and production in African cinema: it depends on others for its existence and not on our ourselves. Africa is the richest continent in the world, yet we hear constantly that we have everything and we are nothing: this must change.

Notes 1 V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994). 2 Ousmane Sembene, O pays tnon beau peuple (Paris: Presses pocket, 1975); Ousmane Sembene, Les Bouts de bois de dieu (Banty mam Yall) (Paris: Le Livre contemporain, 1960). 3 'Dream Aloud', in 'African Conversations' supplement in Sight and Sound, August 1995. 4 Some exceptions to this norm would be Angela Martin's pioneering work African Films: The Context of Production, BFI Dossier No. 6 (London: BFI, 1982); Eleventh Hour Presents Africa on Africa (pamphlet), Channel Four Television 1984, London; and Laura Mulvey's essay on Sembene, 'The Carapace that Failed', in Third Text, no. 16/17, autumn/winter 1991, reprinted in Laura Mulvey's Fetishism and Curiosity (London: BFI, 1996).

Chapter 4 Is the Decolonisation of the Mind a Prerequisite for the Independence of Thought and the Creative Practice of African Cinema? INTRODUCTION Ngugi Wa Thiong'o The act of production, the availability, the quantity, the 'beingness' of African cinema so to speak, is of course the most obvious prerequisite. There have to be films made by Africans on the African condition before we can talk about African cinema. Resources to make films, to distribute them, to make them more accessible to African audiences are all important for the existence of African cinema. As in the case of literature, there has to be a certain quantity, more writers and more books, before we can begin to sort out the good from the bad, the beautiful from the ugly, the relevant from the irrelevant. So there has to be a decolonising of the economic resources and the technology so that they are available to more African filmmakers, and also a decolonising of the political space, freeing the democratic space so that filmmakers can confront real issues without the fear of state reprisals or without their films being blocked from reaching their real audiences in Africa. However, the question of the decolonisation of the mind is as important, and it cannot wait until there are resources available. The question is important because cinema in Africa has developed in the context of the fierce struggles of the coloniser and the colonised and their aftermaths in the postcolonial era. These struggles and their consequences have affected Africa and African peoples at the economic, political, cultural and psychological levels, at the level of images of self and the community. So the question of African cinema is not only that of relations of wealth and power but also of the psyche. Decolonisation of the mental space has to go hand in hand with that of the economic and political space. Any discussion of African cinema inevitably calls into question the role of art in society, for cinema is an art, as Professor Teshome Gabriel put it, 'making the invisible visible' (see pp. 97-102). It is not of course a matter of just making the invisible visible, it is doing it in such a way that it does not come out as simply instruction. It has to come out as delight also. Delight and instruction become intertwined in such a way that they are part of each other. They are not separate entities as sometimes happens in Hollywood where delight or pleasure or entertainment becomes an end in itself, separated from the principle of instruction; or as sometimes happens in some ethnographic films or the crudely political where instruction, teaching, the message, or whatever you want to call the didactic element in art, completely subordinates delight. In giving visibility to the invisible or voice to the silent, African cinema has to do it in such a way that the marriage of form and content creates a delightful harmony. African cinema has to pay equal attention to both the principle of instruction and that of pleasure. They are inseparable. I am sure that a lot of care had gone

94

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

into making the cup that Teshome speaks of, which was given to him by his mother, and it is a carrier of both memory and visible delight as well as invisible memories. The other question is that of our relationship to technology. There is no way that we can talk of the cinema, or any aspect of the cinema, without technology, its availability, its use, its meaning, hanging over the discussion. As Sylvia Wynter points out (see Chapter 2), the technology of making these moving images was part of all the other breakthroughs in technology in the eighteenth century. But the question behind the organisation of this conference, is this: once you have acquired the technology, once you stand behind the camera pointed at Africa, do you stand there as an outsider watching the other (i.e. an African filmmaker watching Africa from the outside) or do you do so as an insider? There lies the challenge assumed in Professor Gabriel's presentation: how are we, as African filmmakers, going to hold the camera so that we are both behind the camera looking in but we are also inside the very society at which the eye of the camera is gazing? This leads us to the other issue raised in the discussion: that of the interaction between public and private lives. The issue was beautifully captured in Teshome Gabriel's image of the cup and the emperor. Here the cup brings back memories of lived experience, childhood memories for instance, mother's touch, the drink of water, milk; it brings back memories of that which has nourished both the body and the soul of the individual. Some of these memories are very personal, intimate, part of one's internal being. But the internal experience no matter how intimate and personal is not independent of the public sector, of the public life, political life, the community, the nation-state, here represented by the image of the emperor. The emperor is the embodiment of the economic and the political sphere of the community. He is authority. And this authority can in fact define the space in which one may make cups, draw water, or give it to the needy. But the cup and the emperor are not free of technology here represented by the typewriter. How many typewriters are available in society? Who has access to them? And who controls the use to which they can be put? There is clearly an area of possible conflict between the cup and the emperor in their relationship to technology. For the use of technology, in this case the camera, can empower the authority or the community, private lives or public lives. The African filmmaker does not really have the luxury of using technology to escape into the realms of the personal, devoid of its interaction with the public. Personal experiences must also be seen in the historical context of their unfolding. Slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, dictatorships are all part and parcel of the African reality and we must never be seduced by our donors into acting as if the only reality in Africa is that of elders sitting under baobab trees exuding wisdom or that of supernatural elements in African lives. The African world view takes it that there is a connection between the dead, the living and the unborn. The three elements embody the reality of the interconnections between the past, the present and the future, and it connects spiritual life with material existence. The realm of the spiritual is not divorced from the materiality of economics and politics within nations and between nations. This leads us to the subject of decolonising the mind in relation to African filmmaking. We cannot avoid asking the question because, as outlined in Sylvia Wynter's paper (see Chapter 2), Manthia Diawara's contribution (see pp. 81-9), and his film Rouch in Reverse (1995), filmmaking does not take place in a vacuum. Diawara sums up the whole problem with the argument that the West and the African nation-state pose dangers for the healthy development of the African cinema (see Chapter 3). Sylvia Wynter talked very movingly about the hundreds of years since the Renaissance as a period in which Europe

THE DECOLONISATION OF THE MIND

95

tried to incorporate the whole world into its memory (see Chapter 2). We cannot will or wish this fact away. We are products of history and we live in history. Colonisation, the most salient part of that history, was a total process invading the entire, ecological, economic, political, cultural and psychological being of the colonised. The anti-colonial resistance was also or should have been a process of the negation of that entire colonial enterprise at all those levels. The success of the anti-colonial enterprise can only be complete if it has restored the colonised to their memory. It is arguable which of the above aspects of colonialism was the worst. Some may want to pick on the economic, others on the political, others on the cultural. The key thing really is that they are all connected. But in some ways the psychological, the aspect of seeing, of images, is most important. If one cannot see clearly, if our memory of what has been and could be has been completely distorted, then we cannot see clearly what we have to do in order to free ourselves in all the other aspects. When Nouri Bouzid (see pp. 103-4) talks about the cinema being more colonial than colonialism, I understand. The battle of images is the most ferocious, the most relentless and, what's more, it is continuous. With this battle, there has to be eternal vigilance on all our parts. If we live in a situation where the image of the world is itself colonised, then it becomes difficult for us to realise ourselves unless we struggle to decolonise that image. Decolonisation of the mind is both a prerequisite for successful African cinema and it is also the object of serious African cinema. In this context, the postcolonial state poses the most problems. The contradictions in the colonial state were clear because they were often seen in terms of black and white. Artists could see where they could situate themselves. Collective black pride for instance was a laudable ideal. Free the fact of blackness and of Africanness! Yet the postcolonial state often sees itself as a free, independent state while it is still suffering from all the colonial scars in its collective psyche. The cinematic art has to unmask the partial decolonisation of most postcolonial states in Africa. Manthia Diawara's comment about the African nation-state as also posing difficulties for the development of a liberated African cinema is alas too true. In this context Mariama Hima (see pp. 104-5) is right in raising the special condition of the woman artist. She talked of the two colonialisms that an African woman suffers even in these so-called free independent states. Decolonisation cannot be partial: it has to be total for all the sections of the population and at all the levels discussed above. Before I end, I would like to draw your attention to one of the most positive contributions of African cinema to our efforts at decolonisation. I am talking about the cinema and its relationship to African languages. If you look at African literature, you will see that even where it has contributed so much to our sense of being, it has itself been further colonised by its refusal to engage in African languages. African literature, or shall I say europhone African literature, has depersonalised the African character by making him see himself and the world in and through French, English and Portuguese. In this literature, even peasant and worker characters, who all have legitimate and vibrant African languages, are made to speak in European languages. It is in the African cinema, no matter what we think of its content, where, on the whole, the African character has been restored to his language. It is on the screen where we encounter African people speaking their own languages, working out problems in their own languages, arriving at decisions through a dialogue in their own languages. In that sense the traditions of europhone African literature and general scholarship are way behind the brief tradition of the African cinema. In its relatively brief appearance on the aesthetic stage, African cinema has already taken a giant stride in

96

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

rejecting the neo-colonial notion that the African person has no languages, that African people can express themselves only in foreign tongues. When Teshome Gabriel's mother gave him the cup of memories she did so in an Ethiopian language. The cinema she made through the gift of the cup speaks to us in translation, true, but it is also there in its original African language. My hope is that as African filmmakers increasingly overcome the problems of technology and resources, they will not be tempted to lose this vital connection with the roots of African cinema's vital being.

THE INTOLERABLE GIFT Teshome Gabriel

Prologue In the church of my childhood, after Mass was said, people used to gather in churchyards where they would be treated to a 1- to 2-hour long verbal visualisation of 'revelations* as experienced by such prophets as Ezekiel, Elijah or Jeremiah (incidentally, 'revelations' in Ethiopic stands for rayey, literally meaning 'seen with the mind's eye'). The telling of the visions, by the preacher/narrator, were in a way a literal attempt to make visible, through performance, what was fundamentally invisible. This was done without questioning the sanctity of the biblical stories. The visualisations were the vehicles for instruction or delight. Then, when the members of the congregation returned to their respective homes, informal discussions would take place. One such discussion that I distinctly remember is how Ezekiel saw visions of wheels and angels appearing in the sky. It is as if technology goes back in time to meet Ezekiel, and in cinema Ezekiel comes forward in time to meet the technology of cinema, and in both cases reference is made to the turning of the wheels.

Preface What I have in mind in this presentation is not the customary academic essay, but a more personal, indeed autobiographical, narrative. I want, in other words, to tell you a story - a story that, although it is based on my own experience, my own memories, also has significance for the questions of decolonisation, representation, and for the cinema itself. In telling this story, in sharing it with you, I would like to note the extent to which cinema is itself a shared experience in Africa. This shared experience, this notion of 'the gift', is one of the threads running through my main story. In telling the story, in which my own mother plays a major role, I also want to show how this idea of gift is linked to the lived experience of women in African cinema and society. I am interested in forms of knowing that operate within ideas of memory and within an oracular view of history which engages with some degree of observation, intuition and selfreflexivity.

Phase I My story begins with my recent visit to Ethiopia after 32 years of absence, a visit which affected me profoundly at a personal level, and in ways that are not easily expressed in a typical academic essay. As a professor at UCLA, I have for some time written and worked on 'Third World' issues, on memory, on identity, on nomadic aesthetics, and especially 'Third Cinema' and African cinema. I am supposed to be familiar with the issues of non-

98

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Western culture, etc. I am, in fact, often considered to be a 'type' of 'the non-Western subject' within the academy. It was a depiction which I all too gladly cherished and accepted. One of the many ironies of my story, then, is that upon returning to my place of birth, I discovered the extent to which I had actually become a reasonable facsimile of a westernised subject, or rather, a version of the postcolonial 'type'. This westernisation is exemplified in my preparations for the trip. Taking stock of what I thought I would need for my visit, one of my first actions was to buy one of the most upto-date video cameras that I could find, along with an appropriate number of videotapes. I also purchased a compact 35mm still camera and a miniature tape recorder, all of which I believed would help me to document my return, both for myself and for my children, who were to remain in Los Angeles while I was away. At a more emotional level, I worried that the shock of suddenly seeing me again, after so many years, might be detrimental to my mother's health. I therefore took the precaution of telephoning members of my extended family and friends who would be able to prepare my mother for my eventual arrival, I had often lectured to my students that 'happy endings only happen in the movies, not in real life'. I was truly afraid that fate had me set up for something terrible that might happen upon my return, that my coming home might turn out to be, not a gift, but a curse. All my plans, my attempts to prescript, preorganise, prearrange the narrative of my return, broke down when I got there. From the moment I got off the plane, nothing happened as I had imagined. Upon seeing my mother again, it was I who was overcome with emotion; it was I who began to tremble as my eyes filled with tears, while my mother was all calm and smiling. The sight of my mother immediately stripped away everything of the past 32 years, and I went back, not only 32 years into the past, but even further than that, because I returned to a time of childhood. I went to Ethiopia on a private journey to interact with my family and community. On a personal level the community welcomed me and opened up to receive me as their son. And on a social level I found myself thrust into a position I did not anticipate. I found myself cast as an elder in the hierarchy of the community. Immersed in the community's experiences, I was no longer simply an individual subject. Thus, I discovered myself in a depth of field which could not be found in any camera; a depth of field that was always deferred elsewhere, where the teller is never in the place of the telling.

Phase II As a professor of film and television at a major university, I was set up as the perfect person with a camera to fill the role of the film ethnographer. My recording technologies were supposed to serve as an aid to memory, as a tool or as a prosthesis. Such an idea is based on a very westernised notion of technology - indeed, it is perhaps the very notion that allows the West to imagine itself as modern, as different from its 'pre-modern', 'non-technological' others. In such a notion, technology is defined as an instrument or tool that enables a 'human subject' to know and control an objectified world. This implies, of course, a distinction between subject and object, a stance in which one stands at a distance from one's own experience and from one's own emotions. When I was thousands of miles away in America, the camera seemed like a useful and necessary tool to capture impressions, experiences and observations. My initial idea was that I would make a kind of home movie out of my visit. I had imagined myself to be an

THE DECOLONISATION OF THE MIND

99

outsider to my impending experiences, from where I believed I could document them with my camera. Yet, when I lived the experience itself, I realised that the camera was superfluous. I therefore recorded nothing with the camera. I did not need the magic of cinematic representation and prescripted narrative to stand in for me; a whole different level of creating traces began to occur. It was my body that took over and became the catalyst for a different process of writing. I began to write internally. In internalising my own images, I am now able, when the need arises to show snapshots or tell vignettes of my trip to Africa, to keep reshooting it, renarrativising it; that is, I can keep retelling the story and readapting it according to prevailing circumstances and situations, as I am obviously doing here now. To voluntarily put myself, with camera in hand, in the position of the outsider, in the position of the intrusive other, would have been incongruous with my own theoretical tendencies and writings. It was as if my camera stylo had somehow flipped around and pointed its eraser's end rather than its writing tip. This was precisely because a film, as a representational record, is fixed, and cannot be transformed, and as my own experiences showed me, the memory of a lived experience is anything but fixed. Since recording my experiences as film was not adequate by itself, instead of shooting the film, I, in a sense, began to shoot memory. But memory is not cinema, in the normally recognised sense of the term, because there is not a film there - it is zero, it reaches a ridiculous point of nullity. Yet for me it represented something more than could be conveyed on film itself. In this unique condition, technology, in the western sense, is banished but the cinema remains. Cinema then becomes more than a matter of a tool, or a means to document or represent reality. Cinema instead becomes more than the sum of its technology and its representations: it becomes a kind of transubstantiated cinema. What is not on the screen, but falls through the gap of the splice between images, is the eminent world that is not represented. It is what surrounds the image as the un-stated. The concern here is that cinema should not be seen solely in technological terms, dependent only on its apparatus. The concern is with the 'ideas' and 'experiences' of cinema: not only what cinema is technologically, but what it can be experientially. Cinema should not simply be images printed in celluloid, but what those images refer to - the memories, the lived experiences, the dreams, the unseen realm of myths and spirits that hover beyond and between the images.

Phase ill Cinema is an intolerable gift: but, first, what is a gift? Some argue that there is no such thing as gift: when one gives a gift one has an expectation of something as a return at some point. In such instances, giving is mutually grounded in the notion of exchange. If the giver in some form or other is expecting something, even some acknowledgement, in some form or other, then the idea of gift is impossible. Even when there is no expectation of something to be returned to the person who gives, there is nonetheless, in some ways, a societal obligation that the recipient reciprocate, by giving something in return. In other words, if there is an expectation within me of somehow having to reciprocate a gift, then the gift in that sense is already contaminated. The contamination comes not from the 'gift' but from the context, the milieu in which the 'exchange' is made. Others argue that there should be no expectation or obligation on either side. It may

100

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

well be that in some ways we have internalised this obligation; but even supposing we have not, we somehow have to reciprocate, but if we have to, then why is it a gift? It is an exchange in some form or other. Can we really call it a gift, in that sense? Is there such a thing as a gift, anyway? Before my departure for Los Angeles, my mother gave me two gifts that serve to suggest a different, and perhaps, an alternative idea of gift. One of the gifts that my mother gave me was a little clay cup that I used to drink milk from, when I was a baby. The little clay cup is a relic of my childhood. It is dependent not only on milk, but nourishment, sustenance, nostalgia and memory. Symbolically, the clay cup is also the womb and the umbilical cord that ties me to my mother. The clay cup is also made from the same earth in which my placenta might have been buried. There is this link to the earth, and that link is through my mother. The gift that my mother gave me does not presuppose anything in return. It is an incredible gift of love, where one does not expect reciprocity. It is an infinite gift. The second gift that my mother gave me is a photograph. In the photograph Emperor Haile Selassie First of Ethiopia is standing and listening in his regal majesty. The image is informal and unstaged. The emperor is standing next to my shoulder. I am sitting at the typewriter. I am about to show the emperor how I can put words on a page. Everything is in this photograph. In a way I was being prepared not only as a typist, I was also engaged in becoming a type - a type of person. The typewriter speaks volumes. It associates the emperor with an icon of modernisation. It also equates the authority of the emperor with that of writing. Writing is also what I do in my professional life. The picture can also be read as a father-son relationship, sharing the same national and cultural context. Surely, it is a photograph that is seemingly very clear and very direct, yet on closer inspection one might ask, Vhy is there so much awe and reverence written all over the face of the young boy at the typewriter?' The irony of this image, however, is that a merefiveyears after this photo was taken, as a university student, and a student leader of the only university at that time (1960-1), I led a students' rally against the emperor's government in support of an attempted coup, which subsequently failed. Although the emperor was in favour of technological progress, he was also keenly aware that political change has to come from within, and be adapted to what was already within. He represented both tradition and change. Whereas, we, the students, imbued with Western intellectual traditions, were looking outwards towards Europe and America for inspiration and models for a revolutionary change. It is in fact partly due to my involvement in the attempted coup d'etat at that time that I began my academic exile in America. This in a way partially accounts for my long absence

from family and country that I alluded to earlier. This then becomes an image, not only of the past but a memory-image I have carried on, and also displaced. From my current position, the photograph reinforces the idea that it is both past and other. It is also, of course, not other and not past, because although it might be a past represented, it is a present image - of the time frame, of identity frame and of national frame, all rolled into one. In a way, the image disintegrates as a hierarchy, because it is only a past representation re-presented in a new context, in which the power in the frame is no longer there. Yet, it is still viable, it is still there, but it is being rewritten and reread in terms of its displacement. It is both there and not there, valid and not valid simultaneously, so it makes me very much cognisant of a past identity, but at the same time, of how it cannot stay fixed and it cannot stay intrinsic to whom I am. It is the epitome of the crossing-over of this fluidity that I wanted to capture, but these are also the things that are the most impossible to capture.

THE DECOLONISATION OF THE MIND

101

My mother's two gifts, the little clay cup and the photograph, are intolerable gifts. Though they were forgotten, static and frozen images in my memory, through her giving they became an intolerable gift. This notion of an intolerable gift suggests something that is overcoming, and needs to be overcome simultaneously. I am attempting to make the gifts meaningful and endurable by remaking them, retransforming them, as a more fluid memory beyond representation.

Phase IV In any image there is always a picture of difference. Every image is a mask, it conceals another image. Any single image is in fact a compendium of several images which prepare a way of how each individual image is seen and read. Let us read the image one more time. No matter what, images keep coming back always as residues and excesses. The little clay cup, which is behind the photograph, is outside of the image-frame, and yet it keeps sneaking back to the frame of the photograph, in a disguised form, and in an invisible way. The little clay cup acts as the mechanism to animate the photograph to come alive. We might go so far as to suggest that what is in fact missing in the photograph is actually contained in the cup and vice versa. It is the cup, however, that captures and completes the picture. The little clay cup, metaphorically, serves as a lens, or as a beacon, through which the photograph is understood. As a kind of lens, the cup sheds light on the photograph in order to cause it to have a kind of movement, and it also takes the stillness of the photograph and energises it, it makes it move and gives it a sense of narrative development. His Imperial Majesty is the authority in the image. The patriarchal impetus in the image is basically the emperor. He represents the institutions of the nation-state, which comes from the idea of a nation, which is missing in the photograph. What is happening in the picture is the transformation of the nation into the nation-state. Part of the photograph is, therefore, a commentary on the nation which is invisible in the image, because it is my mother who is not in the picture. That is partially what is happening in the picture. In many narratives of nations, it is the women who are symbolically the nation, the bearer of tradition and culture, and the repositories of social and historical memories and its spiritual energy. The nation is the people. What is missing, and needs restoration in the picture, is the * invisible woman', who in being the outsider, has always remained the African insider. As they say, 'she is the unsung who makes the song'. There are all sorts of ironies here. One irony is that I went to Africa with the intention of making a Western film of the non-West but, instead of making that film, I received a different narrative, a different story that took the form of a gift. I was soon to discover that my mother has been shooting and editing a film all along. So that just as I was about to leave for America, my mother said, 'Oh, here!' and she gave me a film. She did not call it film. Yet, it was a film that was far better than any film I could have made. Even if I had in fact shot a film, a good film, and given it to her, it would never have come close to the film that took my mother more than 32 years to make. If it was purely a Western film, she would have given me only the photograph. But, little did I know that my mother has been living modernity in the traditional way, so she combined the two gifts so that they resonate to create something that was more than the sum of its parts; something that goes beyond the categories of modern and traditional, Western and African. This gift was intolerable because it cannot be reduced to the terms of such categories,

102

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

because it comes out of the lived experience of African women. It is intolerable because it can never be fixed in a particular photographic or cinematic representation, because it cannot be made a matter of material exchange. It is an intolerable gift because it creates a sense of having been given something which can never be returned. The intolerable nature of the gift is that the gift itself creates a debt which can never be repaid. The representation of Africa is a gift of women. It is women who gave Africa the gift of their shared experiences: stories, musings, memories, and yes, cinema also. It is this gift that has often been forgotten, as I myself forgot it, thinking that I could stand outside it, recording and analysing it from a critical distance. If we acknowledge the gift, will it be less of a gift? Not really. Because, the gift is just like an heirloom - it is to be forwarded, to be passed on to the next generation. The gift is not a state of being; it is continually enacted, lived, performed. In the gifts that my mother gave me, and that I am passing on to you, there is something that can be represented and something that cannot be represented. The photo can be materially represented, but the experiential charge of the cup, that part of my story and my mother's story, must remain amorphous, shifting as it is given from one person to another. Africa, as an idea, is a flexible code, where we are all invited to navigate and narrate our own journeys, as we go along. Finally, you also must find in your own journeys, the pathways to your stories, and to your hushed memories that come from the conjunction between your indomitable image and the little cup.

RESPONDENTS Nouri Bouzid Teshome Gabriel points out (see pp. 97-102) that cinema or script and memory or remembrance function in the same way. That is to say it is a magic that very few scriptwriters in the world possess; the ability to transform a long-lived experience in a very short space of time and send it back again into an even longer-lived experience. It is this magic at work here in Teshome's marvellous news. This reminds me of a little story I'd like to tell you; it's a true story although it's not mine. It is from history with a capital H and it is the story of Tunisia. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a great chronicler called Ahmed Ibn Abi Dhiaf who was Ahmed Bey's chronicler. He was on his first visit to France in the nineteenth century. Since the eighteenth century, the West, especially France, had been infatuated with all that was (Middle Eastern) Oriental. That infatuation led to the Orientalist movement which fantasised about the Orient and discovered things that had never been seen before in the West. Here too representation overtook reality, Westerners saw harems that nobody could see; harems they had imagined and about which they fantasised. This infatuation with the Orient led to invitations to Turkish emperors, ambassadors and other eminent Oriental figures to visit the West. The Bey, accompanied by Ahmed the chronicler as courtesan, was sent by the King to see a play. Here I quote the chronicler, who said', 'They sent us to be amongst people they had chosen as the most eloquent of the population, the most intelligent, the handsomest, the best dressed who allowed themselves to say bad things about their Kings, and . . . ' h e added, * ... at the same time clapping their hands to express their appreciation and pleasure'. It was a play that mocked another king and no-one in the Tunisian delegation understood that it was theatre. This showed us something incredible about our culture, which is that representation did not exist at home; it came with colonisation. All representation is forbidden by Islam because representation is the work of God. That is why the camera, which I love and which I chose as my form of expression, is an intolerable gift; I'd call it a poisoned gift, the virus of the image, the virus of representation is so strong that it is irresistible. In Muslim culture there are many texts which forbid representation but I will mention just one of the Prophet's sayings because it interests me for its certain play on words. The Prophet said that if you commit a sin, do it in secret, or to use his exact words: 'Hide yourself behind a curtain'. For centuries the curtains have remained drawn, and the same word for curtain was also Hijab. Thus representation is heresy: the camera is an instrument of exposure, which hides nothing, rather it shows everything: and the camera came with colonisation. So what does 'decolonise the mind' mean for us? Suppress the image? Suppress representation? That too can be a poisoned gift. What is to be done? Many people would like to return to non-representation. What will become of us with no image? We would become voyeurs incapable of seeing images of ourselves, only those of others because we cannot stop them reaching us; they come by satellite in spite of us. Thus for me the question is out of date and dangerous. There is that which comes from ideology, that which comes from the cultural and that which comes from the

104

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

evolution of human thought. Everything that comes from the evolution of human thought and science cannot be stopped, we have no right to stop the development of human thought; whether it comes from the West, the coloniser or from us. But any idea which is regressive, even if it comes from us, scares me and could kill me. I will oppose fundamentalist ideas even if they are the most anti-colonialist in the world, I will oppose them. For example, look at what has happened in Algeria; Algerian independence brought a political, cultural and economic experience. For 30 years, they made cinema of national struggle and a cinema (apart from a few exceptions) that was in my opinion more colonial than the colonisers, more mummified, more degrading and reductive. I believe that we must stop talking in terms of decolonising the mind because it is a phrase which spreads fear while at the same time it uses the progressive concept of decolonisation. That is why it is a trap. We shouldn't use words that frighten people, and stop them from opposing such ideas, as fundamentalists do, because they don't want to be seen as pro-colonisation. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. We need it. Keep the good stuff. I want the camera, I can do without images from the West and make my own.

Mariama Hima Teshome Gabriel (see pp. 97-102) gives us an image of African women, not just in film, but through the whole journey he takes to describe his mother, with her role in his intellectual, social and cultural development. That said, I could talk about African cinema in the African context by talking about the woman filmmaker in African cinema. There is an anecdote from home which says we must never reject a gift; a gift is a gift, it must be valued and used well. In consequence, this gift of cinema is beneficial for a continent which has always had a strong oral tradition. The gift of cinema has given us the possibility of putting ourselves in the picture, seeing ourselves in these images. The experience of cinema can contribute to our culture, our daily lives without resorting to so-called 'ethnographic' or 'primitive' cinema. Let us return for a moment to the question of decolonisation. I don't believe we are 'decolonised', because, in our experience, in our daily lives, everything still has to do with colonisation. Take, for example, the pressing case of the invasion of images currently seen on our televisions. This is also a form of colonisation. I am not a historian, I experience 'colonisation' as it is commonly understood. As a woman, I would say I have experienced colonisation at two levels: the colonisation of African countries by Europeans which concerns us all; and the masculine colonisation in relation to women. I won't dwell on the religious aspects because I am, after all, from a Muslim country where certain constraints are placed on women, from which they can never completely escape. However, I can talk about gender colonisation in relation to my own experience when I wanted to work in the field of cinema. I think that there is a reconversion of our mentality to be done in relation to African thought. My concern is with the active role, rather than the romantic role, of the African woman in film. When I started to make films I began working with Jean Rouch and Serge Moiti who came to Niger. Rouch came to make ethnographic films and Moiti to 'amuse' himself with film while in Niger to do his French military service. With a group of youths we created a Cinedub in Niger in the years 1963-5, where we tried to understand cinematic language in relation to and through films from Hollywood and old French films because at that time there were no African films we could discuss. In the group of 20,1 was the only

THE DECOLONISATION OF THE MIND

105

girl. From the beginning my presence was unusual in the group of young men. I managed to impose myself because I wanted to learn something about film. Little by little I initiated myself in the field by translating Jean Rouch's films and by editing some of his films and through this participation I tried to touch all aspects of cinema. I then went to France to study - again unusual - to study musicology, which didn't exist in Africa at that time, and when I arrived I wanted to continue with my passion for cinema. But which cinema? There was no school in France at that time which talked about African cinema. Finally I ended up enrolling at the University of Nanterre where I had to produce, like all students (including my colleague Idrissa Ouedraogo), along with a thesis, a practical project - a short film in our case, as we wanted to become filmmakers. I chose directing. So I went back to Niger to ask the television station for equipment and technicians to make a film. The TV offical looked at me and said: 'To make afilm!Are you sure, or are we to make a film about you?' I said: 'No, I want to make a film.' He said that would not be possible, but I insisted. He called in his assistant and told him: 'Listen, what they say about Mariama turns out to be true because she has gone completely mad'. That thinking revealed the state of mind of the masculine world. In this masculine world there was a monopoly of cinema; because, up until I had the desire to make films in Niger, women didn't touch cameras or have anything to do with the technical side of filmmaking in our country. So, the thought of my directing a film became almost a national issue. It was talked about everywhere and some suggested I should become an actress. But I persevered and when my first film came out they no longer asked whether or not I was capable of making films, or whether I had the capacity to direct a film or whether I should be in front of the camera instead of behind it. When the film won a prize, the reaction of the men in my country was, she didn't direct the film, she must have been the girlfriend of the director as it isn't possible for a woman to make a film. I wanted to make a film that was not about women and this was unimaginable to men in my country. Why is a woman making a film that isn't about women? When I chose my subject, even the actors with whom I had to work made my life so difficult that I wasn't even able to shoot the first scenes. It was in a market and imagine if you will, I had chosen to start filming on a Friday; the holiest day of the week in a Muslim country, a lone woman coming alone to film men! I cannot even attempt to put into words the attitude of the men towards what I was doing. Finally they chose to treat me as a joke. Nevertheless I completed the film and travelled to France to present it to my teachers at Nanterre, some of whom didn't think it was possible for me to have achieved this as an African woman. I graduated and made my second film. I was invited as a filmmaker to the Cannes film festival. I met a European friend, who seeing me in Cannes for the first time could not believe that I was there as a filmmaker with films, albeit documentaries and research films, that I could make images. He remained dubious. The conditions are such that an African woman has a mammoth struggle to free herself, or blossom in the domain of cinema. We confer upon her a certain constraining role and that is why I talk to you in terms of a double colonisation.

Chapter 5 What is the Link between Chosen Genres and Developed Ideologies in African Cinema? INTRODUCTION Imruh Bakari

As implied and acknowledged, the title suggests the consideration of some system or theory for classifying African films. This raises issues concerning the characteristics of African cinema itself and the relationship between the filmmakers, the films and their audience(s). Film criticism as an area of study has developed around notions of 'genre' and the way in which this helped to define and distinguish the classical films of Hollywood studios from and in relation to others. A central consideration in the development of the various approaches to genre has been the recognition of cinema as a social institution. It is one determined by the industrial organisation of Hollywood itself which binds studio structure to film to audience into a complex ideological process. In contrast to the industrial characteristics of Hollywood or other 'national' cinemas, African cinema is characterised by the work of a number of individual directors from various countries across the continent. Ferid Boughedir has referred to it as an 'artisanaT cinema. It can also be referred to as an 'auteur' cinema. This term could be used to stress what it is not, rather than what it is, that is, a cinema defined by films which reflect the individual vision of filmmakers. These films are made outside of any industrial context, without much or any 'national' finance, and in many cases with the filmmaker of necessity, fulfilling a multiplicity of roles. Given the primacy and the apparent autonomy of the filmmaker in the production of African films, the notion of 'genre' as developed in film criticism is indeed problematised. This session, therefore, was designed as an opportunity to interrogate these contradictions, and to possibly provide a basis for new approaches which would be adequate for a critical approach to the diversity of films which differentiate African cinema. Approaches to classifying and evaluating African films have been suggested in the past. Ferid Boughedir provided one of the earliest proposals formulated around six 'tendencies of African cinema'. 1 Boughedir outlined the political tendency, the moralist tendency, the commercial tendency, the cultural tendency, 'self-expression' tendency and the 'narcissistic intellectual' tendency as 'the principal tendencies in African cinema'. He has also indicated instances in which films defied these categories; ToukiBouki (1973) and the films of Souleymane Cisse\ for example. However tentative and ambiguous, these categories can best be regarded as an indication of ideas in development during the 1970s. Manthia Diawara, from the vantage point of the 1980s, proposes to categorise films according to the 'modes of representation' employed across various narratives. Diawara suggests three categories: Social Realist narratives, Colonial Confrontation narratives, and

CHOSEN GENRES AND DEVELOPED IDEOLOGIES

107

the Return to the Source narratives.2 Each of these is referred to as a 'movement', indicating some relationship between the representational strategies and moments within the historical development of African cinema. Both of these approaches are indeed useful, but schematic. Further discussions on the issues of 'genre' and 'ideology' in African cinema have developed around the idea of the 'oral tradition' and the institutional role of the 'griot' or 'storyteller' in African society. Diawara, among others, has regarded the African filmmaker as a modern griot in contrast to the traditional role. As Diawara says, 'African filmmakers distinguish themselves from traditional raconteurs by being futurist. Where the griot's narrative is concerned with disorder and the restoration of traditional order, the filmmaker wants to transcend the established order and create a new one'. 3 This notion of the griot locates the African filmmaker in a critical relationship with African society - one which alludes to the theory and practice of Third Cinema, and equally, one which is problematised by the contexts and the conditions within which the filmmakers function. The history of African cinema, as opposed to the African experience of cinema, coincides with the postcolonial era, particularly that post-1945 period marked by the independence of Ghana in 1957, the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963, and the rise of nation-states and liberation struggles across the continent to the present. This cinema has always been regarded as being part of the process of decolonisation and pan-African solidarity. Central to this idea has been the notion of making films for an African audience. This has been a principal motivation for African filmmakers. Taking into account the context and conditions which characterise African cinema as defined by the issues of film finance, distribution, exhibition, censorship and criticism, the position and the role of the 'audience' becomes a contentious one. There is also a body of opinion which recognises that, where it matters, the discourse around African cinema has been developed primarily outside of the continent itself and has been influenced by Africa's position in the global economies, including the cultural. The debate around the issue of 'genres' and 'ideologies' in African cinema revealed this as a major contradiction. On one level it highlighted the inadequacy of established notions within Euro-American film criticism for reconciling the challenge of African cinema. It also brought into focus some of the ways in which the structured relationships defined by the contexts and conditions of African cinema have constructed a laissez-faire environment which is inhibiting the development of a desired African cinema culture, something alluded to by Haile Gerima in the past by the term 'triangular cinema' where 'complementary critical and analytical cultural interaction links the artist/filmmaker, the audience/community and the activist/critic'.4 As part of a wider debate, therefore, let's focus here on that critical area of the cinematic institution, the axis where the processes of production and reception meet. It is here that the notion of 'genre' gains significance and the 'ideologies' become apparent. Ferid Boughedir continues to develop his seminal ideas. Importantly, he takes a critical stance in relation to the ideological perceptions which impact upon African cinema and its structured relationship with Europe. Here Boughedir is acknowledging the important historical relationship between the development of African cinema and France in the first instance, particularly by way of finance from the Bureau du Cinema. This and other similar initiatives, it is suggested, have both an enabling and a censorship role. In the first instance this source of finance has facilitated the production of films by African filmmakers, as well as access to international audiences through festivals, and more recently television.

108

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Censorship is discussed in terms of its wider relevance, beyond the arbitrary actions of individual African governments. Here Boughedir proposes for critical consideration of the actions of both financial agencies and film critics outside of Africa which often mediate between African films and their potential audiences. Ella Shohat (see pp. 123-6) offers another perspective which problematises the notion of an African cinema in terms of the changing discourse around African society itself. The main theme is that of a complexity indicative of the new reality of 'multinationalisation and globalisation' which demands a 'postmodern' approach to the questions of genre and ideology. Shohat cites Gerima's Sankofa and Bekolo's Quartier Mozart as 1990s' films which implicate concepts like those of the 'nation-state' and 'modernisation' which have influenced approaches to African filmmaking. These contemporary films, and others which in the past might have resisted categorisation, recognise and respond to an Africa of complex heterogeneous societies; and indeed require new critical approaches. Both Idrissa Ouedraogo (see p. 122) and Haile Gerima (see pp. 127-32) raise issues which highlight the contexts and conditions within which African cinema exists. Ouedraogo passionately makes a plea for the filmmaker's realities to be taken into consideration as a factor which often determines possible available options. These in turn would impact upon the films and their potential to reach audiences and achieve critical attention. Gerima, in taking up these issues, addresses the way in which Africa's structured global position inhibits the work of filmmakers and the development of African cinema. The African filmmaker is referred to as being part of a 'tribe', a kind of artistic/intellectual class, under siege from unsympathetic forces within the spheres of politics, finance and film criticism. These sentiments bring into focus the primary contradiction revealed by the panel's topic, that is, the lack of recognition and participation of the African audience and its perceptions in the critical debates on African cinema. What seemed to be expressed here is the anguish of a displaced cinema, and the need for efforts to reconcile the diverse and diasporic interest which constitutes modern African society. Interestingly there was reference made here to the developments in Ghana in the area of video where a new popular indigenous 'genre' cinema is taking shape. As in other instances like the Yoruba 'theatre on the screen' films, these productions in the main disregard cinematic value and instead aim for cultural recognition and popular appeal. In terms of the question of genre and ideology, significantly the Yoruba films of Ola Balogun should be considered here: Aajani Ogun (1975); Aiye (1979); Ija Ominira (1977); Orun Moru (1982). These films collectively emphasise the predicament of the displacement of African cinema. It is in this light that the significance of the apparent conflict of interest between African filmmakers and others like critics can be considered.

AFRICAN CINEMA AND IDEOLOGY: TENDENCIES AND EVOLUTION Ferid Boughedir

The Shock of the Old and the New In Africa the cinemas were born and continue to see the light of day during a period when African nations are undergoing intense social and cultural changes as a consequence of the political and economic upheavals which are shaking the continent. African films are all heirs of that period. The filmmakers are living through these changes to such a point that they have made the tension of the old and the new the almost unique subject of their films: a unique subject, but one which can be approached in many ways. This approach varies according to the film, being related to the degree of political consciousness of the director, the stage of cultural formation he is passing through or sometimes also deliberate choices: historical films like Ceddo (1976) by Ousmane Sembene (Senegal), Sejnane (1974) by Abdelatif Ben Ammar (Tunisia) or Rancon d'une alliance (1973) by Sebastien Kamba (Congo) are at the same time witnesses of present times. In the same way, in spite of their commercial ambitions, innocent comedies such as Pousse-pousse (1975) or Notre fille (1980) by Daniel Kamwa (Cameroon) question us about the clash between the old and the new. This confrontation (sometimes expressed under the very ambiguous phrase of tradition versus modernity') is at the heart of the themes of the cinemas in Africa. Conflicts Four conflicts between the old and the new are often found: the conflict between town and village; Westernised woman against a woman respecting the traditions; modern versus traditional medicine; traditional art bearing a cultural identity and art which has become a commodity and an object for consumption. The first important film shot in Africa, the short film Borom Sarret (1963) by Ousmane Sembene, clearly reveals the maintenance of the segregational aspect of the large African towns, now divided into towns for the rich and towns for the poor. Following this, a large number offilmswere to take as their general theme the journey from the village to the town where one loses one's soul and sometimes one's life; the village representing tradition and the town Westernisation and the physical journey symbolising the spiritual journey. This journey is almost always condemned by the authors who invariably advocate the return of the hero to the village, that is to say, to his cultural roots. In contrast to the films which touch on education in order to criticise its traditional aspect - such as Cinq jours d'une vie (1973), a medium-length film by Souleymane Cisse from Mali, or N'Diangane (1975) by Mahama Traore (Senegal) - and which seem to advocate more modern teaching, we find Tiyabu-biru (1978) by Moussa Bathily (Senegal) who at the end of his film considers Western-style education to be a loss of identity.

110

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Several also mention the return to animism or para-religious phenomena on the part of the elite such as Xala (1974) by Ousmane Sembene, Identite (1972) by Pierre-Marie Dong (Gabon) and Le Nouveau Venu (1979) by Richard de Medeiros (Benin); the first by criticising it and the others by giving it their approval. African magic was reinstated in films such as La Chapelle (1980) by the Congolese Jean-Michel Tchissoukou, Comedie exotique (1984) by Kitia Toure" from the Ivory Coast and of course Finye (The Wind, 1982) or Yeelen (The Light, 1987) by the already famous Souleymane Cisse; or Ta-Dona (1991) by his compatriot Adama Drabo; not forgetting Le Medecin de Gafire (1983) by the Nigero-Malian Moustafa Diop or Sarraounia (1987) by the Mauritanian Med Hondo. It is the attitude each director chooses when confronted by the various movements that perturb his society which enables us to discern the main themes African films turn to nowadays. Some Themes amongst so Many Others ... We must first of all quote here, as a matter of interest, the excellent classification of a few of the major themes of African cinema drawn up by the French critic Guy Hennebelle, who was the first to prepare the ground of this little-known cinema,5 and which we illustrate by these more recent films. THE STRUGGLE AGAINST COLONIALISM

The films which glorify the struggle against colonialism in the past and today's struggle of the freedom movements. Examples: Emitai (1972), Camp Thiaroye (1988) and Samory (forthcoming) by Ousmane Sembene (Senegal) or Sarraounia by Med Hondo (Mauritania), Chronique des annees de braise (1975) by Lakhdar Hamina (Algeria), Mortu Nega (1988) by Flora Gomez (Guinea-Bissau) and very many Mozambique and Angolan documentaries. THE CHILDHOOD SICKNESSES OF INDEPENDENCE

The films about former fighters or African intellectuals traumatised by their encounter with the West. Examples: Sarzan (1963) by Momar Thiam (Senegal), Identite by Pierre-Marie Dong (Gabon), and in the Maghreb Une si simple histoire (1970) by Abdelatif Ben Amar (Tunisia) and Heritage Africa (1988) by Kwah Ansah, Ghana. DISILLUSIONS

The films which criticise the new middle classes which appeared after independence. Examples: Xala by Ousmane Sembene (Senegal), Accident (1972) by Benoit Ramampy (Madagascar), Den muso (1975), Baara (1978) and Finye by Souleymane Ciss£ (Mali), Mortu Nega by Flora Gomez (Guinea-Bissau) and Allah Tantou (1989) by David Achkar (Guinea). THE RURAL EXODUS

Others looked into the rural exodus which became a tidal wave after independence: Le Bracelet de bronze (1974) by Tidiane Aw (Senegal), Paweogo (1982) by Sanou Kollo (Burkina Faso). We could also mention the films on the new 'slave trade' which has often been the lot of African workers emigrating to Europe. Examples: Soleil O (1970) and Bicotsnegresy vos voisins (1973) by Med Hondo (Mauritania), Nationality immigre (1972) and Safrana (1978) by Sidney Sokhona (Mauritania), Paris, c'estjoli (1974) by Inoussa Ousseini (Niger).

CHOSEN GENRES AND DEVELOPED IDEOLOGIES

111

THE CONDITIONS OF AFRICAN WOMEN

The films which describe the unjust conditions suffered by African women (being forced into marriage, the dowry system) and calling for their freedom. Examples: Muna

Moto

(1974) and Le Prix de la liberie (1978) by Dikongue-Pipa (Cameroon), Le Destin (1976) by Sega Coulibaly (Mali), Finzan (1990) by Cheick Oumar Sissoko (Mali).

Classicism versus Innovatory Forms The clash between the old and the new is also to be found at the level of the formal style chosen by the film director. The real problem of form challenging African directors goes to the extent of requiring a choice between two extreme possibilities: the adoption of the style of Western action films or the immediate invention of a new cinematographic language (which, however, carries the risk of not being immediately understood). Without discrediting the merits of those who seek and sometimes find a new language, the majority of African filmmakers seem to have opted for a middle way, their main concern being the understanding of the story by the African viewer. Nevertheless, this achievement in itself does not seem to resolve the problem.

What Language Shall I Use in My Film? One of the major problems remains that of the language used in the film. While the countries in the north of Africa possess a predominant language - Arabic - and certain countries to the south of the Sahara Wolof, Twi or Swahili, many others do not have a principal language. Let us think of a country like Gabon which, for a population of less than a million, has almost 40 ethnic groups speaking 40 different dialects! Two schools of filmmakers are therefore in opposition in this field: those who claim that an African film can only be authentic if it uses a local language and those who, discouraged by the many national dialects (or more simply dreaming of a career in the West) opt for French or English, which they consider to be 'unifying' languages. The dilemma has still not been resolved: must African country folk speak to one another in the refined French of the Sorbonne or the English of Cambridge (which is not at all plausible), or must the financial or other risk be run of producing a film accessible to a single ethnic group? Subtitling does not seem to offer a solution for a continent where the majority of the population are illiterate. A first improvement, while awaiting the economic means which would enable dubbing to be practised could consist of installing double-headed projectors in Africa which would take 'twin track' films (the same image being accompanied, according to the country, by different language soundtracks). At the present time one of the solutions would be recourse to a film language which is as 'visual' as possible; that is to say, in which words are not entirely necessary for the general understanding of the story. So it can be seen that all the problems of expression which are posed for African cinema must be resolved individually by the directors. In filmmaking, which is still at the individual craftsman's stage, every economic cloud has a silver lining: the producers have not yet started to demand commercial profitability, rather they still give film authors and directors the final word (the large majority of African film directors are in fact the authors of the scripts).

