The Decline in African-American Representation in Unions and
Self Representation in African Cinema
Transcript of Self Representation in African Cinema
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Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Number 21, Fall 2007, pp.
74-81 (Article)
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SELF
REPRESENTATION
IN AFRICAN
CINEMA
Souleymane Cisse,Film still from Yeelen, 1987
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As I recently paged through a voluminous
book, Anthology of African and Indian
Ocean Photography,1
I could not help but
think about the aesthetic links between still pho
tography and film in Africa. A crucial question we
must ask ourselves, therefore, is what happened
when Africans got hold of still and motion-picture
cameras to represent themselves? Did they inherit
the stereotypes of Africans forged by Europeans,
or did they try to find a new language? There are
aesthetic links between African photography and
film that, if explored, will yield a new apprec iation
of both media in Africa. It is my aim here to show
that black-and-white photography in Africa pro
vides a powerful metaphor for pursuing the aes
thet ic signifiers in African cinema .
African Cinema in Black and White
Looking at the photographs in the anthology, one
can see the African youth movement toward
modernity framed by the still camera. Each photograph by Seydou Keita, Malick Sidibe, Samuel
Fosso, and Philip Kwame Apagya is filled with
energy, desires, and a kind of modern ist melan
cholia that constitute its aesthetic source and
pleasure. Furthe rmore, the subjects in Sidibe's
work in particular seem to imitate actors and pop
music stars from B-movies and magazines from
the West. The dress stylestight shirts, Afro-hair,
bell-bottom pants, and platform shoesand the
body languages of the characters are filled with
cinematic vignettes of the life of hip youngsters in
Bamako in the 1960s and 1970s. The mise-en-scene
is perfected, with outdoor and studio props like
motorcycles, telephones, records, and turntables
that are signifiers of the pop-culture period in
Bamako. The characters occupy the center of the
photographs like Hollywood heroes and individu
als who have conquered history.
My biggest surprise is that I found no strong
continuity between these photographs and the
African cinema coming out in the 1960s and
1970s. Only a handful of films in the seventies
gave a nod to the modern African style and aes
thetics I have referred to here.Tooki Bouki (1975)
by Djibril Diop Mambety, like Sidibe's ph oto
graphs, borrows from the mise-en-scene of
the Western and B-movies, as well as from the
French Nouvelle Vague. The poetic connotations
in the representation of the youth in Tooki Bouki
signal to the same symbols of freedom and indepe nd en ce emphas ized in the bl ac k-and-w hi te
ph otographs.
Den Muso (1974) by Souleymane Cisse is
another film with fascinating intertextual connec
tions to the photography of the 1960s and 1970s in
Africa.Den Muso tells the story of two young peo
pleTenin and Sekoucaught in the struggle
between trad it ion and modernity. Ten in's father
represents traditional nobility and wealth, while
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Sekou's family is from a poor background. But
Tenin and Sekou are united through the modern
youth culture as signified by free sex, the music of
a young Salif Keita and the Super Rail Band of
Bamako, the dress styles, and the motorcycles that
have become the new symbols of mobility in the
city. Tenin's parents are filmed like the studio por
traits of the men and women in Seydou Keita's
classic portraits of the Bamakois clad in their
embroidered grand boubous, with a red curtain in
the background. The recourse to Keita's style of
port ra it ure to represent tradit ional Bamako con
trasts nicely with the use of Sidibe's style to con
note the new and the challenge to tradition.
Both Sekou and Tenin are characters straight
out ofaSidibe photo album. In his Afro-hair, tight
shirts with long collars, and platform shoes, Sekou
looks like a rebel against all that Bamako repre
sents. He quits his job in the beginning of the film
and becomes a pickpocket. He is a playboy with
out a conscience or a commitment to anything in
life, except for the clothes he wears. He changes
girlfriends several times in the film. In one classic
scene la Malick Sidibe, shot at the beach by the
river, the youth, dressed in their bikinis, drink tea,
and play while Sekou rapes Tenin not too far
from them.Tenin is portrayed like the beautiful women we
see in both the photographs of Keita and Sidibe
with their hair braided or in Afros, and wearing
miniskirts or nicely tailored dresses. Interestingly,
Tenin is mute, which signifies the voicelessness of
women in a patriarchal African setting. When she
becomes pregnant , she is rejected by bo th her
father and Sekou. At the end of the film, she sets
fire to a house with Sekou and his new lover
inside, and killsherself.Den Muso thus gives us an
idea of the situations and stories that the youth in
Sidibe's albums might have been dealing with.
