Soon after its invention in France in 1895, cinema came to Africa. Over the next century, its development was shaped by European colonialism and its postcolonial aftermath. By 2005, however, African cinema had come of age. In the beginning, only Europeans had cameras, but Africans gradually gained control of the medium and the message. Africans began also to make films about Europeans and Americans, reversing a century-old gaze.

The history of African cinema is composed of three strands. First and best known is the commercial cinema: feature films made in Africa for the entertainment market. Second are the documentary films made in Africa by scientists, educators, political activists, and the like. Finally, since independence, a self-consciously African cinema has come into being, created by African directors and shown primarily at film festivals, but also available on DVD. Overwhelmingly, however, the films that reach African viewers are American. “Bollywood” musicals from India and kung fu films from Hong Kong are also very popular.

This survey of film production will concentrate on three sub-Saharan regions: Southern Africa, the former English colonies of West and East Africa, and the former French and Belgian colonies of West and Central Africa. Space limitations preclude the wider and deeper survey that would have dealt with topics such as the history of Egyptian cinema, the earliest viable film industry on the African continent, like the German Encyclopaedia Cinematographica, containing hundreds of filmed “thematic units” from all parts of Africa, the Cuban-backed revolutionary cinema in Portuguese-speaking Angola and Mozambique or the cinema-in-exile of Ethiopia. Selection criteria for what constitutes “African cinema” are varied and can be invidious. Sembène’s disdain for Rouch is one example. South African cinema was contested territory during apartheid. It’s therefore important to consult as many sources as possible when researching this topic.

Southern Africa

The “bioscope” gained a foothold in South Africa very early. W. K. L. Dickson filmed the Boer War, from the British side. Dr. Rudolf Pöch filmed in the Kalahari Desert in 1907. After the Union of South Africa was established in 1910, cinema became a vehicle for national pride. More than a dozen films were produced in South Africa in 1916, among them the epic De Voortrekkers (Winning a Continent), in Afrikaans and English, which was a huge success in South Africa and in England. The film was compared to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. In 1918 an even more ambitious film, The Symbol of Sacrifice, depicted the Zulu wars. South African films were unable to withstand competition from abroad, especially from Hollywood in the 1920’s. The number and quality of films declined, and a cinema of apartheid became ensconced, controlled by censorship and government subsidies.

In the early years of sound, most South African feature films were made in Afrikaans, with plots set in a countryside where sex, violence, big money, outsiders and race agitators in particular were excluded. In the years just before the introduction of television in 1976, the first African language features appeared: Nogomopho, directed in Zulu by an Afrikaner, Tonie van der Merwe and U-Deliwe, by the first black director, Simon Sabela. Production of cheap, subsidized films in African languages took off.

Many of the films of South African resistance were made by whites, foreigners or exiles. The Hungarian-born British director, Zoltan Korda, filmed Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country in South Africa in 1951 with the American black actors Sidney Poitier and Canada Lee. Working clandestinely, the American Lionel Rogosin made Come Back, Africa in 1959. The South African journalist Lionel Ngakane spent years in British exile, where he made Jemima and Johnny, winner of the first prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1966. Working in London with footage smuggled out of South Africa, Nana Mahomo made Last Grave at Dimbaza (1974). The film was intended for Western audiences, to counter propaganda films made by the South African Information Service. As repression inside South Africa grew, filmmakers grew bolder in their evasions. In 1988, Oliver Schmitz and his crew hoodwinked township authorities into thinking that they were making a Zulu/Xhosa/Afrikaans/English gangster film. Belatedly banned by South African censors, Mapantsula got rave reviews abroad: the New York Times called it “more authentic than any other South African film.”