Five Trends and Two 'Cases' It is therefore according to the directors, according to their choice of themes and aesthetic qualities, that similar paths come together, that prevailing trends become apparent

112

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

(because no film can be reduced to a single dimension). We have picked out five, it being understood that a narrower subdivision might make substantial differences appear between the authors. The Political (or Socio-political) Tendency In this trend, the filmmaker analyses reality through social, economic and political criteria. The clash of the old and new is explained in terms of a confrontation between social classes with antagonistic interests, in terms of national or foreign powers, in terms of economic choice, in terms of dependence and independence, in terms of a struggle to change the authorities and institutions from which the situation criticised ensues. The main effect sought is for the viewer to become aware of the structures which condition and encourage him to demand change and improvement in his condition. This prevailing trend is found in the majority of Ousmane Sembene's films from Borom Sarret to Camp Thiaroye (1988); also infilmsby Med Hondo from Soleil O to Sarraounia\ in Garga M'bosse (1974) and ReouTakh (1971) by Mahama Traore; in Vaccident hy the Madagascan Benoit Ramampy and more recently in Desebagato (Le Dernier Salaire, 1986) and in Jours de tourmentes (1985) by the Burkinabe directors Emmanuel Sanon and Paul Zoumbara; in Zan Boko (1988) by their compatriot Gaston Kabore or Ironu (1985) by the Benin director Francois Okioh; or yet again in Nyamanton (The Garbage Boys, 1986) and Finzan by the Malian Cheick Oumar Sissoko which succeeded in reconciling comedy with social witness and political commitment. One of the rare films in which the economic analysis dominates, Lettre paysanne (1975) by the Senegalese Safi Faye, which shows poor country folk obliged by their government to cultivate peanuts for export to the former mother country rather than the millet which they would prefer to cultivate for their own consumption, is still banned in Senegal. A dozen censorship cuts were also made in Sembene's Xala which criticised in no uncertain terms the link between the business sector and the authorities. The Moralist or Moralising Tendency Contrary to the directors of the aforementioned trend, these seem to think that it is not institutions but man who must mend his ways. The clash between old and new is placed on the level of moral choice. These filmmakers seem to think that it is sufficient to change one's behaviour to improve things; supposing that the individual has free choice between 'good' and 'evil', without taking into account his political and economic conditioning. The world is thus divided by these directors into two paths, good and bad: the first in general being represented by tradition and the second by 'Westernisation'. In these films there are

no distinct social classes, no economic interests or political powers in the game but merely a dichotomous vision of the world: a split between 'tradition' and 'modernity'. In general the hero of these films can't make his mind up between two women - a villager and a city girl, the first representing tradition and the second Westernisation. His choice of the Westernised woman (of modernity) is translated as the pursuit of money (considered in these films as a true modern demon) which will lead the man to ruin, unless he returns to tradition and finds his soul again. These films, which are not equipped with any means for analysing reality, therefore propose that the traumatic changes of present times should be confronted by taking refuge in tradition, retiring into one's shell - back to the village (almost regarded as the womb if one wants to apply a psychoanalytical approach)! It is to be noted that these films which opt for a conservative choice (as opposed to the progressive choice for a change in society of the previous trend) often take the woman (is it because

CHOSEN GENRES AND DEVELOPED IDEOLOGIES

113

these films are made by men?) as the scapegoat: it is she who, wearing a wig (symbol of falsehood) and European clothes, symbolises alienation to the West and the loss of one's soul - in films such as VEtoile noire (1975) by Djingareye Maiga (Niger), Les Tarns Tarns se sont tus (1972) by Philippe Mory (Gabon) and, more recently, although made more elegantly and with more subtlety, Visages desfemmes (1985) by Desire Ecare (Ivory Coast); or henceforward avoiding over-simplicity as in Paweogo (1982) by Sanou Kollo (Burkina Faso), in the short Gabonese film Le Singe fou (1986) by Henri-Joseph Koumba, the Burkinabe feature film Laada (1991) by Drissa Toure or the Cameroonian feature film Sango Malo (1991) by Bassek Ba Kobhio. The 'Umbilical' Tendency The films of this trend are probably only an exacerbated avatar of the previous trend but their specificity tends to class them apart: they are in general films where the intention of the director is neither to provoke a political change nor recommend a moral attitude but to settle a personal problem - that of an identity crisis in which the director himself takes part. These films are usually made by intellectuals who have resided in Europe for a long time and who are, in their personal search for an identity, in the 'second phase', described by Frantz Fanon in Les Damnes de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth)6 which is that of the colonised intellectual who realises that he has sold his soul to the West and who pathetically tries to effect a 'blind return to his roots' by idolising everything which seems to him to be tied to them - ossified folklore and oppressive or obscurantist practices included! Belonging to this vein are Identite and Obali by Pierre-Marie Dong and Charles Mensah (Gabon), Silence et feu de brousse (1972) and Le Nouveau Venn by Richard de Medeiros (Benin). These very few films which witness a para-religious attitude of forgetfulness of oneself in the 'pure' tradition are in general only a stage in the career of their directors and are perhaps destined to disappear from the range of themes covered by African films. The only difference from the preceding tendencies seems to reside in the attitude of the author: the first wants to politicise his audience; the second wants to preach at it; and the third talks above all to himself rather than addressing his audience, wanting to give priority to resolving a sometimes too 'umbilical' personal problem which doesn't concern the majority of people. The Cultural Tendency Contrary to the preceding trends, this fourth trend does not want to start a discussion on politics or morals, but on culture - a discussion on civilisation. In doing this, it does not choose to idolise tradition blindly but presents at one and the same time its positive and negative aspects, not hesitating to increase the standing of the former or to criticise the latter. So the very beautiful Muna Moto by the Cameroonian Dikongue-Pipa denounces the ancient custom of the dowry and inheritance by linking them to oppression. However, the director recalls the need for a close link with one's ancestors and, through the form he has chosen, increases the standing of corporeal gestures, culture and African daily life in a rural environment. In the same way, Saitane (1972) by Oumarou Ganda (Niger) makes the daily life of his fellow citizens live again from within - not by mystifying it with cliches about tradition as directors of the previous trend do, but with warmth and sympathy while not, however, hesitating to criticise the negative aspects such as the swindles which the marabous practise under cover of religion!

114

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

One finds the same approach in Wend Kuuni (The Gift of God, 1982) or Yam Daabo (The Choice, 1987) by the Burkinabe directors Gaston Kabor£ and Idrissa Ouedraogo respectively or in Djeli (1980) by the Ivorian director Kramo Lancine Fadika which make us literally live in a village by getting the villagers to take part in the film. In the same way, Kodou (1971), the first full-length film by the late Senegalese filmmaker Abacar Samb-Makharam, or Mariamus Wedding (1985) by Nangagoma Ngoge (Tanzania) present us, without making a judgement, with a debate on traditional versus Western medicine; which of them will cure the heroine of the film who has lost her mind? The films come to no conclusion, leaving the field free for reflection, as with all films in this trend which respect viewers and do not impose a single resolution on them. Such was Le Medecin de Gafire by the Nigero-Malian Moustafa Diop; Abacar Samb-Makharam's last film, Jom (1982), goes even further by trying to link, although very didactically, yesterday's culture and today's politics, making a parallel between the heroic past deeds of princes in defending their jom (a Wolof word meaning honour, dignity) and the struggle of today's strikers whose own jom helps them to resist their factory owner's efforts at corruption. Another filmmaker who died too soon, Oumarou Ganda (Niger), in his last film VExile (1980) made the same effort to link the old tradition of the 'said' of the given word (for which one gave one's life!) with the responsibility of politicians in Africa today. Although apparently centred on African spirituality, Yeelen (The Light) by Souleymane Cisse is also rich in echoes of contemporary Africa where the old generation of the founding fathers of the independence struggles do not want to share their power with the rising generations. In the same way in Comedie exotique the Ivorian Kitia Toure uses as his starting point African spirituality to settle his accounts with the false and unequal relationships between Africa and Europe. In Angola, in his first fiction film Nelesita (1983), Ruy Duarte similarly adapts an old fable to the realities of modern times.

The Commercial Tendency As we said previously, every cloud has a silver lining. Because African cinema does not yet have a profitable production structure of national films whose only purpose is financial gain (to the detriment of cultural or social enrichment), purely commercial films are quite rare. Films made with an eye to the market in Africa have more of a moralist message, such as the excellent comedies of the Ivorian Gnoan M'Bala, from Amanie (1972) to Ablakon (1985). In the same way, the Cameroonian films Pousse-pousse and Notre fille by Daniel Kamwa are popular comedies based on the clash of the old and new (which kindly choose to resolve arguments by reconciliations in the shape of a happy ending). The former thus sorts out the problems of dowry and the latter that of the tradition v. Westernisation clash in nice enough final dances, multiplying gags and wry expressions. Fellow Cameroonian Alphonse Beni (Saint Voyou (1982), Anna Makossa (1980), Dance my love (1979)), in a more extreme manner than Jules Takam's VAppat du gain (1979) or Arthur Si Bita's Les Cooperants (1984) which stick to 'political' or 'cultural' concerns, chooses to create films designed for amusement without clouding the issue. A film such as Le Bracelet de bronze by the Senegalese Tidiane Aw, which takes as a pretext the denunciation of the rural exodus and the loss of identity of a peasant arriving from the town, proceeds in a similar fashion by giving prominence to chases, fights and the death of the hero in pure imitation of Western thrillers. The Ivory Coast film VHerbe sauvage

CHOSEN GENRES AND DEVELOPED IDEOLOGIES

115

(1977) by Henri Duparc had no complexes about dealing with the eternal triangle (husband, wife, mistress) from Western cinema before recording a triumph in Africa and Europe with popular African comedies which no longer owe anything to European cinema, such as Balpoussiere (1983) and Le Sixieme Doigt (1990). Must we see in it the famous difference between French colonialism, which was concerned to justify its actions by culture, and British colonialism, solely concerned with business? In any case, English language films are often more 'commercial' than cultural or political. And must we see a proof of this hypothesis in the fact that one of the rare 'cultural' filmmakers from Nigeria, Ola Balogun, is from a French culture and was trained at the IDHEC in Paris? In Nigeria filmmakers such as Sanya Dosumu (Dinner with the Devil (1976)) and Eddie Ugbomah (The Mask (1979), Oil Doom (1981), The Rise and Fall of Dr Oyunesi (1977)), devote themselves above all to directing thrillers of the lowest kind, copies of Italian action and Chinese karate films, A recent vein adapted from the Yoruba theatre will perhaps reconcile the two trends with the film Efusetan Animura (1981) by Bankole Bello, a good and very popular entertainment film which does not copy anything from Western cinema. It was the same in Ghana; after a 'cultural' unfinished effort (No Tears for Ananse (1960) by Sam Aryetey), they turned to musical comedy (Doing Their Thing (1971) by Bernard Odjiba and I Told You So (1970) by Egbert Adjeso), then towards shock melodrama (with Love Brewed in the African Pot (1981) by Kwaw Ansah on the impossible love between a poor man and a girl from a rich family), and finally towards the spectacular panorama on the individual alienations which the colonial system exudes (with Heritage Africa (1980), by Kwaw Ansah, a film whose style and technique are on a par with the best Hollywood super-productions and which was quite rightly the first anglophone African film to win the highest FESPACO prize, l'Etalon de Yennenga).

The Evolution of Themes in the Cinema of Black Africa since 1976: The Two Fetishists or from Modernism Returning to One's Roots We must nevertheless note that a certain evolution has appeared in the themes chosen by African filmmakers: the feature films of the first decade 1966-76 almost all witness a 'modernist' will in relation to African traditions, which one often sees from the angle of retrograde superstitions and which are sometimes held responsible for the historical 'backwardness' of the continent in comparison with the developed nations. Now that the country is independent, the first filmmakers of the 1960s seem to say, 'we must make a clean sweep of this negative heritage and rebuild the nation'. That is why in the majority of the first films out of black Africa the character of the sorcerer or fetishist who claims that he possesses supernatural powers and converses with the gods and their ancestors is always presented as a quack, a swindler who abuses people's faith in order to get money out of them. 'Away with these irrational beliefs', declares the 'positivist' filmmaker, having decided on scientific bases to help his country to catch up with the industrialised world. However, matters were destined to change: the filmmakers, beginning to realise the bad results registered by the systematic ditching of development methods, imported wholeheartedly from abroad - whether these methods are of capitalist or socialist inspiration to adjust their targets. They set out in search of a form of development which will take

116

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

account of the specificities of Africa and its cultural criteria. In order to find these criteria again, more and more filmmakers are returning to the past in order to rediscover yesterday's values which can nourish tomorrow's progress. And these values also include 'magic' or 'irrational' beliefs. Starting with Xala by Ousmane Sembene which is set in present times, the magic powers of the fetishist are real. Sembene's next film, Ceddoy makes a direct leap into the past to extol the values which were current before the invasions of Africa. Sembene's forthcoming film, Samory, will also take place in the past, the same as Sarraounia, a recent film by Med Hondo, (a filmmaker of contemporary themes if ever there was one!) Starting with La Chapelle by the Congolese Jean-Michel Tchissoukou, the sorcererfetishist is no longer a negative character but rather the only guardian of the African cultural heritage who helps his village resist invasions from all directions as the queen-magician with very real supernatural powers will do in Sarraounia. While in Saitane by Oumarou Ganda the swindler-fetishist who called upon the gods when facing towards a sacred tree received no reply other than that of a joker hidden in the tree, ten years later, during a similar scene from Finye (The Wind) by Souleymane Cisse, the gods called on in front of another sacred tree reply and thus prove their existence! This return to African spirituality in Souleymane Cisse's work is to find its peak with his next film Yeelen in which a father, who would not admit that his son had stronger magic powers than he, hounds his son until both of them are wiped out by those magic powers which become the very centre of the film. These 'magical' elements form a wholly natural part of the contemporary subjects by the later arrivals to the filmmaking scene, Adama Drabo (TaDona) or Drissa Toure {Laada)> without conflicting with the realistic aspects of their storylines. On the other hand, the sorcerer in Le Medecin de Gafire by Moustafa Diop (Niger), who has magic powers which are just as real, agrees to transmit his science to a young African doctor freshly returned from Europe. Once the doctor has become complete (he possesses both the African and Western sciences), the sorcerer can die. This last film proves that this 'return to one's roots' which African filmmakers of the 1980s and 1990s engage in has nothing to do with that blind return practised by certain intellectuals who have reached the 'second phase' of which Frantz Fanon speaks and who, in order to reject the West violently, set themselves to idolise all tradition, including that which is no more than ossified folklore. The filmmakers of the 1990s cast a lucid glance at their past and try to do as the hero of Le Medecin de Gafire does - establish a synthesis between the living elements of African tradition and contributions from the West. 'Let's know ourselves before engaging in haste in any political or economic combat', these filmmakers seem to say; and they give priority to their quest for the cultural specificity of Africa in comparison to the priority of political concerns sought by the filmmakers of the previous decade.

Genres in African Cinema and the Ideological Dimension Cinematic genres have always had an implicit ideology. For example, we know that in American cinema, the 'western' (some critics consider it the 'American cinema' par excellence) has always championed individualism against collectivism. One of the classic figures in the western is the solitary hero. Arriving in a town overrun by bandits, he sets about 'cleaning' it up before riding off alone. The 'collective', the group in these films, is always portrayed negatively; forever in the wrong, where the lone hero is in the right, they are quick

CHOSEN GENRES AND DEVELOPED IDEOLOGIES

117

to succumb to fanaticism, demanding the lynching of an innocent victim before the hero steps in to save the day. Cowards, when threatened by the bandits, the group is equally ungrateful once the hero has rid the town of the bad guys: they soon forget his good deeds and he leaves alone. The golden age of the American western came during the 'cold war' period. But even at other times, it hasalways implicitly defended individual success, free enterprise and the entire ideology of tr^e American capitalist system. For its part, African cinema remains an artisanal rather thari an industrial cinema, producing 'auteur' films in place of the genre films that make up tlie purely commercial cinema. For the most part, the 'hero' of these films is not the individual hero but a representative of the collective. It should be possible, nonetheless, to classify these auteur films into more or less recognisable genres. Although they might not fit into the law of'series' characteristic of industrial cinema, some 'genres' are distinguishable by t)ieir regular appearances throughout the short history of African cinema. These genres, then, are: the historicalfilm,the comedy (subdivided into popular and satiric comedy), the melodrama, the love story, and the fantastic genre (including musicals and fables). Historical films like Ousmane Sembene's Emitai, Ceddo and Camp Thiaroye, Med Hondo's SarraouinOy Haile Gerima's Sankofa (1993) and Cheick Oumar Sissoko's Guimba (1995) offer more than simple, beautifully costumed reconstructions of bygone eras. On the whole, they advance a progressive ideology, condemnatory of past abuses, appealing to changes in the present day. In contrast, comedies, even Nigerian and Zairian 'musicals', are predominantly populist, and form part of the 'moralist' trend described above. In these films, it is Man rather than institutions who is at fault. As soon as he strays out of his social rank, he is punished, and brought back time and time again to the village, to the collective and its traditions. The implicit ideology of these comedies, even if they are presented as examples of'African wisdom', is primarily a conservative one; their message: do not be ambitious, do not try to leave your place, do not run after money, women, etc. Into this category are placed some of African cinema's biggest popular successes, including Bal poussiere, Gito VIngrat (Leonce Ngabo, 1991) and even, Quartier Mozart (Jean-Pierre Bekolo,1992) with its moral 'be who you are, do not pretend to be someone you are not'. Satirical comedies, on the other hand, often bear witness to a progressive ideology. Ousmane Sembene's Xala or all Algerian director Mahmoud Zemmouri's films {Les Folks Annees du Twist (1983), De Hollywood a Tamant-asset (1990) etc.) tend to expose and denounce social and political machinations. Melodramas like Godwin Mawuru's Neria (Zimbabwe), Kwaw Ansah's Love Brewed in the African Pot (Ghana), Mamo Cisse's Falato (1989, Mali), and Sou Jacob and J. Oppenheim's Histoire d'Orokia (1987, Burkina Faso) tend to be ideologically conservative. Like the populist comedies, they pit man against fate, emphasising his inability to alter the course of his destiny. Avoiding any explicit condemnation of social and political mechanisms, they assert a kind of resignatory powerlessness, and are much more concerned with soliciting tears and a cathartic sense of compassion. Love stories, are often a variant on the melodrama, and like melodramas will seek to provoke tears and compassion. However, they are frequently more progressive in intent, especially in such cases where traditions are depicted as impeding the path of love. By asserting that over-strict adherence to traditions can often be an obstacle to happiness, films such as Ivorian Fadika Kramo Lancine's Djeli (Ivory Coast), Mamadou Djim Kola's Le Sang

118

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

deParias(1971), Idrissa Ouedraogo's Tilai (1990, Burkina Faso) and Taieb Louhichi's Leyla ma raison (1989, Tunisia) offer an explicitly anti-fundamentalist ideology. In the wake of Yeelen, a new vein, giving an increasingly important place to sorcery and supernatural phenomena, has appeared in African cinema. It can be termed the fantastic genre. In the West, this type of cinema is known to develop during periods of economic crisis, when the loss of a sense of control over events leads to an increase in people's belief in or escape into the realm of the supernatural. Some of the great classics of 1920s' German expressionism - Murnau's Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922), Fritz Lang's Destiny (1921), Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) - were born out of such a period, and the 1970s' world petrol crisis gave rise to William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973) and Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1965). It would appear that a fantastic vein has developed in the Ghana video market: films like Zinabu (1984) and sequels II (1988) and III (1989) by W. Akuffo and the sequel Zinabu IV (1990) by R. Quartey; Socrates Safo and Bismark Nuno's Phobia Girl (1984); and Deliverance (1990) by Sam B. Others treat the subject of sorcery and the supernatural from the non-Western viewpoint of a metaphysical battle between 'good' and 'evil'. French-speaking African films which present magic as a given fact put forward a completely different ideology from Western 'fantastic' films. Much more than a simple escape route from the threatening real, or a nightmarish metaphor for an unliveable economic situation, magic is shown instead as an essential component of African cultural identity and specificity. The African hero encounters it in his initiation quest, and it is this which will enrich his knowledge and wisdom. In this sense magic, in its capacity as component in the African difference, becomes an instrument of revaluation towards an anti-imperialist ideology (the ancestor of this tendency was Moustafa Diop's Le Medecin de Gafire (1983, Niger), a tendency which culminated in Sarraounia and Yeelen). In societies which are from day to day more and more dominated by (through television) Western cultural models, the confirmation of African magic's authenticity as a little-known cultural component to the West becomes a weapon of resistance (as was, before, the sensitive poetic and true description of an African way of life as seen in the films of the 'cultural' tendency). Nevertheless this return to an African spirituality cannot be a weapon of resistance when it is perverted in an exotic, escapist reply to the classifications of Western film festivals, as we will see below. Finally, it is quite startling to note that the African filmmaker, whether unconsciously or consciously as direct descendant of the griot transmitter of tradition, the real 'dominant tendency' which crosses most of the apparent genres, is that of the moralistic fable, descendant of the traditional African tale. So in one of the four African films whose structure is directly inspired by the American western, Samba Traore by the Burkinabe Idrissa Ouedraogo (1992), the individualism of the lone hero, presented as the central figure in the film (so much so that his name is the title of the film), does not lead to happiness but to his downfall. The ideology of the 'western' made in Africa is the complete opposite of the Hollywood model.

1987-1995: When the Distribution Dictates the Ideological Model The year 1987 marked the turn of a page in the history of black African Cinema. 'Arabophone' North Africa had already won honours in the 'Official Competition' at the world's biggest film festival in Cannes (with films by the Algerian Lakhdar Hamina and the

CHOSEN GENRES AND DEVELOPED IDEOLOGIES

119

Egyptian Youssef Chahine). Up until then black Africa always had their films presented in non-competitive parallel sections of this festival, like the 'director's fortnight', Critics Week or 'Uncertain Regard'. In 1987 for the first time a film from black Africa was finally selected for presentation in the official competition. That film was Yeelen (The Light) by Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cisse, whose previous film Finye (The Wind) had been presented in the non-competitive section 'Uncertain Regard'. Finye was a denunciatory socio-political film based on a student revolt against military authorities. But Finye contained a scene that stunned Western critics, of a dialogue between an old 'initiated' man and 'Spirits' living in a sacred tree, a scene which proved the real existence of spirits as we heard them reply to the old man. Many European critics then encouraged Souleymane Cisse to further develop his description of the African spirituality, totally unknown to Westerners. Yeelen came right on time and was a talented reply to this expectation. In a timeless Africa during an initiation quest, the father and son are locked in battle for the father's supernatural powers. An observer making a quick conclusion of the event could say: escapist Africa offering a journey for the European spectator, with no contemporary political reference, merits a place in the official competition, the summit of the selection in the world's biggest festival (Yeelen won the Jury Prize). But contemporary Africa with its political upheavals (some of which are relayed through television news that the Westerners see and so is less escapist), as in Finye, can only be shown under the label 'information' in a non-competitive section. This bold hypothesis is confirmed the following year with doyen Ousmane Sembene's Camp Thiaroye. This eminently 'political' film (it describes the massacre by the French Army of a battalion of African soldiers demanding their pay at the end of World War II) was rejected in France by all the sections of the Cannes Film Festival. However, it won the Jury's Special Prize in Italy at the 1988 Venice Film Festival. From an economic point of view, Yeelen and Camp Thiaroye represent opposite poles of African cinema: Ousmane's film is a successful example of an entirely inter-African southsouth Co-production, which called for neither European capital nor technicians. Co-produced by Senegal, Algeria and Tunisia, all its technical completion was achieved in Tunisia and it was made by an entirely African crew. Yeelen on the other hand would not have seen the light of day without France, which allocated finances (direct aid from the Ministries of Culture and Cooperation), technicians and the entire infrastructure for its technical completion. Yeelen, which shows (with great talent) a timeless, 'mysterious and haunting' Africa (to use terms from reviewers of the time) or, in short, escapism for Europeans, was a brilliant commercial success in France in 1987-8. On the other hand, Camp Thiaroye, which recalled atrocities of the colonial army which the French public would probably rather forget, was never distributed in France, despite its prize from Venice. The next year, 1989, was notable for the release in France of an excellent African comedy, Duparc's Bal poussiere, which was also a great success. Since then the dice have been rolled for African francophone cinema: the French market is ready to celebrate, in its festivals and cinemas, images of Africa as escapist, exotic and humorous, but not the Africa with its political problems, especially when the 'politics' risk making the Western spectator feel guilty. It is this type of misfortune that Med Hondo experienced when Sarraounia (Mauritania) was boycotted on its release by the French distribution network. Sarraounia is about an African queen who resists the French colonial troops and their cortege's exploitation and atrocities committed against the African peoples. The same thing happened with Hondo's film Lumiere noire

120

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

(1995), which shows, among other things, the forced repatriation of African immigrant workers deported by the French authorities. The curse of African cinema is its lack of sufficient distribution in Africa. Its current existence is far too dependent on Europe, both for its finance and for distribution in festivals and broadcast on television. This dependence on Europe (and France in particular for francophone films) has resulted in, whether consciously or not, the filmmakers' modelling their films on the expectations of European and French film festivals and publics. After Yeelen and Balpoussiere the two successes for black African cinema were Ouedraogo's Yaaba and Tilai. Tilai was chosen for selection in the Official Competition at Cannes, and won an even greater prestigious award: Le Grand Prix, second only in importance to the Palme d'Or. Both Yaaba and Tilai, benefiting from an impressive technical mastery, are from a thematic point of view non-political; both take place in a timeless Africa and have as content universal fables. They show, no doubt involuntarily, an Africa that doesn't disturb the West, as the poverty shown provokes an abstract compassion and the well-filmed landscapes an aesthetic emotion which go no further than a simple tourist brochure, while the characters' movements are stylised to the point of being indecipherable. Following Yeelen, numerous African films systematically integrated into their stories scenes where African magic is shown as a working reality. So what started as a return to African spirituality in order to differentiate itself from Western models and affirm an African specificity has become, through some strange perversion in the system, an object of consummation for Western audiences in need of escape. The same goes for other films representing other tendencies which, through a lack of a true African market, seem to turn more and more towards a Western market (even going so far as to take on the appearance of Western films). The Maghreb is in this situation with films like Djafar Damerdji's Errances (1993, Algeria), Ridha Behi and Rachid Ferchiou's Les Hirondelles ne meurent pas a Jerusalem (1995) and Echec etMat (Tunisia). Black African films like Cheikh Doukoure's Blanc d* Ebene (1991) and Le Ballon d'or (1993, Guinea) and Bassek Ba Kobhio's Le Grand Blanc de Lambarene (1995, Cameroon) are all in French, often using French actors, and with huge technical budgets. Mohammed Abderahman Tazi's A la recherche du mari de ma femme (1994, Morocco) goes so far as to submerge itself in an exotic folklore, involuntarily joining forces with what was the archetype of colonial cinema; we laugh at the outmoded customs (polygamy) through a central Arab character 'Punch' going full circle by becoming what African cinema fought against! But this * adoption' by France and Europe of a certain type of African cinema has its limits, which will define little by little the evolution of this cinema. The political vein continues to be ignored: Guelwaar (1992) by Ousmane Sembene, which denounces the international charity' that Africa receives, gained no more than discreet release in France. Sankofa by Haile Gerima which evokes the monstrosity of slavery is not distributed at all. Waati (1995) by Souleymane Cisse was presented at the official competition at Cannes in 1995 to mixed reviews: this vibrant call for the dignity of the African man who gains grace from his education and knowledge, like Yeelen, contains sequences that show the supernatural powers of the heroine. Cisse also displays a 'universalist' philosophy on the creation of man and earth as seen through the prism of Bambara cosmology. But here he introduces the contemporary politics that he had banished from Yeelen by denouncing apartheid in South Africa: this was enough for some European journalists to see in it a schematic vision and to regret the magical timelessness of his earlier film Yeelen.

CHOSEN GENRES AND DEVELOPED IDEOLOGIES

121

Cheick Oumar Sissoko's Guimba (Mali) which won the Grand Prix at FESPACO '95 was refused at Cannes, considered too 'local' and not conforming to entry models! Idrissa Ouedraogo has himself discovered that the glory too quickly attributed to African filmmakers by this system also has its limits that must not be crossed. His Samba Traore, which transposed the rules of an American western to Africa, has had less success in France than his previous films. His next film Le Cri de cceur (1995), filmed in France, was slated by the criticism that Idrissa Ouedraogo had implicitly broken his contract of 'escapism' by putting himself on equal footing with French filmmakers by filming in France and in French besides! The French spectators who for the price of a cinema ticket could save a plane fare yet still experience being abroad, feel robbed when for the same price Le Cri de cceur will only take them to Lyons where they will hear their own language! The French press suddenly finds all the faults in the world with the filmmaker who up until then had been praised. This is how the Western market attempts to shape African cinema which is so reliant on it: by labelling it so its ideology must conform with that of travel agencies, which will take you away for an escapist and guilt-free trip.

RESPONDENTS Idrissa Ouedraogo Much is said about 'postmodernist production'. I don't know what that means. Great films have been made, they are different, we love them, diversities have sprung up. Stop winding people up, saying some are rural, classifying them. Analyse a film for itself if you like! We make films in urgency and often in desperately under-resourced situations! It is hard enough for us to make films and when we do I am sure we are not thinking about classifications. All directors, whoever they are, have the same desire to engender pride in their public and in African people as a whole. Take the case of football; when soccer stars Milla, Weah or Boli play football there is no ideology behind it, but Africa is proud. Let's try to see where our problem lies. Making a film is difficult, not just for us but also for independent filmmakers in Britain, in the US and all over the world. Who says we won't be working together with those countries tomorrow! We don't want to be squashed into categories. We need know-how, because we came late to cinema after colonialisation. We don't have an infrastructure, we have very little experience and a lack of strong administration. With the experience we have gained, we are starting to make more and more demands of our national cinemas. This is what we need to address. Solutions, for example, where people have turned to parts of West Africa today. The various solutions that people are finding around these problems should be part of our discussion, that is what is interesting for us. We want to make films and we don't give a damn about the rest. I don't mean it isn't good to talk, but theoretical categories have nothing to do with me. I would like to talk of shots, images, editing in my films and those of others, things that will help me move forward. I would like to talk about that and strategies for sharing expertise and to think about the resources available to me; and how I will best use those to bring my dreams to my public. The critics have an important role! The Cahiers du cinema encouraged the nouvelle vague in France. Critics and colleagues in the US should encourage us rather than classifying our films as 'rural'. If you are interested in the politics of this situation, do your political duty. If you don't like the films, don't talk about them; if you can't defend them, don't mention them. Don't say we are fighting the same battle, we are together, we eat together and then you push us back by ten years each time you write about our work. Conference organisers must stop setting people against each other and creating unhealthy situations where we don't speak the same language. There are producers at the conference and we would rather discuss exchanges, of productions, this is what interests us, this is what we exist for. You, the critics and theorists, exist in relation to ideas and the books you write. That's OK; it's fine. We, the filmmakers, are not messiahs, otherwise we would have the means to do what we want to do. We have a lot of energy to bring. Don't let's get diverted by classifications, but concentrate on pressing needs.

CHOSEN GENRES AND DEVELOPED IDEOLOGIES

123

Ella Shohat An important aspect of the relationship between ideology and aesthetics in African cinema involves questions of time and history. Ferid Boughedir's presentation calls attention to the issue of spatio- temporality in various ways: the theme of the old versus the new, or tradition versus modernity; post-independence films that lauded the Third-Worldist ideology of progress; the contemporary Eurocentric desire for what Ferid calls a 'timeless Africa'; the very issue of categorising African films according to their relation to the pre-colonial past, as well as the project of periodising African cinema. My response attempts to problematise questions of temporality. First I will sketch the contemporary postcolonial context - or what 1 prefer to call the 'post-Third Worldist' era - in which we try to speak of ideology and aesthetics in African cinema. (I have proposed the term 'post-Third Worldist' elsewhere to point to a move beyond the ideology of Third Worldism. Whereas the ambiguous term 'postcolonial' can imply both a movement beyond anti-colonial nationalist discourse and beyond a specific moment of colonial history, post-Third Worldism, I argue, conveys a more specific designation, that of a movement beyond a certain ideology - Third Worldist nationalism.) Then I will offer a modified framework for transcending the binary notion of old versus new, or tradition versus modernity. In doing so, I will be developing arguments advanced with Robert Stam in our book Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media.7 In an era of'multinationalisation' and 'globalisation', Third Worldist ideology no longer plays the same political role. The early period of Third Worldist euphoria has now given way to the collapse of Communism, the indefinite postponement of the tri-continental revolution and the realisation that the 'Wretched of the Earth' - to use Fanon's words - are not unanimously revolutionary and not necessarily allied to one another, the appearance of an array of Third World despots, and the recognition that international geopolitics and the global economic systems have forced even socialist regimes to be incorporated into transnational capitalism. The term 'Third World' itself is problematic, and by now scholars and artists are hesitant about using it, partially because it flattens heterogeneities, masks contradictions, and elides differences between and within diverse Third World nation-states. Some have argued that Third World theory papers over class oppression in all three worlds, while limiting socialism to the now non-existent second world. North African feminist critics such as Nawal El-Sadawi (Egypt), Fatima Mernissi (Morocco) and Assia Djebar (Algeria), meanwhile, have pointed to the gendered limitations of Third World nationalism. Contemporary cultural practices of 'post-Third Worldist' African cinema intervene at this precise juncture in the history of the Third World. While Third Worldist films such as The Battle ofAlgiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) and Chronique des annees de braises (Lakhdar Hamina, 1975) assumed a sense of coherent national identity to be realised with the expulsion of the colonialists, post-Third Worldist films call attention to the fault lines of gender, class, ethnicity, region, partition, migration, diaspora, religion and spirituality. Post-Third Worldist films, already in such works as Xala (1975) but especially in the 1980s and 1990s, do not reject the idea of the nation; rather they interrogate its repressions and its limits. Within diverse genres, they display certain scepticism towards metanarratives of liberation, but do not necessarily abandon the notion that emancipation is worth fighting for. We cannot speak about one genre in which those ideas and ideologies are articulated; rather as cultural critics we have to speak about polygeneric tendencies.

124

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

The decline of the Third Worldist euphoria, which marked even early gender-conscious films like Sarah Maldoror's Monangambe (Mozambique, 1970) and Sambizanga (Mozambique, 1972), brought with it a rethinking of political, cultural and aesthetic possibilities, as the rhetoric of revolution began to be greeted with a certain scepticism. Films such as Assia Djebar's The Nuba of the Women of Mount Chenoua (France/Algeria, 1978), Sembene's Xala and Atteyat El- Abnoudi's Permissible Dreams (Eygpt, 1983) criticise polygamy and patriarchy; Finzan and Fire Eyes (Soraya Mire, 1994) critique female genital surgeries; films like Allah Tantou (David Achkar, 1991) focus on political repression exercised even by a pan-African hero like Sekou Toure; and Guelwaar (1992) satirises religious division within the Third World nation. Recent video and film works, like Mohammed Chouikh's Youcef(l993) or The Legend of the Seventh Sleeper (Algeria, 1994), and Allouache's Bab El-Oued City (Algeria, 1994), Jean Marie Teno's Afrique, Je teplumerai (1993), Kamal Dehane's documentary Assia Djebar, between Shadow and Sun (France/Algeria, 1994), Ali Akika's documentary Algeria Unveiled (France/Algeria, 1994), Moufida Tlatli's Silences of the Palace (Tunisia, 1994) and Khaled El-Hagar's Little Dreams (Egypt, 1994) break away from the earlier meta-narrative of anti-colonial national liberation. Rather than a unified, homogeneous entity, these films highlight the multiplicity of voices within the complex boundaries of the nation-state. Early anti-colonial films did not ultimately address the two-fronted nature of women's struggle within a nationalistic but still patriarchal revolution. The Battle of Algiers, which ends with an image of an Algerian woman waving the Algerian flag, followed by the title 'The Algerian Nation is Born', has the woman 'carry' the allegory of the 'birth' of the nation. The nationalist representation of courage and unity relies on the image of the revolutionary woman, precisely because her figure might otherwise evoke a weak link, the fact of a fissured revolution in which unity vis-a-vis the coloniser does not preclude contradictions among the colonised. Silences of the Palace, in contrast, exemplifies some of the feminist critiques of the representation of the 'Nation' in the anti-colonial revolutionary films. Rather than privilege direct confrontations with the French, necessarily set in the generic male-dominated spaces of battle, the film presents Tunisian women at the height of the anti-colonial struggle as restricted to the domestic sphere, subjected to hopeless servitude, including sexual servitude. Yet this period of anti-colonial struggle is framed as a recollection narrative of a woman singer, a daughter of one of the female servants, illuminating the continuous pressures exerted on women of her class. The gendered and classed oppression that she had witnessed as an adolescent in colonised Tunisia led her to believe passionately that the 'new' was on the verge of 'being born' in an independent Tunisia, hopes undercut by the postcolonial framing narrative. Her fatherless servant-history, her low status as a singer, haunts her life in the post-independence era. If, in the opening, the words of U m Kulthum's song - 'Amal Hayati' (the hope of my life) relay a desire for a state of dream not to end, Silences of the Palace concludes with an awakening to hopes unfulfilled with the birth of the nation. Birth here is no longer symbolic and allegorical as in The Battle of Algiers, but rather concrete and material, entangled in taboos and devastations, such as rape and abortion. The gender-conscious open-ended narrative destabilises a euphoric closure of the N a t i o n ' . Silences of the Palace represents women who did not plant bombs, as in The Battle of Algiers, but whose social positioning turns into a critique of failed revolutionary hopes, as seen in the post-independence era. In this sense, I agree with Ferid that showing the past is a form of dealing with the present. Situated within a contemporary discourse, films such as Silences of the Palace offer at the same time a transgenerational perspective on national revolution.

CHOSEN GENRES AND DEVELOPED IDEOLOGIES

125

Nationalist discourse, however, has not simply been anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist. Despite their anti-colonial struggles, Third World nation-states have deployed a modernisation discourse, ironically central to Eurocentric vision. Different beginnings, I should note, have been attributed to the epoch of Modernity', from Columbus' so-called voyages of discovery, through the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, to the postWorld War II era of decolonisation. Whereas modernism and postmodernism imply a philosophy and an epistemology, not just an epoch, modernisation has often meant a translation of an ideology into a political programme. The ideology of modernisation, even in the contemporary era, has been crucial for assuring nationalist secular, even scientific notions of the 'Nation'. Modernisation theories thrive on a binarist demarcation opposing twinned concepts - modernity/tradition, underdevelopment/development, science/superstition, technology/backwardness - to create programmes for progress. In this sense, modernisation functions as the liberal bridge between two opposite poles. It often envisions a stagist narrative that can paradoxically speak of an essential superiority of one community over another while also generating programmes to transform the 'inferior* community into modernity. Modernisation discourse has been used on a global transnational scale as well as within nation-states, where even Third World and so-called 'developing nations' grafted it onto local class, ethnic, racial and religious hierarchies. Part and parcel of Eurocentric discourse, modernisation became in certain nation-states crucial for the creation of national cohesiveness. As with the European consumption of a 'timeless Africa', Eurocentric writings also ahistorically project Third World cultural practices as untouched by modernism or postmodernism. As Robert Stam and I suggest in Unthinking Eurocentrism, the 'Third World' in Eurocentric prose always seems to lag behind, not only economically and technologically, but also culturally, condemned to a perpetual game of catch-up in which it can only repeat on another register the history of the so-called 'advanced world'. When the 'First World' reaches the stage of late capitalism and postmodernism, the 'Third World' hobbles along towards modernism and the beginnings of capitalism. A more adequate formulation, we argue, would see time as palimpsestic in all the worlds, with the pre-modern, the modern, the postmodern and the para-modern co-existing at the same time zone within the global system of late capitalism. Although I noticed an aversion towards using the 'postmodern' to describe or understand African cinema (see Chapter 6), there are ways in which the 'postmodern' concept as a refusal of the 'tradition-versus-modernity' paradigm is important. Ferid is right to point out the negative image of magic in those early nationalist films, because the discourse of the Nation as a whole assumed the heroic mission of 'progress'. The resistance to colonialism was often seen within the ideological framework of modernisation and development. Religious and spiritual practices were thus marginalised, reduced to symptomatic signs of pre-modernity. Some recent African and Afro-diasporic films, in contrast, transcend the traditionversus-modernity binarism. Within a somewhat revisionist approach, religion is integrated into the aesthetics of the films and operates as part of a socio-political critique. While moving away from the pre-modern/modern ideological dichotomy and the realist/non-realist genre opposition, films such as the Brazilian Nelson Pereira dos Santos' Ogum (1974) and Amulet (1975), the Cuban Manuel Octavio Gomez's Patakin (1983) the African-American Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Haile Gerima's Sankofa inscribe African religious symbolism and reinforce the complexity of their specific cultural practices.

126

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Alternative aesthetics are often rooted in non-realist, non-Western or para-Western cultural traditions featuring other historical rhythms, other narrative structures, other views of the body, sexuality, spirituality, and the collective life, all part of what Ferid Boughedir calls 'essential cultural components of African identity'. The beginnings of the cinema, as Robert Stam and I argue in Unthinking Eurocentrism> coincided not only with the heights of imperialism; they coincided also with the heights of the veristic project as expressed in the realist novel, 8 in the naturalistic play and in the obsessively mimetic imperial exhibitions. Despite its superficial modernity and technological razzle-dazzle, dominant cinema inherited the mimetic aspirations that had already been relinquished in painting, theatre and literature. And while the 'progressive realism' of anti-colonial films offer an invaluable artistic and political strategy for combating the 'regressive realism' of the colonialist master narrative, a realist (or better, illusionistic) style can also repress contradictory social desires undergirding the formation of the nation. Many recent post-Third Worldist films transcend the realistic-illusionist mode by interweaving diverse avant-garde traditions with popular cultural resources, taking in a sense a postmodernist approach, in which contemporary representations meld multiple sensibilities and experiences of spiritual and collective life. National history in post-Third Worldist cinema no longer entails a teleological narrative that culminates with the erasure of the traces of the West in the East, or of the North in the South. Orality, both in terms of oral stories themselves and in terms of oral methods of storytelling, exemplifies the problematic nature of this 'tradition-versus-modernity' discourse. National modernisation has often reproduced Eurocentric thinking, equating the 'non-literate' with the 'illiterate', valuing literacy over orality. Nationalist literacy campaigns went hand in hand with assigning the prerogative of interpreting history to the literate urban upper-middle classes. Many African films, however, have presented 'bottom up' history conveyed through popular memory, legitimising oral history by 'inscribing' it on screen. History, these films suggest, can also take the oral form of stories, myths, and songs and dances passed on from one generation to the next. Diverse cultural resources, from the archaic magic to the mass-media slick, are melded within the postmodernist approach, where neat divisions between the 'old' and the 'new' have little relevance. Challenging the boundaries separating conventional genres, these post-Third Worldist films reveal the cinematic space as an imaginary where diverse identities and cultures are hybridised. I have tried to emphasise the pitfalls of imposing a linear narrative of cultural 'progress' which inevitably represents 'traditional societies' as mired in an inert pre-literate tradition, living, as it were, 'outside of history'. In the cinema, as I have tried to show, the aesthetic reinvoicing of tradition can also serve purposes of collective agency in the present, where magic and spirituality are integrated into a socio-political critique. Contemporary post-Third Worldist films have moved away from the realities and the discourses of national liberation. But there is also a sense of apprehension about the new age of globalisation, especially with regards to new computerised media technologies. As African filmmakers are winning international awards, the death of cinema has been pronounced. Further discussion of genre and ideology will have to take such new technologies into account, rethinking revised modes of cultural and political interventions.