The film interpellates the Bamakois spectators
by intercutting between trad it ion and mo dern ity
through the representational techniques of Keita
and Sidibe. The scenes with Tenin's parents are
mostly shot insidein the style of Seydou Keita
while the cinematography outside reveals Malick
Sidibe' Bamako. Seeing Den Muso today makes
the spectator relive the Bamako of the 1960s and
1970s as the photographs of Malick Sidibe and the
old songs of Salif Keita and James Brown are able
to do. For that reason alone, it has become a cult
film to treasure in Bamako.
The Evolution of Photography
and Film in Africa
Tho ugh photography and film follow different
modes of production and entail different costs,
they are related aesthetically and politically as far
as representation is concerned. They share the
same illusion of verisimilitude provided by the
camera, which set them apar t from other modes of
representation, such as oral storytelling and sculp
ture. A brief overview of the circumstances in
which the two media developed in Africa is there
fore requ ired here to show why other African filmsdid not follow the example ofDen Muso.
Both photography and film were introduced in
Africa by European explorers, colonial adminis
trators, anthropologists, and missionaries in
search of the primitive and the exotic. It is reveal
ing, therefore, that the early photographs and
films of Africans by Europeans were concerned
with documenting nudity, tribal marks, religious
customs, and polygamous African chiefs. The
Africans in these documentaries lack subjectivity
and personal style; they are reified and framed byan outsider's gaze. In a sense, primitive photogra
phy and film were interested in asser ting and
maintaining the superiority of the European over
the African.
The history of African cinema is recent com
pared to that of its photography. To take the spe
cific case of Mali, for example, there were photog
raphers such as Mountaga Dembele and Seydou
Keita who had mastered their craft as early as the
1930s and 1940s. One might even say that Malian
photography had achieved two golden agesone
with Seydou Keita in the 1950s and the other
spearheaded by Malick Sidibe in the 1960s
before there was even one feature film produced
by a Malian director . The cost of film was one rea
son for the delay in the birth of African cinema.
Another reason was the fear that an African with
a movie camera would subvert the colonial order
of things.
The case of Mali is significant for other reasons
as well. From the beginning the aesthetic choices
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Souleymane Cisse,Film still from Yeelen,1987
of photographers were different from those of
filmmakers in the colonial era;furthermore the
markets inwhich the artwas consumed werein a
complete opposition to each other. Mali wasafer
tile ground for French ethnographic films on the
tradition andcosmology of the Dogons. French
filmmakers like Jean Rouch and Marcel Griaule
had nocompetit ion from African directors whilethe former were busy filming theDogons in their
authentic tribal dwellings. Their desiretoprivilege
primitive African culturesat theexpense of those
lived in the urban setting cemented an ideology
and aesthetic of filmmaking inAfrica that isstill
influential.
Photography meanwhile was evolving in the
cities, with African photographers increasingly
replacing their European counterparts. Malian
photographer s were opening studios in Bamako,
Kayes, Segou,andother emerging cities wherethe
black-and-white photogra phs coincided with the
modern desiresofnew population.
So,while the aestheticsoffilmin th e handsof
Europeans and for a European c onsumpt ion
remained primitive andethnographic, the art of
ph otog raph y evolved with African ca merame nand consumers ofAfrican images.Inother words,
film was stuckin an"auth entic" African tradi tion
al language that could be opposed to European
modernity, while th e photographers were busy
documenting the birth andstylized express ionsof
modern Africans. A look at the black-and-white
ph otog raphs of Seydou Keita reveals the cos
mopolitanism ofthe subjects, as wellastheir o pti
mism vis-a-vis modernity. After all, the people
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SouleymaneCisse,Film still fromYeelen, 1987
who left the rural areas to come to Bamako or
Kayes to become new heroes or heroines in a
changing world wanted above all to show the
world that they had succeeded. They were search
ing for modernity; that was the reason why they
put on the ir best clothes and jewelry to be ph o
tographed and captured on film as symbols of
modern Bamakois identities.
African Cinema in Search of an Aesthetics
It was only in the 1960safter many countries
had won their independence, and more than sixty
years after the invention of the movie camera
that a few Africans were able to make their own
films. They were suddenly encouraged on the one
hand by the cultural policies of newly independ
ent countries that needed to produce their own
images, and on the other by the French Ministere
de la Cooperation,which had reversed its policy so
as to support Africans to make films.