African cinema has always posed the question of authenticity, and none more starkly than the best-known South African film, The Gods Must Be Crazy. Its director, Jamie Uys, had been a successful producer of Afrikaans-language films. The Gods Must Be Crazy began with a Coke bottle dropped from an airplane, and featured elephants, children, an Afrikaner scientist, a British schoolteacher, Angolan guerrillas, a Land Rover, and a “Bushman”, most of whom did gently funny things. Because of the cultural blockade against South Africa, the film was released in Botswana, in 1980. World audiences, particularly in Sweden and Japan, were enchanted by a lighthearted fable, while political activists sharply criticized the film’s racism and fakery. But there was nothing inauthentic about its foreign exchange earnings, which surpassed $84 million.

In reality, N!Xau, the !Kung San “Bushman” in Uys’ film, worked as a cook for a mission at Tshumkwe, where John Marshall, an American filmmaker and activist, had a base of operations. Marshall’s family, collaborating with Harvard and the Smithsonian Institution, mounted several expeditions to the Kalahari Desert, and in 1957 Marshall pulled his footage together into a documentary, The Hunters.

The Hunters became a classic in anthropology courses, but Marshall was convinced that to give a true picture of !Kung San’s life, he should have shown women gathering at least as much as men hunting. His concern was right in step with developments in anthropology, which after 1968 turned into a public critique of anthropology itself as an imperialist project. In 1978, Marshall re-filmed the !Kung San in a desperate state, dispossessed of their hunting lands, subsisting on cornmeal and liquor, dying from tuberculosis and frayed by domestic violence. N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman, was heart-wrenching, especially when it showed N!ai as a young girl in the 1950s. One of its happier moments showed Uys’ film crew directing a N!Xau in a sentimental scene. Marshall’s final film, A Kalahari Family, showed the grandchildren of the Nyae Nyae !Kung of the 1950s, as they prepared to vote in the first Namibian elections.

South African independence in 1994 cleared the way for a more open cinema, with commercial and cultural links to other countries. A production consortium from South Africa, Britain, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria produced the first pan-African action thriller, Critical Assignment (2003), starring Guinness advertising icon Michael Power as a kinder and gentler African James Bond. The Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa produced Hotel Rwanda (2004) and Tsotsi (2005).

Production in all formats and genres flourished, from TV dramas and children’s films to exceedingly frank documentaries, such as Catherine Muller’s Four Rent Boys and a Sangoma (2003). In this atmosphere of freedom, the young Dumisani Phakathi developed in a distinctive personal style. His Christmas with Granny (2000) and Waiting for Valdez (2002) brilliantly showed children’s lives in Soweto, where he grew up. Don’t F– with Me I Have 51 Brothers and Sisters (2004) recorded his efforts to come to terms with the loss of his father. Phakathi told an interviewer: “At first, a lazy eye and mind will have a problem with African cinema. It requires commitment.”

When Did African Cinema Begin?

Some film historians assume that African cinema didn’t exist before independence, which came to many colonies in the 1960s, but clearly it did—in Egypt, which is outside the scope of this work, and even in apartheid South Africa. The principal colonial powers, Britain and France, created two distinct film cultures in the areas under their control. In the British colonies of East and West Africa, a pragmatic and businesslike attitude toward the film medium came in with the colonizers. In the French colonies, the local elites were educated in French philosophy, literature, and art, and filmmakers took on a sense of “film as art” and an attitude of opposition to Hollywood.