CHOSEN GENRES AND DEVELOPED IDEOLOGIES

127

Haile Gerima It is probably fair to say that we, the filmmakers, have finally matured. I have been at the festivals in Bombay, Japan, Edinburgh, Carthage and Ouagadougou. The most awful and obscene thing that I saw happening at those places was the 'false' conflicts that emerged among African filmmakers: in other words, conflicts that are not grounded in the reality of African filmmakers' experiences. This resulted in my no longer wanting to participate in these festivals. I do believe African filmmakers, at this historical juncture, are one intellectual tribe struggling against neo-colonial governments, imperialist cultural domination, and all sorts of'so-called' critics. I'm not speaking about all critics and those who are genuine know who they are and will understand that what I have to say does not apply to them. I think in various ways most filmmakers have been consistently talking about this issue, perhaps even obsessively. I must also say to those of us alarmed by the state of African cinema that when this contradiction between the critic and the filmmaker is juxtaposed to the arresting reality of African cinema it becomes obscene and at best oppressive. This contradiction is cancerous, counterproductive and is in opposition to the constructive, critical and creative environment that African filmmakers have been attempting to create. It is a great pleasure that I have begun to know Ola Balogun, Bassek Ba Kobhio, Gaston Kabore and Idrissa Ouedraogo. Their ideas make me their tribe member, their brother. I'm very happy that what I have to say begins with this positive note. I am seeing how African filmmakers are gradually growing in spite of the circumstances and the historical location of the profession that we have chosen, a field that has so many hostilities and obstacles local, national and international. I'm not an old filmmaker, I'm a Sembene soldier. I believe in Sembene and his work showed me the way. I'm one of his cultural offspring using a weapon that we call the camera. I wish he were here to see this, because he's the one who has suffered the most. Many, especially the French, have targeted him for attack, using younger filmmakers. I have personally witnessed him being attacked by these young filmmakers, and I was horrified. I wish he were here to see our growth, how we have begun to actually reposition our thought processes, in spite of the forces that have opposed us. I usually confess - I don't theorise, I confess - and throughout the different stages of Sankofa I have had an inner monologue that has evolved from a ten year process. I am now writing a book called An Inner Monologue of an African Filmmaker: A Hundred Years of Omission and Thirty Years of Assertion; it expresses my confessions throughout this process. I have always said to myself, 'I will continue to fight.' Now I want to express what I felt to be two personal violations. I was wounded by Manthia Diawara's film Rouch in Reverse (1995) and by John Badenhorst's presentation (See Chapter 7). Badenhorst doesn't know how powerful are the arms he is carrying on the side of cultural imperialism. In his slide presentation a James Dean-type figure was used as a model. I thought to myself'James Dean! Where's the Zulu? Where's the Xhosa?' Is this what is coming through the international information highway? A James Dean cloned in a South African white face? Is this now the phenomenon that we have to battle in Africa? That brought me back to two journeys. One was my first trip to southern Africa. En route to Maputo in 1978 where I was showing my films in Mozambique, I flew over South Africa. I looked at the land out of the aeroplane window, and thought to myself, 'One day, when South Africa becomes free, this will be a very powerful, resourceful and rich region. I'm sure I will find the South African sister or brother who would finance my film, so I only

128

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

need to continue to write though I have yet to make movies of these seventeen to twenty scripts that I already have.' That was my fantasy. Then someone made the mistake of inviting me to the free South Africa. (Forgive me if I may digress for a minute to give some background for the reason why I as an artist cannot be preoccupied with being grateful. Since childhood I have always been ungrateful. I wrote a paper in Canada that I called 'I Bite the Hands that Feed Me': the first victims were missionaries; and the second the Peace Corps. Now the present victims are my friends, who are unaware of that cannibalistic nature I have, which I can't shake off. Especially those do-gooder friends whose deeds are motivated by corrupt but unconditional loyalty and whose world view is a shackle around my independent, individualistic spirit.) During the second trip to southern Africa I actually landed in Johannesburg. As I was approaching I prayed and said, 'I hope that the wrong-brained black people will not take power, because if they do, the flights from New York through Cape Verde to Johannesburg are going to replace the air flight business in Africa when they have the right to land all over the continent in the name of a free South Africa. Ethiopian Airlines and Air Afrique will also be destabilised, regardless of the latter's affinity to France. Those flying all over Africa from South Africa who espouse the wrong ideology will be used as an effective instrument for imperialist culture. Cultural imperialism utilising this kind of South Africa as a platform would be a nightmare that I cannot even begin to fathom'. For two weeks I hoped and prayed that Lionel Ngakane would become the president of South Africa, so that at least if there was a dictatorship it would be led by a filmmaker who would create it under the name of 'The Republic of African Filmmakers'. Can you imagine Hollywood using this kind of South Africa to stage its cultural mission, to take over the rest of Africa? Because we live in a system that sets in motion a civilisation that is based on exploitation and imperialism it will not change by itself. It is not innate: Europeans and Americans were not born this way ... it's not a genetic historical position, it is the system that they inherited which believes in imperialism as a mechanism to control the world. There are some well-meaning white people inside the stomach of imperialism, who emerge now and then to join the struggle against imperialism, yet they do not sustain this fight, they give up. They are merely nibbling at imperialism. They are the over-privileged who are able to choose the agenda for a new struggle for the world - gender now, class next and so on. However, Africa will always be that wretched place that is at the mercy of the missionaries. The first missionaries were the Scouts, including filmmakers such as Flaherty. His film Nanook of the North (1922) was a scouting film for imperialism in Alaska - it is not my film history, it is part of an imperialist film history. The Scouts were the first explorers to find resources in Africa. The letters from missionaries went directly to be analysed by the European colonial military. These missionary Scouts were also disguised within National Geographic mapping missions. Authentic family letters from Kenya were virtual gold mines because they could be used to analyse and delve into the demographic, economic and social information of a people. The colonialists used other strategies as well. When the British were having difficulty with Dedan Kimathi in Kenya, they said, 'This guy is terrible, how do we get him. We've got to get a white person who was raised in Africa and who is knowledgeable in the ways and thinking of Africa'. Henderson was well placed for this role. The British said, 'You know how these Negroes think, we're going to unleash you in the forest. Bring back Kimathi.' We know what happened to Kimathi.9 Thus in the era in which we live, those dots in Figure 7.1 (p. 168), designed into a triangle

CHOSEN GENRES AND DEVELOPED IDEOLOGIES

129

and outlined on the map to indicate the spaces used to control the cultural thought process of the African people, were actually symbols of cultural holocaust communication centres. Because in the era of cultural fascism storm-troopers are no longer needed to culturally control the ways of the people. Presently it is the culture of mercenaries as fascist Scouts who will invade, disfigure and displace the masses of African people. And so, during the slide presentation, (Chapter 7), I witnessed South Africa being set in motion as a launching pad for my own displacement, the final solution of cultural imperialism being unleashed. On the other hand, the end of the armed struggle in South Africa unequivocally opens up the next phase of the fight that has to be fashioned out of a mental and cultural struggle. We can use South Africa as a curtain call for a truly decolonising visionary struggle that will transform and truly empower the African people. Counter-culture practices made within this struggle are going to be the next decisive weapons to fight against our dehumanised placement and our further disfigurement whereby we will assert our own definition of humanity. From now on the struggle that we wage will have to be within the cultural sphere. The armed struggle I'm glad to say is finally over; the hidden mental discrepancy ended with South Africa. For the next phase African visionaries will be forced to coin a cultural vision in all spheres. As the liberation struggles from Mozambique to Guinea-Bissau were fought with guns, we with cameras must penetrate the minds of Africans in every compartment of our heads in order to decolonise, discover and reconstruct our own identity. I think this is where cinema emerges as an effective, potent and powerful instrument. These 100 years of cinema have been a most powerful weapon used against Third World people. Latin Americans call cinema the new hydrogen bomb. The new hydrogen bomb could be dropped in a village and in that village everyone will change their hairdo, their nose, their lips - and this is not only physical change, it results from a mental change. The mental change says that the aesthetics or the beauty of white people is the standard of the world, and we all have to fashion ourselves by cutting and pasting our birthmark to fit those universal aesthetic criteria. Notions of ugliness and beauty have been dichotomised and thrown at people and we all have to then try to find hair we can shake like this [a gesture shaking the head back from side to side] to be part of the human race, because our hair is condemned as unacceptable, as are our noses, our lips and our faces. Within the context of class and gender, black women are the most harassed and subliminally attacked of any human group. In every television commercial and every billboard we find attacks on black women, and those black women who are capable of being honest about what they feel have expressed it in novels, in books, and I hope that they make movies about it. By attacking and devaluing our external aesthetic nature, these advertisements disfigure our inner souls. The combination of these external assaults and the inner disfigurement manifests itself into dependency, underdevelopment, and outright violence as a result of the silent violence against us. Within these cultural struggles, battles and dynamics can we actually be relaxed? Can it be tea-time as usual? ... As Ola Balogun said (see Chapter 7), African countries now have the technology and the economic means. We are not airing our own image for many complicated reasons that the critics, I'm sure, are going to comment about. I think we have enough equipment to exhibit our cinema. There are enough theatres to showcase our own image, but we do not own them. However, whatever way we make our movies, in the end it's a reconstruction of our

130

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

disfigured selves, a tool to find our identity in order to be in charge of our own history, to dramatise our humanity as we see it. It has taken me two years to open my film in my own country, Ethiopia. I have worked for many years to raise $30,000 to blow up my film Harvest 3000 Years (1974) to 35mm to show it to my people who have not seen it in the twenty years since it was made. I now have the film but it has taken me two more years to open my movie in my own country because I have been fighting the bureaucrats. Yet a Lebanese distributor is able to show Doris Day. Old beaten-up films, wherever they come from, are shown in the same theatres where I want to show stories of my mother, and welcome the judgement of my people, who may well say 'Your film is boring', yet I don't have the right to do this. Thus, for me, in a fierce battle such as the one that we are engaged in, I cannot accept the relaxed, scratch-my-back-and-ITI-scratch-your-back critics, and I will not accept them. Because it is a real battle, people are dying, from a mental genocide. There is no coffee-time, this cannot be tea-time, and filmmakers will not accept it. I was recently in Ethiopia and my friends told me about the opportunists, all the Ethiopians who work with NGOs like the World Bank, IMF - those with the donor organisations, who drive Mercedes and Land Cruisers, it's unbelievable. While the filmmaker who drove me around has a car that's thirty years old. His wife would tell me, 'We're not living well, because he just puts everything into his movie. I just don't want to live like this any more.' His car door breaks down the same way that the various parts of Ousmane Sembene's car would break down. In the midst of a downpour, we had to push Sembene's windshield wipers in order to get them started. Wherever I go, I find wretched African filmmakers who are saving money to make an image of their mother and their father in Africa. While visiting my tribe of filmmakers from Ghana to Zimbabwe I see wretchedness all around me. There is no money, yet some of them are hurting their families by mortgaging their homes. It is the same situation whether they be playwrights or painters. In the midst of all this, we have petty bourgeois black people satisfied with their VCRs, with Elizabeth Taylor and Anthony Quinn on the big screen. And then there is the other 90 per cent of the people, who are economically displaced, who have only half a foot in the door. As a result filmmaking is pressure, and yet one can still see the passion of the filmmakers. Why are the filmmakers more impassioned than the so-called critics? Why are we emotional? Because we see the battle from the frontline of the cultural struggle. We are told: 'You cannot make a movie, I do not care about your mother or father, you cannot make a movie.' I have been working on a film on African filmmakers for the last ten years now. It is sitting in my editing room, closed shut. However, a 'Jean Rouch' film by Manthia Diawara gets to be made. I cannot get the financial support to make my movie. Yet Rouch could be placed over and above the inner monologues of African filmmakers? Perhaps one may say that I am trying to dictate priorities, that Manthia has a right to make a film on Jean Rouch - yes, he does have that right. I also have the right to get angry, to get enraged at this obscene reality that exists at the expense of African filmmakers. I was shocked by the film Rouch in Reverse. Not only did Jean Rouch stage a coup d'etat and take over the content and meaning of the film, but he also directed the director. He made the director play 'repeat after me', a subtextual monument showing Jean Rouch once again in charge of one more African as he framed and shaped him into his own story. Jean Rouch has never been challenged on his claim of presenting Africans as they are. He pointed his gun, his camera, framed Africans into his mental eyepiece, claimed it as authentic, never staged, and he has got away with it. At no time has he been challenged on the framing of Africa according to his gospel; a liberal, colonial, cinematic missionary gospel. A film that

CHOSEN GENRES AND DEVELOPED IDEOLOGIES

131

frames, selectively chooses and reproduces images capturing the introduction of technology in a village was falsely presented as an un-tampered image. In all his years of disfiguring the African continent as an ethnographic colonial filmmaker, as the Flaherty of the Nanook of the North, not only has Rouch escaped critical scrutiny from an African vantage point, but he also turned the documentary by Manthia into his own glory and celebration. The film was timed, calibrated and shot for him at the expense of the director. Under the majestic statue of Jean Rouch, we see a black man, his image difficult to make out. He is at the mercy of the Lone Ranger of ethnographic filmmaking in Africa. I'm sure that the laboratory people, responding to their historical position in film developing, were timing Jean Rouch, not the director. Thus a Eurocentric aesthetic has been used to relegate the filmmaker into a classical stereotype of'Tonto-ism'. I battled for a long time, asking myself 'Is that Manthia, the African film critic? Doesn't he know better?' At a poignant point in the film Jean Rouch entraps Manthia by making him repeat after him a fable by La Fontaine, Manthia mimetically responds. Is this what African cinema is? Is it the African film critics' privileged position that gives him the right to make a film of this type? To improvise at our expense? Should we sit and say nothing? I know many filmmakers who are afraid of the pseudo power that some so-called film critics express, and seemingly possess. The tragedy is that such false posturing could be believed within the spheres of bourgeois cinema; that the New York Times, the London Times, and all those other 'Times people, could kill and break Hollywood filmmakers, we are told: but can you imagine an African film critic destroying an African filmmaker? A cinema that is barely existing? Without the possibility of distribution or exhibition? What kind of power is being fantasised here? Are some of our critics hallucinating? The fact is that we are so powerless, at the mercy of a global higher order, that we do not have the ability to possess power over one another. The only power that we can exercise as far as I am concerned is the one that is depicted in the story of David and Goliath: little David, through wit, is able to overpower the mammoth Goliath. If we want to talk about genuine film criticism, then we have to liberate our notion of what kind of film movement we want to create in order to transform the so-called African cinema. We should not be afraid to live up to our claim, not perfectly, but imperfectly. When somebody claims and conjures up a heading entitled 'griot cinema', the very title aesthetically promises so much that even if a fraction of a clue is blazoned then it would be a crucial agent of transformation in African film discourse. One big problem I see that is consistently advanced by film critics is the lopsided and uneven writings about content. In doing so, content is decapitated from its interconnected co-existence to form. I am not dismissing content analysis, it is important. Social political analysis, 'magic analysis' with new exotic names and headings, could also be accidental stepping stones to a genuine theory. I do, however, think that since we are also searching for identity, accent and temperament, it is equally important to analyse our formal cinematic endeavour. To find my temperament, my accent as a filmmaker, it's very important to go into the aesthetic aspect of African cinema. In content, I think filmmakers are universal. Love is universal, hate is universal, war is universal, many themes are universal: but what is very particular to me is my identity. Where is my identity going to be excavated? From the film language? In how I use the medium of motion picture? In how I use the camera/pencil? In 'audiovisually' telling my story? I don't know where it starts, where it goes, nor where it is going to end, but my identity could not be excavated only out of the content of my story, nor from the issues of gender, class, etc. All world films - Russian films, Cuban films, to name two groups

132

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

- have one thing in common: content. Socially-oriented films are everywhere and are not unique to the domain of African cinema. Thus, linguistically excavating the syntax of African cinema remains the challenge for the so-called critics. When you praise an African filmmaker, he or she is embarrassed, including myself. It's better to be critically supported if the intention is to transform all of us - critics and filmmakers alike. When an African filmmaker like Lionel Ngakane says, 'I only made three films and I haven't made more.' I would say that I have outgrown my three films. Why are you critics continuing to badger me about a movie that I made thirty years ago? I am working on these twenty scripts that I have at the present. There is the very surreal reality of African filmmakers. At whose expense are critics talking? There is an intellectual laziness on the part of the critics who are not doing enough to excavate our language and our identity, so that we may at least be put in a position to forge ahead with the very small volume of movies we have made. When talking to Clyde Taylor and filmmaker Charlie Burnett in New York recently, I said 'Let's not take ourselves too seriously, because we have not done the volumes of work and films required to take ourselves so seriously.' We're not allowed, for many historical reasons, to really grow from movie to movie as filmmakers. It takes an African filmmaker fifteen years, twenty years to make a movie. I thought to myself that day, we're mere guinea pigs for the coming generation. The coming generation of filmmakers who will ask why we as filmmakers never grew from movie to movie, why there were gaps, why our experiments failed, what language we were using, all these things. We are only guinea pigs for the young revolutionary African men and women filmmakers who will come behind us. We are exploring to find our identity and to assert our own humanity in motion pictures. In the meantime, let us stop the ego posturing. African cinematic reality calls for a struggle according to our historically defined tasks. Let us fight for the multiplication of our images, our non-visually documented ancestors. Let us reclaim our own image, reconfigure our disfigured visual representation, and in so doing we will look and be normal. I will end with this: while I am talking about film and trying to find the budget for a movie, the video filmmakers in Ghana, those who Idrissa Ouedraogo and Ferid Boughedir spoke of (see pp. 122 and 109-21 respectively), are using Super-8, VHS, whatever is available to preserve the memory of their mothers, their fathers. Why? Because imperialism has distanced us from this memory. When I was doing Sankofay even people in the Jewish community were nervous about the movie. I could not wave pictures of slavery about, or documentary films made by the Germans. I could not wave fascist Italian images showing how Ethiopians were shot and killed. I could not include documentary footage of slavery. Slavery has been so distanced from black people that some black people did not even know slavery happened. So when I am distanced from my mother and my father, because I am denied my very right of expression, that's fascism in the modern era.

Notes 1 See Angela Martin (ed.), African Films: The Context of Production, BFI Dossier no. 6 (London: BFI, 1982). 2 Manthia Diawara, African Cinema, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992). 3 Manthia Diawara, 'Oral Literature and African Films: Narratology in Wend Kuunt, in Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (London: BFI, 1989). 4 See Haile Gerima, 'Triangular Cinema, Breaking Toys and Dinknesh vs Lucy', in Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (eds). Questions of Third Cinema, (London: BFI, 1989).

CHOSEN GENRES AND DEVELOPED IDEOLOGIES

133

5 See Guy Hennebelle, and Catherine Ruelle (eds), 'Cineastes d'Afrique Noire', Afrique litteraire et artistique, no. 49, 1978. 6 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 7 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994). 8 'Verism' refers to the notion of literature and cinema as rendering truth, and to the nineteenth-century aesthetics of realism. 9 Dedan Kimathi was executed by the British colonial administration in 1957.

Chapter 6 African Cinema and Postmodernist Criticism INTRODUCTION Roy Armes

The application of the very Western concept of postmodernism to a body of film work which extends for barely thirty years illustrates the considerable problems involved in a truly critical and historical approach to African cinema. While there are clearly differences between films made in the late 1960s and those produced in the 1990s, attempts at a formal periodisation over such a brief time scale is bound to lead to difficulties. While Sembene is a modern filmmaker in the sense of confronting the realities of postcolonial Africa, his work is by no means 'modernist'. The approach which he pioneered is still valid for filmmakers beginning their feature filmmaking careers thirty years later, and though new styles have been adopted in the years since The Money Order {Mandabi) appeared in 1968, no consistent new direction has been pursued. The range of approaches in African cinema is almost as wide as the number of filmmakers involved. Even to talk of generations can be misleading since Souleymane Cisse clearly belongs both to the generation of the pioneers and - since Yeelen - to the generation adopting a very different stance to tradition and narrative in the late 1980s. Similarly, one of the few films one might regard as being at least modernist and bearing the stamp of Jean-Luc Godard's influence - Touki Bouki - was made by a member of the pioneer generation, Djibril Diop Mambety, as early as 1973. If there are problems with the notion of generations when we consider sub-Saharan African filmmaking, the difficulty is compounded elsewhere in Africa. In North Africa over 60 per cent of all filmmakers were born in the 1940s. In Tunisia, for example, Ferid Boughedir (b. 1944), whose first co-directed feature was released in 1970, is virtually the same age as Ridha Behi (b. 1947), who began in 1977, Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud (b. 1947), who began in 1982, and even Nouri Bouzid (b. 1945), whose feature filmmaking career did not begin until 1986. The same is true of the situation in Morocco and Algeria. Beyond these methodological problems, there is a deep gulf between the roles of filmmaker and critic, even when both of these are combined in a single - complex - persona (as is the case with Haile Gerima). The situation of the African filmmaker is a difficult one. There is no standard procedure for organising production and no conventional source of film finance, and inevitably African films are personal creations in a way that films can never be in the context of an industrialised film industry. Filmmakers have to involve themselves in every aspect of production: not only scripting, directing and producing, but also finding finance from a variety of sources and arranging distribution. Often the filmmaker travels the world as the film's sole publicist, making personal deals with, say, European television companies to arrange for showings for the existing film and to raise finance for a future work. Years may well pass between the completion of a first film and the chance to realise a second (about half of all African features are debut works). In this situation,

AFRICAN CINEMA AND POSTMODERNIST CRITICISM

135

criticism, however positive and well-meaning, can only be regarded as harmful. What the filmmaker seeks is not interpretation but the kind of advocacy which will enable the film to be sold. The close link between the filmmaker and his/her work means that disputes over interpretation can become highly personalised. If we leave to one side journalists who act as film reviewers, those who concern themselves analytically with African film - whether writing or lecturing - tend to be academics. Their critical priorities are different and none I feel would wish to write the kind of grammar of African film which Haile Gerima demands of them (see Chapters 1 and 5). The critics are mostly concerned with chronicling achievement within a wider cultural context - as an expression of the black experience, say, or as an innovative use of the elements of time and space in the creation of narrative. Their link with the cinema is more detached; as Clyde Taylor observed in a telling aside, T m not waiting for a filmmaker to make film before I have something to say'. Given this dichotomy, there is much valuable critical work being done, even if some of this is relatively inaccessible and little publicised.1 On a personal note, I myself went directly from the conference to a gathering of filmmakers and historians in Berlin where I delivered a paper which addressed just those issues of the 'Africanness' of Sembene Ousmane's Borom Sarret that Haile Gerima feels are ignored.2 The general critical situation is by no means as bleak as he would have us believe. There is a mass of valuable work in French: the studies by African critics such as Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and Ferid Boughedir, as well as work by French academics like Pierre Haffner and Andre" Gardies. The series of national studies edited by Victor Bachy for OCIC in Brussels now comprises fifteen volumes. In the USA, besides the work of Francoise Pfaff, there are important and wide-ranging studies by Manthia Diawara and Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike. The latest issue of Iris (no. 18) deals bilingually with New Discourses of African Cinema (Nouveaux Discours du Cinema Africain). In South Africa there is the special issue of Critical Arts on 'African Cinema'. There is even a volume from Jamshedpur by Dhruba Gupta, entitled African Cinema: A View from India.3 If African filmmaking has made enormous strides forward in the 1990s, so too, 1 would argue, has the critical analysis of the films and their contexts.

SEARCHING FOR THE POSTMODERN IN AFRICAN CINEMA Clyde Taylor About nine years ago, when I was heading for the Edinburgh Film Festival to talk about black cinema aesthetics and I was getting my thoughts together, I happened to look at an essay of Sylvia Wynter's. In many ways, it was her first ground-breaking essay into the line of development she's now working in, and it turned my head around. So, instead of writing a paper developing black film aesthetics, I started on a project trying to demolish the concept of aesthetics altogether. My search for the postmodern in African cinema is in many ways a search-and-destroy mission, in which I want to begin with James Snead's observation: 'The black is a signifying absence, the signifying other, in the text of postmodernism'. There is no reason to question the observation of theorist and critic James Snead. Snead's penetrating article, 'Racist Traces in Postmodernist Theory and Literature'4 powerfully indicts postmodernist theory and literature for racism by default, the racism of exclusion, citing Barthes, Derrida, DeMan, Foucault, Genette, Kristeva and Eco specifically. However, what Snead left undone is a critique of theoretical dependency in the periodisation of African history and experience. The search for postmodernism in African cinema reflects a need to bring order to historical experience. The control of one's history and its definitions must include the self-determination of its crucial events, turning points, phases of development and characteristic features of social being and expression - everything, in short, that is promised by bracketing a period within dates and giving it a catchy name. The shoe-horning of African reality within the frames of Europe-centred history satisfies a need of the colonising mentality. To reduce this practice to absurdity, think of a period such as Victorian West African history. The notion of African postmodernism is only slightly less absurd. At the same time, there is no denying the mutual involvement of Africa and Europe over the last four centuries and the overwhelming significance of this involvement for African social development, otherwise one takes the position that slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism had a negligible impact on African people. We do not always notice, however, that this relation is often, and necessarily, adversarial. African peoples have experienced modernity as its victims. If there is an African modernity- as I am convinced there is an African diasporic modernity, or 'Afro-modernity' - then it is a counter-modernity, a movement in opposition to the debilitating effects of Euro-modernism. To exemplify this relationship of domination and resistance, I mark the beginning of the Haitian revolution as a crucial moment for Afro-modernity. Given their different priorities, historical groundings and distributions of power, the dependence of African modernisms on Western initiatives is always in flux. The same holds true for the impact of African thought and action on the West, a relation that is too easily forgotten. Thinking of the years around the 1890s when the concept of modernism was incubating in Europe, we can hardly argue that self-directed African input mattered much in that invention. However, when we come to the period around the 1950s, when post-

AFRICAN CINEMA AND POSTMODERNIST CRITICISM

137

modernism is supposed to have begun its development, the impact of African thought and action has got to be given heavier weight. If the post-structuralists cited by Snead are racists by exclusion, the same is equally true of the theorists of postmodernism. What postmodernist theorists exclude is not only the names and works of important non-Western artistic contributors to their movement - something conventionally done by the Euromodernists - but the changing role of Africans and other non-Westerners as an influence on Occidental thought. Postmodernism has an unacknowledged meaning as the European intellectual response to decolonisation theory. (When I put this view to Jamie Snead, he insisted that I remember as another contributing cause the disillusioning effect of the nightmare of Nazism.) The handiest shorthand for postmodernity is Lyotard's formula: the end of the grand narratives. From this vantage, the rise of feminism in the West should also be considered a provocation of the postmodern, for the way it has punctured the grand narrative of patriarchalism. But among these sources or symptoms of the demise of confident modernism in the West, decolonisation theory must hold a privileged position. It is decolonisation theory that most profoundly disrupts such binarisms as 'civilised/primitive' or 'white/nonwhite' that form essential anchors of Western self-definition. The interruption of the narrative of'progress vs. backwardness', aided by the interventions of OPEC, slowed down the inevitable march of Euro-modernity. Remembering the place of resistance in considering Africa vis-&-vi$ Western history, to speak of African postmodernism is to lose the agency by which African and Third World activists provoked closure on one phase of Western imperialism. I have also argued elsewhere that since black people were never allowed to be modernists by the gatekeepers of these definitions, it is hard to see how they could suddenly become postmodernists. 'African postmodernism' therefore encourages an unfortunate amnesia. Postmodernism in the West refers to the fragmentation following the decline of empires and the grand narratives that supported them. The source of disintegration imposed on African societies came from European invaders centuries ago, when nobody would have named it postmodern. Fragmentation (and other features of postmodernism) operates in the African context as a reflection of incomplete recovery from a regime of oppression - an incomplete modernity, not a 'post' one. To speak of African postmodernity suggests that African societies need not move through stages of resistance and development reasonably characterised as modernity (and which need not, of course, involve tutelage in Euro-modernisation). Yet even as I set aside postmodernism as an inadequate definition for recent developments in African cinema, I must acknowledge that that language points to something that must be taken into account. One of the alternatives proposed to 'postmodernism' is 'postcoloniality' (offered by Thomas McEvilley of Rice University),5 but the losses carried by this formulation outweigh the gains. Without entering the debate around this problematic term (one admirable discussion is found in Robert Stam and Ella Shohat's book Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media) ,6 we might better pursue or await definitions that are based on self-referenced, inner-directed descriptions rather than rely on terminology that depends on being 'post' something from alien, oppressive sources. Which still leaves us with the recognition that black African cinema is not what it was when it began thirty years ago; nor is it easy to shake the notion that something decisive has changed in this arena in the last ten years. How do we view such changes? Doubtless, they are related to the articulations of history. And they must surely be related to parallel developments in other regions.

138

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Two such symptomatic events are the decline of 'Third Cinema* on the international scene and the rise of a new generation of filmmakers among African-Americans. Both of these developments came dramatically into view on one particular, prescient occasion. I am thinking of the Edinburgh Film Festival of August 1986, and its cinema conference devoted to Third Cinema. One jolt came from witnessing Tangos: VExil de Gardel (Fernando Solanas, 1985). This frothy, romantic celebration of the beauty of Paris and the anxieties of exile, spiced by the diversions of the tango, was stunning mainly because it came directly from Fernando Solanas of Argentina, co-author of the revolutionary manifesto of 'Third Cinema'. The room was stunned into silence by this departure from militant form. (Ruby Rich was later to detail the withdrawal from 'Third Cinema' by many Latin American directors.) 7 Then came another shock. Manthia Diawara flew in with an unscheduled film. A late night screening of Cheick Oumar Sissoko's Nyamanton (1986) did little to disrupt anyone's sense of cinema history, as Sissoko's film makes a smart addition to socially conscious African cinema. But following this film came still another very late-night add on, Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It (1986). As the small audience of cinephiles cleared the room after this totally unprepared sensation, the thought was palpable for me that independent black American cinema would never be the same; nor would 'Third Cinema'; nor would African cinema, I can say in retrospect, since that was the year Yeelen (Souleymane Cisse, 1987) appeared, winning a prize at Cannes. More than any other African film it was Yeelen that caused critical thought to reconsider the character and direction of African cinema, and raised the issue of postmodernism. Criticism has differently framed the meaning of the departure represented by Yeelen. Manthia Diawara saw it as the leading example of a wave of'return to the source films' that includes Gaston Kabore's Wend Kuuni (1982) and the rural, almost pastoral narratives of Idrissa Ouedraogo, in such films as Yaaba (1989), Tilai (1990) and Samba Traore (1993). The movement towards the source, interestingly, stands in sharp contrast to the lack of affect, depth perception and historical sense that are primary marks of the postmodern for Frederic Jameson. 8 Others began to speak of a 'second wave' of film directors following the first wave represented by Ousmane Sembene, Med Hondo, Ababacar Samb-Makharam and Haile Gerima among many others. However, there was more to this noticeable shift in emphasis in African films than the passage of time or the appearance of a new generation. This was illustrated by the career of Souleymane Cisse which falls at the tail end of the first generation and at the forefront of the 'new wave'. The features that characterised the first generation were a dedication to service, a tendency to didacticism, a determination to make films for African audiences and their needs, the crafting of narratives that diagramatically exposed the dilemmas and needs of African society in the immediate post-independence period. These films supported a cinema of engagement, a left sensibility, and a readiness to denounce neo-colonialism and the corruption in the African leadership that inherited power from the departing colonial powers. They were, in my frame of thinking, modernist. Modernity for African societies necessarily means resistance to the debilitating effects of such Euromodernist institutions as slavery (providing the capital for capitalism), colonialism, and the industrialism that profited from what Walter Rodney called 'the under-development of Africa'9 while at the same time, African modernity also means taking advantage of selected technologies and intellectual strategies of Euro-modernism for African survival and development.

AFRICAN CINEMA AND POSTMODERNIST CRITICISM

139

Sembene's films are implicated in modernity in the sense of using a language very much tied to colonialism, even in its resistance to colonialism. The cool rationalism of Sembene's movies aligns them with Euro-enlightenment in a rewarding way, i.e. as important revisions of its assumptions, drawn from African culture and experience. The films that Souleymane Cisse was known for before he made Yeelen, i.e. Baara (1978) and Finye (1982), were very much a part of the first-wave tendency of progressive, analytical films. So the break represented by Yeelen was all that much more pronounced: but was it 'postmodern'? The 'return to the source' films have in common high production values, including crisp, beautiful images, clear sound, solid acting and the exploitation of physical beauty, both in the landscape and the people, as well as a more or less direct appeal to European and nonAfrican audiences, muting political discourse in order to facilitate foreign reception. Some critics applaud this direction as a necessary bid for the popular, commercial success without which an independent film industry is impossible. Others decry this tendency as an abandonment of the original mission of presenting reflective and self-empowering narrative to African audiences - the only mission that justifies treating African cinema as a movement. The shift in direction of the new wave of African films parallels a global retreat from progressive activism. The rise of a second generation of independent black American filmmakers reflects what I have called a 'post-OPEC sensibility'. The boycott of petroleum products in the United States in 1974 caused long lines of automobiles at filling stations, and a panicky reflection on the finite limits of fossil fuel and material resources in the world. The spectre of shortages in the universe triggered a 'me first* attitude nationally, and a readiness among young African-Americans to put aside the claims of 1960s movement politics in favour of developing personal entrepreneurial talent. A similarly chilling effect on left militancy arose from the swarm of military dictatorships and counter-revolutionary pressure on the socialist governments of Angola and Mozambique. Soon after that, with the eclipse of Soviet Communism, the left project became an endangered species of ideological speculation. But did these events lead to 'postmodernity', and if so, what does 'postmodernity' mean in the area of African cinema? Consider one film that is often tagged with the 'porno' label, Jean-Pierre Bekolo's Quartier Mozart (1992): how do these characteristics help us bracket Quartier Mozart with the 'return to the source films' like Yaaba or Yeelen7. Bekolo has expressed himself in opposition to this model. 'I've tried to make a popular film where people can see themselves and be amused. African cinema won't have a future if it does not reach an African public. Today we only have films about the countryside, for villagers or Europeans sick with exoticism, films with which many African spectators can't identify.' 'Postmodern African cinema' is a description without a content. If all the phrase means is films made after a certain historical date, it is fairly useless except to impose an air of trendiness, that is, of no serious critical value. Beyond that purpose, the term serves as a deferment of the task of establishing a scheme of interpretation applicable to this new scene where the only unifying thread is the departure of the work from the mini-grand narrative of progressive African decolonisation and reconstruction. One should consider what each innovative film in this zone of practice is bringing to African cinema that was not there before, and then to consider whether the innovation makes a positive contribution or not. Obviously, the assumptions that confirm a positive versus a negative contribution will be open to debate. It is necessary also to include films made in the 'first wave' among the sample of possible directions.

140

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Many of us will know Ferid Boughedir's useful breakdown of African films among a few tendencies', prominent among them the political and the culturalist tendencies (see Chapter 5). One of the characteristics of the contemporary scene is the frequent fusion of these tendencies. Sembene's films have become steadily more culturalist while keeping their sharp political edge. Cisse's Yeelen, while dramatically culturalist, is, through a different code of signification than his earlier films, decidedly political. There is a need to reference the tradition of progressive social consciousness because it remains a mark against which other innovations measure themselves. This is in many respects the genius of African cinema, that its founding examples have come from the most conscientious artists. One serious reason for maintaining attention on this body of work is because our shifts from one historical period to another often involve a deliberate and revealing forgetting of prior experiences. Besides, films continue to be made within this older tradition, perhaps even outnumbering the 'new wave' movies. Niiwam (1992), for instance, by Clarence Delgado, is made from a Sembene novel and looks like Sembene's Borom Sarret (1963) amplified. But this wider scope, including both the 'new wave' and the 'old wave', suggests a pulling back from the close-up on the latest and the hottest, in order to expand interpretative grids to accommodate both 'waves' - to use complexity as an opportunity. As we glance at this vacant opportunity for critical groundwork, I want to put one more film into play among the very diverse works that complicate the new environment, Djibril Diop Mamb£ty's Hyenas (1992). One of the features of the newer film language is a relative indifference to the European gaze as something to be feared or avoided. This indifference shows up differently in the three films I am looking at, Yeeleru Quartier Mozart and Hyenas. Yeelen breaks with a kind of ethnic reticence in Sembene's work and most of his followers' - an anxiety to avoid the folkloric, the stereotypical, the Tarzanic, the touristic and the anthropological. Cissy's film takes new risks in this regard. The film's immersion in tradition, in myth and magic, in colour and spectacular landscape beauty represents a break with a relatively puritanical restraint of the image. Quartier Mozart offers a somewhat different menu of 'code violations', not only magic but also playful sexuality (anticipated in this respect by Visages des femmes (Desire Ecare, 1985) and Balpoussiere (Henri Duparc, 1989)), a youth-cult sensibility disrespectful of elders, and an unabashed referencing of Western, modern languages, themes and values. The departures of Hyenas include wide allusion to Western narrative and style as well as a sharply critical perspective on African personality. (This break from the concern over 'what white people will think' has also been claimed by Trey Ellis as a characteristic of what he calls 'the New Black Aesthetic' in an effort to describe the work of African-Americans from a 'post-nationalist' perspective and is exemplified by the films of Spike Lee.) Some of these departures also show up in the latest films of the first generation, and they include not only a relaxation of political puritanism, but a reach for a more populist audience as well. Sembene's films have increasingly grown colourful and playful, as seen in the jazz and gospel music in Ceddo, or the sexual dalliance of the titular hero in Guelwaar. There is also the spectacle, magic and battle-scene theatrics of Med Hondo's film Sarraouniay and Haile Gerima's use of magic, highly trained actors and a reggae star in Sankofa. In this more open field for critical analysis, among so many changing directions (and we mention only a fraction of them), films might be interpreted not simply by their contributions to the ideological advancement of African political consciousness, as in the past, but, as Sembene argues, according to their 'contributions to the evolution of Africa', or, one might add, to the construction of an African enlightenment that has been underway

AFRICAN CINEMA AND POSTMODERNIST CRITICISM

141

for over a century, but in accelerated force since World War II. The evolution of consciousness in African enlightenment has much to offer the world in the future, as it has contributed much in the past, in correction of the exclusionary humanism of Euro enlightenment, and valuable supports to other non-Western world views struggling to develop. As a construct of historical interpretation, an 'enlightenment' has the advantage of being able to embrace different ideologies and practices, so long as they bring an elevation of consciousness and an extension of human culture. Of course, this would not be the meaningful criterion for everyone, but interpretation on this basis could be consistent, yet flexible, progressive, yet widely explanatory. More importantly, interpretation within the frame of such an enlightenment would preserve the human - serving goals of the best-intentioned beginnings of African film art. As for its flexibility, take the interaction between this interpretative grid and the argument that the important thing is the box-office. The rationale of the boxoffice, against the test of broader cultural contribution, would have to be put to the test whether the gains in commercial viability are matched or negated by the attributes of the films, the filmmaker's subsequent work or the development of African film culture. The interventions of Mambety's Hyenas help illustrate these issues. One of the significant features among recent films is greater depth of characterisation, sometimes with fuller invitations to empathise with characters than before. It has been a convention of critical discourse that African fiction and films abjured the fine, close observation of individual characterisation prevalent in Western narratives in favour of communal as opposed to idiosyncratic reflection. The distribution of focus from a central character to a group of characters has been cited as a strong feature of politically-empowering cinema. This tendency has been challenged in such films as Yeelen, La Vie est belle (Benoit Lamy and Mweze Ngangura, 1987), Balpoussiere and Hyenas. The way in which Draman Drameh is observed in Hyenas has implications for the inscription of the human and the registration of consciousness in African movies. Mamb£ty achieves an unusual, innovative depth by his refusal of innocence and his insistence on moral complexity. Draman is a haunted man, a doomed man, who at the same time is the privileged witness to the disintegration of his society's moral fibre. His dilemmas are very much like those of Ibrahima Dieng in Sembene's brilliant political fable Mandabi (Money Order, 1968), a film which Hyenas parallels in many respects. But one major difference is that Ibrahima is generalised as a character, to the point where he is often described as an African 'everyman'. More, while we sympathise with Ibrahima, we do not identify with him in his simplicity and naivete, for Sembene intercepts identification with his characters as an obstacle to the social reflection that is his main focus. Draman, on the other hand, is very much a particular person and though he is a witness to the decay of his world, he is also guilty of trip-hammering its doom. The portrayal of Draman is one that reminds us that the opposite of innocence may be experience as well as guilt. The film offers several introspective close-ups of Draman in which his characterisation achieves a resonance and depth like nothing else I can recall in African filmwork. In Draman we have a protagonist who conveys the impression that he knows what is happening, that he has an adequate moral calculation of the significance of the events transpiring around him. He looks the most disillusioning manifestations squarely in the eye with an honesty that encourages our identification with him as a co-conspirator in consciousness rather than as an example to be followed or avoided. If Draman has sinned, he will pay for it dearly and knowingly, without flinching, and so earns our respect. Moreover, the film needs him as a moral centre because of what

142

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

transpires. His guilt took place many years in the past when he rejected his pregnant young lover and disgraced her by bribing other young men to claim to have slept with her, thus discrediting her accusation of him. Many decades later this rejected lover, Linguere Ramatou, returns to their village in an ambiguous part of Africa as perhaps the richest woman in the world, 'richer than the World Bank\ Ramatou strews riches around this sleepy outpost with the promise of untold wealth - if the townspeople will destroy the man who betrayed her. The complexity of Hyenas extends to its narrative and symbolical interventions. In both Hyenas and Mandabi the calamitous agency enters the community from the outside world with material temptations and their degrading pay-offs. In Mandabi, the money order arrives from France as the sign of promised wealth and progress through Westernisaton, but soon becomes a promise betrayed in lies, deceptions and mendacities. In Hyenas we see the same wealth and the same promise of progress through Westernisation, although delivered through an African intermediary. Where Mambety's film breaks ranks with most African cinema examples is in refusing to be satisfied with the conventional satiric portrait of the corrupt bureaucrats, the elite been-tos, who have never been depicted with the venom that might match their real life counterparts, who are perhaps adequately delineated only in works like Marquez's Autumn of the Patriarch,10 Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born11 or Ngugi's Devil on the Cross.12 Sembene had the courage to show Ibrahima being picked clean by his poor, opportunistic neighbours who buy much food on the credit supposedly lodged in his money order. But Mambety takes this troupe one step further by indicting the generality of Africans, not just the elite, but the professors, the clergymen, everybody, even Draman's wife, who, in the face of the lure of wealth held out to them, become hyenas of greed, moral scavengers eager to profit from Draman's demise. (It is clear this indictment also applies to humanity in the round.) We can also learn something in the departure of Hyenas from the conventions of prophecy in the films of the first wave. Sembene's endings are invariably prophetic, as they might have to be, coming from an anti-imperialist Marxist. Anything less might risk defeatism. The endings of La Noir de ... (Black Girl 1965), Xala (1974), Ceddo, Guelwaar, like the apocalyptic closure of Cisse's Yeelen, all affirm the prospect of a younger generation carrying the torch to higher levels of realisation. Sembene's Mandabi explicitly closes with the postman saying of his community, if we all work together, we can change things. This is in sharp contrast to the ending of Hyenas, where after the townsmen finally gather around him, they depart, revealing only his empty clothes, as though signifying his being devoured by a pack of hyenas. Hyenas is equally allegorical to earlier African film texts, perhaps more so, using the literary device of setting the film in an ambiguous African 'no place'. The real innovation of Hyenas is not that it does not allegorise or prophetise; it does both. It differs in that its allegory and its prophecy avoid the reflex hopeful glance towards tomorrow. If anything, its closure is pessimistic, and prophetic in a dystopian sense; if we continue to do such and such, our future suffering in such a fashion will be unavoidable. In the beauty of its pageantry, its mythic iconography and rhythms, Hyenas makes a distinct contribution to African cinema by its startling denial of innocence, its insistence on the responsibility of all people for their moral condition. The film is singular in leaving no ideological or sociological space for any viewer to hide, African or foreign, black or white, female or male, in witnessing the moral crisis of contemporary humanity from an African

AFRICAN CINEMA AND POSTMODERNIST CRITICISM

143

viewpoint. So Hyenas turns out to be a resolutely political film from a director who reportedly places art before politics; its warnings against dependency on Western aid and 'progress' are differently but no less powerfully expressive than Sembene's Guelwaar. A related feature of the new film language is that the films go deeper and more fully into the 'affect' of African life, to assess the damage to the souls of the people after so many varieties and episodes of abuse. It almost seems not to matter so much whether the perpetrators are Europeans or Africans. The shift in Hyenas, which takes a tale about a Swiss village (adapting Durrenmatt's play The Visit)1* and applies it to a West African one, seems to make this point. Much will be said about these films being more universal than some others: but the point is they are trying to be more potently felt. The 'feeling' is deeper in Guelwaar, too, than in other Sembene films, where feeling is restrained in favour of rational analysis: but here, Sembene seems to acknowledge that feeling is analysis, or that the two cannot be separated so neatly as once seemed required. The widow of Guelwaar, the political activist, shows on her face the cost of making history. The contradictions of personal/political actions are majorly 'experienced'. The barrier before this fuller affective expression began to collapse, like an emotional Berlin wall, with Yeelen. This shift in tonal meaning in African films may be connected to the opening to the reality of women. This may be the significance of the young wife in Yeelen who seems to have very little to do but witness the developing tragedy. But her presence as witness, together with Nianankoro's mother, introduces another sensibility that is often omitted, even when the presence of women is more actively represented in a film. There is also the witness of the first wife of the protagonist of Xala and the awesome provocation/witnessing of Ramatou, the woman who bribes the villagers into murder in Hyenas. The eyes of these women become the subject position for moral assessment. A singular moment in this shift from being-forothers to being-for-oneself is the scene in Yeelen where Nianankoro's mother performs in her solitude and nakedness a ritual of river water and prayer. So we approach a paradox. The greater impact of African films on the sensitive observer over their Western alternatives maybe connected to the intuition of communal relatedness that African movies routinely communicate, starting with the sense that everybody knows everybody, that all are bound to each other by imperceptible threads of connection. This stands in contrast to the experience of watching a Hollywood film where the alienation is best conveyed by the metaphor of murder. But the paradox is that this sense of common destiny with one's fellow humans is amplified, not reduced, in these later movies by an augmented appreciation of individual emotions. The prospect of interpreting African cinema now in relation to the ongoing movement of African enlightenment leaves the need for closely defined critical requirements unanswered. But this focus may at least alert us to the fact that speaking of the present situation in terms of postmodernism, or even new waves or second generations, etc., dodges altogether the imperative of reworking interpretative criteria. The current scene is opportunity-laden in the sense that it is clearly beyond the 'pre-critical stage' that may have constrained commentary in the past, a consequence of African cinema developing as a movement, a project of decolonisation and societal reconstruction. The departure of Hyenas and Yeelen from these prior assumptions seems to demand the same kind of opening up of criticism. Maybe there is an echo of these departures in the new candour reflected in some of Manthia Diawara's recent reports from FESPACO e.g. Sight and Sound 1993/95. The impasse concealed by the postmodern label is the struggle underway for the soul of African cinema. The moment of high opportunity is also a moment of urgency, if not

144

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

danger. The struggle takes place in three directions. One is greater appeal to international audiences; right now, because of distribution difficulties, the major consumers of African films are outside Africa. Another is the reach for wider, more populist connections with African audiences. The third is maintaining the mission of conscientisation. So far, criticism has been evasively democratic, as if saying all of these directions are fine, so long as they work for the best. There is a need to sharpen critical principles in support of one or the other of these directions, along with assessments of the impact and relevance of the other two on the preferred orientation. There is also an impending need for criticism of criticism, for genuine critical debate. A critical inertia postpones the finding that the contribution of Quartier Mozart to the evolution of African culture is slight, beyond its engaging novelty as an internationally hipper type of crowd-pleaser than La Vie est belle or Bal poussiere.

The advent of Quartier Mozart raises another observation on the present scene. The desideratum of enlightenment will inevitably draw rejection from those who favour a commercial orientation. Much of the discussion among the builders of African cinema revolves around developing distribution and creating an industry: but the development of an industry could be the worst thing for the more profound social possibilities of African cinema. The critical edge in Hyenas, again, warns us against the Utopian naivete that says a bigger, more commercialised version of African cinema will be considerate, rather than dismissive, of the values that have made African films special, or that commercialised African audiences will be more resistant to trash and glitter than other societies. Just as the times impose an imperative for more focused critical principles, they also confront the architects of African cinema's future to be careful and specific in what they ask for. The empty characterisation of this 'postmodern' stage of African cinema raises several possibilities. That this is a moment which we may one day look back on as the best time for African filmmaking. This would mean that the period ending was the period of African modernity in films, and one that was not transcended because it was inadequate, but one that was lost, as victim of a ravaging turn of history. This would mean that African cinema had been turned back from its tentative grasp of modernity into a precarious pre-modernity. For the times show us clearly, on any continent, that the idea of inevitable progress is mythical. If we are going to be optimistic about the present moment in African cinema, that optimism will have to be matched by urgent analysis and ideological struggle.

