African Cinema

African Cinema, historical development of the cinema in Africa. There has been an active film industry in Egypt since 1918. However, among contemporary directors only Youssef Chahine has established a reputation outside the Arab world, particularly for Alexandria ... Why? (1978). Though production in the Maghreb has been more intermittent, several films have been successful internationally, most recently The Silences of the Palace (Tunisia/France, 1994), directed by Moufida Tlati, a moving feature by a woman director. Merzak Allouache’s Bab el-Oued City (Algeria, 1994) reopened debate about the relationship between filmic art and political good intentions. It was shot with limited resources and largely clandestinely on the streets of Algiers during May and June 1993, a period when political assassination was almost commonplace. It depicts a violent and ruthless campaign by a group of Islamic fundamentalists to establish control over its urban neighbourhood.

Some would argue that there is no genuine film industry in most African countries south of the Sahara; there are few working studios or laboratories, few professional actors, and distribution and exhibition are usually in the hands of businessmen who have no wish to show African films, let alone give them the space necessary to build up an audience. The film-maker has to be producer, writer, director, and publicist all in one, quite likely to turn up at an international festival with the film in his or her luggage, and after the screening sit down to try to negotiate a distribution deal for the film or funds for the next film. Nevertheless, remarkable work has been achieved, particularly in the former colonies of French West and Equatorial Africa. For over three decades, the French government has, through various schemes, given financial support to productions from these countries. This has had positive and negative effects. French technicians have usually dominated film crews, and post-production work has been undertaken in France. Be that as it may, film-makers such as Sembène Ousmane, Med Hondo (who is normally based in Paris, and made his first film, Soleil O, an exploration of developing political awareness of an immigrant in France, in 1970), Souleymane Cissé, Idrissa Ouédraogo, Safi Faye, and, earlier, Oumarou Ganda, who, having come to the cinema through his participation in Jean Rouch’s experimental feature Moi, un Noir (1957; Me, a Black Man), died young, just when he was starting to receive the opportunities his own work and talent deserved, are known throughout the world. Conversely, the work of directors such as Kwaw Ansah or King Ampah (Ghana), and Ola Balogun (Nigeria) is little known outside their own countries. At best, they may hope for success elsewhere in English-speaking Africa, such as that enjoyed by Ansah’s Love Brewed in an African Pot (1981) in Kenya. Films from Francophone Africa have won prizes and critical acclaim at major festivals, have been distributed in Europe and North America, and have been shown on British television.

Sembène’s Mandabi (Senegal, 1968; The Money Order) was a major breakthrough. Not only was it in colour but, far more importantly, it was the first African feature in an African language, Wolof. Thus it spoke directly to the audience that Sembène, already a major novelist in the French language, had become a film-maker in order to reach. When it was shot, there was no system for the transcription of Wolof: Sembène wrote his script in French. Two versions of the film were shot simultaneously—one in French (Le Mandat), one in Wolof. The performers generated the dialogue for the latter after internalizing the French text during rehearsal.

Camp de Thiaroye (1987, which Sembène co-directed with Thierno Faty Sow), represented a breakthrough of a different kind. This account of a massacre by the French army of African conscripts undergoing demobilization following active service in Europe was a Senegal/Tunisia/Algeria co-production with no input from outside the South.

African film-makers still keep alive a pan-African vision: films shot in Africa by Africans for Africans, dealing honestly with African problems, using African facilities for processing and post-production, and earning money in Africa through exhibition in the continent’s many cinemas, most of which are still closed to their work. The film-makers of the whole continent (Francophone, Anglophone, and Lusophone) are united to further this project in the Pan-African Federation of Cinéastes. Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa, is an example of what can be done, with government support, to build a film culture. In addition to playing host every two years to FESPACO, the Pan-African Film Festival, whose total audience approaches half a million, most of them Burkina peasants, the country now has a national cinema organization, a film school, and a privately owned studio.

Government film policies in Mozambique and particularly Angola have been undermined by the disastrous effects of the civil wars experienced there for over a decade. There are excellent technical resources in Zimbabwe, though that country has concentrated on attracting prestige productions from abroad rather than developing its own feature industry. The “new” South Africa has resources both to make films, following up the diverse achievements of its film-makers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and to be a market for those made elsewhere. Many of its white population seem anxious to rethink their relationship with the rest of the continent, a process that the classics of African cinema could assist, while the black population is potentially an important new audience, following decades when censorship and the selection of films made the cinema, where it was available, more like another force of repression rather than one of liberation.

Four recent films by acknowledged masters of African cinema indicate the increasing difficulties experienced by African film-makers in their struggle to reach their audience. Britain’s Channel 4 Television was an early investor in Med Hondo’s Black Light (1994; Lumière Noire). Without this investment the film might never have been made. However, it also meant that, with no hope of a subsequent sale to British television, no British distributor was prepared to purchase the film for cinema exhibition. Thus, in Britain, only television audiences have been able to see Hondo’s denunciation of institutionalized state violence.

It took ten years for writer-director Haile Gerima, whose Mirt Sost Shi Amit (Ethiopia, 1973; Harvest 3,000 Years) was one of the great pioneering films of African cinema, to complete another co-production in which Channel 4 invested at a crucial stage. This was Sankofa (1993), which also drew on finance and resources from Burkino Faso, Ghana, German television, and the United States. Though this story of slavery, aimed partly at the black American audience, received a standing ovation at the London Film Festival, its subsequent exposure in British cinemas was extremely limited. Sembène Ousmane’s Guelwaar (1992), a story of religion, aid, and the role of politics in modern Senegal, received no cinema release in Britain, and the same has so far been true of Souleymane Cissé’s Time (1995; Waati), a co-production shot in South Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, Namibia, and Mali. This story of a fugitive from apartheid, set in the recent past, is an expression of the ideals of pan-African collaboration that still inform the aspirations of most African film-makers.