At that time, the artistic policies of many of the
newly independent countries mirrored those
espoused by European Marxist and African
Diaspora intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre,
Aime Cesaire, and Frantz Fanon. They embedded
art in the project of nation building and believed
that its true function was to be revolutionary andto reflect the social reality of the people. To quote
Sekou Toure, "it is the responsibili ty of the State to
create a cinema which, in turn, emphasizes the
positive things in the revolution in order to mo ti
vate people and prepare them for changea cine
ma which is unabashed about its educational role,
and its power of transformation."2
A look at Sembene Ousmane 's filmsfrom
Borom Saret (1963), to Mandabi (1968)reveals
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that they derived their aesthetic resource from the
socialist cultural policiesofAfrican independences,
and that they emphasized a social transformation
in thestoryat theexpense of characterizationand
plot co ns tr uc ti on . In both Borom Saret and
Mandabi, themain characters areantiheroeswho
are sacrificed to the need of the people to rise
againstthesystem that isoppressing them .In fact,
the narratives of both films enfold against their
pro tagonists: weidentify less with the cart driver
in Borom Saret because he remains blind to the
system that exploits him; we take our distance
from him, to paraphrase a Brechtian expression,
because of his failure to rise up and change his
social environment. In Mandabi, too , we are as
angry with Elhadj Dieng, the main character, asweare with thesystem and thepeoplewho arebent
on robbing him. Sembene positions the spectator
to reject the pompous attitude of Elhadj Dieng,
who is, after all,nothingbut apaper tiger,a sexist
pig,and a reactionary.
For Sembene,who isonly interested in an ideal
reality-a reality that issymbolized by justiceand
democratic principles in his narrativesfilm
becomes atool forsocial transformation andrev
olutionary grandstanding, and thehero turn sout
as less important than th egroup that shapeshim.
There are no high mimetic stories or epic narra
tives in Sembene's Africa. By adopting the
oppressed masses as the "heroes" in such films
as Mandabi, Xala (1974), and Ceddo (1978),
Sembene seems to berobbing theAfrican specta-
OusmaneSembene,Film still fromMandabi,1968
tors of the narrative pleasure that they are so
accustomed to in the art of traditional oral story
telling and popular Western cinema. Clearly,
therefore, therevolutionary cinema that Sembene
is proposingidealist, anticolonialist, andagainst
"archaic" African traditionsfinds its echo more
in theUtopia ofPan-Africanism astheorized by
men like Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba,
and Fanon than in the reality of the people.
Aesthetically speaking, it is therefore fair to say
that theSembenian cinema alienates the majority
of African spectators bydepicting menlike Elhadj
Dieng, who symbolized traditional nobility, as
caricaturesanddemagogues,onthe one hand,and
literate Africans asassimiles andworthless,on the
other hand.When we turn to the input of the French
Ministere de laCooperation foraesthetic consider
ationinAfrican cinema , we find that itmade every
effort tocounter the Brechtian film language pro
posed by Sembene. TheBureau du Cinema was
created at the Cooperation in 1963, with Jean-
Rene Debrix as itsdirector. It soon became the
most important source for African film produc
tion, providing many Francophone Africans with
the first opportunity to realize their dreams as
filmmakers. As early as 1975, 185 filmsshorts
and featureswere made in Francophone Africa,
four-fifths ofwhich were produced withthe finan
cialandtechnical helpof the Bureau that prompt
ed Debrix to brag that "any African directorwho
thinks,asLouis Malle pu ts it,thathe'hasafilmin
Ousmane Sembene,Film still fromCeddo,1977
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Souleymane Cisse,Film still fromYeelen, 1987
his stomach,' can find the means to make that film
in freedom at Bureau du cinema."3
Debrix, who described himself as a student of
Abel Gance, wanted to be at the origin of a new
cinema created by Africans and distinct from
Western film language. For him, Western film
makers had reached an impasse because they
allowed rhetorical and dialectical styles to take
over their films, subjecting the art of cinema thus
to Cartesianism and to the precepts of literature
and theater. Under the spell of a notion that an
African contribution would save cinema by restor
ing to it "sorcery," "magic," and "poetry," Debrix
seized the opportunity offered him by his new job
to become the architect of this new cinema.
The reality is that while the Bureau and other
French political and cultural institutions enabled
some of the best-known African directors to make
films, they also trapped these directors into aself-representation that remains reassuring to the
Western imagination of Africa as primitive. At
best , African films like Yeelen (1987, by
Souleymane Cisse), and Tilai (1990, by Idrissa
Ouedraogo), by attempting to correct European
representations of Africa, have legitimized the
search for anthropological aesthetics in their nar
ratives. Critics are justified therefore to point to
the appropriation of Negritude and prirnitivism
in these films. The slow narrative pace, the abun
dance of long takes, and long shotsat the
expense of a dynamic editing for character psy
chology and individualismalso link these
African films to ethnographic cinema.
At their worst, what Debrix calls "magic" and
"sorcery" in this kind of film can simply be dis
missed as bad anthropological cinema that rein
forces the stereotypical themes of Afro-pessimism,
or Africans' lack of capacity to adjust to the mod
ern world. In 1968, in a celebrated statement,
Sembene argued that Rouch's camera depicts
Africans as insects. 4 Still today, what reassures
European television and film festivals are African
directors taking the place of the entomologist
/anthropologist, and showing Africans like insectscaught outside of human history and trapped in
Afro-pessimism.