RESPONDENTS Kobena Mercer Taking as his point of departure a sceptical disposition towards prevailing definitions of postmodernism, Clyde Taylor (see pp. 136-44) examines three important films from the past decade of African cinema - Souleymane Cisse°s Yeelen (1987), Jean-Pierre Bekolo's Quartier Mozart (1992) and Djibril Diop Mambety's Hyenas (1992) - to open up a wideranging discussion on three dimensions of African cinema in relation to the cultural and political questions of postcolonialism. These concern, first, shifts in the contexts of production and reception which have given rise to a prolific 'second wave' of African filmmakers in the late 1980s and early 1990s who have found wider audiences for their films - a shift highlighted by critical and popular acclaim for Idrissa Ouedraogo's Yaaba (1989), Tilai (1990), and Samba Traore (1993). Pointing out a chronological coincidence with the boom years of a new wave of black diaspora cinema in the United States and Britain between, say, 1986 and 1992, Taylor notes that, rather than an absolute break among generations, whose influence can be seen to overlap in the work of Souleymane Cisse, there is nevertheless a qualitative shift away from the political modernism of the first generation, as embodied by Ousmane Sembene, for example, whose cinema was characterised by a left sensibility, a tendency towards didacticism, and a programmatic exposure of the social costs of neocolonialism that was intended primarily for the benefit of African audiences. Thus, second, Taylor approaches qualitative shifts in tone and sensibility among the more recent films with keen attention to the aesthetics and politics of ambivalence. In place of the modernist ground-clearing gesture, where the valorisation of novelty for its own sake merely repeats the logic of commodity production, Taylor demonstrates that there is no one homogenous or unifying tendency amongst the films that could be periodised as postmodern. Rather, Taylor foregrounds Yeeleny Quartier Mozart and Hyenas as indicative of a pluralist situation in contemporary African cinema which has brought about a fusion of culturalist and political tendencies. The three films offer distinct responses to a set of shared circumstances arising from the loss of faith in the grand narrative of political progress which is the dilemma of post-coloniality. In the sense that the films might be more usefully described as postcolonial, given the Eurocentric limitations and exclusions of existing definitions of the postmodern, their salient feature is freedom from fear of the European gaze, something shared with films of the African diaspora over the past decade. To the extent that this shift can be said to let go of the aesthetic puritanism of modernist counter-cinema, which was always anxious to avoid the folkloric, the stereotypical, the exotic and the anthropological, what results are rich and varied forms of narrative pleasure in the elaboration of cinema's response to the postcolonial predicament. Like the 'return to the source' films of Idrissa Ouedraogo, Cisse^s Yeelen exemplifies the high production values, pastoral location and mytho-poetic storytelling that imply a retreat from the former certainties of an oppositional cinema whose narratives defined African agency and identity against that of the neo-colonial masters. While such an introspective

146

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

turn to stories set in Africa's pre-colonial past may suggest a search for spiritual resources in an implicitly political response to contemporary dilemmas - the implication of Haile Gerima's Sankofa (1992) as storying a search for collective memory across the geography of diaspora - an alternative view might regard with critical suspicion the success of Yeelen among European and other non-African audiences. As with responses to the visual art exhibition Magicians of the Earth (1989), or to Ben Okri's prize-winning novel, The Famished Road (1992), there is a concern that while the aesthetics of magic-realism may encode postcolonial disenchantment with discredited myths of progress, such work is also vulnerable to appropriation when it is decoded to confirm the West's wish to absolve itself from its share of responsibility in shaping Africa's violent history. Jean-Pierre Bekolo's Quartier Mozart clearly foregrounds the contemporary by depicting African urban space in all its culturally syncretic quality as a worldly domain in which lives and stories intertwine in complex, unpredictable and often funny ways. The film also appeals to fantasy and the 'fantasmatic' to flesh out a distinctly African imaginary - it is a coming-of-age story whose main protagonist is a girl who magically turns into a boy. Thus, the film turns away from the problem-oriented fixation of social realism in the 'first wave', but there is also, as Taylor notes, an overweened dependence on the fixed idea of the 16- to 25-year-old audience demographic as the sine qua non of populist cinema, which may be attributed to the influence of Spike Lee. While African-American filmmaking has been an inspiration to burgeoning indigenous developments, in the volume of recent video-originated feature films in Ghana, for example, the question remains whether critical values are compatible with commercial imperatives - which was the question that Third Cinema sought to answer with alternatives to such either/or choices. Insofar as Hyenas brings about a reconciliation between the storytelling expectations of popular audiences and the critical ethos of Third Cinema, 1 would want to amplify what Taylor describes as its 'refusal of innocence and insistence on moral complexity' by underlining its symbolic intervention as an important response to the postcolonial condition. Confronted by the return of Linguere Ramatou, who arrives to seek revenge for an earlier act of betrayal, Draman Drameh is the story's tragic hero who accepts his guilt and acts in full awareness of what his fate will be at the hands of his fellow villagers who are seduced by Ramatou's wealth and their own greed. As Taylor argues, the film achieves affective texture and depth by its refusal of satire at the level of characterisation, with its clear-cut distinctions between heroes and villains. Through a subtle interplay of identification and distanciation, one finds oneself implicated as an ambivalent witness to a prophetic allegory in which the moral question of innocence and guilt cannot be decided by a clear-cut binary code. If the underlying question allegorised by Draman's tragedy can be interpreted as asking 'who is responsible for the perpetuation of suffering?', then the moral and political achievement of the text is to reply that responsibility cannot be owned by any one identity: it must be shared. We see this explicitly at the end of the film when Draman accepts his fate as a scapegoat in the face of the violent unanimity of his community, which becomes his executioner. The universality of the narrative resides not in the translation into an African context of a European story originally set in a Swiss village, but in the way Mambety observes the human capacity for violence when shared responsibility is instead polarised onto the scapegoat within the logic of retributive justice. In the sense that Hyenas registers what Taylor calls a 'shift in tonal meaning' in which artistic reflections on violence and disenchantment arise out of the collapse of nationalist

AFRICAN CINEMA AND POSTMODERNIST CRITICISM

147

legitimisation narratives - a key theme in Kwame Anthony Appiah's study of postcolonial literature 14 - I would want to push a little further Taylor's notion of Afro-modernity as a counter-culture of critical values by drawing attention to a range of films that crystallise such postcolonial and post-nationalist structures of feeling. Although Taylor's focus is quite rightly on narrative feature films from African national cinemas, films such as David Achkar's Allah Tantou (1991), Raoul Peck's Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (1991) and John Akomfrah's Testament (1989), could all be described as independent works that are neither drama nor documentary, but hybrid products of a translational diaspora film culture. From his exiled location in Paris, David Achkar uses fictional tableaux and home-movies in Allah Tantou to portray his father's life story as one of Sekou Toure's most favoured cultural ambassadors who then became one of his most reviled political prisoners. A struggle to make sense of volatile dynamics in the mass psychology of nation-building also informs Raoul Peck's film. Elements of autobiography, as a Haitian growing up in Zaire in the 1960s, then living in Belgium in the 1980s, combine with archive material to create a biography of a nation in turmoil which reveals Lumumba as both the people's prophetic hero and then as the scapegoat from whom the price of collective disappointment is exacted. In Akomfrah's Testament, after years of exile in Britain following the 1966 coup against Nkrumah, the fictional character Abena returns to Ghana to confront the experience of loss, abandonment and mourning that arise once the Utopian promises of pan-African decolonisation give way to what Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris would call 'the ruined fabric of the shattered human'. 1 5 In each instance, the films employ a range of aesthetic strategies to explore complex structures of feeling which, however unpleasant or unpopular, are nonetheless universally human. Hence, in a signifying riff on Taylor's concept of Afro-modernism, 1 would suggest that such films give shape to what might be called Afro-pessimism. Drawing on Frantz Fanon's unflinching study of the colonial psyche put forward in The Wretched of the Earth?16 literary critic Homi Bhabha has argued, in his essay entitled 'Postmodern Authority and Postcolonial Guilt', that the question of responsibility hangs over coloniser and colonised like a sword of Damocles. 17 In a situation where blame and guilt cannot be apportioned in simple binary polarities, and yet the call for justice demands to be answered, one way of thinking through the ambivalent ties that bind adversaries and antagonists is to enter the arena of critical reflection provided by artistic works that give form to what Bhabha calls 'melancholia in revolt'. In an era of increasing global interdependence, the forms of thought and feeling embodied in key works of African cinema locate them at the cutting edge of a new universal humanism that may yet come to answer the question of whether the need for belonging must inevitably take the form of the need for a nation.

Bassek Ba Kobhio My view here is not just that of a director, because I am involved in African cinema from several aspects. I left a very senior post in Cameroon cinema administration to create a production company. From November 1995 I will start distributing primarily African films in Cameroon; I am also (and I was before I became a filmmaker) a writer and a literary critic; and although I live in Cameroon I have the opportunity to travel to Europe every month, which is very important because I remain close to my roots and I can also be informed on all developments in the world of cinema.

148

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

When I received the initial conference document entitled 'African Cinema and Postmodernist Criticism' I cringed a little; when I read the tide of the paper, 'Searching for the Postmodern in African Cinema' I cringed even more. We must be careful when identifying the need for decolonisation in every circumstance, because colonisation can be found where we least expect it. For example, we must be careful not to apply to a reality that we know well, but perhaps in an episodic way, analytical instruments and tools which were conceived for entirely different realities. Recently, I spoke to Sembene Ousmane in Dakar and asked him how he would classify the generations of African cinema today. Sembene replied: 'We cannot talk today of three or four generations. I am still here with you, I am fighting with you, I make the same films today as you simply because I advance with my times. We are still in the first generation of African cinema.' I didn't totally agree with him but my point is that we must be careful about the barriers we construct. So when we start with the presumption that we are going to seek out the postmodern in African cinema, the presumption is problematic. Both Clyde Taylor's (see pp. 136-44) and Manthia Diawara's (see pp. 81-9) categorisations of some films as 'return to the source' and others as 'rural' films made for Europeans I find problematic. For me, living in Cameroon, seeing Dynasty on TV at 9pm and a technically mediocre Cameroon television drama called VOrphelin (The Orphan) at 10pm, both of which achieve the same audience ratings, I am convinced that we need to look again at the audience potential for so-called 'rural films'. This means that 'rural films' cannot be considered as films primarily for European audiences. If, as critics and filmmakers, we content ourselves with the appreciation of African cinema through the formidable and irreplaceable forum of the FESPACO festival, without spending the following two weeks in Ouagadougou to see the public continue to go to the cinema - not to mention in Dakar, Yaounde or Abidjan - we are completely deluded about local appreciation and local perception of African cinema. The problem is that we have depended on external value-judgements of our cinema. That's why I would ask FESPACO to reintroduce the Prix du Public (The Public Prize), not given by those who have their presumptions about African cinema and come to Ouagadougou from Europe or America for a few days, but by the public of Ouagadougou who fill the cinemas before, during and after the festival. The huge problem at the moment is that it is difficult to get over to people how Africans really perceive African cinema, for the simple reason that there is a type of thought lobby which descends on Ouagadougou and which catalogues filmmakers, saying which films should or shouldn't be made, refusing us the right of creation, while at the same time advising us to 'decolonise' ourselves. The proof that these analyses are sometimes made without taking into consideration the whole of African cinematic production is that it is impossible to want to categorise films today without taking into consideration the production of someone like Alphonse Beni who nobody mentions. Alphonse Beni is a Cameroon director who makes what are termed 'action films', with titles like: Cameroon Connection (1985), Saints Voyou priez pour nous (Blessed Urchins Pray for Us> 1982) and Anna Makossa (1980). We cannot talk about what the African public expects if we don't see the public's reaction in a city like Douala or Yaounde to films like these. Nor can we appreciate the expectations of African publics if we forget films like Pousse-Pousse (Daniel Kamwa, 1975) which are commercial successes in Africa. We must be very careful and try to analyse and appreciate films truly within their social contexts as Nouri Bouzid suggests (see Chapter 4). We will understand, for example, that the reality of local conditions of production can determine whether there is music or

AFRICAN CINEMA AND POSTMODERNIST CRITICISM

149

not in a scene. Such decisions are often made from artistic choice but it can also be a constraint of the time. I think that for example Ceddo is the meeting between Sembene Ousmane and Manu Dibango, who in his music already has the 'jazzique' register, which will lead him to the type of music he creates for Ceddo. Some films use traditional music not because it is the preferred artistic choice, but because of financial limitations. I can also tell you about Gabon, where Roland Dubose releases an African film regularly and successfully. We need to consider the African market, African commerce and industrialisation, and it is very important that we know what that public's expectations are. That public has its exigencies, its dreams, and wants its money's worth. It's not interested in where the production budget for the film came from. From this point of view, any financial help that comes our way will be useful and it pains me to think that today some people believe they can, by looking at films on the screen, know which films were financed by which country. Today, as soon as you make a film, without even seeing the film, or being asked about it, you are labelled by the thought-lobby mentioned above, on the basis of who funded your film. In relation to African cinema criticism, I think that African cinema should have its strong, international criticism, but I think it's paramount that we invent our own instruments of appreciation and analysis. If we don't invent tools of appreciation for African cinema you can be sure that in ten years it will no longer exist. There will be a type of 'new vision' African cinema, perhaps honest but distorted by inappropriate tools of analysis, which will lead to the death of African cinema. The foregoing illustrates my impression that there has been little thought given to developing new instruments and above all a profound new African vision in relation to our films. It doesn't make sense to tell us to make films by thinking about your consumption, your commerce, your local public but at the same time appreciate the African reality with theoretical instruments which are totally alien to African culture reality. Criticism is essential and African filmmakers are aware that there is academic criticism which allows appreciation of African cinema in a scientific manner. But there is another type of criticism that the pan-African Federation of Filmmakers encourages, which is found in the FEPACI review Ecrans d'Afrique (African Screens). In that magazine African filmmakers appreciate criticism of their work and it is very gratifying for a creator to realise that as well as the public that sees his films in the cinema, there are professional critics and theorists to examine and critique their work. Criticism must permit the development and blossoming of a real African cinema which also takes into account the expectations of the African public. I have seen in some articles commercial African films being contested on the pretext that they are made for Europeans, because the filmmaker lives in Europe and appreciates that the European public wishes such and such a film made, without taking into account the African public's reaction or expectations to the same film. I also see in these same articles or interventions the questioning of international support, but some films named and referred to as 'great films' would never have existed if there had not been this support. I think it is important that we set up a cinema industry in Africa and a distribution network, but we cannot establish or sustain production and distribution in Africa without international support. I am a free nationalist, anti-European, but I am not ashamed to know that today there is a new project being established by the French Centre Nationale du Cin6ma (CNC) to regenerate African cinemas, which we welcome. In Cameroon's case the cinemas are starting to benefit from showing African films.

150

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

I am fighting for an industry, a market and a local cinematic art in Africa. We are taking steps and making progress. We are for the continuation of, and would actually like to see more importance attached to, the prizes given at Ouagadougou. Our African public is also starting to identify itself with those prizes. I know many Cameroonians who have never seen Cheick Oumar Sissoko but who are happy because Mali has won a prize and who are ready to believe that we have a cinema as valuable as any other cinema. We have never seen criticism of American films saying that a film is problematic because part of the money came from South Africa, even during apartheid; or because money comes from Mexico or elsewhere. For example, I know that Kevin Costner is making an expensive film, I don't know where he gets his money from, I only know producers who are participating in the operation. I believe that the critics' primary role is to respect the creator because without the creator there would be no critic. Most criticism we hear lately gives us orders: do this, don't do that. And when we don't agree, we are told that if we can't accept criticism it's not worth the critics' and theorists' participating in debates. It isn't criticism that we refuse! I recommend that critics subscribe to Ecrans dyAfriquey where they will see that there is a great possibility of gaining knowledge about the reality of African cinema. In that magazine there is a large section for filmmakers to talk about their films, to explain the genesis of their films; films are discussed and reviewed; all this information could enable those interested to get a feel for the films and the filmmakers, and it would also enable them to talk about these films more effectively. We do need criticism as we further develop our cinema, but there is a concrete reality that critics should get to know about, and there should be a little humility when they do not know that reality. Let us be part of a common struggle.

Notes 1 The material I have in mind here is foreign-language material of which Haile Gerima would not necessarily be aware: in German - Pierre Haffner's Kino in Schwarzafrika Cicim (Munich), nos 27-8, November 1989, and Kristina Bergmann's Filmkultur und Filmindustrie in Agypteny (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993); in French - a work I've never seen discussed, Sebastien Kamba's Production cinematographique et parti unique - Vexetnple du Congo, (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1992) and French-language publications from Canada - Michel Larouche (ed.), Films d'Afrique, (Montreal: Guernica, 1991), and Ratiba Hadj-Moussa's Le Corps, I'histoire, le territoire: les rapports de genres dans le cinema algerien (Montreal and Paris: Publisud/Les Editions Balzac, 1994), my own Dictionary of North African Filmmakers (Dictionnaire des cineastes du Maghreb) (Paris: Editions ATM, 1996). 2 These were personal lecture notes on the 'Africanness' of Borom Sarret not yet prepared for publication. Presentation involved a detailed look at the ideas on the spatialisation of narrative in (many) African films (as advanced in Armes and Malkmus' Arab and African Filmmaking, New Jersey: Atlantic Highlands, 1991) applied to Sembene's first film. 3 T h e mass of valuable work in French': Ferid Boughedir, Le Cinema africain deAaZ(Brussels: OCIC, 1987). Ferid Boughedir, Le Cinema en Afrique et dans le monde (Paris: Jeune Afrique Plus, 1984). Andre Gardies, Cinema dyAfrique noire francophone (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1989).

AFRICAN CINEMA AND POSTMODERNIST CRITICISM

151

Andre* Gardies and Pierre Haffher, Regards sur le cine'ma nigro-africain (Brussels: OCIC, 1989). Pierre Haffner, Essai sur les fondements du cinima africain (Paris: NEA, 1978). Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou, Le Cinema et VAfrique (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1969). Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou, Sembene Ousmane cineaste (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1972). Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou, Le Cinima africain (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1975). Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou, Le Cinema au Senegal (Brussels: OCIC, 1983). Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou, Reflexions d'un cineaste africain (Brussels: OCIC, 1990). 'Additional OCIC volumes': Victor Bachy, La Haute Volta et le cine'ma (Brussels: OCIC, 1982). Victor Bachy, Le Cinima au Mali (Brussels, OCIC, 1982). Victor Bachy, Le Cinema en Cote d'lvoire (Brussels: OCIC, 1982; new edn 1983). Victor Bachy, Le Cinima au Gabon (Brussels: OCIC, 1986). Francoise Balogun, Le Cinema au Nigeria (Brussels: OCIC, 1984). CESCA, Camera nigra: le discours dufilm africain (Brussels: OCIC, 1984). Guido Covents, A la recherche des images oubliees (Brussels: OCIC, 1986). Ousmane Ilbo, Le Cinema au Niger (Brussels: OCIC, 1993). Rik Otten, Le Cinima au Zaire, au Rwanda et au Burundi (Brussels: OCIC, 1984; new edn 1989). 'In the USA': Manthia Diawara, African Cinema, Politics and Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992). iris, no. 18, spring 1995: 'New Discourses of African Cinema/Nouveaux discours du cinema africain'. Francoise Pfaff, The Cinema ofOusmane Sembene (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984). Francoise Pfaff, 25 Black African Filmmakers (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988). Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Black African Cinema (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1994). 'In South Africa': Critical Arts: A Journal for Cultural Studies (Natal), vol. 7, no. 1/2, 1993: 'African Cinema'.

4 5 6 7 8 9

'In India': Dhruba Gupta, African Cinema: A View from India (Jamshedpur: Celluloid Chapter, 1994). James Snead, 'Racist Traces in Postmodernist Theory and Literature', Critical Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 1, Spring 1991. Thomas McEvilley, Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Indentity (Kingston, NY: McPherson, 1992). Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, (London: Routledge, 1994). Ruby Rich, 'An/Other view of New Latin American Cinema', in New Latin America Cinema: volume one, ed. M. T. Martin (Detroit, IL: Wayne State University Press). Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, 1992).

152

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

10 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Autumn of the Patriarchy trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). 11 Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1968). 12 Ngugi Wa Thiong*©, Devil on the Cross, trans, by the author (London: Heinemann, 1982). 13 Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Visit (a play in three acts) (New York: Random House, 1958). 14 Kwame Anthony Appiah, T h e Postcolonial and the Postmodern', In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (London: Methuen, 1992). 15 Wilson Harris, quoted in Ann Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement: 1966-1972. A Literary and Cultural History (London and Port of Spain: New Beacon, 1992), pp. 174-6. 16 The Wretched of the Earthy preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). 17 Homi Bhabha, 'Postmodern Authority and Postcolonial Guilt\ in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Trichler (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). Called 'Afro-pessimism'.

Chapter 7 Information Technology, Power, Cinema and Television in Africa INTRODUCTION Jim Pines

Under colonisation, the basic weapon was the brute force of military technology; modernity combines military technology with communication technology, Western cultural products and instrumental rationality. The 'civilising' mission gives way to 'progress' and 'modernisation' and produces the same effect: cultures are decimated, bulldozed, 'globalised' with barbaric abandon.1 The emergence of new technologies of communications, information and entertainment has accentuated the pivotal role of mass media in contemporary society. Its impact has been felt at the local level of national policy as well as globally. Indeed, since US Vice President Al Gore's pronouncements in 1993-4 on the creation of a Global Information Infrastructure - which further boosted the idea of a 'global information marketplace, where consumers can buy and sell products'2 - there has been growing pressure both in the West and in the so-called developing regions of the globe to embrace these new technologies and accompanying delivery systems wholeheartedly, and more significantly to regard them as 'empowering' instruments of social, political and cultural change. We are told that the 'digital revolution' promises - or threatens, as the case may be - to transform human history itself, by facilitating radically new (some would say liberating) forms of social and cultural experience both in the public sphere and in the personal/private domains. We are witnessing what Morley and Robins have called 'the restructuring of information and image spaces and the production of a new communications geography, characterised by global networks and an international space of information flows; and by new forms of regional and local activity. Our senses of space and place [Morley and Robins go on to assert] are all being significantly reconfigured.'3 But to what extent can we map non-European, and particularly African, communications politics and cultural identities onto this paradigm? There certainly is no indication at this juncture - that the technological centre of gravity could one day shift to Africa, or to Asia, or to Latin America; nor are there signs that these technologically marginalised regions might eventually succeed in securing a substantial stake in the development of 'global image industries and world markets' and the new transnational systems of delivery. In terms of consumption, moreover, we cannot even speculate on whether African endusers will actually want to embrace the virtual worlds of cyberspace, or subscribe to the sort of disembodiment that is stridently fetishised in the predominantly EuropeanAmerican technotopia movement. Although having said that, an African filmmaker confidently assured me that Africans will indeed want to participate in these new realms of

154

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

cyber-experience, that they too will want to explore the new electronic frontiers which their Western counterparts have been conquering and which they never cease celebrating, when the technological toys are eventually made more widely available to them of course. And why not? Mapping Africa onto the electronic information highway is certainly an intriguing notion, if only because it flags the possibility of extended African diasporas and alternative African 'public spheres' emerging within the new global information order. More speculatively, these developments (if they did take off in a real sense) could be seen as a new context through which a variety of virtual African identities might be constructed along nonessentialist lines similar to some cyber-feminist orientations for example. But, surely, we would be wise to approach this futuristic scenario of a digitally constituted African presence on the World Wide Web with scepticism. The political, cultural and historical connection between colonial conquests and c the conquest of cyberspace' which Sardar explicates, obliges us to approach this area of 'development' with a clear sense of unease. 4 This scepticism takes hold even before taking into consideration the unchecked bigotry that infects much of the intercultural 'interaction' that appears on the net - to be sure, it is a very familiar kind of bigotry that is firmly rooted in stereotypical pap and mindless selfindulgence. The only thing that is different about it is the delivery system through which it is conveyed! Moreover, it might be presumptuous to conceptualise African consumers of new media technologies in terms that imply that they will be easily absorbed by the new global regime of electronic entertainment and pleasure, or that they will necessarily subscribe to the sort of virtual identities which, in many respects, are 'predicated on deceit and trickery'. 5 Nevertheless, the corporate drive to develop new media markets in Africa is predicated on the notion that it is possible to develop new patterns of consumption on the continent. The array of products which will be on offer might include some African sourced material, but convention dictates that the bulk of the programming or software will in fact be mass-produced, relatively low-level European-American. Analytically, this begins to sound like the traditional media imperialism thesis, though the situation on the ground is probably more complex and subde than the paradigm is able to accommodate. But the fact remains, these developments in communications, information and entertainment technologies are couched very much in the corporate language, politics and economics of globalisation and global markets. It is therefore not surprising that many African (diaspora) cultural practitioners, critics and, hopefully, consumers as well, view the situation with deep scepticism, and with the question of Western imperialism and neo-colonialism very much in mind. There appears to be great unease in some quarters about taking up the invitation to join this particular revolution. Mosco aptly reminds us that 'Africans have taken a leading role in the movement for a New World Information and Communications Order'. 6 In a very important sense, this acknowledges the proactive role that African media professionals themselves have played in the critical and political debates concerning the development of new media technologies in Africa, and it particularly highlights African efforts to influence global agendas against powerful Western political and economic interests. The importance of this African intervention cannot be overstated, if only because it goes some way towards ameliorating the stereotypical image of Africa as a kind of technological hinterland simply waiting to be Cultivated', and it reaffirms the proactive role that Africa has to play in the establishment of global information and communications

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, POWER, CINEMA AND TELEVISION

155

infrastructures, despite the continent's obvious geopolitical and economic disadvantages. This is possibly one of the most important challenges presently confronting African governments, as well as African diaspora cultural critics and practitioners. There is obviously pressure on governments to construct policies in response to these growing communications and information technologies, and no doubt there are strong feelings among many officials and cultural practitioners that the social benefit that these technologies could bring far outweigh the disadvantages that are inextricably linked to them, such as the vested interests of transnational media corporations. But the problem is, far too much still hinges on promises. No one has really calculated the social benefit against corporate interests which ipso facto control the technologies and the information flow. How, then, will these conflicting interests be played out within the African social, political and economic context? Multimedia is a particularly good example of how a new technology might play an important role (say) in delivering new means of educational provision, while at the same time conforming to its more obvious consumer-led entertainment and commercial uses. But it remains to be seen whether, in the final analysis, the market can achieve the critical mass that is necessary to make the balance between cultural value on the one hand, and market-driven consumerism on the other, work effectively in the African context. A lot will probably depend on the extent to which Western corporate and political interests are willing to 're-image' Africa in basically non-pathological terms, and thus shift the focus away from traditional 'development' preoccupations. It was with these sort of broader themes in mind that I found the topic of'information technology, power, cinema and TV' especially interesting. In an important sense, it set out to marry the old with the new - specifically, to explore the feasibility of overcoming certain structural weaknesses in conventional African film distribution through the introduction of new means of delivery via satellite. John Badenhorst (see pp. 158-75) argues for the establishment of satellite links as a means of disseminating African films across the whole of the African continent. It is generally acknowledged that conventional film distribution has not been able to achieve this pan-African objective, despite the efforts of the Federation Panafricaine des Cineastes (FEPACI), the African filmmakers' organisation which was established in 1969 to challenge the distribution monopolies and to promote African films both within and outside Africa. The issue of African film distribution, and the concomitant problem of making African films more widely available to African audiences, was raised during several discussions at the Africa and the History of Cinematic Ideas conference - evidence of just how important this particular issue is to everybody - though the emphasis tended to be less on structural and organisational matters, and more on the political and cultural viability of dubbing and/or subtitling films into different African languages for example. Badenhorst proposes a plausible technological solution to what are basically fundamental structural problems in African cinema industries. His scenario is understandably optimistic in tone. But the fact that it is corporate-led needs to be flagged here, since historically African filmmakers by and large have tended to be extremely cautious in their dealings with corporate cultural mediators, especially in matters regarding ownership and control, cultural and artistic value, and financial return. Nevertheless, satellite technology is offered here as the most promising means of delivering film entertainment to African mass audiences. Not wishing to downplay the creative and political possibilities that satellite delivery systems could bring to African filmmakers and African audiences, I think that it is worth

156

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

reiterating the crucial point made by both Claire Andrade-Watkins (see pp. 176-8) and Ola Balogun (see pp. 179-81), namely, that new technologies are not a panacea for chronic infrastructural weaknesses in film production finance, distribution rights, exhibition facilities, and so on. Badenhorst acknowledges some of these issues when he addresses the thorny question of electrification, for example. But what is less clear and therefore needs further explication is the demographics of cinemagoing on the African continent; that is to say, there needs to be a much clearer delineation of the different ways in which African audiences in particular consume media products such as films and television programmes. The statistics regarding cinema audiences and patterns of cultural consumption in Africa do not always speak for themselves, because the basis on which they are collected and collated (notably by such agencies as UNESCO) is not entirely reliable. For example, the advent of Video houses' in Ghana during the mid-1980s, which coincided with the movement among a number of Ghanaian filmmakers to adopt video-based production methods (which Ola Balogun mentions on p. 180) marked an important shift in the development of 'cinema' exhibition in Ghana; it effectively helped to reinvigorate 'cinemagoing' among predominantly younger audiences in the capital Accra especially. These unregulated venues - usually small rooms or halls equipped with a VHS recorder and twenty-inch television set - literally 'packed them in' night after night, albeit screening imported Hollywood blaxploitation films. This writer was unable to get exact figures relating to this phenomenon at the time, though it was quite clear to everyone working in Ghana's cinema industry that the emergence of these exhibition venues represented a significant trend which needed to be factored into any assessment of how audiences consume films in Ghana, and perhaps elsewhere on the African continent as well. There are a number of ways in which African audiences do not conform to the standard configurations which conventional audience studies and survey methods tend to employ. While the traditional split between urban and rural patterns remains an important dimension, for example, there are other equally significant factors or variations within urban African conurbations which demand a rethinking of African audience research and analysis. In addition, regulatory questions need to be addressed as well, particularly with reference to the increasing fetishisation of the marketplace, which has swept across Western economies with a vengeance since the 1980s, and the way in which corporate-led initiatives are accompanied by media corporations pressing for the deregulation of markets. Thus, characteristically, Badenhorst advances the twin notions that, first, regulation (by which he specifically means government control) works against democracy and, second, that the new media technologies can facilitate the democratic process (in Africa), provided of course the logic of the market is allowed to operate without restraint. Andrade-Watkins rightly challenges these assumptions, partly in historical terms (for example, the history of democracy itself) and partly in terms of questioning this particular strand of technological determinism which both governments and corporations, often in cahoots, are fond of promulgating.7 Although some of the themes highlighted in this introduction are not directly addressed elsewhere in this chapter, they nevertheless play a significant part in the debates about the future of cinema and the development of new media technologies within the African context. Film is still a highly popular medium in Africa, and there is no indication of it declining in importance, or losing out to other popular cultural forms which require a relatively complex technological base such as television. In a very real sense, therefore, the strengthening of national and pan-African cinema infrastructures is culturally and economically vital to

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, POWER, CINEMA AND TELEVISION

157

the continent as a whole. But at the same time, it is also recognised that these infrastructural changes can be addressed only through a combination of techniques, including technological, organisational, social, political and cultural. The introduction of satellite delivery systems as a means of reaching the maximum number of African cinemagoers, provides an ideal vehicle for debating and implementing some of these changes, that is, in the context of a highly popular cultural artefact: cinema.

POWER, CINEMA AND TV IN AFRICA John Badenhorst I neither make movies, nor do I commission them. I do have something to do with the business of rewarding filmmakers, and over the past two years I have been privileged to discover the cinematic riches which lie, largely unseen, all over the continent of which I am proud to be a citizen. I am no technocrat, therefore my presentation will focus more on what new technology may mean to filmmakers in Africa, rather than what it is. Let us look forward to a high-tech Africa in the twenty-first century; an Africa no longer characterised by the begging-bowl, or the latest corruption scandal. Let us share with Bernard Dadie the vision encapsulated in the following poem: Dry your tears Africa your children come back to you their hands full of playthings and their Hearts Full of Love. They return to clothe you in their dreams and their hopes.8

The Satellite Picture Although I disclaimed a wide technical knowledge, I would like, nevertheless, to guide you briefly in layman's terms through the range of information technology which will greet Africans as the new century dawns. Satellite is no longer just a sputnik or something out of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), but simply the most dynamic means of keeping in touch with one another. In its simplest concept, the satellite is a mirror in the sky, beaming up knowledge or entertainment from one source and sending it on to another, to any destination which falls within its footprint, or coverage area. Digital compression of channels, via satellite, vastly increases the number of channels which can be distributed to African territories. As many as seven channels can be 'squeezed' into the space previously occupied by one channel, without losing visual or sound quality. Much of the new technology currently in final development, which will extend to the African continent as well, holds a promise of eventually becoming more accessible to ordinary citizens, as have radios, although in the start-up phase the items will certainly still carry a purchase price too high for the popular market. TVs, satellite dishes, decoders, cellular telephones, computers, CD-Roms, all of these technological advances are constantly being refined and the market has already seen a drop in the price - although not yet to the level of the man in the street in Africa. The so-called 'hot bird' in the sky, the satellite will enable anyone who has the means - both financial and hardware - to receive its wide variety of material. In 1995 we saw the successful launch of PANAMSAT 4 - or PAS 4 - which now covers nearly the whole African continent, except the extreme western tip.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, POWER, CINEMA AND TELEVISION

159

Many countries in Africa make films. The more prolific producers include Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali and Togo (in West Africa), Tunisia and Egypt (North Africa), Kenya and Uganda (East Africa), Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique and South Africa (southern Africa). The Ivory Coast and Nigeria are already served by existing satellite beams, and all these countries, with the exception of Senegal and Guinea-Bissau, fall well within the footprint of PANAMSAT 4. PAS 4, transmitting on C Band, direct-to-home, will be able to serve all of these countries, with the exception of Senegal and Guinea-Bissau. Some of the territories already pull down programmes off other satellites, of course, but what will they have access to now? Certainly more international news and actuality programmes, more entertainment, ranging from cartoons to classics, more programmes for children, more sport, and many more movies. More significantly perhaps, the satellite beam symbolises the wave of democracy that has swept the continent, the farewell to both colonial overlords and tinpot dictators - it is happening! To have access to all these wonderful new things, what must one pay? Around 1500 US dollars - and whatever monthly subscriptions are required. The recipient must have a TV set, and electricity. For his or her money, the satellite subscriber receives a satellite dish, 2-2.4 metres in diameter, an LNB - or 'low noise block converter', attached to the dish and an IRD, Integrated Receiver Decoder, the so-called satellite decoder. Will Wend Kuuni (Gaston Kabore\ 1982) or Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambety, 1973) or The Emigrant (Youssef Chahine, 1994) be beaming down to African viewers? Or will it all be Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Jean-Claude van Damme? Or even Spike Lee, John Singleton and Mario van Peebles? What would be really encouraging would be to see the works of Youssef Chahine, Djibril Diop Mambety, Gaston Kabore and Daryl Roodt shooting down to the African viewer. With this aim in mind, let's briefly note some statistics relating to the likelihood of Africans en masse having access to the new technology (Tables 7.1 - 7.8 and Figures 7.1 — 7.4. Source for these, unless otherwise stated, is Cinema Action 1994: Les televisions du Monde: Panorama dans 110 Pays, Paris: Cerf-Corlat, 1994.). 9 It is difficult to generalise in Africa, as African countries have all reached different stages of development and technological sophistication. However, if we look at something as basic as radio, we see that in 1991 Africa had around 10 per cent of the world's population but only 2 per cent of the world's radio receivers, 3 per cent of radio transmitters, 1 per cent of television sets and 2 per cent of television transmitters! So what hope for satellite TV? Unfortunately, this is likely to remain the province of the more advantaged citizens. Then again, as an average of only 2 per cent of the population of any country goes to the cinema, this may also be the percentage that currently wants to see African films, as opposed to martial.arts spectaculars! Which is not to say that I regard this lack of audience for the African film as being a good thing, far from it. The potential audience is vast, and it is only by preserving one's own culture and heritage that one can gain confidence in one's own identity. Charles Amira and Cecil Blake have written authoritative papers on these topics and I have been influenced to a degree by their conclusions. 10 Both deal with the question of electricity supply but it is arguable how conclusive any electrification figures can be, relating to Viewership', because rural and so-called township viewers - certainly in southern Africa use motor car batteries, and not electricity, to power their TV sets. In such residential

160

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

areas there are many more viewers per set than in middle-class households, which are electrified.

The Regulatory Aspect Satellite television is almost impossible to regulate - unless a government actually bans the satellite dishes, as was the case in Saudi Arabia. Such regulation flies in the face of democracy and progress, not to mention the advanced business systems which will be made possible by the likes of the Internet. Deregulation differs from country to country. It certainly is occurring more now than previously, basically because governments have found that broadcasters still tend to support the government of the day, once privatised, while also taking over the costs! One problem which sometimes arises is the fact that most African nations inherited their regulations regarding local content from Europe, and did not revise them on taking their independence. The emphasis in the broadcasting universe at large no longer seems to be on a quota system, as regards local production. More and more, broadcasters are being called upon to invest specified minimum amounts of money in their local industries regardless of how much product this in fact produces. The emphasis is thus shifting from regulators requiring a quantity of local product to the quality of the local product. To build up a loyal African audience of viewers of their own products, quality of product would seem to be essential, especially if Africa is to challenge the more Western style of programming successfully.

Table 7.1 Televisioni Broadcasting Service in Africa Country

TV (k)

Algeria Burkina Faso Cameroon Egypt Ghana Guinea-Bissau Ivory Coast Kenya Mali Mauritania Morocco Nigeria Senegal Togo Tunisia Zimbabwe

300 4000 146 550 115 1 1 1206 550 220 16 500 150

TV

VHF

UHF

Total

trans-

trans-

trans-

(p. 100) mitters

mitters

mitters population country

TV

receivers density

system (*)

-0%

-0%

95

90

10 98

70

2

45

10

-

22 2 79

90 30 20 84

80 3 62

17 88 98 57

40 90 80 47

PALBG PAL BG SECAM B j SECAM B SECAM B PAL BG SECAM B SECAM K SECAM B PAL BG

7.01 0.46 2.87 8.06 1.04 5.14 0.52 0.01 0.06 5.29 0.56 3.33 0.51 6.62 1.78

TV

TV

coverage coverage

PALBG SECAM B PAL BG SECAM B PALBG

13 2 2 79 4 12

9

4

17 16 9 3 57 10 3 1

14.22 20.59 16.29 10.31 17.24 17.04

8.68

16 600 700

560 1300

750

Togo Tunisia

Zimbabwe

260 4800

3.8 13.02 8.72

14

1

6 3

7 10

7 7 1 4

7 6 3

21 62 4 2

1

20 2

1 4

5

14

12.01 31.73 29.87 1 3

30 81 8 6

11

3 3 0 2

22.34 2.41

22 3 9

5250 200 1300 16 500 4000 35 1450 2000

Morocco Nigeria Senegal

Mauritania

Kenya Mali

Cameroon Egypt Ghana Guinea-Bissau Ivory Coast

Algeria Burkina Faso

mitters

mitters

mittors

Total

8 50

6 12

mittors

83

15 26

39 19

37 10

transmitters

(p. 100)

VHF trans-

(k)

HF trans-

MF trans-

LF trans-

Radio density

Sound receivers

Table 7.2 Sound Broadcasting Service in Africa

96

100 100 99

100 100

90 75 80

60 80

100 70 100 100

70

88

100 100 90

100 100

40 80 88 65 50

100

98 100 100

% %

Served coveragecountry

Served coverage population

332.5°E AOR 66°E IOR 359°E AOR 359° AOR 307°E AOR 332.5°E AOR 26°E 63°E IOR

307°E AOR 66°E IOR

ISVA(F-ll) IS V (F-7) Transp. 13 IS V (F-2) Transp. 21 IS V (F-2) Transp. 22 IS V (F-3) Transp. 22 IS V-A(F-ll) Transp. 3 ARABSAT ISV(F-5)

IS V (F-3) Transp. 22 IS V (F-7) Transp. 12 IS V (F-2) Transp. 23 ISV-A(F-ll) Transp. 25 ISV-A(F-ll) Transp. 22 ISV-A(F-ll) Transp. 24 IS IV-A (F-4) Transp. 7 IS V (F-7) Transp. 12

L P P P L L L L

L L P L L L L L

9 MHz Hemi

72 MHz Hemi

72 MHz Hemi

36 MHz Hemi 9 MHz Hemi 36 MHz Hemi 8.25 MHz 14 Vista channels

36 MHz Hemi

9 MHz Hemi

72 MHz Hemi 36 MHz Hemi 36 MHz Hemi 36 Mhz Hemi 36 Mhz Hemi 36 Mhz Hemi

2 Central African Republic

3 Ethiopia

4 Gabon

5 Ivory Coast 6 Libya 7 Mauritania 8 Mauritius

9 Morocco

10 Mozambique

11 Niger 12 Nigeria

Note: L - Leased P - Purchased

13 Sudan 14 Zaire

IS - Inteset To be changed (sold to Ethiopia)

66°E IOR

ISV(F-7)Transp. 13'

L

36 MHz Hemi

1 Algeria

359°E AOR 332.5°E AOR 332.5°E AOR 332.5°E AOR 338.5°AOR 66°E IOR

Orbital position

Satellite

LorP

Country

Satellite capacity

Table 7.3 Domestic Satellite System in Africa

Several TVROs 15 x 11m 14 x 14m

17xllm 10 x7m lxllm 3 x7m projected 10 x 7m lxllm 2x7m projected 8 x 7m 1 x 15m 8 x 11m 2 x7m 1 mobile 2 x 7.2m 13 x 11m 2 x 11m l x 11m l x 10m 1 x6.1m 1 x 4.5m 1 x 14m 2 x 14m l x 13m 2 x 13m 3x 11.5m 21 x 11m

Type and no, of earth stations

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, POWER, CINEMA AND TELEVISION

Table 7.4

International Earth Satellite Stations in Africa (1988) Name

Satellite

1 Algeria

Lakhdaria 1 Lakhdaria 3 Lakhdaria 4*

60.00 335.50 346.00

Lakhdaria 5**

26.00

2 Angola

Cacuaco 1 Cacuaco 2 Aborney-Calavi

335.50 325.50 335.50 325.50 325.50 338.50

Country

3 Benin 4 Botswana 5 Burkina Faso 6 Burundi 7 Cameroon 8 9 Cape Verde 10 Central African Republic 11 Tehad 12 Congo 13 Ivory Coast 14 Jibuti 15 Egypt 16 Eq. Guinea 17 Ethiopia 18 Gabon

19 20 21 22 23

Gambia Ghana Guinea Guinea-Bissau Kenya

24 Lesotho 25 Liberia 26 Libya 27 Madagascar 28 Malawi

Kgala Somgande 1 Somgande 2 Bujumbura 1 Bujumbura 2 Doula Zamengoe Varsea Mpoko 1 Goudji Mougouni Abidjan 1 Abidjan 2 Ambouli Maadi 1 Maadi 2 Baia Buluita 1 Sululta 2 Franceville N'keitang 1 N'keitang 2 Banjul Nkutune Wonkifong Rissau Longonet 1 Longonet 2 Ha Sofonia Sinker Tripoli 2 Tripoli 3 Phillibert Taira Kanjedza 1 Kanjedza 2

60.00 307.00 335.50 335.50 335.50 325.50 332.50 335.50 325.50 335.50 60.00 335.50 60.00 325.50 335.50 60.00 335.50 335.50 325.50 325.50 335.50 325.50 335.50 60.00 335.50 341.50 325.50 335.50 60.00 60.00 60.00 341.50

163

164

Table 7.4

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

continued

Country

Name

Satellite

29 Mali

Sullymanb'g 1 Sullymanb'g 2 Sullymanb'g 3 Toujoumine Cassie 2 Behoule Boane 1 Boane 3 Geudai Kujama Laniate 1 Laniate 2 Kleuhire Sae Mereal Gandeui Ben Espoir Wilberferce Kaaraan Umm Haraz 1 Umm Haraz 2 Esulwini Mwenge 1 Mwenge 2 Cacavelli Dehile 1 Dehile 2** Mpoma N'sale Mwembeshi 1 Mwembeshi 2 Masawe

325.50 335.50 325.50 335.50 60.00 335.50 335.50 335.50 60.00 325.50 60.00 325.50 60.00 325.50 325.50 60.00 325.50 60.00 325.50 325.50 341.50 60.00 325.50 325.50 335.50 24.00 335.50 335.50 60.00 335.50 341.50

30 Mauritania 31 Mauritius 32 Maroe 33 Mozambique 34 Niger 35 Nigeria 36

36 37 Rwanda 38 S.T. & Principe 39 Senegal 40 Seychelles 41 Sierra Leone 42 Somalia 43 Sudan 44 Swaziland 45 Tanzania 46 Togo 47 Tunisia 48 Uganda 49 Zaire ; 50 Zambia 51 Zimbabwe Note: All INTELSAT except **ARABSAT *INTRSPTNK

!

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, POWER, CINEMA AND TELEVISION

165

Table 7.5 Distribution of Receivers by Continent (Major Areas of Groupings listed only) Continents, major areas and groupings listed only 1 World total 2 Africa 3 America 4 Asia 5 Europe (including USSR) 6 Oceania I 7 Developed countries 8 Developing countries 9 Africa excluding Arab States 1 10 Asia excluding Arab States 11 Arab States 12 North America 13 Latin America and the Caribbean

No. iof receivers (in millions) Radio Television 1932 105 700 555 546 26 1238 694 69 538 53 551 149

797 21 286 190 290 10 592 205 10 180 21 217 69

No. ofireceivers per 1000 inhabitants Radio Television 375 177 989 182 701 1020 1023 176 154 180 263 2016 342

155 36 404 62 375 379 489 52 22 60 102 796 158

Having said that, I had the experience some years ago of dealing with a film in the M-NET film awards, called Saikati (1992) made by a very talented Kenyan woman filmmaker, Anne MungaL I understand from viewers and from the authorities in Kenya the movie houses in Nairobi were packed for this film. Despite the fact that there were technical problems with the film's sound, photography and editing, the quality of the idea and the integrity of the filmmaker were never in any doubt. However, I do feel that quality is important. A product of truly high quality will always develop a new audience, but we all know how difficult it is to produce a film which possesses all-round brilliance. African film is a multifaceted thing - if one regards all films produced on the continent as being African - but a more-or-less common point of departure from the American product is the relatively slower speed of the narrative exposition. I tend to call this 'more nuance and less noise', but there might be those devotees of the car-chase-into-quick-dissolve style of movie who simply fall asleep, or switch off, when confronted with what are uncharitably called 'African Cultural Epics'. In this regard deregulation and the emergence of more private players in the broadcasting industry are also essential components of the promotion of local African products. Private players who break former government monopolies stimulate innovation on all fronts, and if these commercial broadcasters are then compelled - along with the state broadcasters - to invest money in the local industry, the advantages to local filmmakers are significant. However, this still presupposes that audiences want to see African features, and that governments, entrepreneurs and audiences are prepared to put their hands into their pockets, in the quest for a local African film culture.

o o

*o

»*

oo On o

4s> NO *0

OO 00

8

On

8

OO

o ©

» — •

On

o

• — '

o

On

On

*> ©

>__» ^j © © © to © © i—»

©

Oi

ON

>—*

©

©

i—i

ON ON ON ^vl

VJ OO OJ

4*

OO NO Oo OO

OO © VJ

NO

ON VJ

00 OO ©

OO

00 00 Ol

OO 4*.

©

^

Oo "O

^j ON ©

©

NO O0 O

NO imml 00

©

Table 7.6 Radio Broadcasting

o©

Country

•—*

&

Algeria 1 Burkina Faso Cameroon Egypt 1 Ghana | Guinea-Bissau Ivory Coast Kenya

Mauritania Morocco Nigeria Senegal Togo Tunisia Zimbabwe to *>

s

-—-v

*Z er of Rec

I—>

to O M *»H vg

i—•

Oo

On 4* 4*. Oo tO

OO Ol

H-* to

On rft

O ^

© ©

8

to

ON 4> ©

to

OO

o ON 00 o o o o o 1 — '

* O

OO

4*

OO on 4* O o to o o o o ON o o o © o o o ©

O

on ON

*o

>» S^ **0 OO

OO to

© to

On

Oo

to OO

i-^

•—»

H-'

--4

*o

OJ

-o OJ

OJ

to OO to © ©

8 ©

to

©

ON to on to vj oo © VJ o to 00 to on On to On O o o Ol On ON ^J © NO © ©

•—>

o

© ©

©

to oo OO

ON

00 to *o On Oi OJ on O o o o o o o o o

^ 00

to

ON

4^ O

O oo vj O

OO Ol -O. OI

vj

ON

00

to ON M

ON

NO

4* o

t—' Oo

-o OO o 4*> »o o o o © o

On © >4 Oi © ©

o o o

|# ##

8

ON Os

O

o

oo

4^ OO

>—»

ON © ©

oo Ui

K>

H->

to oo © ON to © O © ©

ON

OO

vj

to 00

00 © ©

8

•—»

OO

i—i

©

4^ Ol

©

to © Ui ON

#

In ^ d-

OJ

©

to On © ©

4*-

45*

4^ to © ©

NO Co

N3

H

housands

oo OO ©

OO

I_I

oo

o to ON o o oo o o o o

1—» 4*

o

>J

t-w

^O 00

«S >

4*

NO >—

oo

K

to 4* 00 © NO © © 1 * . 4^ On © © ©

^

Oo

on

to On on On to On •vj to ON © © © on ©

vo CO ON

4*> ON © On © on ©

NO

1—1

8

On

8

OJ

4* NO

OO ©

>5 #

Ol

on

••—1

^-* 8

Oi

t — •

OO

© ©

00 ©

#

»_

to to

8

00 NO

Ul ©

oi y—*

Oo XJ

^ s

1 *a^ s* ^

3

C

• rt

1400 57

Burkina Faso Cameroon Egypt Ghana

10 300

Togo Tunisia

73

450 4

Nigeria Senegal

Zimbabwe

749

Mauritania Morocco

Ivory Coast Kenya Mali

300 65

975

Algeria

Guinea-Bissau

1980

Country

Table 7.7 Television (Number of Receivers)

455 5 12 347 89

452 11 323 81

5

823

350 72

1800 70

1208

1982

786

330 69

1600 63

1092

1981

6 13 370 97

860 457

380 75

2000 76

35

1325

1983

3860 140

520 193

220 16 500 150

200 15 400 120

479 6 13 385 109

300 17

600

2 1300 1206 550

1150 500

1005

600 125 2

1607 40 300 4150 200

1987

500 100 1 1

550 115 1 1

1610 38 120 4000 146

1986

440 79

108

2930

1985

1557 36

Thousands

1441 36

1984

22.5% 7.9% 8.2% 14.9%

4.2%

9.8% 10.4% 10.4% 8.2%

10.4%

16.8% 19.6%

7.4% 3.4%

Annual rate of growth

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

168

Table 7.8 Sound Broadcasting Manpower in Africa (1986) Country

Algeria Burkina Faso Cameroon Ivory Coast Egypt Ghana Guinea-Bissau Kenya Mali Mauritania Morocco Nigeria Senegal Togo Tunisia Zimbabwe

Personnel

838 153 867 150 16109 2877 162 625 201 250 1848 2789 535 150 284 435

Senior Operating Graduate staff engineers technicians

Support staff %

527 40

469 96 100 35 12109 1726 50

56 63 15 23 100 60 31

33 47 336 34 276 20 34 32

68 180 1128 2168 207 112 133 347

34 72

145 7 90 10 100

163 24 237 45 300

61 26 260 60

16 2 40 30 7 124

608 70 585 70 16 260 554 33 14 87 54

33 19 4 30 2

Support staff

Fig 7.1 International Earth Satellite Stations in Africa (1988)

61 78 39 75 47 80

1

P0

Fig 7

idio Receiversp er 100 Inha bitan

15

20

25

30

35

TJ

Zimbabwe

Tunisia

Togo

Senegal

m

Nigeria

o

o
>

O

Morocco

Mauritania

Mali

m

£

Kenya

-

m o X z o I o CD < O

10

70

> o

o

Ivory Coast

Guinea-Bissau

Ghana

Egypt

Cameroon

Burkina Faso

Algeria

8-

n

o

2?