Former British Colonies

British colonial authorities were concerned about protecting African filmgoers from films made for Western audiences, fearing that they would be misinterpreted. But they appreciated film as an educational medium. In 1935, Major L. A. Notcutt directed the Bantu Educational Cinema Experiment in Tanganyika. This short-lived unit produced its films on agriculture, hygiene, and folklore entirely in Africa, including film processing and editing. For the first time, African staff were trained in film techniques. In 1939, the Colonial Film Unit was established in Nigeria to help build African support for Britain’s war effort; eventually there were eight units located throughout the British colonies. In 1949, a film school was set up in the Gold Coast. When the British colonies became independent, they possessed both film equipment and trained personnel. A popular hit of 1935, Sanders of the River, directed by Zoltan Korda, showed the relationship of a colonial official with Bosambo, a native chief. The American actor Paul Robeson starred. The story was set in Nigeria, but it was actually filmed in London, with exteriors shot in Kenya and the Belgian Congo. (Jomo Kenyatta, who later became Kenya’s first president, had a bit part.) Robeson also appeared in a 1937 Gaumont-British production of King Solomon’s Mines, based on H. Rider Haggard’s historical fantasy. This story was filmed repeatedly, in various parts of Africa. The spectacular American version, made in 1950 by MGM, involved its crew in a 12,000-mile journey through Tanganyika, Uganda, Kenya, and the Belgian Congo, accompanied by refrigerated trucks carrying the film stock. Independent Kenya built up its communications infrastructure in the 1970s, and Nairobi became a center of television production and of satellite distribution. Blessed with wild animals and scenery, in addition to film crews, Kenya became a favored location for Hollywood. Out of Africa (1985) was filmed at Isak Dinesen’s meticulously restored coffee plantation in the highlands, with the Kenyan novelist Meja Mwangi serving as assistant director to Sidney Pollack.

Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, understood the importance of film for cultural and political ends, but state-funded production trailed off as equipment aged and was not replaced. Ghanaian entrepreneurs took up the slack, and the first truly free cinema in Africa was born. The Hollywood-trained playwright and musician, Kwah Ansah, set up his own companies to produce commercials and feature films. Love Brewed in an African Pot (1980) was a critique of arranged marriage, and Heritage Africa (1987) was the poignant tale of Quincy Arthur Bosomfield, a former martinet in the colonial administration, who received a talking-to by his ancestral spirit, and went back to being Kwesi Atta Bosomefi, to his family’s relief. In the 1990s, theatres disappeared from most African cities, as video distribution replaced film. A vibrant Ghanaian video industry sprang up and was soon producing dozens of features a year.

Nigeria, with its population of 125,000,000, is the largest market in Africa, and the Nigerian diaspora is important as well. The pre-eminent Hausa-language filmmaker was Adamu Alhaji Alilu, who made a film called Shehu Omar (1977), the Hausa religious leader, and another about Kanta of Kebbi (1979), a medieval hero of the Songhay wars. In the south of the country, Ola Balogun was for many years the most prolific Yoruba-language filmmaker; for about a decade he churned out a film a year, alternating hits and misses. The hits were Ajani Ogun (1976), a musical comedy, made with Duro Lapido and Ade “Love” Afolayan, stars of the Yoruba theater, Ija Ominira (1977), with the same group and was the first Nigerian film to recoup its cost within a year, Aiye (1979) with Herbert Ogunde, and Orun Mooru (1982) with Moses Olaiya Adejumo (“Baba Sala”).

In the 1990s, “Nollywood” was born in Lagos, as video replaced film; the director Tunde Kelani has never used any other format. Saworoide (1999) and Agogo Eewo (2002), his Yoruba village dramas, were veiled critiques of Nigerian politics. Thunderbolt (2001) showed the conflicts in a marriage between an Igbo woman and a Yoruba man. In The Campus Queen (2002), presidents of rival social clubs at the university fight over the dishy heroine, in an aspirational drama replete with cars and big houses. Indeed, the wide range of cultures and classes depicted in Nigerian films is striking, from the working-class dad in Tade Ogidan’s Owo-Blow (1997) to desperate housewives in Lancelot Imasuen’s Emotional Crack (2003), and posh London businessmen in Zina Saro-Wiwa’s Hello Nigeria! (2004). Distributed on inexpensive DVDs, Nigerian films outsell Hollywood in Nigeria, and reach the remotest parts of Africa and beyond.