At any rate, the Sembenian film language that
critiques neocolonialism and imperialism has
completely disappeared from the grammar of
African cinema produced in France or by televi
sion channels likeArte in the last decades. It is not
as if Africans no longer need to worry about
underdevelopment and regional conflicts as
induced by the structural adjustments of such
financial insti tutions as the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Ironically, Africans are the audiences most
alienated from African cinema today. They fail to
identify with characters who are inarticulate, dis-
empowered, and portrayed by nonprofessional
amateur actors. With African cinema caught in
this kind of Afro-pessimism, one wonders why
European critics and producers continue to
bes tow awards and lavish praise up on the films
that are considered "authentically" African.
Conclusion
Perhaps one positive reaction to the hegemony of
a Francophone African cinema out of touch with
its audience is the emergence of Anglophone
videos. This also brings me back to my discussion
of the links between cinema and African photog
raphy. Like the black-and-white photographs of
Seydou Keita, Malick Sidibe, Samuel Fosso, and
Philip Kwame Apagya, the Nigerian videos are col
ored with the desires and fears of the African mid-
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die classes. The videos reveal beautiful houses wi th
lush living rooms, refrigerators, television sets,
telephones, and cars. The narra tives often revolve
around love, betrayal, and the power of religious
faith versus greed and money. Most importantly,
the videos, like the photographs, address Africans
as their primary audience. This crucial aesthetic
choice reflected in the videos contrasts sharply
with Francophone cinema's intention to address
only Europeans.
Personally, I feel that we have to be careful
about an uncritical endorsement of Nigerian
videos, too. Like the Francophone films, they also
contain their share of primitivism. Their stories
are often trapped in outdated or invented tradi
tions. Furthermore, they have not yet achieved thetechnical and aesthetic perfection of the black-
and-white photographs of Seydou Keita and
Malick Sidibe. Most of the videos are limited in
terms of poor shooting and editing. But in spite of
their imperfections, the videos draw audiences
because they tell stories with characters who are
involved in situat ions that everybody can identify
with. Like the photographs, the videos show
Africans as agents of their own history, as cosmo
pol itan figures, and as actors in the global world
something that is lacking in Francophone cinema.
I believe that both Nigerian videos and
Francophone cinema can learn a few things from
the classic era of African black-and-white photog
raphy. For one thing, when it comes to aesthetics,
every universalism has a local basis. The early suc
cess of photography in Africa was grounded in the
fact that each photographer had adjusted his cam
era to the taste of his people and envi ronment .
The African photographer did not content himself
with the notion that photography has a universal
languageas Francophone filmmakers are fond
of saying about filmrather they created a black
aesthetic of photography.
The photographers, like the tailors and barbers
who are popular from Bamako to Cotonou, suc
ceeded in their communities because they provid
ed consumers with the best products. If the world
is discovering Seydou Keita today, it is because he
perfected his art for the Bamakois first. I believe
that the Nigerian video makers too are well aware
of the technical and aesthetic requirements of
their audience, and realize that they must work
hard to rise to their level to survive. The fact is
that, as a mass consumer product, no cinema can
afford to ignore its audience.
I have had heated debates with African film
makers who refute this argument as simplistic. For
them, the problem is complex because African
movie theaters are colonized by American and
Asian films that leave a very small market share for
African films. They argue that they have to play
the game of French and European institutions as
long as there are no alternative production facili
ties in Africaas long as there are no Africans to
invest in film. The African filmmakers see festivals
like Cannes and Berlin not as French or German,
bu t as universal sites for film language. For them,survival depends not on African audiences, but on
the taste of the organizers of these festivals and
prog ramme rs of European television.
Some African filmmakers in Paris even suspect
that racism is behind the recent success of
Nigerian videos in Europe an d America, which
they argue is related to the desire to turn back the
wheel and to once again ghettoize Africa cinema.
They see paternalism in European and American
praise of African videos that would have no artis
tic merit if they were made by filmmakers in theWest. Perhaps these critical African filmmakers
have a point insofar as the politics of production
and distribution is concerned. But how about
black-and-white photography as a model?
Manthia Diawara is the Distinguished Professor of
Film and Comparative Literature and Director of
the Institute of African American Affairs at New
York University.
Notes
*Anthology ofAfrican and Indian Ocean Photography (Paris:
Revue Noire, 1998).
2 Ahmed Sekou Toure, LaRevolution Culturelle (1965),
p. 365.
^Manthia Diawara,African Cinema: Politicsand Culture
(Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1992), p. 26.4
Ibid., p. 174.
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