10

73 73

>

73 O

Z

Togo

Tunisia

Zimbabwe

o z m >

>

Tl

CO

> < m

Senegal

Nigeria

o z >

Morocco

r;

o

CD

CO

o

Mauritania

Mali

Kenya

Ivory Coast

Guinea-Bissau

Ghana

Egypt

Cameroon

Burkina Faso

Algeria

TV Rec. (1,000 000)

•

H Radio Rec. (1,000 000)

Europe

America

Fig 7.4 Number of Receivers (Radio and Television)

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

900

1000

Radio Rec. /1000 Inh.

TV Rec./1000 Inh.

Asia

1

Africa

172

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

The Information Superhighway Much is read and even more said about the Information Superhighway. This is also possible because the mirror in the sky beams down images to be seen on a personal computer, or PC, rather than a television set. One possibility is that a group, some aid or commercial organisation, like an international bank, would need to invest a lot of money into a VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminals) network for Africa, as already exists in Europe, Asia and the United States. From a hub station anywhere in the satellite's footprint, VSAT terminals all over the country and the continent could receive and transmit data, which could then be passed on terrestrially to a number of 'sub-terminals'. Services like up-to-date automatic teller machines in the bundu}1 for instance, would facilitate commerce in remote areas but, more importantly, anyone in the country could buy into this network and start exchanging information. This form of new technology will be much more accessible to ordinary citizens and students than the satellite entertainment programmes. With the development of satellites it will now be much cheaper for African countries to participate in global information flows, provided that governments ease up on private ownership, restrictive regulation and censorship. The level of access Africans will have to the Information Superhighway also depends on the extent to which African countries invest in the new communications technologies which will of course lead to a lessening of the governments' control over state media, a lifting of censorship and hopefully an end to repression. More and more African universities are installing electronic mail connections (for example, in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Zambia). Parallel developments are the roll-out of international e-mail networks such as the African Cinema Consortium, based at Michigan State University and Development Through Self Reliance (DTSR), Columbia, USA, which is a distribution list for socially relevant African films. The African Cinema Consortium aims to encourage the study of African cinema and film distribution in the USA and DTSR distributes tens of thousands of African video titles on the continent. They have a registered charity in Zimbabwe, called Media for Development Trust, which has also produced award-winning African films such as Neria (Godwin Mawuru, 1993) and More Time (Isaac Mabhikwa, 1993). In South Africa, FRU (the Film Resource Unit) also does sterling service in distributing African films on video. Africans are publishing more and more papers on the Information Superhighway,12 and the need for Africa to become directly connected. Given the often inadequate postal, telephone and telecommunications systems in Africa, and the often top-down nature of national broadcasting services, the Superhighway will be the most likely way for Africa to connect with the international media grids.

Will It Help the Filmmaker? Again, how does this help the filmmaker? Just as watching television encourages a culture of cinema, watching short or long features, and other programmes, on television develops - one hopes - a desire to see it on the big screen. Through the medium of television the technology of the cinematic form is popularised, and with any luck the viewer will go to the picture house with its giant screen, to experience 'the real thing'. But what is it they will see? American pop video culture at its best, and slickest, or something actually relating to their own African heritage? Sadly, audiences often see only the former. Enhanced media capabilities, coupled with a more liberal government approach, will

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, POWER, CINEMA AND TELEVISION

173

hopefully instil confidence into the local African cultures, as was the case, for example, in Japan. Africans - wherever they are - should start to buy less and create more. There is a real danger in the continual importing of outside products, however glossy or cost-effective they may be. The local industry cannot immediately compete with the international one, but it is only through the promotion of home-grown efforts that the first steps along the road to a truly indigenous cinema will be taken. It is possible for both state and private broadcasters in a country like South Africa to become African-located commercial giants, competing with channels like SKY, CNN and the BBC for viewership. Already M-NET, and its sister company MultiChoice, have a network that realises Cecil John Rhodes' dream of a network (railroads in his case, airwaves in ours) running from 'Cape to Cairo'.13 Having mentioned Rhodes with intent, the danger is that even the New South Africa could be perceived as a neo-colonial or imperialist force. I would hate to see my company regarded as the 'big brother' - reserving a space for African broadcasters but making money for the capitalists! Sadly, it is private broadcasters like M-NET which are far more likely to have the capital and expertise to establish an African channel - but by their very nature private broadcasters have to keep on making money, otherwise they would be forced to close down, and no further progress would be made in 'the africanisation of the african viewer'. In South Africa, both M-NET and the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), on their Contemporary Community Values (CCV) channel are making some progress in this regard. From October 1995 M-NET has been including African films such as Youssef Chahine's The Emigrant, Nii Kwate Owoo and Kwesi Owusu's Ama (1991), Elaine Proctor's Friends (1993) and two Zimbabwean features (Neria and More Time, from the Media for Development Trust), on its schedule, for South Africa and the rest of the continent. In 1995 the SABC had three channels: TV 1, which was the original television channel established in South Africa in 1976 and broadcast equally in English and Afrikaans; CCV, which has the more popular entertainment programmes but caters also to the wide spectrum of the population; and a channel called NNTV which tends to show more culturally orientated programmes.14 CCV scheduled thirteen features of varying lengths, mostly from West Africa, all dubbed into English in 1995. The issue of dubbing French-, Arabic-, Wolofor More-language films into English is a crucial one, if these excellent products are to enjoy the wider audience that they deserve. South Africa has much to offer in dubbing expertise and infrastructure and this kind of initiative can vastly promote the spread of the African film. But what are the problems faced by African filmmakers, which ultimately will force African audiences to be deprived of their own 'home-grown movies', irrespective of whether the images arrive over land, from the sky, or on the cinema screen?

The Real Problems Speaking as someone not too directly involved in the actual hurly-burly of making pictures in Africa, but therefore hopefully able to be quite objective, the main problems confronting African filmmakers would seem to be: • the aftermath of colonialism • lack of government support • no ownership of cinemas

174

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

• no adequate continental distribution system • a shortage of prints of African films, sometimes due to fears on the part of the filmmakers that their films may be pirated. Colonialism is too broad, too notorious a topic to fall within the scope of my paper, but it is salutary to reflect on Africa's colonial past, and to be on our guard against a neocolonial onslaught down the airwaves. In many cases, the continuing link between the former colonisers and those-they-colonised is fortunately not all bad. Certainly the cinema of francophone Africa (around 80 per cent of Africa's cinematic output) would not be the same at all without the technical and financial support of France, although some critics say that the emphasis on European cinematic norms works against the fostering of the local African culture. Some governments do support their local cinema industries, with the Burkinabes leading the way. The 15 per cent of each cinema ticket which goes back to the government and is in turn used to fund local cinematic projects, in Burkina Faso, is money well spent, and in the lower-admission-price cinemas of Ouagadougou local filmgoers do have the opportunity of seeing their own cultural heritage, captured for ever on film. The 15 per cent that is siphoned off the latest Jackie Chan or Arnold Schwarzenegger blockbuster is chickenfeed to the distributors - and the studios - because the total number of cinemagoers in Burkina Faso is relatively small, and the money lost to distributors not so great. Apart from which, the government had the good sense to nationalise the distribution system, along with the cinemas, when the country became independent. Speaking for South Africa, I foresee a minor revolt if 15 per cent of one's pleasure money for the latest Hollywood release has to bypass the pockets of the large distribution chains, or if 15 per cent were to be added on to the admission price, so as to finance local films. But how else? TV stations do pre-license movies, a certain amount of purchasing of African product is taking place, but generally speaking, African artists continue to get very little opportunity here. For many years we have been told that the imported product is far superior - and the imported product is very well packaged, conforming to general Western world conventions and therefore having so much bigger a budget at its disposal. Dr Blake mentions the need for the African entrepreneurial class to diversify their investments in such a way that the new communication and information sector should capture a significant share of their resources. 15 Secondly, students and researchers should be further prepared to embrace the new technologies. As has already been said, some African universities have made a good start at gearing themselves up in this regard. Finally, a cultural 'resensitising' is essential. The destructive impact of colonialism on African culture and self-perception needs to be addressed, creating self-confident Africans who will undoubtedly make better partners with the rest of the world, with mutual respect firmly in place. In South Africa the airways are being used to good advantage, as a series of programmes appear on both state and private television services, which put the record straight about the past. A further problem confronting filmmakers relates to where African people actually live - about 80 per cent of them in the rural areas. And of those living in the cities, how many can afford the price of a dish? By clubbing together they may be able to - and passing the signal along the street - but this is, unfortunately, illegal, and not calculated to keep the pay TV companies in business! Mobile cinema units will do a lot to spread the culture of indigenous cinema. In South Africa, during the early years of the twentieth century, Sol Plaatjie, who was a co-founder of the ANC, spread the word by staging free 'bioscope shows' under

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, POWER, CINEMA AND TELEVISION

175

the stars - although not without some interference from the authorities. By and large, local African citizens do not own the movie houses, nor do local governments impose realistic quotas for local production on local broadcasters. And if they do, inferior so-called 'quota quickies' could be the result, or low-cost and usually mindless game shows. As I have previously suggested, perhaps the emphasis should now be on quality of product, rather than quantity, and broadcasters should have to meet set levels of financial reinvestment in the local industry. The minimum financial level does, however, need to be realistic in terms of what the private broadcaster needs to survive in business. Imported American/British/French programming will always be more affordable than the local African equivalent and government regulators need to tread a fine line between stimulating the local industry and strangling the private broadcaster!

Possible Solutions With the advent of serious satellite television in Africa, education will take a quantum leap forward. Different genres and art forms will become much more accessible to all broadcasters, and governments and broadcasters should be encouraged to share and syndicate all programmes that have a continental appeal Dubbing is a relatively inexpensive way to bring new African product to countries that struggle to finance an adequate supply of non-imported features. Sub-titles can be most effective, but the cinema audience - even in more sophisticated territories - prefers to hear its heroes speaking their own language. African filmmakers should also be quick to benefit from the opportunities provided by digital television. With so many new channels now being beamed at all of us, there are so many more movie slots to be filled, and also many brownie points to be scored by TV channels which don't neglect the local filmmaking community. A balance would seem to be the final answer for African cinema, part foreign-owned cinemas, part locally-owned. Governments should take a hand in the financing of local films, perhaps drawing on some form of cinema taxation, but should be wary of being too prescriptive - artists don't like being told what to do! And local broadcasters need to be firmly but fairly compelled to invest some of their profits in their own home film/TV industry. Certainly we should go on enjoying the best fare that Europe and the United States have to offer, but African heritage should be well filmed and entertainingly presented by African filmmakers. In the end, it all comes down to distribution, in whatever form. Some of the best African filmmakers only really show their movies at festivals. With continental dubbing systems in place, with all of our filmmakers committing to an African film culture, not merely a South African, an anglophone, a francophone, an Arab world film culture ... there would indeed be hope on the horizon, or rather, in the sky. The shiny new hardware of the satellite era could very well be beaming African cinematic gems to Africa, and the world. The challenges are enormous, the opportunities to make a positive change for African filmmakers and African audiences are immense. One has every reason to feel rather upbeat about the likelihood of positive developments in African cinema, but first the Africans themselves - audiences, distributors, filmmakers and governments — must make a concerted effort to continue being African, and proud of it! As Ghandi put it: 'Become the change you wish to see*.16

RESPONDENTS Claire Andrade-Watkins I want to look here at the issues and implications of the new technologies. The market forces represented by the reality of new technologies in Africa will be what are really going to shape Africa in the twenty-first century. For the sake of argument, you could already say that Africa is obsolete and left out of this new century in terms of the new technologies. Looking at satellites, new technologies and information, we're also talking about some of the issues from the 'first emergence', or from the 'second emergence' (as noted by Sylvia Wynter; see Chapter 2), which are exacerbated and amplified when you talk about the new technologies. With satellites, there still is a power dynamic with the new technologies. Who owns the satellites? By the time we go into the twenty-first century, we will find that the geodesic orbit (the orbit above the Earth where there are satellites), which is finite and limited, is almost full. So when we talk about ownership, in reality the power of information, and the power to create your images or transmit others, the question is: can you get a space up there in that geodesic orbit? Every time we sit there on television and watch one of those lovely satellites go up (or not go up) and we hear talk of 'pay loads', those pay loads are satellites that are being launched. To launch a satellite costs between US$9 million and $11 million. So every time one of those rockets goes up with the pay load, some company, corporation or government is launching a satellite on the geodesic orbit. One question for the twenty-first century is: how many of those satellites on the geodesic orbit are the countries in Africa, African cinemas, African televisions going to be controlling? So Africa is going into the twenty-first century with a larger dependence, where it's forced to rely on a technology that was in place even before we came into the new century, which means that we are renting transponder space. The power with the new technology is not down-linking, it's up-linking. Down-linking means I can sit there with my dish whether I'm in the city; or in the rural areas, and I can down-link. All you have to do is go to any (I will not use Third World) country in the southern hemisphere, Cape Verde, or to Maputo - everybody's got a dish. I remember when I was in Cape Verde in 1993, I was sitting in my cousin's house in Praia. It's part of an archipelago where there are only Cape Verdians (who are from there) and rocks. After dinner, was watching one of the steamy Brazilian novellas on television. My daughter doesn't speak Portuguese, but she was following the whole thing (she's 11), she was telling me the storyline. We left Praia and went to another island, where the volcano is; so it was the volcano, the rocks and the people and us. We had dinner at the mayor's house in Sao Filippe. We talked about a film that was being shot there, we talked about Cape Verde, and at 7 o'clock, everybody just turned around and watched the novella. I left the novella in Sao Filippe in Cape Verde; I went to Maputo, Mozambique, where at 7 pm, when everything was done, didn't I watch the next episode in the series of the novella that I saw on the island with the volcano and the rocks and the people? Plus CNN was telling me what Michael Jackson was doing. So the down-link is not a problem; it has already happened; the new technology has arrived. But we still, in this new configuration of the dissemination of information and

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, POWER, CINEMA AND TELEVISION

177

power, don't own it. For the most part we do not up-link (i.e. we do not send African programmes and images up onto the satellite), we down-link. There is a perception that technology, any new technology (and this happened when film went to video, then to DAT), has an answer for issues; technology is a panacea, technology is a substitute. What you find in the 'second emergence' - and I'm grateful for that term, because I think it applies in many ways - is that many of the fundamental and perennial issues that plague African cinema, ownership, distribution, the whole furore over what is the dynamic between the critic, the audience and the filmmaker, still have not been resolved. Now, there is the seductive element of the new technologies that appears to offer the solutions; we're going to do it better. Actually, we do it worse, but now we do it in cyberspace! With the new technologies and cinema, there needs to be a kind of retooling of how we think about what cinema basically is. You reduce cinema and any message to information. The new technology does not make any distinctions between cinema, video, DAT or Betacam; it's information and data bits that are going to be transmitted electronically. So you're not even talking any more about the production of the medium itself, yet you still have to deal with the cognitive process that happens before film, video, data information is transmitted, and that is something that has to be addressed. In the context of this book, a lot of those questions revolve around aesthetics, in terms of'what is the film form'. You realise that the whole process of information, the form that it takes and how it's transmitted, has changed radically in the twentieth century. However, there still is the responsibility of the cognitive process, the elements that shape it and its impact or influence on the data and the information that you present. Some of the elements from the 'first emergence' that were the major problems, we are going to see amplified in the second emergence, such as: distribution problems and ownership; and the ongoing, unresolved crisis of the relationship between the critics, the filmmakers and the audience, which has been the reality of African cinema because it is a rather irregular phenomenon where none of those entities - which in a normal sense interact with one another - exist. So you end up having somehow to strike a balance between three components that feed on one another, that are also often isolated from one another. The result is that instead of the possibility of good, substantive development, in the twentyfirst century, you have 'cyber-babble' (which is a term I made up, meaning a greater capacity for, but resulting in a lack of, communication in cyberspace), which might be a possibility, unless we begin to resolve some of the issues of discourse. The role of women in development is an aspect of this issue I would like us to bear in mind as one example of the concerns we need to address in the following context. The whole notion that the new technologies are going to encourage democracy through wider access and are going to be a catalyst for development really needs to be looked at a lot more closely. Has anybody questioned the idea that a democracy might be a kind of historical anomaly over time? What is democracy? What does equal access mean? What does access to the local constituencies mean? What is the content of the programming going to mean? Does it mean, with the new technologies, that democracy translates into not just access, but control over content and accessibility in the widest form? Who is going to be the monitor of this new technology? Where is the conscience? There has to be an ethical concern for the new technologies, which is a very crucial concern. There has to be a conscience. In the 'first emergence' governments supposedly did this through regulatory bodies. In this new emergence, it's not the governments; we're dealing with the postcolonial reality, and Man-

178

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

thia Diawara raised this when he spoke about the new economic order, in which we're dealing with private corporations, foundations, the International Monetary Fund (see Chapter 3). We're dealing with market forces which have their own consciousness. Where are the ethics and the consciousness for the African population and the people who need to be serviced by this new technology? I want to raise a couple of other points. In the 'first emergence', we haven't been able to have the luxury of going beyond looking at cinema as a vehicle for establishing ourselves and our identity. There is a need in social, economic and political development to look at the other forms that are contingent upon African reality, such as theatre or music. How are they also going to be able to grow into the 'new emergence' in a way that doesn't lose African unity, steal it, plunder it, translate it into data bits that do not serve the constituencies from which they come, or the ones who need it? For M-NET, the Cape-to-Cairo phenomenon is a very important image for the twentyfirst century. Africa has already been wired; it's a 'moot' point. At this point, one can only hope that a corporation like M-NET, and the others who own the up-link space, will be a benevolent giant, because there is no control mechanism or leverage to guarantee that it's going to be anything other than a controlling giant. If you look at the statistics that John Badenhorst presented (see pp. 158-75), it's very difficult to try and actually count television sets and radios. I can just think of a 200-mile stretch of road to get from one urban centre to a rural place where I was going, and my backbone still remembers every jolt, and I would be damned if I was going to try to count every radio on the way, to come up with any statistics for UNESCO. So I think it's very difficult to try to attribute or do a derivative analysis from statistics which are very difficult to get. Even though UNESCO's are some of the best, they are still a decade behind. So we must recognise that the figures are a kind of beacon, but you have to take them with a pinch of salt in terms of what they really mean for audiovisual access in Africa. Finally, I like to look at other alternative resources in this 'second emergence'. What does Africa have within the continent that cannot challenge but that can make it an equal partner in this technological debate, or reality, or programming, or access in the 'second emergence'? In my opinion there are maybe four countries (three other than South Africa), that have the capital intensive resources to be able, at some point, if everything was stable, to be equal partners in this technological kind of configuration of the twenty-first century. They are Angola, Zaire and Nigeria (and perhaps Kenya). But there are in those countries issues and problems from the first emergence that have hamstrung African cinema and, unless they're resolved, will continue to be the bete noir of what that cinema will become. It was Gil Scott-Heron who said: 'the revolution will not be televised'. Well, in many ways Africa will not be there in the twenty-first century to see its own image, and it will not be televised. The information data bits that represent our reality won't be there, unless we find a way of interfacing with what the reality already is, before we even enter the 'second emergence'.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, POWER, CINEMA AND TELEVISION

179

Ola Balogun African Cinema and Satellite Technology: Allies or Enemies? One of the basic axioms of successful strategy in warfare is that it is extremely unwise to accept batde on terrain chosen by the adversary. For this reason, generals always seek to impose their own choice of terrain, so as to be able to take maximum advantage of factors that favour the particular composition and nature of their own army. For instance, a general commanding an army that is mainly composed of foot soldiers and who is facing an adversary with large quantities of tanks and motorised weapons would rather wage war in forests and broken terrain than in wide open grasslands that offer no cover to infantry. In the same manner, it would be a serious error for anyone attempting to map out possible strategies for Third World countries to adopt in the field of the so-called Information Age Superhighways to do so on the basis of terms defined by the dominant technological powers. On the contrary, we have a duty to consider the implications of the emergence of new information technologies from the point of view of how we can turn some of these new advances to our own advantage, rather than accept that our people should be assigned the role of passive recipients of programmes and programming strategies devised elsewhere within the overall framework of a new world order designed to favour exclusively Western interests. Therefore, when we sit down to discuss satellite technology, we have to begin by asking ourselves two basic questions: Are Third World countries doomed to be confined forever to the receiving end of satellite broadcasting?; and, if not, what are the basic obstacles that need to be overcome for Third World countries, and the African continent specifically, to be in a position to broadcast to their own and to world audiences via satellite? In seeking to answer the first question, we first need to point out that the utilisation of satellite technology for broadcast purposes is most definitely not outside the reach of African countries, either from a cost point of view, or from the point of view of the technical and artistic capability to manufacture programming, even if that capability has not yet reached an adequately developed stage. In fact, there are already a small number of satellite broadcasts that originate in African countries today. For instance, Sudanese Television, RTG (the official Gabonese television station) and Tele Sahel (the Niger Republic national television station) broadcast their programmes on Intelsat 512 satellite; Mauritanian television broadcasts on Arabsat IC; Ethiopian television broadcasts on Intelsat 510; while Algerian television transmits on Intelsat 601. Although these are programmes aimed essentially at domestic audiences, they can be picked up in many parts of Africa by anyone equipped with a suitable antenna and decoder. In a separate category, we find BOP TV and M-NET international, which have been broadcasting for some years now, on Intelsat 601 with the wider ambition of reaching transnational audiences in Africa with programming designed for international consumption (although BOP TV's continued existence is now in doubt, following the collapse of the apartheid-devised Bantustan structure in South Africa.)17 In addition, whenever any African country has hosted major sports events such as the all-Africa athletic games and the pan-African football competitions in recent times, the national television station of that country has generally provided satellite broadcasts of such events to be picked up all across Africa. Such broadcasts are mostly received and retransmitted on Hertzian channels by local television stations, but where they are not scrambled

180

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

they can also be received directly from the satellite broadcasts by anyone who has a suitable dish. There is thus no doubt that, provided the motivation exists, satellite broadcasting is not beyond the reach of governmental or private television broadcasters from a purely technological point of view, since it is already being done for a variety of purposes. Why then has there not been greater utilisation of satellite technology for television broadcast purposes in Africa so far? The main reasons that have been advanced are the cost factor, both in terms of transmission and reception. So far, the cost of hiring air time on satellites for broadcasts is generally considered by African television stations to be too prohibitive, although they are often only too happy to pay for down-link facilities (often with more than a little financial assistance from the originating parties) for the purpose of receiving satellite transmissions originating from other parts of the world, such as from Deutsche Welle, C-Span, TV5 Afrique, and Canal France International. However, the relatively high costs associated with television broadcasting will soon be a thing of the past. Within the next few years, recent technological advances such as giant electro-magnetic guns that have already been successfully tested will make it feasible to send satellites into orbit for about 1 per cent of the present cost of using rockets. Thus, it should be feasible, possibly as early as by the turn of the century, to launch satellites into space for as little as half a million US dollars or even less. In addition, the cost of satellites themselves has been steadily declining. Satellites with all the components required for television broadcasting can now be obtained from manufacturers in countries like Japan for less than $10 million. Even for relatively poor African countries, as well as for some of the ambitious private sector entrepreneurs who now exist in many African countries, $10 million dollars is not such a large sum of money. As for the receiving end, the solution would seem to lie either in Direct Broadcast techniques, which require only relatively small and inexpensive antennae (about 60cm, as opposed to the 3.6m or 5m antennae that are currently required). In fact, even without DBS (Direct Broadcast System), it is already possible to receive the Arabsat satellite and Intelsats 512 and 601 with small-size dishes in many parts of Africa. Even more promising, the SMA (Satellite Master Antenna) TV or Mmds (Multi-point multichannel distribution system) has made satellite reception much cheaper with the emergence of local operators who retransmit satellite broadcasts to homes equipped with small dishes of 30cm diameter and a Vhf/Uhf converter. This is now a flourishing business in Nigeria for instance.18 Also, as we have already noted, many African television stations retransmit satellite broadcasts from overseas sources. One case in point is that when CNN was first introduced to Ghana, Ghanaian state-owned television relayed CNN free of charge for a while to local audiences, while most francophone countries' relay selected programmes from Canal France International and TV5. With time, television sets will also certainly become more widely available in Africa, especially if there is greater utilisation of solar energy to provide electrical power to rural areas. One major question that therefore remains to be answered is: how can programming be developed for satellite broadcasting originating from Africa, so as to make it both economically viable from the point of view of private sector operators, and politically and culturally desirable from the point of view of state-owned broadcast stations.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, POWER, CINEMA AND TELEVISION

181

It is, however, sufficient to state within this context that any serious attempt to provide practical solutions in this field would require the input and co-operation of African filmmakers and television producers. The other crucial question, of course, for which the answer remains in doubt is: are there any political leaders and senior civil servants in Africa who are prepared to map out useful and beneficial strategies for African participation in the so-called information and communication superhighways on other than passive terms?

Notes 1 Ziauddin Sardar, 'alt.civilisations.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West', in Cyberfutures - Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway, ed. Z. Sardar and J. R. Ravetz (London: Pluto Press, 1996), p. 15. 2 Herbert I. Schiller, Information Inequality - the Deepening Social Crisis in America (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 91. 3 David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity ~ Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 1. 4 Sardar, 'alt.civilisations.faq', pp. 14-41. 5 See Schiller, 'Information Inequality. 6 Vincent Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication (London: Sage, 1996), p. 127. 7 For a short, sharp critique of governments' and corporations' blind faith in technological determinism, see Schiller, Information Inequality. 8 Bernard Dadie poem: annotation to a group of anti-apartheid paintings from New Zealand by Mark Adams, Emily Karaka, Selwyn Muru and John Puhiatau, exhibited at the Africanus Johannesburg Biennale in 1995. 9 UNESCO Yearbook, 1991. 10 Charles M. Amira, Development of Broadcasting in Africa: Review of Technological Changes, Issues and Future Prospects. Dr Cecil Blake, Access to the New Communication, Information Technologies and Media Development in Africa. No further details available. 11 Bundu: a Shona word (Zimbabwe) meaning grassland. In colloquial use in southern Africa meaning a rural district out in the wilds. 12 P. E. Lowu and K. G. Tomaselli, 'Considerations on the Role of Media and Information in Building a New South African', Africa Media Review, vol. 8, no. 2, 1994: 57-72; S. Musaka, 'Towards a pan-African Cooperation in Satellite Communication: An Analysis of the RASCOM Project', Africa Media Review, vol. 6, no. 12, 1992: 13-20; J. A. McClain, 'UNESCO and the African Media: Towards the 21st Century', in A. J. Ahua, K. Babatesi and S. Waweru (eds), Africa: Communication Development and the Future (Nairobi: URTNA Programme, 1994), pp. 64-8. A special issue of Africa Media Review on the Information Superhighway and Africa was published in 1997. 13 Cecil John Rhodes often mentioned his dream of a highway from Cape Town to Cairo, one reference being pp. 600 and 647 (both para. 2) in The Founder by Robert I. Rotberg, published by Southern Book Publishers, Johannesburg. 14 In 1999, SABC Television is constructed around three main terrestrial channels: SABC1 the commercial, entertainment-driven channel; SABC2 - the public service-focused channel; SABC3 - the news and actuality channel with a mix of local and international entertainment. There are also two pay TV channels: a 24-hour news channel and an entertainment channel both specialising in and focusing on the best from the African

182

15 16 17 18

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

continent. SABC1,2 and 3, BOP TV and thirteen public broadcasting radio channels are all distributed by Sentech on a digital satellite platform. Dr Cecil Blake, Access to ... . A quotation commonly attributed to Mahatma Ghandi. BOP TV exists as a station, but is now part of the South African Broadcasting Corporation. See report by Malcolm Browne in the British Sunday Times, 25 February 1990.

Chapter 8 Can African Cinema Achieve the Same Level of Indigenisation as Other Popular African Art Forms? INTRODUCTION Mbye Cham The African creative landscape is populated by different forms of artistic practice, some of which claim indigenous roots in Africa while the origin of some others is located in cultures outside of Africa. The co-existence of these forms of varied origins on African soil over a broad time span and the resulting inevitable encounters, tensions, mutual nourishment and cross-fertilisation between them have produced a complex creative environment inhabited by forms whose identities are complex, commanding varied labels, designations, attributions and audiences depending, for the most part, on their relative antiquity on African soil. Thus, it is frequently the case that Makonde sculptural forms, Igede masquerades and masking traditions; Nyanga and Mandingo epic traditions; Xhosa 'Ntsomi' and Zulu Izibongo', Oromo oral narrative traditions; and musical forms such as 'highlife', 'juju*, c mbalax\ 'maskossa' etc. are invoked respectively as representative of 'authentic' African sculpture, narrative performance, literature/orature and music. Their status as 'authentic' indigenous art forms is said to derive both from their specificity in terms of their recognisably African forms, styles, languages and function, and from the fact that they are seen by indigenous audiences as organic or 'natural' components of all aspects of life in their societies. On the other hand, imported forms such as the novel and cinema tend to be seen as 'foreigners* on African soil, in terms of language and, most crucially, their lack of a popular African audience, notwithstanding the sustained struggles of many African novelists and filmmakers to do for the novel and film what, for example, Mbilia Bel, Youssou Ndour, Luambo Makiadi (Franco) and countless others have been able to do for music. What accounts for the limited success, so far, of African cinema in becoming an organic or 'natural' component of the African imaginary and political economy; in commanding the kind of audiences and support on African soil enjoyed to a comparatively greater degree by 'authentic' traditional indigenous forms, and by modern-4ay plastic artists, musicians and performers who use modern tools and instruments to produce products whose 'Africanness' is usually taken for granted and which enjoy wide popular circulation, legal or otherwise? Is it not the case that many African filmmakers claim certain aspects of the 'authentic' traditional artistic canons of their indigenous societies as paradigms or models or sources of inspiration which in various ways inform both the form and content of their work, as well as their sense and definition of what an artist is? To what extent has this engagement

184

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

with indigenous traditions been successful in altering perceptions and industry sentencings of African films as 'foreigners' on African soil? What are the material, structural, infrastructural, historical, political, economic, etc. factors challenging African cinema in its efforts to cultivate deeper roots and to flourish in the African landscape and beyond, and what are some of the strategies that need to be deployed to meet and overcome these challenges effectively? What role for criticism and what kinds of critics? These are some of the compelling questions and issues confronted and raised in this chapter by Gaston Kabore, Cheick Oumar Sissoko and Samir Farid from personal, national and transnational experiences and perspectives. The arguments and the discussions provoked here constitute significant advances in debates on African cinema, for at the moment, these debates tend to be heavy on criticism, theory and interpretation of narrative, theme, subject-matter and other related issues of content, and light when it comes to serious sustained focus on structural, material and other kinds of issues related to the conditions (past, present and future) of existence of this cinema on African soil. Critics and others have paid passing lip-service to the latter, while for those who produce the products, i.e. filmmakers, producers and their technical collaborators, informed, imaginative and productive engagement of these structural and material questions is paramount and imperative in any attempts to come to terms with the issue of 'indigenisation' of African cinema on African soil. Moreover, a better and more sophisticated understanding and appreciation of the gamut of questions, issues and challenges related to the structural and material conditions of African cinema will no doubt contribute to more profound, appropriate and informative theories, criticisms and interpretations of African films.

COMMENTARY

Ousmane Sembene When I was invited to attend this conference, the title of the proposal I received was 'Can African cinema achieve the same level of indigenisation as other popular African art forms?' I said to myself, anyone who can pose this sort of question has in my humble opinion no mental experience of contemporary African realities. Whatever its form, subject or content, artistic expression stems from a lived and shared social reality. Domestic art, in its variety of forms, from the decorating on the inside and outside of houses, to clothing and adornments, from the art of hairdressing, to the fashioning of domestic utensils, is the most far-reaching testament to this relationship. If you know how to see, you can easily locate those African signs and symbols where the ethnic roots offer as much to the continent as to the outside world. In short, ethnic culture (individual identity, group identity) coincides with civilisation. Civilisation is the marker by which a large number of individuals are identified. It is the fusion of several cultures. Africa is no stranger to image, colour and rhythm. Filmmakers, however, have to know how to use their art to make a 'new contemporary expression' with its style, its aesthetic. This new expression must be used as a tool to explore and go beyond the past. I have a thirst, a desire, to decide my own development, and it cannot be satisfied or quenched simply by admiring or contemplating classical African arts, however beautiful or refined they may be. Any African content simply with sublimating the magnificent objects that our fathers and great-grandfathers created is a reactionary. Even though his parents were forced into a state of subjugation, they were still, in so far as they were 'Men', his superiors ... and socially they were culturally richer. If there is a cult which glorifies and celebrates our past, which fails to analyse that past, we run the risk of creating a negative situation for ourselves. The solution does not lie in self-pity. I know and can confirm that there are some people around us who have been persecuted for generations for their religious beliefs. Yet these victims have fought, have refused to forget their past. They have built a new society on top of their painful past. We must not let our memory become a silent graveyard - a scar on the surface of our heart, with the witnesses that speak of our history as the masks, the statues. To come back to our cinema, and to my idea of the role it plays at the heart of the community, cinema is an evening class for the people. From its sacred origins to its current status as a means of profit, the image has always fascinated. Films and television programmes dominate our cinema screens and our living rooms. They crush and they erase all memories of the past, they atrophy and they uproot the vague impulses towards social change. This is effected and developed with the complicity of a large number of our rulers. By confusing the type of folklore commonly produced for tourists, with culture, these African governments have played a part in prostituting popular expression. Under the iron rule of the World Bank and the IMF, these governments see their fellow citizens as just so many digestive tracts.

186

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

In spite of its numerous handicaps, Africa is richer today than it ever was. Its children are the beneficiaries of a range of strengthening experiences unknown to their forebears. This new generation are the bearers of a faith in a renaissance which is pushing back the barriers of long-held prejudices. Cinema and television can convey all the dreams and ambitions of our people. The fruits to come will be more beautiful, more succulent than in the past. This is only the introduction to a debate. The struggle continues.

DISCUSSION Gaston Kabore Since the birth of African cinema, African filmmakers have been concerned with its entrenchment in its own soil. Many conferences, symposia and seminars have been dedicated to the question 'how can we reach African publics with African films; publics who should be the primary beneficiaries because these films deal with their realities, their histories, their memories and their imaginations?'

The Role of Filmmakers African filmmakers are aware of their responsibility as creators, convinced that the attention they pay to the reality around them involves other people and that this attention can bring new thoughts, new ideas, new senses and possibly a real liberation of African people. That has been a fundamental concern for African filmmakers since the establishment of their pan-African Filmmakers Federation, FEPACI. In the words of my Ethiopian colleague Haile Gerima, I would say that African filmmakers must go deep into their collective mind to try to retie the broken thread of our history and our memory. Whether as a filmmaker, teacher at the University of Ouagadougou, activist in the federation, or Secretary-General of FEPACI, I have the same central concern: to give social significance to the struggle I am involved in. I am not the result of an unpredictable accident - my individuality has roots; I have a history which is linked to the history of my community, my society, my country and my continent and that is what I try to explore in my films.

The Role of Critics There is work to be done in the content of our films. Our films are farfromperfect and the public-filmmaker-critic relationship must be afruitfulone because our cinema exists in a particular historic environment, where each of these three constituencies has specific responsibilities. For instance, we cannot always voice everything we feel because there are times when it might be irresponsible to do so. Criticism has to be constructive. After making my first feature Wend Kuuni (Gaston Kabore\ 1982), which was quite well received throughout the world, I was lucky to get large press coverage. There was an article written by an Algerian journalist who liked Wend Kuuni but posed a number of questions concerning the narrative of the film, on the way I chose to tell certain things and on the fact that I had chosen to situate my film in a pre-colonial time. For five years I kept this article; travelling with it, I must have read it a hundred times. This criticism, which did not praise my film, is the one that has done me the most good in myfilmmakingcareer. In short, a dialogue must be truly established but it must not be forgotten thai: an important component of the dialogue is the African public. Someone once said to a poet that 'the day you can speak to the people of your village in words that they use everyday and are understood

188

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

by them, that is the day you have the means to communicate with the whole world'. There is a dialectic relationship between specificity and universality. To attain the universal you must be yourself first, whatever words are used, we cannot escape from this. Thus our films are in fact witnesses of the society in which we live. It is not productive when films are approached in a reductive way, because in their content all films carry in them fundamental elements of the African reality. The second story that I would like to tell you concerns a Moroccan journalist. He asked me, 'what stage is African cinema at now?' I started to tell him and he said, 'For thirty years you have said the same thing', and I said, 'That's because in thirty years you haven't changed your way of asking questions and you ask the same questions; when you change the way you ask questions it will help us to reply differently.' I emphasise the critic-filmmaker relationship because there is a power play involved. I am not for the dictatorship of filmmakers, nor for the dictatorship of critics, and even less of the public. I am for a type of dialectic, dynamic approach, which happens during a rapport of exchange, positive confrontation and solidarity in a fight. Whilst we get tied up fighting a war between filmmakers and critics, the world advances. If African filmmakers don't play their role as consciousness awakeners, maybe tomorrow Africa will be a culturally condemned continent, with citizens who bodily live in Africa but are mentally displaced because they will have been showered with images conceived and thought of by other people. This is what we fear. That is why Idrissa Ouedraogo talked about urgency in Chapter 5. In urgency things must be done, and in what is done, African filmmakers are no more geniuses than the rest of the world! Every African film is expected to be a masterpiece, and to remake the world. No! There must be quantity because it is through quantity that quality is born. If out of Hollywood today (or American cinema generally) films bring something to the universal patrimony of cinema, it is because they make 600 films a year; they make dross too but those films aren't mentioned because fifty American films can dominate the world. There have to be people in Africa making films on a daily basis. It is not by making four films in a lifetime or every five years that we can have a career as a film director! But what is important is that each film brings you closer to an ideal, that each film brings something to an African public, that each film is a way to say no to Afro-pessimism, and that we see Africa as a continent which holds hope, a continent with a history, a continent which can continue to be self-assured because it has citizens that are aware of their history, who have a vision of the progress of humanity, in short, a vision of man. It is by putting all this together in a precise conscience of solidarity and of historic responsibility that we can help, wherever we are, to build an African cinema, first implanted in Africa and then brought to the rest of the world. African cinema is a stranger on its own ground and a great part of the problems it suffers is due to this state of affairs; without the African public's Access to films made by African filmmakers, a basic and irreplaceable condition to achieve entrenchment of African cinema on its own ground will be lacking.

The Role of Production Finance In Chapter 3 it was suggested that certain sources of finance have influenced the shape and content of African films, but there are some errors being transmitted here. It is completely wrong to say that France is pushing African cinema into the arms of the European Union. First, the history of African film finance coming from Europe has nothing to do with

INDIGENISATION IN AFRICAN CINEMA

189

France, even though it is a member of Europe. Second, although we receive finance from France, the amounts and the conditions are little known: I will give you three examples I know well, as they are my films. Wend Kuuni was financed from beginning to end by Burkina, not one centime for this film came from France. It cost 800,000 French francs in 1982. Zan Boko's (1988) initial budget was 4,300,000 French francs, but in the end it cost 4,016,000; France put in 850,000 francs and we spent 3,200,000 francs in French laboratories. As you can see, I brought more money to the French cinema industry than I received from France. Rabi (1992) was a series initiated by TVE and the BBC. France put in 169,300 francs, which covered the budget for the mix that took place in Paris. With what I added as filmmaker to have a 35mm copy, the film cost around 3,300,000 francs. We spent about 2,100,000 francs in France, against its investment of 169,300. This is a reality we would like to be able to multiply through partnership with other European countries until we have other options. In 1968 the Centre of Interafrican Film Production, parallel to the CIDC (discussed below), was set up in Ouagadougou and consisted of a number of infrastructures which had to be implanted in Ouagadougou to permit African filmmakers to work in situ, and a laboratory for post-production. It started in 1979 but by 1985 it was on its last legs and died: we had got the administration of it wrong. So ideas about independence and selfsufficiency are not new, we have thought about them for a long time but haven't had the necessary instruments to set things up. We would have liked the laboratory in Zimbabwe to be functional so we could develop our films there. Until 1997 there was also a laboratory in Jos, Nigeria; but now there is only one in Rabat, Morocco, and regrettably it is yet to serve a regional function. The regional integration of cinema infrastructures is also one of our goals. All of these contradictions are part of the process of trying to make the centre of gravity for African cinema the satisfaction of an African audience. At the same time, we need other publics elsewhere, and our films can interest them, because in the end our films talk about Man's adventure.

The Role of Distribution It's easier to watch African films in Paris, New York, Berlin, London, Tokyo or San Francisco than to see them in Nairobi, Dar Es Salam, Harare, Niamey, Lagos. This situation is not only one of commercial disadvantage, it also prevents a mutual development between filmmakers and the public, and at the same time it prevents the development of indigenous criticism which could be a determinant element in the development of a genuine African expression. The distribution of African films in Africa is a major problem and its resolution is a prerequisite to the entrenchment of African films on the continent. The Interafrican Consortium of Cinema Distribution (CIDC) was an interesting attempt at the diffusion of African cinema in Africa, but its premature failure has complicated government-level talks on film commercialisation. The idea, supported by FEPACI, was to create a common market for African films, so that the revenue generated by the distribution of films, which mostly come from abroad, would serve to buy African films for distribution in Africa, but also that part of the revenue would go towards the development of indigenous cinema in Africa. The idea came in 1968 and it took eleven years for the consortium to be established. We counted heavily on the state; today we realise that the private sector must be encouraged to invest in cinema. The private sector represents a new alternative, but favourable

190

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

fiscal conditions must exist first. Most African countries have no legislation, rules or code of practice for a film industry; a fact which does not reassure private investors. That is the situation in which we are today; we would like to find finance in Africa in order to make and distribute our films. There are many countries who are exploring other alternatives with some success. There is the growth of videoteques, for instance in Ghana and Nigeria and more and more in Burkina, and I am sure the same is true for many other African countries. The people aren't waiting for directors or governments; the public resolves its need because it has already been contaminated with images, and has a thirst for them.

Finally ... If African films don't have a chance to be part of the menu offered to the public then the public will become increasingly out of touch with reality, led outside of its own needs as African citizens living somewhere in Africa who in the end see nothing but the constraints of this Africa where there are enormous problems, catastrophes, either natural or provoked by the rivalries of international powers. We all know there are wars taking place in Liberia, Rwanda and Burundi. Citizens must be given alternatives, through images of hope (not that we should show everything in the garden to be rosy, but), because we will give them the option to form their own views on life around them. In that way they won't lose hope that they can be actors in the transformation of their realities. This is where image plays a capital role in Africa today. African cinema is evolving in a particular historical context and everyone has to be conscious of that, filmmakers as well as the public and critics. The entrenchment of African cinema in its own soil is an emergency which nothing must divert and on which Africa's cultural survival depends.