Francophone Africa

The first French films of Africans date back to 1895, when a scientist made motion studies of West Africans from Senegal at a colonial exposition in Paris. In 1926, Léon Poirier’s La Croisière noire celebrated the Citroën expedition that started in Algeria, crossed French West Africa and the Belgian Congo, and ended up in Madagascar. Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko was filmed in the Algiers Casbah in 1936. In 1946, an unemployed French civil engineer, Jean Rouch, floated down the Niger River in a canoe with two friends and a Bell and Howell 16-millimeter camera, stopping occasionally to send dispatches to Agence France-Presse. This was the beginning of a career that catalyzed the film genre of cinéma-vérité with Chronique d’un été (1960) and came to define the field of visual anthropology.

Rouch wrote and filmed prolifically on Songhay religion. His wartime experience, during which he built roads across the interior, impelled Rouch to study the new African religions that were appearing in the cities of the west coast. The most famous, or infamous, of the resulting films was Les Maîtres fous (1953), about the Hauka cult in Ghana. The intensity of Hauka ritual, and its cruelty in the way it depicted both African and European culture, deeply shocked most viewers. Rouch drew encouragement from the fact that offense was shared equally by Africans and Europeans.

Outside of an avant-garde following, his work was greeted by hostility from Africans, and incomprehension from almost everyone else. He made a series of fictional films, which dealt  with topics such as migrant labor (Jaguar, 1957), global business (Petit à petit, 1968), avian flu (Cocorico, 1974), and drought (Madame L’Eau, 1992) all in humorous ways. However prescient, these films had less critical impact than Rouch’s highly emotional psycho-drama, Moi, un noir (1957). Starring Oumarou Ganda as a disillusioned Vietnam vet eking out a living in Ivory Coast, it was named one of the ten best films in history by Cahiers du Cinema.

The first dramatic film by a black African director was Paulin Soumanou Vieyra’s 1955 Afrique sur Seine, which was filmed in Paris while Vieyra was a film student. Vieyra became Africa’s first film historian, and wrote the first biography of Ousmane Sembène, who is revered as the father of African film.

Born in the Casamance area of Senegal, Sembène served with the French armed forces, joined the labor movement, worked as a longshoreman in Marseilles, and wrote politically-themed novels in French. In 1962 and 1963, he studied filmmaking in Moscow in order to present his work to a wide African audience. His first feature, La Noire de… (Black Girl, 1966), filmed on the French Riviera and in Dakar, established his reputation. Based on a true account of the suicide of a desperate African maid in France, the film provoked strong opinions, pro and con, at its festival screening in Cannes. Sembène returned to Senegal and embarked on a trilogy of social-realist films, Mandabi (1968), Xala (1974), and Guelwaar (1992), depicting his characters—often with biting humor—struggling against illiteracy, bureaucracy, corruption, intolerance, impotence, sexual oppression, and international aid. From Mandabi onward, Sembène’s films were made using African languages, predominantly Wolof.

In 1971, Sembène returned to his home province to direct Emitaï, depicting the resistance of Jola villagers during World War II. This film became part of a second trilogy, on historical themes, which included Ceddo (1976) and Camp de Thiaroye (1988). More somber than the social-realist films, these works dealt with religion, slavery, and ethnic strife, and depicted shocking massacres. In 2004, Sembène turned his attention to the international cause célèbre of genital cutting. His film on this subject, Mooladé, was intended for the widest possible audience. Sembène remains optimistic about African cinema, which, he maintains, employs an original film language, distinct from the rest of the world.

A generation of filmmakers born in the 1940’s and 1950’s followed Sembène’s lead, striving both for high standards and a steady stream of production. Gaston Kaboré of Burkina Faso made films set in the Burkinabe countryside (Wend Kuuni, 1982). Aiming for a broader audience, S. Pierre Yameogo made comedies out of the complexities of city life. Silmande (1998) showed the predicament of Lebanese merchants, while Moi et mon blanc (Me and My White Pal, 2003) set two appealing slackers against the petit-bourgeois backdrop of their families, in Paris and Ouagadougou. Mweze Dieudonné Ngangura made the hugely popular La Vie est belle in Kinshasa in 1987, starring Papa Wemba, before decamping for Brussels, along with the rest of the Zairian film industry.