RESPONDENTS Samir Farid

As a professional film critic writing weekly for the last thirty years, I want to comment on three points. First is Africa and popular culture. While it is true that Africa is one continent, it has two main cultures. In Egypt, when we say Africa, we mean 'black Africa'. We never consider Tunis or Algeria or Egypt part of one culture called African culture, but part of the Arab culture which is completely different from African culture. However, we in Egypt are also black people: the Egyptians are black people and Egypt is part of the continent of Africa. I remember at the Cannes Film Festival in 1967 I saw the first film of Ousmane Sembene, with my colleague Tahar Cheriaa, and I sent an article from Cannes about the first African film back to Egypt. Nasser himself read the article and gave an order to the Minister of Culture, that any African film or Arab film should be bought for Egyptian distribution. Nasser died before that order could be meaningfully operationalised. It was bad luck, because the rise of Arab cinema and black African cinema occurred at the same time as the change of policy in Egypt, and that is why the Egyptian market is closed to other Arab and African films. Now it is beginning to be closed to Egyptian films too. In 1994 and 1995, many Egyptian films were on the shelf, waiting for a distribution date, because of the American monopoly, just as in Europe and everywhere else. There is something strange in the coupling of'Africa' and 'the history of cinematic ideas'; it sounds as if you are putting together two things that are in contradiction with each other - cinema and Africa. For me, the cinematic idea (if we can use this term) was the first art in the history of human existence that drew people together in their experience of it. People everywhere were afraid of the train in the Lumiere film; in Johannesburg, in New Delhi, in New York, the reaction was the same everywhere. And that was the first time that an experience was shared by people of all kinds, of all races, of all cultures. Most of the problems discussed elsewhere in this book do not exist in Egypt: the question of financing, the question of markets, the question of criticism, and the aesthetic analysis or the review. We have an industry which has produced 3,000 feature films and 5,000 documentaries. We started in 1907, and we still produce about fifty films every year. (Egyptian TV produces films, features and documentaries, and also buys Egyptian films, not to the level of investment of American films, of course, where the ratio of expenditure is 10:1 in favour of the amount spent on American product. The budget for producing feature films is at a maximum 20 per cent of the total budget for features on TV; the other 80 per cent is for TV serials on video.) We have a market: all of the Arab countries constitute the market for the Egyptian films for the last half-century and the structure is completely different to Africa. The problems of African cinema, therefore, are completely different from Arab cinema or Egyptian cinema. Second, I hear 'What is African cinema?' as if it is a metaphysical question. For me, African cinema is the films made by African filmmakers, whether they are living in Africa or in the United States, or here or there; whether it's cinema spoken in French or English. African cinema is the films which have been made by African filmmakers, regardless of

192

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

how they express it. What is cultural identity? What is the British cultural identity? It is Shakespeare and Dickens. I mean, there are no conditions, there is no order often or twenty points that we look for, suggesting that if seven of them are present then that constitutes a national identity, and if not, it has nothing to do with the identity. The question of identity, as I see it, is not metaphysical: it is the films which have been made already. This is African cinema. Third, cinema as a form of popular art. I want to make just a very brief comment on what my colleague Gaston Kabore said about African music, African cinema and popular culture. African music became popular everywhere, not because it is folkloric but because some creative individuals with their particular style and talent are able to bring out the universal qualities in their work, and that's why it becomes popular everywhere. I don't agree at all with Ousmane Sembene when he said that furniture is an art and hairstyle is an art. If we consider everything as art, there is no art. We can, however, consider it culture; the way we dress, the way we talk, the way we live, is our culture. Art is something completely individual to the creative person. Cultural identity is invented by those creative individual people. There is nothing strange about fighting or struggling for African or Egyptian culture. The struggle of the filmmakers, like the struggle of writers and musicians everywhere, is part of the history of all creative people. It's not something only for African filmmakers - Greenaway also struggles to make his films, and a director like Arthur Penn in the United States struggles. We have to look at the general view: the African filmmaker is part of world cinema; he faces the same problems, but in different ways. In Egypt the films imitate the fairytales in the Egyptian folk tales, and because of that they are very successful. When Griffith started, he was influenced by the cowboy stories and how the West was won, and all this is modern folk tale. Many people consider these badguy-nice-girl stories bad commercial cinema which doesn't reflect the real identity of the Egyptian people, while it is part of the fantasy. But can cinema achieve the same level of indigenous expression as other popular art forms? I would say it has achieved that in Egypt but many critics, and filmmakers, reject that quality; they consider it commercial. Because I think we have to give answers to young students, and not answer questions with questions. I want to share the following anecdotes with you. One of the anarchist groups in Cairo, with every member being under twenty years of age, distributes magazines in the streets and in the cafes. I was asked by them, 'Mr Farid, please give us just one idea you believe in, for which you have fought for the last thirty years and which has succeeded in reality'. I couldn't. It has all failed, and that's why everything is in question, even the question of liberation. Recently, in a cafe, I saw a poster proclaiming 'Fifty Years after the Liberation of Europe'. I looked carefully at the words 'Liberation of Europe', and I thought that the only winner was Hitler, because fifty years after the defeat of his army the fascists are everywhere. There was an open letter published by Charlie Chaplin in the journal Fran Tero} and although there are a lot of books on Chaplin, this open letter has often been ignored. He was asked to be the first citizen of Israel, officially. He answered in an open letter, saying, 'Yes, I understand why you invite me to be a citizen because some people say that my grandmother had Jewish blood and so on . . . I don't feel guilty or happy. For me, to be Jewish is like being short or tall.' He also said that if the result, after World War II, was to have a religious state in Palestine, that meant fifty million people had died for nothing. And that's why he refused. He spoke of the racist poison going from the gladiator to the victim, who then becomes a gladiator looking for another victim.

INDIGENISATION IN AFRICAN CINEMA

193

Finally, in relation to popular art, I think that people have always needed to tell their stories. Now, the new type of storytelling is cinema. I feel that I belong to the sixties' generation; but Fm fed up with my generation. I really believe that if we listen to another generation, who have no such experience, maybe they will have a better grasp of what's going on now and what might happen in the near future, more so than the sixties' generation.

Cheick Oumar Sissoko We can only talk about indigenisation if there is existent cinema. Here I will consider this and all the other issues concerning our cinema which has been under quite a bit of pressure to improve the standard of its films. A filmmaker communicates through a certain well-established language which involves a public and its cultural references. Unless it is argued that African cinema, unlike all the others, isn't built on the dialogue between the artist and his public, I cannot see how we can escape this necessity and I cannot see how this wouldn't have repercussions on the artist himself. It is because we are going to build up an intimate rapport between our societies, with stories that touch us, that we will have something to say to the rest of the world. In Africa artistic creation is not separate from social utility and this is the case for music, dance, theatre, oral literature, fine arts; cinema can also have the same popular character unless we fail to establish and reinforce an artistic and financial freedom. However, over those freedoms hangs a deadly threat in the fact that the distribution network has been carved up, due to the invasion of violent films and porn via the satellites which are able to dump more images than have been shown in 100 years of cinema, because of the total absence of any politics of culture. I am convinced that an African film only really exists as such when it has conquered an African public. Our films are often shown in France, and it is true that the independent arthouse cinemas of the Latin Quarter are indispensable but they aren't enough. It is important for others to know that when our films are shown at home there is an extraordinary dialogue between our films and the public, a dialogue of a cinema that is sure of itself, of a pioneer cinema, before which there was no distinction between commercial films and artistic films. African filmmakers are always pleased and proud when our films create an infatuation and a dialogue is established, continuously supported by the laughter and comments of our public. For me that is artistic autonomy; what would have been called authenticity. However, I am then asked the question, doesn't this 'authenticity' risk impeding the understanding and appreciation of a non-African audience? What are we to do? Make bad French films? Or good African films? What should the French and the British do? Make bad American films or should they make really French films for the French and good British films for the British? We Africans make great efforts to understand Europe; this is rarely reciprocated. Our films offer sufficient immediate access for a non-African public to feel at ease. Doubtless there will remain certain mysterious zones for the occidental public, some aspects of the films may seem strange to them, but there is room for dreams and discovery. Can this artistic autonomy be achieved without financial autonomy? Gaston Kabore was right when he said that as filmmakers we must think of ourselves as funders. We have the human and material means to set up a cinematic industry in Africa, to build this audience potential which is there, so that in the end our films can be profitable. In a recent issue of Ecrans dyAfriquey2 in an interview I gave about my film Guimba (1995), I suggested the things that would help us ensure the installation of the human and

194

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

material means of a cinema industry of African dimensions from existing technical infrastructure which, because it is underused, is not fulfilling its potential to help reduce the production costs of our films. It would be possible to make a film entirely in Africa. For Finzan (1989), for example, only the laboratory work was done in Europe (we were obliged to do it there because of a lack of convenient air links between Mali, Tunisia and Zimbabwe). The post-production was done entirely in Burkina Faso. We must capitalise on these possibilities and with preferential tariffs ensure a reduction in production costs for our filmmakers. This is crucial because the finance from abroad which exists today and helps in part to produce our films will not be available indefinitely. Foreign finance is provisional and consequently we must reflect on the means needed to ensure a continued and greater production. Above all, our public can ensure that. The distribution problems mean we can't reach the 800 million inhabitants of the continent, but there is also a language problem. There is enormous potential to be realised if we can dub our films into national languages, in the first instance, into the great national African languages - Swahili, Yoruba, Hausa, Mandinka, Fulani and Arabic - for North Africa. If we could achieve this, we could with a new type of CIDC (without the civil servants running it) redeem the films and provide them with a financial independence to develop and reproduce African cinema. We need governments to introduce global cultural policies that can encourage a close co-operation between television and cinema to produce films for both the large and small screen. Our television programmes are not rich and television lacks people capable of making films that can interest the mass public. This is the crucial question: how can we develop policy in favour of our cultures and identities? In Mali we are working towards this cultural policy. In 1991 all the filmmakers met to set up a professional code of practice for the audiovisual industry. We drew up a 213-article document, inspired by those of Burkina and Senegal, to simplify taxation on television and video cassettes, which are increasing everywhere, so that cinema and audiovisual production could earn revenue. We need to harmonise the understanding. I think that if we manage to achieve what I have suggested above, the question of the indigenous nature of African cinema will not be an issue.

Notes 1 Fran Tero (Switzerland), 28 January 1947. 2 'Guimba - a film on power' (interview by Clement Tapsoba with Cheick Oumar Sissoko), in Ecrans d'Afrique (African Screens), no. 9/10, 3rd/4th quarter 1994.

Chapter 9 Audiences and the Critical Appreciation of Cinema in Africa INTRODUCTION Rose Issa

This book has been concerned with the point of contact between filmmakers' intentions and audience expectations. Addressing issues of censorship and control in its various forms, access and technology, identification and signification in relation to the audience, this chapter emphasises the importance of many of the issues raised in other chapters and brings the theoretical propositions back squarely down to earth as only the cinema audience can. It is inevitable that earlier philosophical questions will be revisited, while at the same time looking at specific situations in southern Africa, North Africa and West Africa. The range of approaches so far has been rich in content - covering the characteristics of African cinema, the dynamic conceptual arguments, the coexistence of the different forms of artistic practice, the conflicting and complementary relationship between filmmakers and critics, and the issues concerning the indigenisation of African cinema - and in positive controversy. Gaston Kabore emphasised the importance of African films being seen by their audiences in Africa and the way one should involve audiences in the construction of a dialogue, paving the way for this chapter. Tafatona Mahoso, linking the philosophical to the realist, explores how African films have the potential to enable their postcolonial audience to visualise their own space, myths, symbols and time. He reminds us of how a film's message may cross borders, but from its own space, ground and time, and explores what may be needed to invite audiences into a deeper involvement with their own dreams and their own environment. By contrasting those films which succeed in inviting audiences to contextualise their own experiences against those which still preach, he states that Africans must reclaim their 'symbolising capacity' if they are to survive. His inspirational rallying call was for filmmakers to 'hold up the light1, so that the 'silent audiences' can explore their own consciousness, their own memory, their own space and 'become public witnesses instead of private consumers'. Kwate Nii Owoo raises the question of the filmmakers' moral/political/social responsibility as members of society and asserted that the relationship between filmmakers and audiences should not just be a straightforward commercial one. While he does not directly address the issues raised by Mahoso, he focuses on the same critical concerns - the 'sociological and psychological impact' of mythology, the potential importance of collaboration between writers and filmmakers, and the reasons why a product should have a liberating influence on the audience. He concludes that African filmmakers should take time to know their audiences well and mirror reality in their films rather than mystifying it.

196

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Ahmed Attia, is well known to many African filmmakers. He gives in an anecdotal intervention his response to the thorny question germane to the survival of cinema in Africa. Speaking from a background as one of the most adventurous producers in North Africa, Ahmed Attia, who defines himself more as a technician than a theoretician, speaks about his collaborations with several Arab and African filmmakers to create a new 'free cinema', achieved by ignoring the laws of censorship, and giving filmmakers total freedom to express their ideas. The films he has produced tackle many taboo subjects. In the strategy he proposes for African cinema the audience is pivotal and a valued ally to raise its voice and vote with its feet in cases of censorship; in return, African producers have a responsibility to bear the audience's interests in mind and to maintain control of the film with strategies of financing that will not put them at the mercy of powerful financial partners.

UNWINDING THE AFRICAN DREAM ON AFRICAN GROUND Tafataona Mahoso Sylvia Wynter's paper (Chapter 2) confirmed from a scholarly perspective that there is an African cinema, an African identity and an African reconstruction project. Therefore, we cannot be lulled to sleep by pseudo-universalist claims by Euro-Americans and their Third World supporters who now preach that the project to reconstruct a strong identity is futile, if not ultimately oppressive, and must therefore be abandoned; that the African must agree to be swept along in the flood of globalisation and commodification of cultures in which postmodernists tell us no one is really in control. Professor Wynter's paper confirmed that there are fundamentally different projects of artistic, cultural and spiritual reconstruction between the African and the Euro-American. Euro-American religion, philosophy, science, technology and culture in the last four hundred years have been characterised by linear perspective. Linear perspective vision is a way of seeing and knowing the world and the self which multiplies and exaggerates the sense, the technique and the power of the eye over other senses, other powers and ways of knowing the world and the self. This eye of linear perspective vision employs distance and all its ramifications as a means of increasing its unilateral power and precision. Its roots originate in Father-centred religion and its vision of one jealous God who does not tolerate any other gods and who sends out militant evangelists who also do not tolerate other ways of approaching God. Its symbols are the cross, the narrow path and the ladder. And the technology, symbolism and attitude which this vision produces are characterised by the propensity to escape, to retreat from, to abandon the body with its attributes and associations, such as: • • • • • • •

the community matter nature birth ecology fertility smell incarnation

• • • • • • •

woman mother sex passion ageing decay family

Linear perspective vision has become the most powerful way of dealing with the world and obtaining a certain form of knowledge in which control is often mistaken for understanding and knowledge. Linear perspective vision insists on separating knowledge of the head from knowledge of the heart; it prefers the former to the latter; it values the technical knowledge and data of distance over that of experience, intimacy and solidarity. Therefore where Ren6 Descartes says, 'I think, therefore I am', the African must say, 'I relate, therefore I forge my identity in community'. In relating, the African sees the body as essential for the creation of relations; for the body is the locus of memory, which is far larger than individual recall. The body is the body of the memory of DNA, the body of the memory of

198

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

totemic blood. This body is a space-creating body; it does not just occupy space. In African history, this body is the possessed body. It is the only body which colonialism and imperialism failed to co-opt and use for their own purposes. But the evil eye of linear perspective, which looks out on the narrow path commanded by the earth-fleeing and body-fleeing religion of the jealous God, soon forms a window around itself. This window we might imagine as a proscenium stage at first. Here already, a distinction has emerged between the viewer/spectator and the actor viewed on the stage. It is still possible for the audience to go backstage and see or touch the actors. The curtain can also still be removed. But soon the window is closed. It becomes the windshield of a car or window of the camera. The driver behind the wheel and windshield begins to see all who try to cross the road, to cut his line of vision, as obstacles. He commands them to 'Get out of my way you luggards'. He has no respect for slow pedestrians; but he has respect for those who have retreated behind a screen like himself. In religious terms, the window around the eye looking out to the narrow path divides heathens and kaffirs from saints and believers. In Africa, the Euro-American Christian driver did not like his Muhammadan counterpart; but he respected him as one who had also retreated behind his own windshield just as drivers respect one another during a traffic jam while reserving their contempt for the pedestrians zig-zagging everywhere through the oneway traffic. Meanwhile the space on the other side of the window is turned into 'neutralised space'. African cinema has inherited the neutralised space of colonialism and neo-colonialism. It has got to recharge that neutralised space by revealing new space-creating African bodies, not just space-occupying bodies: but what is in that neutralised space? Why is it such a challenge? What has the evil eye of escape and distance created in that neutralised African space? Table 9.1 is my attempt to demonstrate the neutralised space which our cinema must help to change: Table 9.1 Autonomous vs Neutralised space Original charged communication in autonomous space

Compromised communication under linear perspective in neutralised space

1 culture 2 creative vitality 3 choice 4 difference 5 art 6 egalitarian solidarity 7 progeny 8 the body as locus of memory 9 consensus 10 workers, productive people 11 women, children and the elderly

1 'tradition' 2 'preservation of traditions' 3 variety 4 exotica 5 curios/folklore 6 charity, 'aid' 7 'population explosion' 8 the brain of recall 9 charisma 10 'hands' 11'surplus appendages' 1

'

i

AUDIENCES AND CRITICAL APPRECIATION

199

The Concept of Indigenous Culture Emerging out of this 'Neutralised Space' One of the most disastrous cultural effects of colonialism and neo-colonialism is the uncritical acceptance of linear perspective vision by the Africans themselves. In southern Africa, many among the elites may insist ad nauseam that 'Culture is dynamic' but what they proceed to demonstrate is not dynamism at all but a rationalisation for their indiscriminate adoption of every Western concept, habit, gadget and affectation. These Africans understand culture and tradition to mean that African existence is not contemporary and sometimes that only African and other Third World people have traditions. Anything the West brings to Africa is seen as modern and modernising and therefore contemporary; and to be 'dynamic' is to discard one's own values and adopt those of the West with the fastest speed possible. So we find ourselves in a most curious situation. Every time we hold workshops or conferences on culture and the arts with people from Angola and Mozambique they are at great pains to tell us that the word 'indigenous' was so abused by the Portuguese settler that it cannot be used any more without causing offence. The African elites in general are ashamed that the white man found their foremothers and forefathers living in grass-thatched houses; but they do not see the significance of the fact that it is the white man and his tourist cousins from Europe and America who can now afford to enjoy the environmentally-sound coolness of grass-thatched rondevels, chalets and houses in the hot season and the steady warmth of the same in winter, while the overwhelming majority of the Africans are now stuck with tin cans and plastic sacks and cannot afford the prices the white man charges for thatching grass which is now growing on his farm or estate. Likewise the African elite are ashamed of the white man's claim that their forefathers and foremothers wore animal skins when he 'discovered' them (an obvious exaggeration). Yet the same African elite fail to notice that the majority of the Africans can no longer afford the animal skins and leather suits and skirts so popular with Europeans and Americans and sold everywhere in southern Africa in 'high-class' tourist shops and curio-shops. Meanwhile the African is again stuck with the white man's dralons and polyester which are totally unsuitable for the tropical climate. On 15 September and 6 and 11 October 1994 the latest amendments to tighten the Censorship and Entertainments Control Act (a Rhodesian relic) came before the Parliament of Zimbabwe. Members for the most part seemed to believe in the 'magic bullet' theory of mass communication whereby a direct causal relationship is presumed between what is showing at the cinema or on television and actual behaviour. Even the few members who opposed the bill accepted the premise on which it was based: that the people did not know what television shows or films and videos to watch or not to watch; that there were no other ways of enabling them to make choices except through the Censorship and Entertainments Control Act and the Censorship Board; and that it was the unsophisticated, 'poorly educated' people with a 'strong rural background' who needed the most protection. A member who actually opposed the bill said: 'The cultures we are seeing our children adopting are [sic] caused by what they see on television. When we did not have television before we did not see the violence that we see today'. The view which treats cinema and television as having a direct one-on-one effect on behaviour and being all-powerful is a convenient way of avoiding having to look at the possibility that the way the African elites

200

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

have been reorganising life and managing the whole economy may be a greater contributor to social violence than cinema and television. One of the supporters of the bill had this to say: 'This Bill actually came too late because if it had come yesterday these things that we are experiencing would never have existed ... I believe this august house is a reflection of a good mirror and, therefore, it must be prepared to guard, teach the society towards good and appropriate norms ...' It was not clear how a censorship bill and a censorship board would 'teach* 'good and appropriate norms'. However, the most significant part of this parliamentary debate was the notion of 'African culture' implied. It was the same caricature used by settlers to denigrate and destroy African practices which resisted and threatened the settlers' power and interests. The debates remained suspended between a sense of shame about defending native culture and a sense of confusion about the vague pseudo-universalism to which those who believed themselves to be educated, progressive and open-minded tried to appeal. Neither the 'progressives' nor the 'traditionalists' were able to say what values constituted this 'African culture' which the bill would protect through the Censorship Board. Although the debate was about values, both sides could refer only to nhembe (animal skins), derere (okra), dovi (peanut butter) and macimbi (mopani caterpillars) as making that culture. But all these were foods. How would the Censorship Board promote and protect peanut butter? There was mention also of some national dances; but it was not clear what the link between them and the Censorship Board was supposed to be. If the idea was to promote these things in order to counteract Western influence, why not set up foundations, restaurants and associations to popularise and market them? The notion of 'culture' which emerged from the debate was similar to what Gail ChingLiang discusses in 'White Skins/Black Masks: The Pleasure and Politics of Imperialism'.2 Ching-Liang points out that 'native' in India and Africa ceased to mean 'originating from the region, indigenous or autonomous'. It came to mean something unnatural, foreign and backward - the very thing which settlers built: fences, durawalls and apartheid in order to quarantine. African elites like to maintain this notion of culture because it automatically makes them the bearers of a superior culture which they have absorbed by osmosis from the settler; it justifies their own ignorance of the fundamental values of the very people they are claiming to protect through censorship; and it justifies doing nothing beyond tinkering with the wording of legislation left behind by a crude and corrupt white regime. Definitely the debate in the Zimbabwe House of Parliament in September and October 1994 confirmed the elitist and settlerist view that the natives cannot cope with pleasure, even when it is they who create most of it. After all the people whom the bill purports to protect are not the ones who watch the American TV programmes Santa Barbara* McGiverx Dynasty or the film Rambo (Ted Kotcheff, 1982). The people in whose name cinema, video and television are to be censored do not normally go to the cinema, watch television or videos. The mass impoverishment which has resulted from the imposition of Economic Structural Adjustment Programmes on African states means that cinema, television and videos remain inaccessible luxuries to the majority of the people. This fact remains one of the main challenges to cinema audience development in our region. Therefore, when the Zimbabwe Parliament speak of cinema and television corrupting the entire nation, in my opinion they are projecting their own corruption and ignorance upon the peasants and workers. Of course, Western programmes will have impact on African audiences, not because of a direct one-on-one causal relationship between text and behaviour, but because

AUDIENCES AND CRITICAL APPRECIATION

201

of the absence of leadership and mediation. The cultural dynamism which the elites like to talk about is just not there. Therefore the question of cinema audiences in Africa is important because it reveals the link between cultural regulation, aesthetics and democracy or the struggle for democracy. The struggle for cultural reconstruction is a struggle for meaning and for democracy. However, it is made doubly difficult because the Western media, just like the colonial media in decades past, like to focus on abuses of that concept by such retrogressive figures as Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, Jonas Savimbi in Angola and Mangosuthu Buthelezi in Kwa Zulu, Natal, South Africa. The picture of so-called African 'authenticity' which these retrogressive leaders present and exploit is a caricature, the very mirror image of the colonial and neo-colonial fear of the 'native'. It is not based on creativity and dynamism; it is based on 'preservation' and myths of 'tribal purity'. It is that caricature which fulfils the postmodernist fear of 'identity' as an oppressive concept. Yet, at the same time, it is obvious that the African cannot liberate himself or herself outside of the African time-space. It is that time-space which slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism have neutralised; it must be recharged together with all the African bodies occupying it. I am therefore interested in how cinema can lead us in this project of reclamation and reconstruction. My focus is the filmmaker and the audience as participants in the reconstruction of consciousness. For this to happen there should be, first, a relationship of reciprocity between the filmmaker and the audience/community. There are stages during which the filmmaker is the listener, is the audience, and the community is teacher and communicator. There are also stages where the filmmaker is the communicator and the community the audience. There are also many tales in which both play both roles simultaneously; this is in contrast to the Western linear perspective vision in which the window, the lens, has become shut. Second, the African body as the locus of memory, the African body once abandoned in the slave compound, in the Bantustan, in the single-sex barracks of apartheid, must once more reclaim its place, not just occupy it. That is the only way the African dream can be unwound. This African dream is frightening to those in whose gaze the African has been framed up for so long. For, if we take any true African dreamer, hero or heroine - Kwame Nkrumah, Samori Toure, Amilcar Cabral, Bambata, Nehanda, Queen Nzingah or Marcus Garvey - we notice one common thing: their fantasies frighten those who oppress or have oppressed and exploited our people. Queen Nzingah's dream was that slavery should never have begun and that the Portuguese slave catchers should be kicked out of Africa completely. In Zimbabwe, our fantasies about Nehanda are the fantasies of tormented children, fantasies about a powerful and liberating mother whom the tyranny of objectified, colonial time failed to erase. It does not matter much that Nehanda was in reality a frightened peasant whom the British South Africa Company executed only to frighten the 'natives', that she really did not wage war on the white. What matters to us is that the settler regime was so frightened of the helpless woman whom its priests and pirates claimed they had come to rescue from the brutal power of her African man. To us what matters is that among us, sexist and male chauvinist as we are accused of being, Nehanda is a true woman liberator who came to our assistance twice: once in 1896, when she was executed; and again in the 1970s, when she returned as a fighting spirit possessing a number of women in our midst and mobilising hundreds of thousands of youths against the settler regime. She is a communicator of power.

202

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Third, the Africans must reclaim their 'difference' and stop seeing themselves as yet one more variation of exotic 'native' whose existence has no impact on history or contemporary life. When Europeans arrived in Africa or the Americas, they found 'native' dreams and fantasies displayed all over the landscape like so much washing put out to dry. The natives did not see themselves as living in the periphery of anyone or as 'underdeveloped', 'developing* or 'First', 'Second' or 'Third' world. They were who they were, defining their own values and relations and living according to them. They lived their aspirations openly, worked when they chose to work and with means of their choice and command. In southern Africa the natives also fed themselves and the white refugees and economic plunderers (called pioneers) for a very long time before the white man could learn from the African how to farm and survive on African soil.3 One reason why both the slave masters of the diaspora and the colonial masters in Africa abolished the African rituals of space and place - such as dance, music and healing - was the fact that these rituals did not recognise, did not include, did not reflect, indeed, did not confirm, the settler or slave master as the paragon of morality, humanity and civilisation which he thought himself to be. In southern Africa, it is easy to see the contempt with which the Africans regarded the values and habits of the settlers, when we know that they called the latter 'those who shut the door when they eat'. In his chapter called 'Milton Friedman's Smile', Peter D. Osborne explains that the white intruders were frightened to death by the truly autonomous existence of 'natives' in their own time-space because the intruders could not recognise themselves in the 'natives'. The intruders could see no redeeming reflection of themselves in the existence of the 'native'. According to Osborne: 'it was as if they [the whites] came to the end of themselves and that's like death, when we love who we are ... coming here [to Africa or the Americas] was like suddenly arriving in a world where the mirrors no longer worked. All of nature was strange. Nothing reflected them [as superior discoverers on a mission] ... There was no echo of their human nature. Nothing cared. They had come to the end of themselves. And they had to abolish everything that abolished them.'4 So, this is how the 'native' was sacrificed; so that what had become the end for the intruder because his beginning, his 'pioneering' and the indigenous dreams and fantasies luxuriating everywhere had to be wound up and tucked away or burned as evil fetishes threatening civilisation. Whether under slavery or apartheid, African expression which did not confirm to the white man's view of the place or role of the Negro had to be suppressed. But, you may ask, what can the African filmmaker do about all this?

Rumveno: Fantasy of the Relationship between Communicator and Audience African oratory is full of wise sayings which can guide the African filmmaker and film critic in search of an audience: 'A good soup gathers many chairs around it'; or 'One does not buy a cock and let it crow in someone else's village'; or, better still, 'One can see the inside of the assembly by standing on someone else's shoulders'. 5 The first proverb says the obvious: a good soup is easy to notice because it changes the space around it. People gather many chairs in the eating area and wait patiently,

AUDIENCES AND CRITICAL APPRECIATION

203

hoping to savour the special soup. The second is about a universal communication symbol, the cock, which in Africa served for thousands of years the same purposes as the clock. The cock announced time in space; it symbolised autonomous time-space; it marked the rhythm of community life. When one bought a cock, one had to make sure it communicated from one's own ground. The proverb is not a prohibition against neighbours benefiting from the cock's message. Rather, it means that neighbouring villages should hear the cock's message as clearly coming from the grounds, from the time-space, of the owner. The message may cross borders, butfrom its own space, ground and time. Therefore, the charge that African cinema tends to ignore its audience does not mean that this cinema should not reach out to foreigners. It means only that the home ground should be primary. The cock's crow represents communicative power which the owner of the cock must retain within his time-space and which must be heard as coming from that time-space. Otherwise, the owner is regarded as a fool if his cocks crow everywhere except at home. The third proverb presents the essence of ground, time-space and discourse at once. What is going on inside the assembly is so important that one who arrives after others have completely encircled the arena should ask to stand on a taller person's shoulders in order to witness the process of discourse going on inside the assembly, inside the community. It is this inside of the assembly which we want our cinema to reveal The audiences will do anything for the opportunity to see the revelations. And the fact that colonialism, Christian denominationalism, and ethnic chauvinism under apartheid did everything to create fragmenting and conflicting assemblies cannot be an excuse for abandoning the quest. On the contrary, the reconstructed assembly becomes even more imperative under the threat of sectarianism and demobilisation. I have already referred to the good soup which transforms the eating area. That is the antidote to demobilisation. Let me now shift the position of the soup maker within the circle from the role of communicator to that of audience. In my Shona language in Zimbabwe the cook says to the child assistant, 'Uya undivhenekerewo ndione mabikiro', which literally means 'Come hold the light for me so that I see how to cook'. But this translation does not reveal fully the meaning of rumveno (light, flare) or kuvheneka (to direct a light). Kuvheneka (to direct a light for one's partner) combines the feeling of lighting the way, shedding light, with that of opening up a closed, dark space. The light, rumveno, becomes both a light and a k e y - almost like the star guiding the Magi to the cradle of Jesus. In other words, the cook does not enter properly into the responsibility of cooking for the entire extended family without the assistant opening it up with a special key, a special light. There is another litde ritual of space and place and, in the age of microwave ovens, the ritual demands reconstruction. Otherwise the kitchen turns into yet another neutralised space. In the biblical story of the Ten Virgins, audience with the bridegroom depends on whether one is holding a lamp that works. The five women whose lamps were on empty are forbidden to enter the wedding celebration and feast with the bridegroom. There is more. Audience with the bridegroom depends also on patience and perseverance. Those who were found with their lamps on empty had expected the bridegroom to arrive in their own time, not in his time. Patience and perseverance are crucial in our efforts to develop an effective African cinema and audience. The rush to substitute poorly understood foreign bridegrooms for our own may also lead to similar disaster: exclusion from the celebration when the real bridegroom does arrive.

204

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

The African circle means that both the filmmaker and the audience refuse to be frozen on one side of the lens or window. The filmmaker, the critic and the audience are all communicators; just as the cook and the child assistant who directs the light are also communicators. It is not surprising to me therefore that Teshome Gabriel had the odd experience on his return to Ethiopia which he made the subject of his paper (see Chapter 4). His return to Ethiopia after 32 years and his desire to make a film of the home-coming confirm the dual position I have been trying to explain. His light failed the first time because it had been forged and set up in California in the absence of the cook or soup maker who is the mother whom he intended to film. In that relationship the camera and light remained the instruments of distance they are meant to be in Western aesthetics. They threatened to ruin the whole experience of home-coming. The Prodigal Son cannot hold the light for his welcoming another until she invites him: 'Uya undivhenekerewo ndione mabikiro.' In fact, in Gabriel's story the mother's tasty soup so transforms the eating area that the Western-contrived light and camera had to wait. Moreover, the returning son understood that You do not go directing the light without first being invited to do so', without being sure that the subject is ready and happy to be the subject. In the case of Teshome Gabriel, while he prepared for his home-coming in California, his mother and other relatives were bodies on the other side of the Atlantic. His head, his thoughts, assured him that he could make a great film of this momentous event as soon as he arrived in Ethiopia. But upon his actual physical arrival, the bodies of his mother and his relatives presented themselves not as his home-sick mind had imagined them; they presented themselves as gestural, pantomimic, space-creating, space-transforming bodies in their own time-space. These situational African bodies reduced the imagined filmmaker to the subject of their welcoming gestures. He obeyed. He set the camera aside. And, in his own words, the mother was making her own film first, in which he was the centre of attention. In other words, the act of co-operation and reciprocity embodied in the words, 'Uya undivhenekerewo ndione mabikiro' is not as straightforward as it sounds. The cook knows she wants to prepare the meal. The family know that they are hungry and ready for food. But no one knows ahead of time everything that may happen during, and because of, the co-operation. As long as Teshome Gabriel was open, willing both to see and to listen, he saved himself from making a grave error and perhaps offending his family by filming them on arrival. For when the light is finally directed after invitation, it may reveal that there are ants in the flour, rats in the water, cockroaches in the cooking oil, and scorpions under the cook's stool. Another child may have stolen the meat and eaten the relish intended for supper. There can be a drama of the same magnitude as in the story of the Ten Virgins and their lights, once the light as key reveals the underlying relationship. So, the call 'Uya undivhenekerewo ndione mabikiro' ('Come hold the light for me so that I see how to cook') could also mean, 'Come and direct the light for me so that I see if we are going to have supper at all'. It is an invitation to share in revelation and surprise. 'Come hold the light for me so that I see whether or not our mutual story is ready for telling to the rest of the world.1 Both the mother-cook and the child-facilitator are communicators in their own right. The child knows the special type of wood used as rumveno. That wood is best for producing light - not for smoke, nor for heat, nor for charcoal. That special wood is chosen with skill. And the holder of the light is not supposed to burn the cook, to drop cinders in the food, to poke the cook's eyes or to direct smoke towards them.

AUDIENCES AND CRITICAL APPRECIATION

205

I am suggesting that in the special circumstances of African communities, the same reciprocity, the same co-operation we expect between the cook and her facilitator, should be encouraged between filmmakers and their subjects, audiences and communities. Africa must develop both aspiring filmmakers and aspiring audiences. One of our aspirations must be this vision of co-operation and reciprocity. The cry 'Uya undivhenekerewo ndione mabikiro' can be extended as a cry to African filmmakers, covering many needs, as follows: 'Uya undivhenekerewo ndione mabikiro' ('Come direct the light for me so that I see how to live'); 'Uya undivhenekerewo ndione mapfekero' ('Come direct the light for me so that I see how best to dress'); £Uya undivhenekerewo ndione mashandiro' ('Come direct the light for me so that I see how to work better').

The Sad Case of the Film Flame in Zimbabwe For me no film history demonstrates my thesis better than that of Ingrid Sinclair's Flame (1996). The controversy over this film has been widely publicised in the Western media, including BBC Radio and the Mail and Guardian Weekly (8-14 December 1995). The story also appeared in Africa Film and TV Magazine (edn 8, Jan.-Feb. 1996). Scripted and directed by Ingrid Sinclair, Flame is presented as the story of two Zimbabwean women who join the liberation struggle against Ian Smith's Rhodesian Front regime in the 1970s. Sinclair says the aim is 'to pay tribute to the courage of women who fought in the liberation struggle'. The producers, Joel Phiri and Simon Bright, add that 'Flame is the most important film to come out of Zimbabwe since the liberation struggle'. Unfortunately for the director and the producers, Zimbabwean police confiscated the rough cut of the film on 12 January 1996 after the Zimbabwe War Veterans' Association, the Ministry of Information and the producers failed to agree on changes to be made in the story before the release of the film. The War Veterans' Association sees itself as both the subject and the immediate audience of the film. Its views are best summarised by the Director of Information in the ministry, who states that the main problem is the wide gap between the sort of film implied in the script submitted for the ministry's approval at the start of the project and the film which appears in the rough cut. The contents of the script reflected a film which was supposed to tell the story of two young women who make the journey to Mozambique and enlist as comrades. It tells the story of their lives until after Zimbabwe's independence. It shows the courage of the women and the harshness of the conditions of freedom fighters. It was supposed to tell the story of these girls who grow to womanhood through the struggle and learn to be selfreliant ... The film had been seen [in the research and design stage and the script] as filling a crying void, in audio-visual terms, of some record of the war. Regrettably, this plausible version became watered down as the filming progressed and has now, at rushes stage, attained a level where undue prominence has been given to certain aberrations and misdemeanours in which young women were abused, brutalised or raped, a far cry from the original script.6 The Director of Information concluded his minute by saying that his ministry decided that disagreements between the producers and the War Veterans' Association warranted a

206

meeting at which arbitration which to the Censorship would release the

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

the ministry would mediate between the two. It was the failure of such led to the request for the police to seize the rushes and hand them over Board. Again, it appears the ministry believed that the Censorship Board rushes and end the dispute there and then.

The director of the film and the producers countered the Ministry of Information's account by making the following claims: 1. That they had 'submitted a copy of the script to the Ministry of Information and got their blessing and approval'. 2. That they 'respect the feelings and views of those who fought for Zimbabwe in the liberation struggle'. 3. That it was because of this 'respect' that the director and the producers 'have gone out of our way to consult veterans and take on board their views where we feel they fit the structure of our story'. 4. That during the research and design and the shooting of the film, the director and the producers 'received full support from the Zimbabwe National Army and the Zimbabwe Republic Police'. 5. And, finally, that given all this background of agreements, consultations and endorsements, the producers 'cannot understand' why the police would agree to seize the rushes at the request of the War Veterans' Association and the Ministry of Information.

What the Flame Debacle demonstrates One of the problems explaining the bitterness of the dispute between the Black and White Film Company (the producers of Flame) and the War Veterans' Association is the former's attempt to mix two incompatible approaches: a Hollywood approach based on strict linear perspective; and an African approach based on the circle of mutuality and reciprocity leading to a work of solidarity. If the producers wanted to stick to the former approach, which they emphasised only after the falling-out, then they would have to take a strictly contractual stance, whereby all who consulted or provided service did so only as 'hired' or 'sub-contracted' parties with no claims to the project once their services had been discharged. But the rhetoric they have used is that of solidarity. If they wanted to use the African approach, then they would have to be willing to pursue their 'respect' for the other, the subject, to the same extent Teshome Gabriel did: postpone the shooting until the relationship between the filmmaker and his/her subject is ready to carry them both through the project. Reading all the press releases and news stories about Flame, I came to the conclusion that the producers were using the language of the African circle of mutuality, reciprocity and solidarity while operating according to the Hollywood paradigm. On the one hand, the producers use terms such as 'consult', 'participate', and 'respect' to indicate their supposed stance towards the War Veterans' Association; yet, on the other hand, they come out and say: 'We cannot be party to filmmaking by committee/ The concept of 'contextualism' in critical theory underlines the fact that a situation of discourse cannot be understood by locating the process of communication at only three points: encoding or the creation of the text(s); textuality or the nature and meaning of the text; and reception or the nature and responses of the supposed audience. The Flame

AUDIENCES AND CRITICAL APPRECIATION

207

controversy has also been reported as if those three locations are all there is, so that the film can be viewed as something which is 'none of the business' of the War Veterans' Association. There is a whole politics and history revealing who gets to be chosen as encoder of African messages, by whom and how often. This background or context is not irrelevant to the nature and quality of the film. Simon Bright, the director of Dance for Peace (1994), which was funded by the same sponsors funding Flame, once admitted that Dance for Peace could have been a much better film if the context in which he made it had been more positive7. The constant complaint one hears about such films is that many of the directors and producers may be based in Africa but the 'gaze' on African life which they bring is not African. It is not only the Zimbabwe War Veterans' Association which concludes that the eye of Flame is a distant European eye. Therefore the expose of the liberation war which it claims to offer is not an African woman participant's expose. It merely uses African bodies in African space which has remained unreclaimed, which remains 'neutralised'. An African woman combatant standing on African ground and accusing her male comrades of raping and abusing her will not fail to make those males recognise her, identify with her, accept her motivation and even thank her for pointing out the abuse within the context of fighting for the liberation of the whole nation, the whole culture, the whole paradigm, even from its own worst weaknesses. Back to the dispute: both sides are in fact saying that having agreed to co-operate up to a certain stage, they did not expect the other side then to object to new developments which to that other seemed contrary to the original understanding; yet neither side is actually abiding by this principle. For example, the producers imply in their arguments that approval of the script and provision of logistical support from the government side should mean forfeiture of any objections to the end product. Likewise, the War Veterans are saying that the 'solidarity', the 'participation' and the 'consulting' which the producers claim to have offered the War Veterans should have applied throughout the project, that is, until the release of the film, and not only at the producers' or director's convenience. Indeed, when observers invited to see the rushes pressed this issue, they discovered that the words 'consultation', 'participation' and 'involvement' were being used quite loosely. The producers merely hand-picked a few war veterans whom they employed to offer certain advice or play specific parts. It was only when disputes arose that they agreed to involve the association officially: and here the association felt as if it was being manipulated to endorse indirectly something which was not acceptable to it.

My Views as an Observer and Member of the Potential Audience The focus of the dispute on the rape scene was most unfortunate because it merely made all the objections appear to be motivated by a desire to suppress a fact: that some male freedom fighters did abuse or rape their female comrades. From an artistic point of view, it is possible either to object to the rape scene and still accept and enjoy the whole story; or to see the rape scene as so central and integral to the entire development of the story that its inclusion becomes natural and unquestionable though still disturbing. It must disturb, otherwise there is no point in including it. Unfortunately, for me neither of these happens. It is the weakness of the whole story which makes the rape scene seem to be the only thing people remember.

208

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Flame as a story remains paralysed between two unintegrated exaggerations: that of the abuse of women recruits and their feeling rather useless throughout most of the film and that of heroism of the very same women which the director says is the main motive. There is no need to argue that 'This is just the women combatants' story', as if that disposes of the context of the whole struggle. Without even discussing the implications of the film on male combatants, one is disappointed by the director's failure to portray the fear, the dread, the determination and the fury of an African woman fighting to reclaim her land which she identifies with sisters, mothers, aunts, colleagues, going back for a century. I remember myself being confronted by a yourg girl in primary school in 1965 who had remained intoxicated by national liberation fever after attending only one meeting at Mutambara which had been addressed by one of the leaders of the banned liberation movement. Her power was electric. It was as if she had become possessed with a liberative power going back to Nehanda, Queen Nzinga and the Queen of Sheba. Now, once the director moves towards showing the women primarily as victims and the war as rather farcical, it becomes impossible to build the same women to the level of peasant heroism which is so palpable in the history of that struggle. In fact the women do not grow; they remain basically 'victims'. And the heroism has to be expressed mainly through slogans and not through their eyes surveying the land they almost died for. The eye which sees this land — its rivers, its grasslands, its mountains, its rocks - remains the detached, distant eye of the outsider, leaving the viewer wondering about the extent to which the director took upon herself the eyes of her subject and enabled her actresses to do the same. The rape scene is also objectionable, not because we are foolish enough to imagine that rapes did not happen, but because the eye in the scene is also a distant, detached and alien eye. Most of the scenes of the film are devoid of the smell, the texture, the sounds, the heart-beats, the dreams which frightened, inspired and overwhelmed those who joined the war. The struggle was so powerful that it radiated thousands of miles outside Africa where it attracted millions into what came to be known as the 'Liberation Support Movement'. Flame promises the eye of the storm or volcano, but we cannot even feel the after-shocks. Where then is the assembly who are to warm their hearts and hands, where are the brewers of the Zimbabwean dream of liberation for whom Flame is to light the way? For in order to be able to reveal the process of discourse inside the assembly, the filmmaker must first locate and recognise the assembly, the locus of transformative energy. Once the filmmaker has found his or her centre of the assembly, it becomes easy to recognise the obstacles that obscure his or her view and to confront them. The need to confront and remove the colonial and neo-colonial obstacles still cluttering African visual space comes from the fact that: Human society changes and develops by bringing back the energy of what has been repressed and using that energy to transform social forms. The great growth of individualism in the last three hundred years, for example, has been achieved only by the repression of the human need for community, and this age of individualism will cease only when the energy in the repressed need for community becomes viable again.8 Therefore, we can say, Africans are looking for the sort of aesthetic clearing of the visual space which will unleash the psychic energy suppressed over the last four hundred years. Indeed, the history of cinema in Africa shows that the settler and the missionary both tried hard to suppress the African soul through propaganda films.

AUDIENCES AND CRITICAL APPRECIATION

209

Yet, as Eli Sagan says, 'the need to create symbols and live in a symbolic world' is 'as powerful as sex or aggression', and its constant denial to the human psyche can be achieved 'only at the cost of severe psychic disorder'. Therefore Africans may fail to reclaim their visual space at their own peril. The opportunity to meet this need to create symbols and live in a coherent symbolic world is what film, video and television promise to widen, far beyond what print was ever able to do. Unfortunately for Africans in the southern region, the visual landscape is cluttered with imposed, dumped, alien debris, yet, in Sagan's words, 'Psychic health depends upon the symbol-making capacity'. It is not the male child's task to contemplate killing his real, actual father and sleeping with

his actual mother ... The whole experience [leading to sexual maturity] is played out on a symbolic level, where there is no real blood.9 Therefore, the constant symbolising of one's experience is good for the individual, for the family and for the whole society. Through the symbolising capacity, culture humanises instincts into drives and drives into needs. It is needs, locally defined, which make otherwise universal and raw instincts and drives assume unique and constructive expression in time-space. By their very nature, cinema, television and video can profoundly enhance, hinder or disorient the symbolising capacity. For example, in 1994 I showed Chris Austin's Brenda Fassie: Not a Bad Girl (1993) to a mixed class of American and Zimbabwean college students. I asked them to deal with the semiotic implications of Brenda Fassie's desire to allude to Madonna throughout most of the video. The majority of Zimbabwean students said Brenda Fassie diluted her authenticity and weakened her impact through the apparent imitation of Madonna. The majority of US students, on the other hand, thought the Zimbabweans were trying to deny Brenda Fassie her 'freedom' (in the libertarian sense) to express herself in any way she chose, including freedom to model herself as the South African Madonna. About two of the US students agreed with the majority of Zimbabweans that, by reaching for a Madonna model, Brenda Fassie was foreclosing the exploration of her own existence in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa which the video seemed to promise. The critical students also wondered whether Chris Austin had been fooled by Brenda Fassie or he had colluded with her to obscure the existential crisis which she was facing under a system once condemned as a crime against humanity. A year later, much of the reality of loneliness and hollowness which Brenda Fassie was fighting and hiding through Not a Bad Girl was beginning to come out. A number of publications picked up the story, including Drum magazine (September 1995), which came out with 'Brenda Fassie's Tragic Life of Drugs and Booze: How Her Young Lover Died'. The story reveals the contrast between the superficial reaching for Madonna and the need for Africans to explore their own space and name it into a real living place. According to Drum: Less than a week after (her lover) Poppie died, a bitter and tearful Brenda told reporters: CI have been neglected by society ... What have I done to deserve this? ... I have done so much for people and they have turned their backs on me. If it were not for my son Bongani I would have taken my own life long ago. I do not understand what is going on in life.

210

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

The story confirms the thesis of this paper. First, it was not Madonna who came to assist Brenda Fassie the many times she found herself on the brink of despair; South Africans did. Brenda's own mother was also an important pillar to her adult life. Even Not a Bad Girl could not leave out that truth, making Brenda's audience wonder what she needed Madonna for. Aesthetically and morally Brenda Fassie: Not a Bad Girl would have empowered both the subject and her audience a great deal more if it had been given a different title and drawn on more accessible models of women's struggle and emancipation in Africa: the women in You Have Struck a Rock (Deborah May, 1981) and South Africa Belongs to Us (Chris Austin, 1980) come to mind. There is Queen Nzinga and Nehanda: and there are the Nigerian women discussed in Judith van Allen's 'Sitting on a Man: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women'.10 There is Miriam Makeba and how she survived decades in exile. The African linkages are endless; likewise, one would have expected the women of the feature Flame also to reach out to their female ancestors in the struggle for the emancipation. That alone would have gone a long way to resolve the problems of the context and the dominant eye in Flame.

The Power of Intervention In Back to the Future: Modernity, Postmodernity and Locality, Philip Cooke gives an illustration which sums up some of the main problems of African cinema and its audience, n particularly in southern Africa. The illustration shows isolated individuals dotted all over what looks like the surface of a paved globe. Above the individuals is perched a centralising power reclining upon a satellite and looking down on the individuals. Each of the individuals is restricted in his or her space, which is a cubicle fitted with an electronic terminal which is linked by a single cord to the centralising figure above. There is not a single cord linking any of the individual cubicles or individuals on their own ground, in their own space. So, these individuals communicate with one another only through the centralising power perched above them in outer space. Two of the isolated individuals have apparently recognised their inability to communicate directly with each other, to explore their own space, to carry on independent discourse, without going through the centralising figure. The two are therefore stretching their hands, ineffectually, towards each other. The space around these isolated figures and the ground on which they are based could serve as the locus of their communicative power; it could be filled with the energy and evidence of their symbolising and synthesising capacity. But it is depicted in the illustration as empty space, barren ground. To the viewer, the communicative power and symbolising capacity of these cubicled individuals have been obliterated by the unilinear and metanarrative links to the centralising power above. Examples of such include: • Northern donor demands and preferences which privileges Northern themes and agendas in filmmaking over Southern ones • Northern production distribution regimes and institutions which directly or indirectly serve as training grounds for Southern communicators • Northern directors, artists and 'superstars' promoted in the South as universal models

AUDIENCES AND CRITICAL APPRECIATION

211

• Particularly Northern ideologies popularised in the South as universally applicable and true. In African cinema, a classic film which seems to express this relationship is Out ofAfrica (Sydney Pollack, 1985). It dazzles outsiders with the beauty of Kenya, as the venue of white fantasy and adventure, while turning its back completely on the efforts of those occupying that venue to reclaim it as the locus of their own beauty, wisdom, competency, fantasy, myth-making. In southern Africa, the films which express this relationship of centralised distance are the so-called 'development films', in which the donors' determination to convey singular messages in line with a predetermined logonomic system creates the same phenomenon of 'centralised distance'. These development films present themselves as texts ignoring context; they talk too much to be able to enhance the symbolising capacity of their audiences. They include: Neria (Godwin Mawuru, 1993), which pays some attention to context in so far as it uses Shona music, but is weakened by the attempt to blame the oppression of women on 'African tradition' while appearing to exonerate the 'modern' sector and its system of'justice 1 ; More Time (Isaac Mabhikwa, 1993), which claims to be about AIDS, fails to explore the African understanding of illness and health, and finally degenerates into a mere commercial for condoms; Dance for Peacey which initially promises to reveal the symbolising capacity of many Mozambican communities but ends up suppressing many of the symbols in order to stick to a UN-EU view of war, peace and elections; Consequences (Oily Maruma, 1987), which has the opportunity to reveal the African's symbolising of preOedipal, Oedipal and post-Oedipal conflicts, but restricts itself to schoolgirl-schoolboy naivete' about adolescence, sex and pregnancy; and No Need to Blame (Edwina Spicer, 1993), which restricts itself so much to the need to repress guilt about HIV-AIDS that it fails to symbolise, reveal and confront the sources and depths of African guilt connected with passion, pleasure, betrayal, disgust, distrust, anger and fear. To go back to the illustration in Back to the Future, the unrealised potential of African cinema to mobilise and empower its audiences is illustrated by those two hands stretching over emptied space and failing to touch. The only difference is that, while the landscape in the illustration is empty, in southern Africa it is strewn with colonial debris and neocolonial obstacles which claim to put the African communities 'in touch'. In addition to the debris and obstacles, there are colonial and neo-colonial ghosts stalking the space between communities and between individuals, claiming to bring everlasting revelations about the destiny of Africa and the world. These ghosts have replaced the African dream with a nightmare which is almost impossible to understand. All Africans, not just filmmakers, should work together to make their visual space an environment in which they can see their own visions. The myth of white superiority used to be propped up by the most crude material contraptions and barriers, such as: • you cannot urinate where I urinate; therefore I am superior to you • you cannot drink the liquor I drink; therefore I am more refined than you • you cannot sleep with all those I am able to sleep with; therefore I am a higher species of humanity than you • you cannot lie on the same beach or sit on the same bench as I do; therefore ... and so on. Now, the same myth still attempts to convince Africans that their own space is not a real place, not a real locus for indigenous pleasure and ecstasy. Rather, it is reserved for settler

212

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

and tourist pleasures. If the indigenous Africans want to experience pleasure and joy, then they must continue to imagine themselves as being somewhere else, in someone else's time and space, just as they used to be forced to imagine what lay beyond the 'No Trespassing' and 'White Only' signs. Zimbabwe still has a Vagrancy Act which, when it was first enacted in Rhodesia, presumed every African to be a vagrant until he could prove otherwise. A vagrant is not entitled to pleasures and joys in the space he occupies and he is not allowed to turn it into a real place by naming it to suit his needs. African cinema can help its audiences in their quest to make African spaces real African places whose pleasures should be credited to themselves and not to Paris, New York or London.

The Debris and Ghosts of Intervention Still Occupying African Aesthetic Space As the written word and text played a crucial role in the shattering of the African circle, so cinema can - properly focused - help reverse the disintegration. In the hands of settlers and missionaries, the written text was an instrument of demobilisation. It was used to condemn and disperse Africans from their rituals of space, such as Nhitnbe, Mikiri and Dare.12 It is interesting to note that African rituals of space were seen as so powerful that they had to be banned both under slavery and colonialism. In North America, Brazil, the Caribbean and many parts of Africa, African dances and rituals were banned by both slave masters and colonial settlers. In Zimbabwe: They imposed European religious and aesthetic values on Africans and condemned traditional forms of expressive culture, including music. Thus as masses of Africans were converted to Christianity the ... call and response singing styles accompanied by drums and other ... instruments gave way to European ... hymn singing.13 The drum, the dance, call and response singing, the festival, these were the means by which Africans, even in slavery, tried to explore, define and claim whatever time-space they found themselves in. By this process Africans threatened both the slave master and the colonial settler. Both often admitted that the Africans - as slaves, servants, prisoners and subjects - were happier than the white man as slave master, native commissioner or missionary. Both made the mistake of thinking that somehow the Africans were happy because of them rather than in spite of them. Yet they feared the rituals, because: The ultimate expression of passion ... indicates that the community in which the celebrant attains such a state [of ecstasy] basically rejects the authority (and moral superiority) of those who exercise control over it... What was not understood and seemed not to lend itself to (the master's) discipline was threatening and consequently should be discouraged.14 At first the Africans were also forbidden to learn to read and write. But even after they were allowed to do so, the written text could not take the place of the rituals of space. The text in fact played an important role in the continuing demobilisation of the African. It could be obtained individually for perusing alone in private, away from the space of the experience being narrated. 'Knowledge is power' came to refer mostly to textbook knowledge and power at the expense of contextual, space-based knowledge and oratory.

AUDIENCES AND CRITICAL APPRECIATION

213

During the second liberation struggle in Zimbabwe (the struggle for independence), for instance, Africans went abroad to Europe and America to study texts written about themselves. But now, as Anthony Smith writes in 'On Audio and Visual Technologies', film has the potential to resume or revive the capacity of 'carrying the spirit of the people again', a capacity which was evident in the African rituals of space which the slave master and the settler banned long ago: 'In cinema and television the psyche is being offered a return to the cathedral, the forum ... a return to the reading of human feature and gesture, to the transcultural rather than intracultural dissemination of signs.'15 Cinema therefore has the potential to bring back the African Nhimbe, Mikiri and Dare. But cinema cannot return the African to the Nhimbe and Mikiri without first enabling the people to explore their timespace in order to reveal and clear the aesthetic debris and ghosts still occupying it. Some of the debris and ghosts can be seen in Rhodes of Africa (Berthold Viertel, 1936).16 Apart from the expropriating title of the film, there is the voice of Cecil John Rhodes declaring: 'What I stand for is inevitable.' Rhodes ends up demanding to be buried where Lobengula the King of the Ndebele was supposed to be buried. And now, almost every visitor to the Matobo area of Zimbabwe is taken to view Rhodes' grave. The Africans do not even know where the dislodged Lobengula is buried. Whose centre of the assembly does the African see when he continues to stand on Cecil Rhodes' shoulders? The centenary of the first united African effort to overthrow settlerism was in 1996. While several African film projects to commemorate that centenary exist, they were poorly funded. In contrast, another Rhodes film, financed to the tune of 18 million Zimbabwe dollars, was planned. So the ghost of Rhodes continues to stalk the land, casting a shadow on the whole region and declaring, 'what I stand for is inevitable'. Apart from Rhodes at Matobo, there are statues, monuments and names of Allan Wilson, Alfred Beit, Queen Elizabeth, Selous and others, marking the European occupation and destruction of African time-space all over southern Africa. Particularly stubborn have been the narratives of Rudyard Kipling {Kim), Henry Rider Haggard {King Solomons Mines and Quartermain). King Solomon's Mines was promoted from text to cinema in 1919 (Lisle H. Lucoque), but the Zimbabwe version (Lee J. Thompson) of the film adaptation was not made until 1985, exactly a century after it was written. African space is not a real named place for Africans because the African continues to be seen and to see himself from the gaze of the white man as voyeur. Indeed, the white text continues to dominate and hinder the African symbolising capacity. In 1995 there was the release of a remake of Allan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (Daryl Roodt, 1995), a film produced by Annant Singh of South Africa. The white liberal continues to be the Madonna of African conscience. The Africans live in the shadows of these ghosts and monuments, reading pretty texts on 'reconciliation' which the context negates in every visible way. Written texts designed to obliterate the African time-space also constitute the obstacles and debris which the African must learn to sweep into their place before his cinema can become a true means of releasing a new communicative power. Following political independence, the Africans in the southern region have reoccupied their territories, but they have yet to reclaim them as bases for the African psyche to unfold. The people who left their debris behind did not see Africa as African space. Listen to the South African High Commissioner to Britain in 1951: 'South Africa and Southern Rhodesia are not part of Black Africa. Both have built up a permanent white population and

214

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

established a modern state on European lines'. 17 The examples are countless. But let us go back to 18 September 1947. According to the magazine East Africa and Rhodesia of that date, a Miss Mabel Shaw, a Briton, had the privilege of meeting the first six African women to attend Makerere College, now Makerere University in Kampala. This is her report of the encounter: In reply to a word of mine one [of the six African women] leaned forward and in a very moving manner said: 'But you cannot know what all this that we are now learning and reading means to us ... history, literature, poetry, child psychology. These things have been yours all your life. You have never been without knowledge of them. We have been imprisoned in ignorance, knowing nothing, seeing nothing, and now the doors are opening for us and taking us into worlds which we had not dreamed, worlds whose existence we did not know ... We have been in prison; now the doors are opening: what lies before us? As a typical promoter of the metanarrative of colonial modernisation, Miss Shaw did not expect to learn anything of value from the six African women. Instead of disabusing the six women of their false belief that women in Britain had always had access to university education and that indigenous African knowledge was nothing, Miss Shaw chose to celebrate the women's sycophancy and her own blindness. She went on: They were afraid of being 'drowned in Africa' - of going back into the masses of the people and losing their own newly-found identity, afraid of a strange loneliness they were even then sensing ... For them education was release from the prison house of ignorance (Africa!). Another remaining obstacle in Zimbabwe is the Witchcraft Suppression Act of 1899, which remains law. The first effect of the law was the lumping together of all African communication, healing and psycho-spiritual skills under one label of witchcraft. The second effect was what we call foreclosure in social science. All phenomena which the scared settler could vaguely associate with 'witchcraft' were henceforth foreclosed to enquiry. They were unworthy of study, thereby compounding the African's own ignorance of those aspects of his/her own culture which scared the white man. There is no better illustration of this compounded ignorance than the fact that more than five categories of African medical practitioners were collapsed into one: witchdoctor. The third effect was that the really ignorant and backward medicine men and women flourished after the Witchcraft Suppression Act because of two reasons: they were ineffectual and therefore posed no threat to the new regime; but they also served to justify the condemnation and suppression of African culture. They became the favoured specimens of the African's backwardness which justified the imposition of tyrannical colonial rule on the African. In Africa, as in Europe before, it was the effective and popular medicine woman or man whom the rulers feared most and suppressed first. The fourth effect is that one of the most underdeveloped areas of research in Africa today is the link between the indigenous symbolising capacity and mental health or illness. What is clear is that among the abilities which the settler, the educator and the missionary condemned as witchcraft were some which dealt with such mental health problems as:

AUDIENCES AND CRITICAL APPRECIATION

• • • • • •

215

anxiety disorders somatoform disorders dissociative disorders hysteria depression schizophrenia

The net effect of these colonial and neo-colonial obstacles is that those claiming to 'develop' African communities hold on to pre-determined positions which prevent any meaningful penetration of reality and tend to fossilise the symbolising process. The missionary says that African culture is evil; the pseudo-scientist says it is irrational and superstitious; the educator says it is backward and not advanced enough for him; and the developer/technocrat says it is 'traditional' and an obstacle to his modernising project. Yet if this culture has so much power, why couldn't it be the actual driving force for development? Why is its power only negative? Now, as long as the filmmaker waits to be hired, it is obvious that he will be hired by one or more of these people, to convey their favourite messages about 'development'.

African Wholesale Acceptance of the Metanarrative of Progress 1 and the Internalisation of Colonial Debris by the African Elites In the case of Miss Shaw and the African women of Makerere College, we could perhaps doubt whether those six women really said the backward things about themselves and their knowledge system which their white mentor reported to East Africa and Rhodesia. Let me share with you two more excerpts which are remarkable for a number of reasons: first, they were published in independent Zimbabwe more than a decade after decolonisation of the country; second, they were published in the popular media for popular consumption; and, third, they reveal a pattern established during the colonial era, that is the dependence of the metanarrative of white-driven 'progress' on Africans who are as alienated from their own communities and their history as they are ignorant of the history of Europe and North America which they adore. In social psychology this phenomenon is called 'identification with the aggressor'. The African elites are often backed by powerful donor agencies and non-governmental organisations. One European organisation in 1993 set up a regional seminar on Culture and Development and played a crucial role in selecting those Africans who were invited to speak and those who were not. The European organisation saw one of its major objectives as 'to facilitate local debate on those issues that are put on the development [southern] agenda by the North'. Although it also claimed that 'culture is the process of (re-)shaping society', it was silent on who should do the reshaping and for whom. What was most revealing in the working papers was the organisation's definition of development as 'the process of managing change' which required that the organisation engage in a concerted fight against 'intolerance and narrow-mindedness'.18 This organisation has been a major contributor to the funding of 'development films'. The topics considered relevant for the seminar on culture and development fit neatly with the subjects and themes of the development films.

216

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

The seminar papers, the working papers and the film themes all beg the question: why is it necessary for a Northern organisation to 'facilitate local debate on those issues that are put on the development agenda by the North?' What happens to those issues raised by the Southern communities? Who facilitates them, when even seminars held in the South see their duty as facilitating Northern issues? If development means reshaping society, who does the reshaping? What would be the Northern response if Southern agencies went there to reshape society? What sort of 'development' can one expect when the duty of the South in 'development' is defined as 'managing change'? Does this mean that all 'change' is good and therefore all resistance to change is automatically bad? Where does this 'change' come from which does not need creating or resisting but can only be managed? There are dozens of seminars, workshops and conferences of a similar nature taking place all over Africa, but there is no room here to deal with all of them. One of these took place in Brussels in 1993. An African observer in attendance wrote that 'The dependency which brought the Africans to Brussels dictated their silence' in the face of a predetermined agenda for their 'development' and 'freedom'. 19

Development Films Although the development film in southern Africa is among the worst in stopping short of revealing (through effective symbolising) the full power of a given social context, this failure is shared by cinema elsewhere. The power of movies and its potential is enormous and hardly tapped. Hollywood today works mostly by manipulating audiences' emotions in the quest for money. Cinema has produced only a handful of artists who give us an inkling of what this (power) could be; artists who connect, both intimately and consciously, to this parallel world of dreams (symbolising); artists who can take us there and give us perfect day-dreams ... We know deep down that film can be revelation, and the excitement we feel each time the lights go down is the expectation of that. All but a few fail. Some have great moments, flashes of revelation; we get caught up in their stories, follow the action, but finally they mosdy disappoint ... 20 The reasons for this failure in southern Africa include the ideology of'development' which requires the filmmaker to ignore or underestimate the film story already waiting to be made among the people. As Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress point out, ideological complexes are: A functionally related set of contradictory versions of the world, coercively imposed by one social group on another on behalf of its own distinctive interests ... Ideological complexes are constructed in order to constrain behaviour by structuring the versions of reality on which social action is based.21 In the Zimbabwean film Neria (Mawuru, 1993), we are assured that the oppression of women originates in African tradition and we become uncritical of the role of modern courts, even though these were responsible for reducing the status of adult African women to that of perpetual minors.

AUDIENCES AND CRITICAL APPRECIATION

217

We remain uncritical of women's clubs and co-operatives as avenues for women's liberation, even though we know that these have been used, ever since the first missionaries came to Zimbabwe, to keep African women busy and divert them from more meaningful pursuits such as trade and business. In other words, the film fails to explore for its audience the full significance of the courtroom as space which Africans have yet to reclaim from its colonial and neo-colonial heritage and function; Neria fails to reveal to the audience the full significance of the women's club or co-operative as marginalised space and therefore misrepresents it as a liberated and liberating space. The result is that development films have been greeted in predetermined, superficial, 'gender' jargon while most reviews have focused on the biographies of the actors and actresses rather than on their artistic and social significance. Effects of the domination of Southern African cinema by a narrow 'development' ideology have been far-reaching and many, such as: • Film production and distribution organisations setting themselves up for the specific purpose of scripting, directing, producing and distributing 'development' films and videos. • Film directors preoccupying themselves with whether or not the films they are making will sell across national borders before they have yet established the space, place and

audience for them at home. • The metanarrative of 'development' which already dominates education, missionary religion, commerce, industry and politics has been extended to the relatively new media of cinema and video.

• From all this, a vicious sort of self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates itself and goes like this: there is no money except in 'development' films; so let us make more of them. Zimbabwean film is not very artistic or entertaining (because it is driven and diluted by the need for 'development' messages), therefore we must rely on foreign films for art and entertainment, while restricting our cinema to 'development' messages. • The potential range and power of Zimbabwean cinema remains unrealised, unexplored and unknown. • Donor funding and the donor-driven themes of 'gender, AIDS, the environment and civil society' create a problem which Philip Cooke in Back to the Future calls the problem of centralised distance. For Zimbabwe, the main result of this problem is that filmmakers and their small numbers of fans relate more and better to their donors and donors' cultures and societies than they relate to their own communities and their own values. The country is also directed to relate to its own communities and constituencies through agendas, themes and perspectives set from outside: Women in Development (WID)), Women and Development (WAD), Civil Society, Multiparty Democracy, and Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPS). What my complaint means is that 'development' is an ideology, a metanarrative of the North about the South. It is presented as an objective techno-scientific process when in fact it is a moral, ethical and political stance which the North assumed when it discovered the 'Third World' as a problem after World War II. Allfilms,books and stories whose narrative is about 'development' in Zimbabwe tend to narrow rather than open up the discourse about our condition.

218

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Specifically, this narrative depends too much on posing dichotomies in films, videos, the press and television which upon critical examination cannot be justified by daily experience or history. Some of the false dichotomies suggest that: 1. African knowledge, African wisdom and African knowledge systems are treated as if they are all 'traditional' and opposed to Western values and knowledge systems which are quite wrongly perceived and treated as all modern and always progressive and modernising. In the film Neriay for example, the 'modern' court system and even the wearing of an ancient British-style wig among judges are presumed to be 'modern' and not 'traditional*. 2. African values are viewed as lacking dynamism, lacking internal discourse or dialogue, so that the struggle between progressive African values and backward ones is suppressed or obscured; the differences between Inkatha and the African National Congress, between Dedan Kimathi and Moi, between Fanon and Idi Amin, between Savimbi and John Garang is purposely collapsed, so that in the end Rwanda, Somalia, Uganda and female circumcision become blurred emblems of the incapacity and backwardness of Africa; so that the world can move comfortably from saying Africans have problems, which they should and can solve, to saying the African is the problem who therefore needs external intervention. 3. Through a peculiar time-driven consciousness, it is also assumed that all African values became obsolete as soon as the white man intervened in African lives; those which did not become obsolete at the time of white intervention must at best be treated with suspicion until proven, through white confirmation, to be good. 4. The indigenous African community therefore is usually incapable of self-interrogation and self-assessment; it can carry out discourse only when jump-started by an outside interrogator, consultant, facilitator or missionary/invader. 5. Therefore, backward ideas in general and the oppression of women in particular are explained as taking place in the 'traditional' sector which is almost always portrayed as domestic and communal, leaving the modern capitalist sector to boast of its claimed progressive role, when in fact even the oppression apparently taking place in the traditional sector is itself buttressed by the modern sector which has conveniently preserved the most backward elements of'African tradition' while rooting out the enabling but threatening ones. In the case of the subject before us, it is no accident that the so-called modern system has preserved and used the offices of headman and chief throughout the last hundred years while refusing to recognise or promote spirit mediums and n'angas. The latter have been dismissed as just 'witchdoctors'.

Neria In the case of Neria, for instance, the apparent role of African tradition in the oppression of women in the text is contradicted by quite a number of contextual factors which produce a counter-discourse or an oppositional reading which the director may or may not have recognised. The first factor is language: the characters who are supposed to represent this intractable African tradition express their values in English. The way they speak also shows that they do not ordinarily speak English in their daily lives; in fact they have memorised English lines only for the purpose of using them for the first time on the screen. This non-textual reality makes it hard to believe that these people represent tradition, are expressing tradi-

AUDIENCES AND CRITICAL APPRECIATION

219

tion, whatever that is supposed to mean. In fact it is hard to believe that these 'traditional' characters are motivated by interests which are different from those of the supposedly 'modern* and 'modernising* ones. The two brothers, Phineas and Patrick, as far as we can tell, were raised together. Why one should be wedded to 'tradition' while the other is 'modern* is not clear. The fact that Phineas lives in the rural areas while Patrick lives in the city is not an adequate explanation of their differences, especially since the former has very aggressive 'businesslike* tendencies, to accumulate wealth fast, behaviour more common in urban than in rural areas. In fact, both Neria and her brother-in-law are motivated by values which derive from the 'modern' sector and not from 'tradition'. Articulating these values in English makes this fact even more obvious. The third factor is the African interpretation of 'inheritance' which a critical viewer of the film would know, as opposed to the Western and neo-colonial definition. The text forecloses the potential discourse over these definitions. The African definition is not at the root of Neria's problem, although the text makes it appear to be. It is the European definition, rationalised through insincere overtures to 'tradition', which in fact is the root of the problem. The African meaning does not focus on possessing the estate of the deceased; it focuses on whether or not the successor qualifies for and accepts responsibility over the survivors. This qualification is determined by a council of elders of the extended, community-based, family. It is not claimed as a right. But if it is the modernistic, Western definition of inheritance which is at the root of Neria's problem, then the main thrust of the story becomes very problematic, since it associates modernity, city life, and the law and courts with the liberation of women. In fact the role of these in perpetrating gender oppression is not even hinted at. Yet, the adversarial concept of right comes from this modern urban sector and its business and legal institutions. How, then, can 'African tradition' in the rural areas be said to lie at the root of Phineas's motivation and to explain the development of the story? Looking at the film, it seems as if the director became aware of these contradictions as the story developed, but this awareness did not result in dropping the implied urban-modernity-modernisation versus rural-life-as-backward-tradition thrust. More Time The credits for More Time essentially constitute a who-is-who-among-donors in Zimbabwe. All the major organisations chose to be involved in funding thefilm,which cannot decide whether it wants to be a teenage romance or an AIDS story. The failure of More Time as a story has been analysed elsewhere.22 What has not been recognised is its failure to take advantage of its context, that is the African capacity to deal symbolically with adolescence, sex, father-daughter relations, mother-daughter relations, trust, betrayal, illness, fear and death. Like Nericiy More Time sets up a dichotomy between rural and urban areas, between 'modern' and 'traditional' areas; but there is a complete failure to use meaningfully the associations which Africans make with going 'home' to the rural areas from the city. There is failure to show the skills which the African family and community have built up over many centuries to deal with illness and death in the rural areas as well as in the cities. In fact the vision of Zimbabwean African adolescent existence in the film is based on the experience of a tiny minority characterised by the so-called Group A schools and Radio Three. Therefore, the film gives the impression that it was made for tourists who have no time to grapple with intricate symbolism and symbolising among Zimbabweans.

220

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Another area of failure worth mentioning is gender. Superficially, the film has been hailed as empowering women, because of the pharmacy scene where teenage girls demand to buy condoms. In reality the film empowers the condom sellers at the expense of probing the deep-seated, even subconscious terrors gripping society about AIDS, sex, adolescence and certain death. More Time opens the door towards the exploration of teenage sexuality and power. But it ends there. In the first place, the star of the film thinks of condoms only after her boyfriend has tried to pressure her into having sex. She makes a clear decision that she does not want to have sex. Then she goes and buys the condoms! Now, if we are to believe her assertiveness in making the boy David stop pressuring her, how do we also accept her undeveloped resolution to buy condoms and put them in her bedroom drawers where her mother (for unexplained reasons also) finds them? There is no proper development in motivation for the introduction of condoms in all the places where condoms come up. The only motivation is that all the donors were insisting on their donor-driven formula for 'development' funding in Southern Africa, which is that projects must 'highlight AIDS, gender, the environment and civil society* - all superficially examined or understood. The power which is reinforced in More Time is not the power of young women to make independent moral decisions in the face of male domination and parental control. What is reinforced are two things: the power of donors to turn a promising film story into an extended excuse for advertising condoms and the power of male-dominated, neo-colonial society to skirt around all the most threatening issues about sex, gender, trust, love, betrayal, disease and death. In fact the film succeeds precisely because it reinforces the contemporary desire of African elites to avoid all probing examinations of their condition, including the disastrous failure of the medical profession to communicate simply and clearly with those it is supposed to serve. In More Time it is clear that both the mother and father of Thandiwe, the star, are terrified by their daughter's sexuality and potential rebellion. But the possibilities are not pursued. It is also clear that the story teeters on the verge of exposing the fragility of African petty bourgeois individualism and its 'nuclear family' in the face of HIV-AIDS which kills relationships long before it kills individual bodies. The suggestion to involve Thandiwe's aunt in the discourse about Thandiwe's destiny could have opened up the contradictions between the tendency towards individualism and nuclearism on the one hand and the need to consider the community-based African family on the other. But the aunt disappears from the picture as soon as she appears; so do the rural relatives. What is worse, the only characters with whom the viewer is allowed some identification are those who definitely do not have HIV-AIDS. The ones who have HIV-AIDS remain faceless and remote to the extent of misrepresenting normal African behaviour in the face of relatives who are ill. The implications of More Time are serious: teenage daughters do not really enjoy or want sex; only the aggressive boys pressurise them; those teenage girls who want and enjoy sex do not have loving parents; and empowering young women means having them assert their moral right to demand and carry condoms in their handbags without actually making any decisions about the way they want and choose to live as Africans in an African context. There is no convincing development in the story leading to the mother's ransacking of her daughter's drawers, where she finds condoms, or to the confrontation between the pharmacist and the girls demanding condoms! It is as if the director wished to say: take condoms first and all other decisions will fall into place, including

AUDIENCES AND CRITICAL APPRECIATION

221

those to do with family relations. So, without the 'development' straitjacket, this film could have been great. Dance for Peace Dance for Peace is the latest among development films using aspects of African culture. Funded by the European Union, the film is seen as Europe's contribution to the development of democracy in Mozambique. Its singular purpose is to use dances from Mozambican nationalities in order to persuade their people to vote in the elections following the peace accord between the ruling Frelimo party (Marxist) and Alfonso Dhlakama's Renamo (Mozambican National Resistance). Remembering that in African history dances have been banned because of their power in revealing the psyche, one would expect Dance for Peace to come out the richest of all the southern African films. Such a film could exploit the fullest range of the symbolising capacity of the Mozambican nationalities whom the dance troupe visits in the course of the film. Yet the film did not do that. In all the provinces where the Mozambican dance troupe toured, there was only one where the local people joined in the dance. In the rest, the local people were just spectators, ironically hinting at their spectatorship in the election process which the dances were supposed to promote. In most of the film, the UN intervention is too distracting, making the film seem like a dance between the troupe and the UN personnel. And the European Union's insistence on 'neutrality' also ruined the film. To fill a picture with only white dove symbols makes little sense, unless the process of peace is not supposed to be based on understanding. While there is definitely a question as to whether all Mozambicans see peace as a white dove, there are even more serious questions: Who fed the dove during its exile? Who fed the vulture, which does not appear anywhere in the picture? Is the vulture dead or locked up or exiled? Otherwise, how is confidence in the peace process to be developed? How do we know that the demon of war and brotherly hatred has been banished? Another aspect of Dance for Peace which is typical of development films is its assumption that the white dove and the colour white are universal symbols which have relevance to all Mozambican communities. This presumption forecloses the probe into how different Mozambican communities symbolise and see: • war between brothers hate and death brotherly love hope the demon of war peace unity betrayal innocence guilt

• treachery • • • • • • • • •

political wisdom political maturity honour political naivete fanaticism individualism selfishness aggression shame

These are not explored and the presumption that the symbols of war and peace are obvious and universal forecloses the experience which the title promises. In terms of the development of conscious, self-reflexive art, the question on which the choreography is silent is this: is sponsorship now the chosen means of controlling and silencing the African symbolising capacity? After all, the descendants of those who banned

222

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

African rituals of space in Africa and the diaspora are the ones who are sponsoring African films, videos, dances and music bands today. Where has the threatening power of these rituals of space gone? Why are they not threatening any more? Why are these rituals no longer disturbing? Does this mean the African's existence has been emptied of all disturbing visions, dreams, fantasies and drives?

Inside Africa: Films that Enhance the African Symbolising Capacity Without placing them in any particular order, I would like to turn now to those films from southern African and other parts of the continent - which seem to point the way to the future. Among the early southern African films in this category is Simon Bright's Mbira: Spirit ofthe People (1991), which was based on extensive and sensitive research on music, African metaphor and symbolism in Zimbabwe. The film goes a long way in enabling the Africans to reclaim the land of Zimbabwe for which they fought so hard for fifteen years, the land which Africans have reoccupied since 1980 but have not yet fully made the ground of their vision. Mbira: Spirit of the People is a journey into the African psyche via its indigenous music. It integrates sound, rhythm, movement and colour with the landscape providing both the text and context. As a result, the film does not have to lecture its audience. It simply invites the audience's participation. The audience enter the space which the film has cleared for them. A very different film which also points the way to the future is Chaz Maviyane-Davies's After the Wax (1992). The film compresses almost six hundred years of African history into just seventeen minutes, using an ancient device which Africans have used for thousands of years to overcome the tyranny of time as a barrier between past and present, past and future. The device is the voice of a dead man using nationality to look back on the point of his life and human existence. The film is a poem of high density in which every word, every image, every metaphor is absolutely essential and resonates symbolically with all the others. The symbols speak syntagmatically, avoiding the excessive textuality and literalness so typical of the 'development' film. Indeed, the link between good aesthetics and effective audience's development is not necessarily that the message should be literal and easy to grasp; rather, it is that the film should invite, challenge and engage the viewers enough to make them want to come back to it and find more and more about themselves through its agency as they do so.

The West African Exception Although some of the problems of cinema in the south exist all over the continent, West Africa has for the most part been able to overcome or avoid them. Its filmmakers have shown a greater determination to count on the uniqueness of a story to its time-space as the surest basis for its success even overseas. In other words, they do not believe that one should forfeit local language, colour and rhythm in order to please vaguely understood foreign audiences. Rather, they seem to believe that if a film is based on a story of substance in its own time-space, outsiders will make an effort to enter its time-space too and experi-

AUDIENCES AND CRITICAL APPRECIATION

223

ence what it has to offer. And if it is strong in its articulation of symbolic meaning, its use of a local African language will not be a big obstacle to the outsider. Gaston Kabore's Wend Kuuni (1982) is a good example of the West African film of high symbolic density. It is the story of a boy who is discovered in the wilderness by a hunter. At first the hunter believes the boy is unable to speak only because he has fainted. Later, after the boy revives, the hunter and his family (who adopt him) realise that the boy is dumb. As a result, it is impossible to know the identity and history of the boy. Africa has found itself. It now needs motivation to speak. In the hunter's family is a little girl of the same age as the boy. The girl takes an intense interest in the boy and it is this innocent love which later provides a strong enough motive for the boy to start speaking again and revealing his origins and identity. Africa needs to love itself in order to empower itself. This film is myth-making at its best. The landscape, the language, the pace, the colour and the faces, all work together to produce an internal resonance which cannot be confused with something else. Wend Kuuni, the boy's adopted name, means gift of God. He is the lost soul of Africa who needs more than bread, butter and water to revive. He needs love, African eros. The litde girl is the African eros; the affirming voice of Africa which will make Africa speak again. In Xala (1974) Ousmane Sembene also gives us a story of high symbolic density. Xala means impotence and is based on a polygamous member of the post-independence African elite who also sees himself as a modern businessman. Dealing with impotence, the story opens up problems of the African psyche in West Africa, with its layers of African, Islamic and Catholic repression and guilt. Alhaji back is the polygamist whose first wife is guilt-ridden because she disobeyed her converted Christian father to marry a Muslim. He himself pays lip-service to African culture while wanting to escape from it; since it is symbolised by the older wife who seems to hold Alhaji back from adventure and excitement. So Alhaji escapes by going after young women, until one day he marries a girl younger than his own daughter. As soon as she becomes his, all his desire for her vanishes. She is no longer a challenge. She has become part of that which he wants to run away from again. And although Alhaji thinks he is 'modern', he does not go to modern doctors to solve his impotence. He goes to those who are considered free of the ambivalences and predicaments of which he has become victim. He goes to traditional healers and destitutes for help. But the impotence is not only pre-Oedipal and Oedipal. It is also political. The ruling class in Xala is politically impotent and corrupt. The sexual terrors and fiascos are paralleled by political and economic ones until all the repressed subconscious forces take their toll on the ego, Alhaji, who loses control completely, both of his 'family' and his 'business'. Sembene's Ceddo (1977) is equally rich. It sets up a tragedy involving an assertive African princess in the middle of three religions and traditions: the indigenous African culture, Islam and Christianity. The woman asserts her rights both as a woman in a male-dominated triangle and as an African. This is a long way from the development films of southern Africa which seem to assume that there is no basis in African history on which to anchor the liberation of the African woman.

224

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

The Circle and the Ladder: for Mining the Lode and Reaching the Sky from African Ground Despite all the weaknesses outlined in this paper, African filmmakers have accomplished a lot. They need the co-operation of others in society in order to accomplish more. They need film critics, better-trained scriptwriters, competent design teams, non-governmental organisations and government institutions committed to the promotion of film. Despite the weaknesses outlined here, African audiences have responded favourably to African cinema. Some have come out in support of the actors and actresses they know; some have come out because they know the scriptwriter personally; some have come as friends of the producer; and still others have come because they know the director. In the case of Neria, More Time, Consequences and other films, many African audiences have supported these because they are first: Consequences and More Time were the first to attempt opening up cinema space and air time for African teenage sexuality; Neria was the first full feature on gender in an African community in Zimbabwe. So, where there is virtually no precedent, it is clear that people do come out; people respond. African people responded even to the degrading colonial movies, such as the awful We Were Primitive (Rhodesia House, PR) about the Chiweshe people in Zimbabwe. The point here is that neither the victims nor the perpetrators of We Were Primitive can come out today to celebrate such a monstrosity. The fact that people come to see a film does not in itself prove that the film is great. I suggest therefore that our filmmakers have been too timid to make pictures of lasting impact. The metaphors of the circle and the ladder which I suggest here mean that the filmmakers must dare to reach for the sky, as long as they do so from African ground, from the African arena. They must also define, with a circle, the specific areas of that ground which interest their people. There are millions of pressing stories waiting to be scripted and shot. The filmmaker should engage people to do research among the people, until he finds his lode, until he melts his ore and moulds it into nuggets. There is a deep spiritual crisis in Africa which shows quite simply that the suppression of the psyche under such colonial legislation as the Witchcraft Suppression Act did more harm than good. Frequently there are stories in local newspapers indicating this crisis. In one story, a Zimbabwean soldier killed his own father, alleging that the other prevented him from leading a normal sex life by 'forcing him' to sleep with wild creatures. In another case in July 1995, the head of a school in Gwanda, Zimbabwe, alleged that one of her subordinates unleashed a tokoloshe (the spirit of a dead relative which has taken a physical form) upon her and that this creature repeatedly raped her in her own house, until she left the school. In yet another story in 1995, a huge mob surrounded a house belonging to an enterprising woman in Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe. The cause of this near hysteria was that the daughters of another woman who had died two years before had been told that their deceased mother was now a slave in the enterprising woman's house, where she was making doilies non-stop. It was this enslavement of a deceased woman which was supposed to explain the success of the owner of the house, who made frequent business trips to South Africa. There is also evidence that, contrary to the popular myth of modernisation versus tradition, the attacks on women come from the same drive, from the same spiritual crisis, as the attacks on everything African. In that case the dichotomisation of women's liberation and African values would be false.

AUDIENCES AND CRITICAL APPRECIATION

225

Filmmakers are the new spirit mediums. They are expected to make visible the fears, the anxieties, the terrors, the dreams and pleasures which the people suffer and cherish in silence. If they succeed, more people will come out to see their pictures than the huge mob who surrounded the house in Chitungwiza to see a dead woman making doilies. Even more interesting, the mob would stop surrounding people's houses and mob movie houses instead. We must reclaim our symbolising capacity if we are to survive.

Arrogance, Ignorance and Contempt for Potential Audiences At first the distributors claimed they could not show African films because there was no African cinema at all. Yet when African associations made an effort to provide some of the film, the response changed to: African cinema is of such inferior quality to Western cinema that it should take a long time before it could be distributed normally. Still, when the distributors were brought to festivals and convinced that the films were of great quality, they made yet another claim: the films may be good but they remain unfamiliar and unattractive to 'our Southern African audiences who are used to Hollywood thrillers'. Recently, mounting pressure from festival organisers and activists has produced yet another shifting response: yes, African cinema is good and unique and the interest is definitely increasing, but it is difficult to make a profit from distributing this type of cinema. In short, African cinema is on the march, pushing back walls of racist and monopolistic defences. The last one cited above is just as weak as all the others. Businessmen have their own values, their own culture, according to which they may be quite willing to take financial risks and make huge investments. Twenty years ago these same businesses were willing to forfeit bigger profits by running 'whites-only* shops and theatres when they could have made more money by including Africans. Even since independence, I can count dozens of ventures which were uncertain and risky, but which the business community pursued with enthusiasm: there was a silkworm project which failed; there was an oil exploration project in the Zambezi Valley which failed; there was a palm oil experiment which also failed. So, the resistance to African cinema is not to be explained by lack of profitability alone. The historical backwardness of the private sector in the region is also part of the answer. African cinema negates the culture which has dominated that sector for more than a century. But the future is going to be different now. The future will be different if the filmmaker, the culture analyst and activist and their audiences together find ways of employing the gift of cinema to recharge the space once neutralised by the Euro-American gaze of Out of Africa and King Solomon's Mines or The Gods Must Be Crazy (Uys, 1988) and to enable everyone again to experience African existence as contemporary existence requiring no Euro-American validation. For the last four hundred years African existence has been treated so much and so often as 'tradition' that the Africans themselves have come to believe that they have no contemporary life, that the contemporary can only be external and imported and that only tradition can germinate in African space. The absurdity of this cliche is that it is baggage invented by Euro-American linear perspective. As Walter J. Ong demonstrates in Orality and Literacy, the ancestors whom we credit with placing the baggage of 'tradition' upon our backs could neither live the experience nor perceive the moth-eaten concept of 'tradition' which curses our lives today, since "matters from the past without any sort of present relevance ... dropped into oblivion. Customary law, trimmed of material no longer of use', was automatically up to date and

226

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

youthful'. Indeed, such a concept of history was the exact opposite of what weighs us down today as 'tradition'. It was 'a resonant source for renewing awareness of present existence'.23 In other words, so many Africans perceive their ancestors as traditionalists who could produce only 'traditions' precisely because they themselves as contemporaries feel thoroughly neutralised and incapable of producing much. The concept of 'tradition' in Africa today is the mirror image of African neutralisation and marginalisation; otherwise we should at least be able to recognise that our ancestors did not see themselves as creating 'traditions'. What for? They saw themselves as living their lives, enacting their own aspirations within their own time-space. Their values were so imperative and 'inevitable' to them because they were immediate, contemporary and relevant, though justified as belonging to the ancestors, of course.

RESPONDENTS Ahmed Attia I am no cinema theorist, so I will speak from my experience as a filmmaker. I started out as a film technician and I have worked in cinema throughout the world. I worked with an assistant director called Nouri Bouzid who handed me a script one day. Nobody wanted to produce it; I found it so beautiful that I decided to produce it and that is how I became a producer. From this first film VHomme de Cendres (1986) onwards I tried to understand the need for a strategy in relation to the home market and finance from abroad. I always felt from that moment on that a filmmaker in any country in the world and every people however small in number have the right to express themselves and the right to use this marvellous popular instrument of film. With a group of filmmakers that included Ferid Boughedir I tried to develop a strategy which consisted above aU of making 'free* films. That is to say in my country, Tunisia, there is cinematic censorship: but we made films paying no attention to the National Film Commission and its restrictions. We forgot that the Arab body was forbidden; that it was better to ignore the Jewish minority in Tunisia; and we forgot that to be a homosexual in our society was not acceptable. I think these were the things that struck the public the most. The liberated tone and content of the films attracted the public and there was a succession of incredible successes in Tunisia. There was a debate with the censor concerning these films. Actually VHomme de Cendres was banned for a few months and we had to cut some scenes to get it released; the second film, Les Sabots en or (1989) was banned for more than a year and it too inspired an international campaign to get it shown; we used all the restrictions as points of debate and publicity around the film. The result is that in Tunisia today cinemas and distributors consider it a good season financially if one or two Tunisian films are released. The biggest successes are Egyptian and American films which get between 60,000 and 100,000 spectators: but VHomme de Cendres had 220,000 spectators in the towns in Tunisia for which we have records of ticket sales. Halfaouine (Ferid Boughedir, 1990) had more than 500,000 spectators, Bezness (Nouri Bouzid, 1991) had 250,000 and Soltane el Medina (Moncef Dhouib, 1993) had 200,000 spectators. Why do people like these films? I think there are three reasons that relate to being in control of the process from fundraising for production, to marketing the finished product. First, audiences recognise themselves in these films; the films are in their language, about people in the street who have a certain poetry about them. What was really strong in these films was, more than anything, the sincerity of the subject-matter and the credibility of what was in front of the camera. Second, despite our success the Tunisian market is still very small. We have sixty cinemas for a population of 8 million and the most expensive ticket costs £1. The local market had to be increased to try and fill this chasm and to prevent manipulation from those who pay for the production. I tried to develop the market closest to me, the Maghreb, Africa and the Arab world, and also to engage with the international market. I discovered that the larger the aid or support was in proportion to the budget the more we lost control of the content of the product through manipulation, resulting in a completely different film from

228

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

the original intention. So my strategy was to have many different small sources of finance and smaller markets rather than seeking a large input from a financial partner more powerful than myself, who would control a greater market. The third thing that seemed important to me was to have an intelligent rapport with the critics and journalists, (the critic has an interesting role in promoting cinematic creativity). This rapport with the critics led to a dialogue, refined our rapport with the public and reinforced our presence. I think that if my films did not have a strong local market I would not be strong enough to defend myself against those who would like to manipulate me. We are here in a situation of mass communication and if I don't have consistent local finance I risk losing control of the content or the means to make a film.

Nii Kwate Owoo My response is not directly related to Tafataona Mahoso's text (see pp. 197-226). It is really a response from another angle, aimed at highlighting certain concerns and critical issues that we face in Africa today. These concerns will focus on our moral and social obligations as filmmakers to our audience, the African public. I have always tried to emphasise that we are living through a critical period. This is the last decade of the twentieth century; the year 2000 is almost here. We are living through a period when a monumental wedge has been driven between us and our audience, the African public; with the advent of information technology, and broadcast satellites all over the world. Another critical issue is that, because of this wedge between us and the audience, the notion of the collective in African society, the collective impulse that brings people together to thrash out or debate or discuss issues, whether they are in conflict or otherwise, is now in danger of being overwhelmed by the notion of individualism and competition. It's almost as if - symbolically speaking - the lives of our audience are actually in the hands of artists, writers and filmmakers, and there are two fundamental issues that I would like to raise here: how well do we know our audience?; and what are the sociological and psychological implications of the form and content of our films on African audiences? The dialogue or debate about our films that used to exist among African filmmakers has suddenly vanished into thin air. What I would like to explore here are certain fundamental issues, namely mythology, reality, language, politics and the African audience, which ever since the emergence of written African literature and the cinema on our continent have been the source of endless debate and discussions. Mythology, for instance, has at various times past, under different conditions, played a central role in numerous themes or plots in the work and publications of African filmmakers, novelists and critics, but their culminative sociological and psychological impact on our audience, the African public has not often been critically examined. Often the socio-economic nature and history of the development of African societies have been either relegated to the background or totally ignored. Culture is the concentrated reflection of the political and economic organisation of any given society, and language the fundamental vehicle through which culture is transmitted, perceived and assimilated.