Safi Faye, a Senegalese anthropologist who acted in Rouch’s Petit à petit, was the only woman filmmaker of this generation. She made several fiction films, and also turned her camera on white women and immigrant restaurants in Paris in As Women See It and Ambassades nourricières (both 1980). Souleymane Cisse of Mali had a particularly interesting career, making ambitious films while bobbing and weaving to avoid censorship. Baara (1978) dealt pointedly with labor problems and Finye (1982) showed military repression and intergenerational conflict in “an African city” (actually Bamako). For his next film, the apocalyptic Yeelen (Brightness, 1987), Cisse retreated into the safer “long ago and far away” of esoteric Bambara and Dogon spirituality. In Waati (Time, 1995), Cisse worked on a Pan-African scale. Lavishly filmed in South, West, and North Africa, with dialogue in seven languages, Waati told the story of a young girl’s exile, personal growth, and return.

The greatest artistic talent of this generation was the Senegalese Djibril Diop-Mambety, whose early comic promise (Contras City, 1968; Touki Bouki, 1973) matured in his Tales of Little People trilogy, incomplete at the time of his death. Le Franc (1994) and La Petite vendeuse de Soleil (The Little Girl who Sold the Sun, 1999) transfigured the hard reality of life in Dakar. Diop-Mambety also adapted Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play, The Visit, as a Wolof-language film (Hyenas, 1992). In the words of Mahen Bonetti, Diop-Mambety moved beyond documenting Africa’s victimization towards envisioning the continent’s recovery.

The generation of filmmakers born since independence has already shown that it can follow on Diop-Mambety’s achievement. The Cameroonian Jean-Pierre Bekolo, having warmed up with gender-bending mockery of traditions in Quartier Mozart (1992), was asked in 1995 to make a film to celebrate the centennial of Lumière’s cinematograph. The result was Aristotle’s Plot, in which followers of Schwarzenegger and Sembène, marooned in a dusty South African ghost town, duked it out for control of the town’s derelict theater, Cinema Africa. Bekolo followed this cerebral satire with Les Saignantes (The Bloodettes, 2005), a glossy hybrid of action, horror, comedy, porn and science fiction. Two delectable femmes fatales, Majolie and Chouchou, used ingenious means to rid their futuristic African country of its corrupt and lecherous powerful men. The reactions of viewers to this film, while both strong and polarized, had nothing to do with it being African. Thus, one can fairly say that by 2005, “African Cinema” had arrived, and that it is now Cinema.

FILM SOURCES

African Film Festival, Inc., 154 West 18th Street, Suite 2A, New York, NY 10011. Internet: www.africanfilmny.org Documentary Educational Resources, 101 Morse Street, Watertown, MA 02472. Internet: www.der.org FESPACO (Festival Panafricain du Cinéma et de la Television de Ouagadougou), 01 BP 2505, Ouagadougou 01, Burkina Faso. Internet: www.fespaco.bf International Movie Data Base. Internet: www.IMDb.com Sithengi Film and Television Market, PO Box 52120, Waterfront, 8002, South Africa. Internet: www.sithengi.co.za

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bonetti, Mahen, and Prerana Reddy. Through African Eyes: Dialogues with the Directors. New York: African Film Festival, Inc., 2003 Les Cinémas d’Afrique: Dictionnaire. Paris: Karthala/ATM, 2000 Rouch, Jean. Cine-Ethnography. Edited and Translated by Steven Feld. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003 Tomaselli, Keyan, and Hopeton S. Dunn. Media, Democracy and Renewal in Southern Africa. Denver: International Academic Publishers, 2001 Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank. Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002