AUDIENCES AND CRITICAL APPRECIATION

229

Audience, Social Reality and History This is precisely why we urgently need to work out collectively an adequate programme within which a collaboration between our writers and filmmakers could gradually develop. Myth, reality, politics and the language of real life are the most vital component parts of the gamut of ideas present in the work of our writers and filmmakers. Before we delve into these, we should remind ourselves that the basis of any collaborative effort between filmmakers and writers must undoubtedly and logically call for a clarification of ideas such as: • In whose interest do we come together to collaborate? • What is the common ground on which we come together to make films? For the sake of art? For personal profit or aggrandisement? or rather to ensure that our joint efforts should result in a product that will have an emancipative and a liberating influence on our people? We may not necessarily share exactly the same ideas on how to reach our common goal, but at least we must begin to plan our strategy and tactics, step by step, taking into account our very different historical and natural conditions, while not losing sight of our limitations and the fact that we are involved not only in a highly capital-intensive industry but also in a struggle against the spider-web of control of the means to produce and distribute our films. Now let us ask ourselves the question, 'how do our writers and filmmakers define their finished product?' Any work of art, a novel, a poem, a play, a film can in a sense be described as a commodity, i.e.: • it has undergone a production process where mental and physical labour has played a key or fundamental role • as a finished product it becomes ready for consumption like any other commodity. In the realm of literature, art, music, dance/drama and film we can generally accept the fact that consumption takes place in an audiovisual sense. Whether we like it or not, audiovisual 'consumption' also transmits to our audience 'nutrients' in the form of ideas packaged as information, which may be rational or irrational, subjective or objective. These ideas, or if you like 'nutrients', act on our senses and will, in the final analysis, result in the formation of an opinion in the mind. So from the above we may conclude that any writer or creator of a work of art or film endeavours to impart to his or her audience (the consumer) certain thoughts and feelings about his or her society. Clearly then, no African writers or filmmakers can claim to be neutral to any of the social forces operating in the society of which they are a product. This so-called neutrality can only be self-deception. It is the result of a failure on the part of the writer or filmmaker to approach a problem without first considering the circumstances, without viewing things in their totality, i.e. their past history and their present condition as a whole. Thus they are very likely to end up dealing only with the effects of the problem and avoiding or disregarding the origins or causes. Artists and writers are sometimes described as the 'mirror' or 'conscience' of their societies. This is precisely what African filmmakers and scriptwriters should set as one of their main goals: to mirror reality, not to mystify it. Of the utmost importance in this should be a desire for unity and cordiality rather than competition amongst us. Why? Because the spirit in which criticism and self-criticism is conducted is one which is marked by a genuine desire to forge unity again and again at an even higher level. It should be self-evident

230

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

to all of us that research and investigation, as well as a critical assimilation of information and facts, should be our beacon and guide. Dialogue and collaboration should first and foremost be based on a mutual flow of information about past and current research activities, and findings on African history, culture and politics, reviews, essays and articles on African cinema and today's social realities and ideas acquired in the concrete practice of making films under African conditions. African Realism - a Potent Film Resource Writers and filmmakers are all suffering in various degrees from a problem known as 'information colonialism' because, in the visual and historic sense, we have been saturated with all manner of distortions from an army of European historians, official artists and illustrators, well versed in the art of distorting our reality. To demystify all the rubbish written about African people is certainly an onerous task for filmmakers and writers. Now let us examine some of the themes which African writers have explored in their novels. Until quite recently, most of the novels written by Africans dealt with a variety of subjects within the context of colonial, rural and contemporary settings and concerned themselves mainly with conflicts, intrigues or power struggles between traditional rulers, or among their subjects, as well as themes of love and jealousy. Again, in the colonial setting, we have had novels on themes about the alienation arising out of the contradiction between village and city life. Several themes have in a variety of ways commented on, or tried to interpret, African society, but few put forward any concrete solution to the myriad of problems inherent in it. Our writers have come a long way; they have traversed a rather complex and thorny path, where in the heat of the march towards authentic African novels and cinema, some of us collapsed by the wayside, suffering from financial or intellectual stroke. Still others picked themselves up and carried on the fight. Luckily for us, the smoke screen is gradually being penetrated. Today in Africa, we have a model, a monument which we can indeed be really proud of: the father of the African cinema Ousmane Sembene, a man who was a fisherman, a mason, a dock worker and then a writer, before exchanging the pen for the camera. His experience in the adaptation of African literature for the screen is the most concrete example that we have before us today. Let us learn from him. As our Kenyan patriot and fiery novelist, playwright and filmmaker Ngugi Wa Thiong'o has observed, I t is both an act of education and an educational process to struggle, to seize back the right and the initiative to make one's own history and hence culture, which is a product and a reflection of that history'.24 No-one is saying that we should, in adapting African literature to the screen, avoid themes about love, emotion, conflict, rituals, mythology and so on. No, what we are saying is: by all means, utilise all the elements of drama and aesthetics, not to mention the entertainment inherent in the abundantly rich and unexplored landscape of African culture, but bear in mind that at each stage you have to buttress yourself with concrete and well-researched information. A critical assimilation of the subject-matter that you wish to portray in a book or film is imperative. It is only when the perception (and experience) are very rich (not fragmentary) and are as close as possible to reality (i.e. not illusory) that we can at last begin to unravel the different aspects of the contradictions inherent in the complex and hierarchical bureaucracy of traditional African or contemporary society. Of course there are people who will be only too quick to affirm or declare that politics has nothing to do with art. We should be very careful not to be hoodwinked into the notion that human culture is alien to poli-

AUDIENCES AND CRITICAL APPRECIATION

231

tics and political institutions. This is why this text maybe interpreted or seen by many people as a political or an ideological statement, but it is actually no more political than any current 'official* viewpoint of culture in Africa today. They will tell you, Oh! but this one belongs to a certain sphere of influence of ideas in the 'arts' which is outside the realm of 'polities'. You see, it is a very simple device; all the elite have to do is to reduce your field of vision from a Very wide angle' to that of an 'extreme close-up', so that you may view politics as a profession or something to do with elections and government, which we only discuss everyfiveyears. Now, politics may be defined as a body of ideas which have evolved, or emanated if you like, from the historical experience of any given social grouping. It is the sum total of the direct and indirect experience of its struggle to understand itself, to survive in nature by striving to change or transform some aspects of the political reality to serve its interest, or simply a desire to dominate it. The alternative to the above definition is to offer oneself in a blind submission to politics; as they say, 'to declare oneself completely at the mercy of nature, or to allow nature to take its course'. So that, over the centuries in African society, ideas which emerged among our ancestors (as a result of thousands of years of their strivings primarily on economic and social levels, to improve their lot and to understand, interpret or transform nature), were synthesised, combined or fashioned into an order, a way of life, traditional institutions or norms, which they then used to 'regulate' themselves. Thus, in their daily interaction with each other, our ancestors must have naturally (as we are doing now) exchanged ideas and opinions about each other and about fundamental issues such as land ownership or authority in the community. These are the kind of subjects rich in a variety of ways, in terms of ideas for plays, novels, films and so on, which should be the focus of African literature and cinema today. Let us take for instance the issue of women and polygamy. African writers or filmmakers may consciously or unconsciously portray a character (or a hero) in a book or on the screen as a womaniser who, depending on the nature of the plot, may end up being popular or unpopular or even physically eliminated. Now given the fact that the notion of polygamy has been from time immemorial institutionalised by men within African society, a writer or a filmmaker who does not challenge or question this notion (of polygamy) in his work will create a situation where his audience would consciously or unconsciously internalise certain negative values which our society has hitherto held as sacrosanct: notwithstanding the fact that the history of the African continent is saturated with various accounts of the heroic deeds of women. Towards a Popular Audience In principle, the substance of literature and cinema cannot be abstract, intended only for the literacy or cinematic pleasure of individuals or exclusive groupings outside the common cause and aspiration of the mass of the people (our audience) on our continent. The collaboration between filmmakers and writers will therefore have to be organised around the areas of contradiction, against which the combined energies of the democratic, patriotic and progressive forces on our continent continually pitch their struggle. May the spirit of collaboration and unity between African writers and filmmakers result in the production of films which would make our audience feel like going through the screen, to live the lives of the people in our films, because they are real.

232

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Notes 1 The epithet 'surplus appendages' or 'superfluous appendages' referring to African women, children and the elderly is credited by Merle Lipton to South Africa's Bantu Affairs Deputy Minister Froneman in 1970. See Merle Lipton, Capitalism and Apartheid (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allenhead, 1985), pp. 34-5. 2 In Erica Carter, James Donald and Judith Squires (eds), Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1993), pp. 241-66. 3 Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fall of One South African Peasantry (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970). 4 In Carter, Donald and Squires, Space and Place. 5 C. A. Akron, Twi Mmebusem - Twi Proverbs with English Translations and Comments (Accra: Waterville Publishing, 1966), pp. 24 and 39. 6 Ministry of Information Posts and Telecommunications: the Director of Information's Report following the viewing of rough cuts of the feature film Flame at Central Film Laboratories on 19 December 1995. 7 Mr Bright revealed that many Mozambican filmmakers were angry that he, a white Zimbabwean, should be asked by the European Union to make a film about Mozambican dances when there were dozens of Mozambicans who could have done a better job. This meant that Mr Bright could not receive the full co-operation of the Mozambicans which would have enhanced the quality of Dance for Peace. 8 Eli Sagan, At the Dawn of Tyranny: The Origins of Individualism, Political Oppression, and the State (New York: Knopf, 1985), p. 370. 9 Ibid., pp. 370-1. 10 Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 1972: 165-81. 11 Philip Cooke, Back to the Future: Modernity, Postmodernity and Locality (London: Unwin, 1990), Figure 6. 12 Nhimbe is a Shona word meaning 'work-feast'. The colonial state had to destroy this system of organised work before it could successfully force the Africans to enter colonial time-space. The Nhimbe was both a mini festival and a party. It kept communities selfsufficient, refusing to work for the settler for decades after the imposition of colonial rule. Mikiri is an Ibgo word referring to meetings at which women made their own political and social decisions to protect and advance their interests as women. When the British colonial regime tried to extend taxation from African men to African women, it was surprised to find the women using Mikiri to fight the regime without any men being involved. Dare is a Shona word for a court where judgement was usually based on the consensus of all present. 13 Paul Berliner, The Soul ofMbira (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 25. 14 Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 56. 15 Gerd Baumann (ed), The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 180. 16 Gaumont British Instructional, 1937. 17 East Africa and Rhodesia, 22 February 1951. 18 See 'Culture and Development: The HIVOS Perspectives', 1993. No further details available. 19 Adewale Meja-Pierce, Index on Censorship, vol. 22, no. 4,1994. 20 John Boorman, 'Bright Dreams, Hard Knocks', Projections: A Forum for Filmmakers, issue no. 1, 1992.

AUDIENCES AND CRITICAL APPRECIATION

233

21 Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress, Social Semiotics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), p. 3. 22 See Olley Maruma, 'More Time (Thandiwe): A Badly Portrayed Idea', The People's Voicey 16 October 1993. 23 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the World (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 98. 24 Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, The Barrel of a Pen (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1983).

Part Three Reflections

Chapter 10 Weapons of Resistance Tahar Cheriaa Rather than synthesise the previous chapters here, I will make a sort of final contribution, adding something, in turn, for reflection - for the slowest and most tranquil meditation. I was profoundly interested and moved by the papers of Teshome Gabriel and Mariama Hima, whose contributions I wish had been longer, less reticent, and less modest, given the extreme seriousness of the condition of women, as citizens, creators and above all as creative artists. In Africa this condition is even more tragic than it is elsewhere. In the same vein I was sadly aware of two absences: that of the doyen Sembene but also that of Mrs Moufida Tladi of Tunisia, because her film Les Silences du palais (1994), is a remarkable work and I am sure she would have made an enriching contribution to the subject of women filmmakers in Africa. I also greatly appreciated Idrissa Ouedraogo's Le Cri du cceur, which gives relief in this type of conference, which for me is as valuable as his films, but which apparently for him, seemed to lack the point, to lack the urgency. I do not think that those who locate themselves outside the urgency of this debate should be neglected. The struggle for African cinema needs images from Idrissa and other filmmakers as much as it needs critics, even the most bizarre or inadequate, and as much as it needs research, even the most eccentric that any university can offer. All this is indispensable material for our struggle, which must be nourished and continue to arm itself with experience and talent. I share a great deal the open approaches, orientation and perspectives of the contributions by Nouri Bouzid (Chapter 4) and Haile Gerima (Chapter 5), and also - from a much more emotional point of view - Ola Balogun (Chapter 7), with whom I am in clear and complete agreement. Ola seemed to pose, in his calm and efficient manner, the essential issue behind all these debates and at the epicentre of all battles, and which is in fact more or less evident in all the films without exception that Africa has been able to make in all its diverse conditions: essentially that this really is a war. There is no other word for it. It reminds us that the problem Africa has is one of awareness of its resources and the harnessing of these for its own use while in a state of war. For those who might just see Ola Balogun's proposition as a simple aggressive cry for war, I hope that a deeper reading will moderate their immediate reactions and that it will inspire them to reflect further in order to seize its true meaning and the true value of what is posed. History has it that Africa, in this fight, is still the battleground for the most excessive and abominable 'relationship between disproportionate forces', which is totally deplorable and which must be challenged to bring about a more natural and humane balance. In effect it is a vicious and malignant relationship with constantly perverse effects which creates, develops, renews and improves ceaselessly iniquitous and - for us at least - catastrophic situations. This relationship is such that every new element reinforces the dominant, immediately creating, as if automatically, ten new elements that reduce or annihilate the means of resistance and efficient auto-defences of the dominated.

238

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

In addition this war has simultaneously changed in an astonishing manner in its weapons and military tactics, and multiple strategies of weakening, subordinating and exploiting entire human societies which are methodically reduced to markets of consumption for their products, of recycled and inflated value sub-products and even, eventually of 'dump-clients' for their various and most diversely toxic, socio-economic wastes. It has really become a war of images. For African filmmakers, it is a war of survival and not just about having a bit more pleasure at playing with African images amongst the television gameshows, or films or videos that Japan, the USA or Europe supply us with. It is not simply a question of participating in making some of the pastime fodder we, as human beings, need. It is more about making weapons of resistance for what is - against us - more and more, an arsenal of means of domination.

Chapter 11 The Homecoming of African Cinema Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

The presence of filmmakers in any gathering on cinema is always one of its most interesting aspects: to be a witness to the process of them defining their concerns and goals as filmmakers. This is important because any meaningful evaluations of an art must begin with how the practising artists see themselves and their craft. So the absence of Ousmane Sembene, one of the most notable of African cine-artists, from the conference on 'Africa and the History of Cinematic Ideas* was a loss to the gathering. The fact that he could not make it because of some passport problems did in itself speak about some of the obstacles, bureaucratic mix-ups, indifference or downright hostility that are often in the way of the success and triumph of African cinema. However, it was exciting to hear other artists, like Haile Gerima (Chapter 5), challenging the critics of African cinema to come up with analyses that would help define the identity of this cinema; its rhythms, its grammar, its language. He was really calling for that vital relationship between the practising artist and those who look at the end product evaluating its contours, its balance, weight and movement - those who examine the relationship between the parts and the whole of a single product, between an individual artist and his ceuvre, and between the ceuvre of an individual artist and the collective works produced at the national, continental or pan-African level. The intellectual - the worker in ideas - has a role to play in the development of African cinema. The worker in ideas and the worker in images need to work together in a vital critical give-and-take that can only enhance the tradition as a whole. Gerima was intervening in the contribution of Clyde Taylor (Chapter 6) in the panel 'African Cinema and Postmodernist Criticism'. The heated exchange that followed was in itself a proof that that vital relationship was actually evolving and the conference itself was part of that evolution. It was a conference with an ambitious agenda: to place African cinema in the history of cinematic ideas as we move from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. The timing and the agenda were appropriate: at the end of a century which has seen one of the youngest arts, the moving image, come to occupy the central place in the mediation between human consciousness and the entire ecological, economic, social and political landscape. Africa stands in a very peculiar relationship to that art, being more of a victim of its dominance than a recipient of its capacity for collective empowerment. It is often forgotten that Africa has always been part of world cinema since its invention by the Lumieres in 1895; the early protodocumentaries of the Lumieres and Melies being shown in Senegal, Algeria and Egypt for instance. But whereas other regions developed national traditions, the African continent became more of a provider of the raw materials of image-making and a consumer of the finished product. The continent provided the terrain (savage, beautiful, rough, threatening, nourishing, depending on the filmmaker) and its people - particularly the fact of their blackness - provided Europe with a contrasting view of its self-image as the

240

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

civilised. The relationship has not really changed. The end of formal colonialism has not stopped Africa's still being a provider of raw materials and the consumer of the end product. The paper 'Africa, the West and the Analogy of Culture' (Chapter 2), by Sylvia Wynter, was bold in its conception, placing Africa in the context of the five hundred years of the evolution of Western modernity, and very illuminating in some of its key images. Of these the most important was the notion of European modernity submitting the world to its memory. The evolution of that memory was intertwined with structures of national and international domination. Is there anyway of looking at the emergence of the modern West without the historical evil of slavery: mercantilism which produced slave trade and plantation slavery; colonialism which enslaved people in their own backyards; and even neo-colonialism which puts the entire world under the domination of capitalist fundamentalism? Memory and its control are important because they affect how both the perpetrators and the victims of that evil see it, argue it out, and even fight it out. The memory Professor Wynter is talking about is that of the dominating classes. In that sense African and Asian peoples as a whole and the working majority in the West are all victims of its unrelenting dictatorship. Liberation for them consisted in breaking free from the dictatorship of that memory, and the cinema which on the one hand helped in consolidating that memory and its hold over the consciousness of world peoples was also the best placed as the site of resistance and affirmation of values of total emancipation. Yet it is precisely its potential as a tool of collective self-emancipation from the tyranny of that memory which has resulted in its control still being exercised by a powerful minority in the West. The West will not let go of the control of the cinema in Africa without a fight. Quite frankly the emancipation of African cinema lies in the field of political struggle. African cinema will never really find its own feet, hands, heart, mind, without the political liberation of the continent from all vestiges of neo-colonialism. African cinema will not be free to be, as long as the organisation of wealth and power and values is still dominated by the West. All the forces within and outside Africa which facilitated that continued domination and which hindered any steps towards the social empowerment of peoples are part of the problems of African cinema, more powerful than simply matters of availability of technologies and finance. All these problems of the production, distribution and consumption of African cinema are tied to the problems of African economies, African politics and African cultures, to issues of democracy and social justice. In that sense the contribution of Manthia Diawara (Chapter 3) provided the other telling image in the panel 'The Iconography of African Cinema\ He argued that the problem for African cinema was actually Europe and the nation-state. He argued that the colonial state did not want African countries defining themselves and creating their own images of themselves. The very self-definition would necessarily have meant resolute resistance to the colonial state and its images of the world. Equally, the neo-colonial state does not want African peoples to define themselves for this definition involves a people resisting the social inequalities, the poverty, the degradation of the masses, the rule of the bullet and the continued ties of subordination of Africa to the West. Thus there is a collusion between the rulers of the neo-colonial state and the dominant market forces in the West. The real basis of the successful development of African cinema lies in that cinema finding a home in the continent of its birth. African films have to be produced in Africa primarily for national consumption. Thus Kenyan cinema must find its home in Kenya, Nigerian cinema its home in Nigeria but for this to happen, liberated states and governments are required. The

THE HOMECOMING OF AFRICAN CINEMA

241

national television stations and cinema house must be freed from the tyranny of having to devote 90 per cent of the time to showing the daily activities of the President and his entourage. An African filmmaker should surely be able to make a film with the knowledge that his product can at least be shown in his own country first. This would be supplemented by regional co-operation all the way to the continental and even pan-African levels: but today every impediment is placed in the way of African cinema by the nation-states themselves. African cinema is thus forced to live in exile! The reason why African literature has thrived is the fact that this literature, by and large, has a readership in Africa and not too many impediments have been put in the way of its distribution within the countries of the writers* birth and residence. Otherwise, were it forced to live under conditions of exile, it would have been facing problems similar to that of African cinema. Thus all the other problems - of finance, international distribution, technology, aesthetics and more which were discussed at the conference and thoroughly dissected in the various panels - pale in significance besides the political. Related to all this is the other telling image of the conference, the cup and the emperor, developed by Teshome Gabriel in the panel on 'The Decolonisation of the Mind' (Chapter 4). The emperor must die before the cup can be fully realised in all its power and glory. A real awareness of this need for a true decolonisation should be the basis of the further regeneration of African cinema. I say this because whereas the older generation of African filmmakers were aware of these connections between the aesthetic and the political, the younger generation, removed from the mud and blood of real political struggles, may very well be seduced into thinking that the success of their ventures lies in their escape from the social and political and into the realm of the magical and the abstract in the hope of attracting an abstract international audience or in attracting finance and support from the West. As we move into the twenty-first century African cinema, despite the enormous difficulties in the way of its successful self-realisation, must still continue to forge its aesthetic from the struggles of the peoples of Africa from both the internal and international structures of oppression. African cinema has to continue to strive to link itself to its real sources of strength: African people and their struggles for their rightful place in the sun. It is only by its continuous quest to emancipate itself and African peoples from the dictatorship of the memory of the world as forged by Europe over the last five hundred years that African cinema will become part of the progressive aspects of world cinema. It has to be local to find its way into the international. It has to have a place it calls home. Its linkage to the place it can call home will give it the necessary anchorage to realise its promises. For to go back to Sylvia Wynter's paper, 'If no other medium was to be more effective than the cinema in ensuring the continued submission to its single memory of the peoples whom the West has subordinated in the course of its rise to world hegemony, no other medium is so equipped to effect our common human emancipation from this memory, from the prison walls of its world perception.' That is really the challenge of African cinema as we move into the twenty-first century, the challenge posed in different words and images by many of the panels in what was a stimulating and challenging conference.

Part Four Information

The Iconography of African Cinema: What Is It and How Is It Identified? The structure of the nation-state in Africa places obstacles in the way of African cinema. The emergence of the EEC as a super European nation-state is as significant to the structure of African cinema as any consciousness of ideological or cultural identities. This paper is an attempt to discuss West African cinema within the contradictions put forth by the nation-state and the EEC. First, I look at Borom Sarret (1963, by Sembene Ousmane) as a paradigmatic film in African cinema's quest for dignity and self-determination. The Sembenian cinema, a vision of the world struggling between tradition and modernity, has continued to dominate African cinema like the trees that hide the forest, at least until recently. Second, the paper argues that, with only three films, Touki Bouki, Hyena and Le Franc which won the award for best short film at FESPACO '95, Djibril Mamb^ty Diop's cinema poses the most serious challenge to Sembenian socialist realism and the Utopian narrative of independence. In all three films, Mamb£ty Diop deploys a narrative style which is more grounded in magic realism than in the verisimilitude language of Sembene. Finally, the paper looks at three new films at FESPACO '95 - Guimba by Cheick Oumar Sissoko, Keita: The Heritage of the Griot by Dani Kouyate, and Haramuya by Drissa Toure - which invest storytelling with a breath of fresh air, enough to defamiliarise the Sembenian paradigm. Manthia Diawara. Is the Decolonisation of the Mind a Prerequisite for Independence of Thought and the Creative Practice of African Cinema? This paper is an attempt to bring personal experience to bear on the questions of decolonisation, ethnographic representation and African cinema. Theories of decolonisation and of ethnography have for too long relied on an outside perspective. In using personal experience based on my own recent visit to Africa I hope to explore the possibility of an autobiographical ethnography, the possibility of a 'decolonisation from within'. In this exploration, I want to examine those things that have always, to some degree, exceeded visual representation: memory, lived experience, the visceral. Teshome Gabriel

246

PANEL 3 Discussant: Clyde Taylor Respondents: Bassek Ba Kobhio Kobena Mercer Chairperson: Roy Armes

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

African Cinema and Postmodernist Criticism The label 'postmodern' trivialises while postponing analysis of new developments in African cinema. From the beginning the dominant tendency in African cinema has been modernist, rationalist, analytical and socially progressive. The decline of'Third Cinema* in Latin America, the anti-Maoist emphasis in Chinese cinema and the new wave of black-directed movies in Hollywood, all in the mid-1980s, reflected a shift away from the progressive activism of the 1970s. In Africa, this shift was signalled by Yeelen (1986). But considering the 'return to the source' films like Cisse's epic, along with Quartier Mozart (Dir: Jean-Pierre Bekolo) and Hyenas (Dir: Djibril Diop Mamb£ty), two other strong departures, the new directions must be read as multiple and even contradictory, but hardly postmodern in the Western sense. Among more recent films, there is a greater fusion of political and cultural focuses, a weakening of the fear of confirming occidental stereotypes, a wider use of tradition, myth, magic and spectacle, more depth in characterisation, and a greater depth of feeling. Women characters are of increasing importance as witnesses, as centres of moral consciousness. The newer films exhibit a more direct appeal for popular, commercial attention. These features run directly counter to those of Euro-postmodernism. In fact the shift seems less a break than an expansion of the African enlightenment cinema, and is evident in the new work of 1970s directors as well as among the newcomers. Clyde Taylor.

PANEL 4 Discussant: John Badenhorst Respondents: Claire Andrade-Watkins Ola Balogun Chairperson: Jim Pines

Information Technology, Power, Cinema and Television in Africa This paper provides a broad overview of opportunities available to citizens of Africa to share in the new information technologies which are beginning to sweep the globe and the problems which may be experienced by Africans in buying into these developments as well as some suggested solutions to the current barriers to entry. The implications, for African filmmakers, of both satellite television and the Information Superhighway are discussed, as well as the deregulation of broadcasting services and some of the positive developments with regard to the spread of African film across the continent in spite of major handicaps, such as the lack of a continent-wide distribution system. Finally, however, the onus is placed on Africans themselves to provide an environment which will be conducive to the spread of, and meeting the audience demand for, their own product. John Badenhorst.

APPENDIX A

247

PANEL 5

What is the Link between Chosen Genres and Developed Ideolo-

Discussant: Ferid Boughedir

gies in African Cinema? This text will attempt to make a first assessment of the major trends

Respondents: Idrissa Ouedraogo

into which most African films can be classified, and to determine what genres are most often tackled by these cinemas (that are still

Ella Shohat Haile Gerima Chairperson: Imruh Bakari

in their development stage and not in production). Also this text will try to bring out the ideologies expressed, implicitly or explicitly, through the trends identified (that reflect the position of the director) and through the identified genres (that represent the format which he gives to his expression). Finally the text will try to define the historical evolution of these trends notably vis-a-vis film festivals, the European distribution markets, and in the absence of a real market for film distribution in Africa. Ferid Boughedir.

PANEL 6 Discussant: Gaston Kabore Commentator: Ousmane Sembene Respondents: Samir Farid Cheick Oumar Sissoko Chairperson: Mbye Cham

Can African Cinema Achieve the Same Level of Indigenisation as Other Popular African Art Forms? She or he who asks such questions, in my humble opinion, is mentally outside the reality of contemporary Africa. Whatever the form, medium or content, artistic expression is an issue of experienced and shared social reality. The most advanced witness will always be domestic art: interior and exterior decorations of homes, dress, ornamentation, the art of hair styles and home furnishing, equipment, etc. For those who know how to look, it is easy to spot the signs and symbols of African ethnic origin which are mutual property, as much on the continent as elsewhere. Ousmane Sembene

PANEL 7 Discussant: Tafataona Mahoso Respondents: Ahmed Attia Kwate Nii Owoo Chairperson: Rose Issa

Audiences and the Critical Appreciation of Cinema in Africa Africa was colonised during the ascendancy of print media. African oratory, the African symbolising capacity, and most rituals of space and place were either banned or heavily modified and exploited in over-textualised and decontextualised forms. The African's mythmaking and symbolising capacity was treated as a threat to the imposed order. Now film has the potential to enable its audience to visualise their own space in time; it has the capacity to invite audiences into a deeper involvement with their own dreams and their own environment; it has the potential to help its audiences explore their own landscape until such space becomes the focus of African beauty, African knowledge, African dreams, tears and hopes. Unfortunately, two main obstacles have thwarted the African cinema renaissance: colonialism itself and the domination of the post-independence cinema by the so-called 'development film'. This is the main thrust of this paper. It concludes by contrasting those films which succeed in inviting audiences to contextualise

248

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

their own experiences, against those which still preach, lecture and otherwise behave like textbook plays designed by foreign consultants. Tafataona Mahoso.

Appendix B Conference Screenings

The screenings took place at the National Film Theatre and were introduced by the directors concerned. HALFAOUINE - L'Enfant des terrasses (Halfaouine - Child of the Terraces) Dir: Ferid Boughedir 90 mins/Tunisia 1990 Twelve-year-old Noura, who lives in Halfaouine (the ancient part of Tunis), has a dilemma: is it better to stay in the warm and protective women's world of his childhood or acquire the toughness of the men's world of his adolescence? Noura finds his own solution. In this charming and beautiful film, Boughedir challenges the arbitrary cliches about Arab culture and presents a Mediterranean society that is luxuriant and tender and where humour and eroticism combine with tolerance.

ROUCH IN REVERSE Writer/dir: Manthia Diawara Camera: Arthur Jafa Formation Films Prod. 50 mins/UK/USA 1995 The director Manthia Diawara (conference panellist) declared this film 'a rite of passage for myself. Personal friend of Jean Rouch, the anthropologist and filmmaker famous for playing a key role in the representation of Africans on film, Diawara describes Rouch as a generous, loyal and playful man. Known for speaking for Africans and for defending their cultures against Eurocentric racism, Rouch, claims Diawara, can also be faulted for disenabling Africans from speaking for themselves with equal authority. With this in mind, Diawara reverses this situation and passes through Rouch in order to render visible more African voices and images; the ones that defy stereotypes and primtivism. He soon realises 'that my own modernity, my knowledge of Africa, and my journey as a filmmaker had to pass through Rouch first'.

250

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

LE CRI DU CCEUR (A Cry From The Heart) Din Idrissa Ouedraogo 86 mins/Burkina Faso 1994 On the face of it, this film marks a surprising departure from Ouedraogo's previous oeuvre. But Ouedraogo has skilfully transposed a number of themes from earlier films in this deceptively simple tale of a boy uprooted from his Malian village to join his father in urban France. Once there he is repeatedly assailed by visions of hyenas. This time Africa inhabits the internal landscape of the boy's mind and the memory of its warmth and humanity contrasts with the lack of depth and affection he encounters in France. A film about the various levels of diasporic displacement and cultural hybridity, it is at the same time a paean to the power of the subjective vision and a cry for the greater understanding of individual and cultural differences.

Index

Aajani Ogun 108 Ablakon 114 A Bout de souffle 86

Bah El-Oued City 124 Bachy, Victor 135 Badenhorst, John 19, 127, 155, 156, 158, 178

UAccidentia 112 Achkar, David 110, 124, 147

Bakari, Imruh 3,106 Baker, Josephine 85

Adjeso, Egbert 115 africa 95, 5 African Cinema Consortium 172 Afrique, je teplumerai 124

Balpoussiere\\5, Ballon d'or 120

Baiogun, Ola 19, 108, 115, 127, 129, 156, 178,

After the Wax 222 Akika,Alil24 Akomfrah, John 13, 80, 90, 147 Akuffo,W. 118 A la recherche du mart de rnafemme

117, 119, 120, 140, 141, 144

120

Al Bakri, Asma 13, 80, 92 Algeria Unveiled 124 Allah Tantou 110, 124, 147 Allouache, Merzak 124 Airman, Robert 89 Ama 173 Amanie 114 Amira, Charles 159 Amulet, 125 ANC (African National Congress) 174 Andrade-Watkins, Claire 18, 19, 156, 176 Anna Makossa 114, 148 Ansah, Kwaw 3, 110, 115, 117 Anyanyu, K. C. 44 VAppat du gain 114 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 147 Apted, Michael 43 Armah, Ayi Kwei 142 Armes, Roy 15, 134 Aryetey, Sam 115 Attia, Ahmed 22, 195, 196, 227 Austin, Chris 209, 210 Aw,Tidiane 110, 114 Ba Kobhio, Bassek 16, 113, 120, 127, 147 Baara 110

237 Bambata 201 Barnouw, Erik 42, 43 Bastide, Roger 44 Bathily, Moussa 109 Battle of Algiers 123, 124 Battleship Potemkin, 34 Bauman, Zygmunt 38 Behi, Ridha 120, 134 Bekolo, Jean-Pierre 108, 117, 139, 145, 146 Bel, Mbilia 183 Bello, B a n k o l e l l 5 Ben Ammar, Abdelatif 109, 110 Ben Mahmoud, M a h m o u d 134 Beni, Alphonse 148 Between Shadow and Sun 124 Bezness 227 Bhabha, Homi 147 Bicots-negres, vos voisins 110 Biko, Stephen 39 Birth of a Nation 32, 33, 43 Black and White Film Company 206 Black Consciousness Movement 39 Blake, Cecil 159 Blanc d'Ebene 120 Bohm, David 27, 59 BOP TV 179 Borom SarretX 38, 79, 83, 84, 85, 109, 112, 135, 140 Boughedir, Ferid4, 16, 17, 106, 107, 108, 109, 123, 126, 132, 134, 135, 139, 227 Bouzid, Nouri 14, 95, 103, 134, 148, 227, 237

252

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Bracelet de bronze, Le 110, 114 Brenda Fassie: Not a Bad Girl 209, 210 Bright, Simon 205, 207, 222 British South Africa Company 201 Brown, James 85 Burnett, Charles 132 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The 118 Cabral, Amilcar 7, 83, 201 Cahiers du cinema 122 Cameroon Connection 148 Camp Thiaroye 110, 112, 117, 119 CCV (Contemporary Community Values) 173 Ceddo 40, 41, 84, 91, 109, 116, 117, 140, 142, 149, 223 Centre of Interafrican Film Production 189 Cesaire, Aime 32, 44, 58, 59 Chahine, Youssef 119, 159, 173 Cham,Mbye4, 19,183 Chapelle, La 110, 116 Chaplin, Charlie 192 Cheriaa, Tahaar 191, 237 Ching-Liang, Gail 200 Chouikh, Mohammed 124 Chronique des anndes de braise 110, 123 CIDC (Interafrican Consortium of Cinema Distribution) 189, 194 Cinque jours d'une vie 109 Ciss£, Mamo 117 Cisse\ Souleymane 3, 82, 83, 84, 88, 106, 109, 110, 114, 116, 119, 120, 134, 138, 139, 140, 142, 145 CNC (Centre Nationale du Cinema) 92, 149 Columbus, Christopher 26, 28 Comidie exotique 110, 114 Congo 42, 43 Congorilla 42, 43 Consequences 211, 224 Cooke, Philip 210, 217 Cooptrants, Les 114 Coulibaly, Sega 111 Crick, Francis 39 Cri de Coeur 120, 250 Cry, the Beloved Country 213 Dadie, Bernard 158 Damerdji, Djafar 120 Damnes de la terre, Les 113 Dance for Peace 207, 211, 221 Dance my love 114 Danielli 55, 56, 57 Darwin, Charles 36

Dash, Julie 125 Daughters of the Dust 125 Davis, John 40 de Medeiros, Richard 110, 113 de Nicholas, Antonio 40 Dehane, Kamal 124 De Hollywood a Tamanrasset 117 Delgado, Clarence 140 Deliverance 118 della Mirandola, Pico 55 DenMuso 110 Derrida, Jacques 47 Descartes, Rene 197 Desebagato 112 Destin, Lelll Destiny 118 Diawara, Manthia 4, 11, 12, 17, 18, 22, 32, 33, 55, 79, 81, 90, 94, 95, 106, 107, 127, 130, 131, 135, 138,143, 178,240 Dibango, Manu 149 Dikongue-Pipalll, 113 Dinner with the Devil 115 Diop, Moustafa 110, 114, 116, 118 Djebar,Assia 123,124 D/e/i 114, 117 Djim Kola, Mamadou 117 Do the Right Thing 38 Doing Their Thing 115 Dong, Pierre-Marie 110, 113 Dosumu, Sanya 115 Doukoure, Cheikh 120 Drabo, Adama 110, 116 Drum magazine 209 DTSR (Development Through Self Reliance) 172 Duarte, Ruy 114 Dubose, Roland 149 Duparc, Henri 115, 119, 140 Durrenmatt, Friedrich 143 Ecare, Desir£ 113, 140 Echec et Mat 120 Ecrans d'Afrique 149, 150, 193 Edinburgh Film Festival 7, 15, 138 EEC (European Economic Community) 81,92 Efusetan Animura 115 Eisenstein, Sergei 32, 34, 35, 36, 41 El-Abnoudi, Atteyat 124 El-Hagar, Khaled 124 Ellis, Trey 140 El-Sadawi, Nawal 123

253

INDEX

Emigrant, The 159, 173

Gods Must Be Crazy, The 225

Emitai 41, 110,117

Goldstein, Avram 52

Errances 120

Gomez, Flora 110

L'Etalon de Yennenga 115

Gomez, Manuel Octavio 125

L'Etoile noire 113

Gorillas in The Mist 43

European Union 188, 221

Grand Blanc de Lambarene, Le 120

Evans-Pritchard, Edward 57

Grassi, Ernesto 27, 45, 46, 4 7 , 4 8 , 50, 51

VExile 114

Griffith, D.W. 33, 34, 192

Exorcist, The US

GuelwaarSX

120, 124, 140, 142, 143

Guimha: un tyran, une fyoque 79, 87, 88, 89, Fadika, Kramo Lancine 114, 117

117,120,193

Falato 117 Fannon, Frantz 6, 7, 37, 113, 116, 123, 147 Farid, Samir 20, 184, 191 Faye, Safi 3,112

Gupta, Dhruba 135

FEPACI (Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers) 3, 149, 155, 187, 189 Ferchiou, Rachid 120 FESPACO (Pan-African Film and Television

Hall, Stuart 37

Festival of Ouagadougou) 3, 44, 87, 88, 89, 115,143,148 Finyf 83, 86, 110, 116, 119, 139 Finzan 111, 112, 124, 194 Fire Eyes 124 Flaherty, Robert 128,131 F/awe205,206,207,210 Folles Annies du Twist, Les 117 Foucault, Michel 25, 29, 30, 40, 43, 53, 55 'Franco' (Luambo Makiadi) 183 FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of

Haffher, Pierre 4, 135 Hrt//o«me 227, 249 Hamina, Lakhdar 110, 118, 123 Haramuya 79, 87, 89 Harder They Come, The 38 Harris, Wilson 147 Harvest 3000 Years 130 Heidegger, Martin 31 Hennebelle, Guy 4, 110 Henzell, Perry 38 VHerhe sauvage 114 Heritage Africa 110, 115 Hima, Mariama 14, 95, 104, 237 Hirondelles ne meurentpas

a Jerusalem, Les 120

Histoire d'Orokia 117 Hobbes, Thomas 31

Mozambique) 221 Friedkin, William 118 Friends 173

Hondo, Med 3, 110, 112, 116, 117, 119, 138,

FRU (Film Resource Unit) 172 Funkenstein, Amos 26

hooks, bell 22

Gabriel, Teshome 4, 7, 14, 93, 94, 96, 103, 104,

Hyenas%5, 87, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146

Hodge, Robert 216 Hommes de Cendres 227 140 Hour of the Furnaces 91

204,206,237,241 Ganda, Oumarou 113, 114, 116 Gardies, Andre 135 Garga M'bosse 112 Garvey, Marcus 201 Geertz, Clifford 29, 35 Gerima, Haile 3, 4,16, 17,18, 107, 108, 117, 120, 125, 127, 134, 135, 138, 140, 146, 187, 237,239 Getino, Octavio 7 Ghandi, Mahatma 175 Gibson, William 19 Girard, Rene 54 GitoL'Ingrat 117 Godard, Jean-Luc 86, 134

Identite 110, 113 IDHEC (Institute des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques) 115 Ija Ominira 108 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 89, 178, 184 Ironu 112 Issa, Rose 20, 195 I Told You So 115 Jacob, Sou 117 James, C. L. R. 38 Jameson, Frederic 138 Johnson, Martin 42

254

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

/cm 114 Jours de Tourments 112

Maruma, Oily 211 Marx, Karl 29, 37, 57 Mask, The 115

Kabore\ Gaston 3, 19, 112, 127, 138, 159, 184, 187, 192, 193, 195, 223

Maviyane-Davies, Chaz 222 Mawuru, Godwin 90, 117,172, 211, 216

Kamba, Sebastien 109

May, Deborah 210

Kamwa, Daniel 109, 114, 148

M'Bala, Roger Gnoan 114

Keita, Vheritage du griot 79, 82, 87, 88, 89

Mbira: Spirit of the People 222

Kimathi, Dedan 128

Medecin de Gafirey Le 110, 114, 116, 118

King Solomon's Mines 43, 213, 225

Media for Development Trust 172, 173

Kodou 114

Melies, Georges 239

Kollo, Sanou 110, 113

Mensah, Charles 113

Korda, Zoltan 42

Mercer, Kobena 15, 145

Koumba, Henri-Joseph 113

Mernissi, Fatima 123

Kouyate, Dani 79, 82, 87

Minh-Ha, Trinh T. 43

Kress, Gunther 216

Ministere de la Cooperation 81 Ministere des Affaires Etrangers 81

Laada 113, 116

Mire, Soraya 124

Lamming, George 21, 22

M-NET 165, 173, 178, 179

Lamy, Benoit 141

Mobutu, Sese Seko 201

Lang, Fritz 118

Moi un noir 86

La Noir de ... 142

Moiti, Serge 104 124

La Vie est belle 141, 144

Monangambe

Le Franc 85, 87

More Time 172, 173, 211, 219, 220, 224

Lee, Spike 38, 138, 140, 146

Morley, David 153

Legend of the Seventh Sleeper, The 124

Mortu Nega 110

Legesse, Asmarom 58

Mory, Philippe 113

Lettre Paysanne 112

Mudimbe, V. Y. 5, 9, 28, 29, 39, 44, 57, 79

Leyla ma raison 118

MunaMoto

Little Dreams 124

Mungai, Anne 165

Louhichi, Taieb 118

Murnau, F. W. 118

111, 113

Love Brewed in the African Pot 115, 117 Lucoque, Lisle H. 213

Nanook of the North 128, 131

Lumiere Brothers 4, 28, 43, 239

Nasser, Gamal Abdel 191 Nationality immigri 110

Lumiere Noire 119

109

Lumumba: Death of a Prophet 147

N'Diangane

Lyotard, Jean-Francois 137

Ndour Youssou 183 Nehanda 201, 208 Nelesita 114 Neria 90, 117, 172, 173, 211, 216, 217, 218, 219, 224 Newton, Isaac 26, 27, 47 Ngabo, Leonce 117 Ngakane, Lionel 128, 131 Ngangura, Mweze 141 Ngoge, Nangagoma 114 Nietzsche, Friedrich 29, 47 Nii Owoo, Kwate 22, 173, 195 Niwam 140

Mabhikwa, Isaac 172, 211 McEvilley, Thomas 137 Machiavelli, Niccolo 31 Maiga, Djingareye 113 Mahoso, Tafataona 20, 21, 22, 195, 197, 228 Maldoror, Sarah 124 Mambety, Djibril Diop 3, 12, 79, 84, 85, 87, 134, 140, 141, 142, 145, 159 Mandabi 134, 141, 142 Mariamus Wedding 114 Marley, Bob 61 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 142 Marshall, Frank 42 Martin, Angela 3, 4

Nkrumah, Kwame 147, 201 No Need to Blame 211 No Tears for Ananse 115

INDEX

Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens 118 Notre Fille 109, 114 Nouveau Venn, Le 110, 113 Nuba of the Women on Mount Chenoua, The 124 Nuno, Bismark 118 Nyamanton, 112, 138 OAU (Organisation of African Unity) 107 ObalU 113 Obenga, Theophile 44,45, 47 OCIC 135 Odjiba, Bernard 115 Ogum 125 Oil Doom 115 Okioh, Francois 112 Okri, Ben 146 Ong, Walter J. 225 OPEC (Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries) 137, 139 Oppenheim, J. 117 L'Orphelin 148 Orun Moru 108 Osborne, Peter D. 202 Ouedraogo, Idrissa 3, 16, 84, 106, 108, 117, 118, 120, 122, 127, 132, 138, 145, 188, 237 Ousseini, Inoussa 110 Out of Africa 43, 211, 225 Owusu, Kwesi 173 Pagels, Heinz 59 Pandian, Jacob 30, 54 Patakin 125 Paton, Allan 213 Paris, c'estjoli 110 Paweogo 110, 113 Peck, Raoul 147 Pereira dos Santos, Nelson 125 Permissible Dreams 124 Pfaff, Franchise 4 Pfeiffer, John 44,47 Phiri, Joel 205 Phobia Girl 118 Pines, Jim 18, 153 Polanski, Roman 118 Pollack, Sydney 43, 211 Pontecorvo, Gillo 123 Pousse-Pousse 109,114,148 Prix de la liberty Lelll Proctor, Elaine 173

255

QuarteyR. 118 Quartier Mozart 108, 117,139,140, 144, 145, 146 Queen Nzingah 201, 208, 210 Queen ofSheba 208, 210 Rabi 189 Ramampy, Benoit 110, 112 Rancon d'une alliance 109 Reassemblage 43 RENAMO (Resistencia Nacional Mocambicana) 221 Reou-Takh 112 Rhodes, Cecil 173, 213 Rhodes of Africa 213 Rich, Ruby 138 Rise and Fall ofDr Oyunesi, The 115 Robeson, Paul 42 Robins, Kevin 153 Rodney, Walter 138 Roodt,Daryll59,213 Rosemary's Baby 118 Rouch in Reverse 17, 18, 94, 127, 130, 249 Rouch, Jean 17, 18, 86, 104, 105, 131 RTG (official Gabonese television station) 179 Saaraba 30, 60 SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) 173 Sabots en or, Les 227 Safo, Socrates 118 Safrana 110 Sagan, Eli 209 Said, Edward 44 Saikati 165 Saint Voyou, priezpour nous 114, 148 Saitane 113, 116 SamB. 118 Samba Traore 118, 121, 138, 145 Sambizanga 124 Samb-Makharam, Ababacar 114, 138 Samory 110, 116 Sanders of the River 9, 42, 43 Sang de Pariasy Lelll SangoMalo 113 Sankofa 108, 117, 120, 125, 127, 132, 140, 146 Sanon, Emmanuel 112 SAPs (Structural Adjustment Programmes) 200, 217 Sarraounia 110, 112, 116, 117, 118, 119, 140 SarzanllO Savimbi, Jonas 201

256

SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES / AFRICAN CINEMA

Scott-Heron, Gil 178

Toure, Kitia 110, 114

Scubla, Lucien 48

Toure\ Samori 201

Seek, Amadou Saalum 30, 60

Toure, Sekou 124, 147

Sejnane 109

Traore, Mahama 109, 112

Selassie, Emperor Haile 100,101 Sembene, Ousmane 3, 12 17, 18, 19, 4 0 , 4 1 , 42, 53, 55, 79, 83, 84, 88, 90, 91, 109, 110, 112,

UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) 97

116, 117, 119, 120, 124, 127, 130, 134, 135,

Ugbomah, Eddie 115

138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 148, 149,

Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank 4, 28, 33, 42, 135

184, 191, 192,230,237,239

Une si simple histoire 110 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) 156, 178 University of Ouagadougou 187 Uys, Jamie 225

She's Gotta Have It 138 Shohat, Ella 4, 16, 108, 123, 137 Short Cuts 89 Si Bita, Arthur 114 Silence etfeu de brousse 113 Silences of the Palace 124, 237

Van Allen, Judith 210

Sinclair, Ingrid 205

Viertel, Berthold213

Singe Fou, Le 113

Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou 135

Singh, Annant 213

Visages des femmes 113, 140

Sissoko, Cheick Oumar 20, 79, 87, 88, 111, 112, 117, 121, 138, 150,184,193 Sixieme Doigt, Le 115 Snead, James 136, 137 Sokhona, Sidney 110 Solanas, Fernando 7, 91, 138 SoleilO U0, 112 Solomon, Anne 47 Soltane el Medina 227 South Africa Belongs to Us 210 Sow, LB. 39 Spicer, Edwina211 Stam, Robert 4, 123, 125, 126, 137 Stevenson, Robert 43 TaDona 110, 116 Tarns Tarns se sont tus, Les 113 Tangos: VExil de Gardel 138 Taylor, Clyde 7, 8, 9, 15, 16, 26, 132, 135, 136, 145, 146, 147, 239 Tazi, Mohammed Abderahman 120 Tchissoukou, )ean-Michel 110, 116 Tele Sahel, 179 Teno, Jean-Marie 124 Testament 147 Thatcher, Margaret 37 Thiam, Momar 110 Thompson, Lee J. 213 Tilai 84, 117, 120,138, 145 Tiyahu-biru 109 Tlatli, Moufida 124, 237 Touki Bouki 12, 79, 84, 85, 86, 87, 106, 134, 159 Toure, Drissa 79, 87, 89, 113, 116

Wa Thiong'o, Ngugi 6, 13, 93, 142, 230, 239 Waati 120 WAD (Women and Development) 217 Wallace, Michelle 32 Wallon, Dominique 92 We Were Primitive 224 WendKuuni, 114, 138, 159, 187, 189, 223 WID (Women in Development) 217 Wiene, Robert 118 Winch, Peter 47 Winston, Bryan 10 World Bank 89, 184 'Wretched of the Earth' 123 Wynter, Sylvia 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 20, 22, 7 9 , 8 2 , 9 4 , 176,241 Xala 86, 110, 112, 116, 117, 123, 124, 136, 142, 143, 197, 223, 240 Yaaba 120, 138, 139, 145 YamDaabo 114 Yeelen, 82, 84, 8 7 , 9 1 , 110, 114, 116, 118, 119, 120, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146 You Have Struck a Rock 210 Youcef 124 Zan Boko 112, 189 Zemmouri, M a h m o u d 117 Zinabu, I, II, III, IV118 Zoumbara, Paul 112