Like other forms of creative expression by Africans, filmmaking constitutes a form of discourse and practice that is not just artistic and cultural, but also intellectual and political. It is a way of defining, describing and interpreting African experiences with those forces that have shaped their past and that continue to shape and influence the present. It is a product of the historical experiences of Africans, and it has direct bearing and relevance to the challenges that face African societies and people of African descent in the world in the present moment and in the future. As product of the imagination, filmmaking constitutes, at the same time, a particular mode of intellectual and political practice. Thus, in looking at filmmaking, in particular, and the other creative arts, in general, one is looking at particular insights into ways of thinking and acting on individual as well as collective realities, experiences, challenges and desires over time. African thinking and acting on their individual and collective realities, experiences, challenges and desires are diverse and complex, and cinema provides one of the most productive sites for experiencing, understanding and appreciating such diversity and complexity.

A significant portion of what constitutes African cultural, symbolic and intellectual thought and practices – be they oral, written, dramatic, visual or filmic – can be characterized as responses to and interventions in the factors and forces that have shaped Africa over time. Generally conceived as triple, these factors and forces have been described by Kwame Nkrumah and, more recently, by Ali Mazrui as (i) indigenous, (ii) Arab-Islamic and (iii) Euro-Christian. The patterns of interaction, cross-fertilization, tensions and conflicts between and among these forces over many centuries on African soil have produced a wide range of complex dynamics and transformations that have resulted in the shape of Africa at the present moment. They have also spawned diverse patterns of thought and practices in many domains of life in Africa, particularly the domain of filmmaking. African cinema functions as a mode of entertainment. At the same time, it assigns itself a pivotal role in definitions, enactment and performance of African notions and ideologies of individual as well as community and humanity, just like its counterparts, the indigenous oral narrative traditions and written literature in both African and European languages. African filmmaking co-exists and interacts with these other forms of creative practice on the level of subject matter, theme, form, style and conceptions of art and artist and their role in and relationship to society.

African participation in the global civilization of cinema as producers and transmitters of their own images is, however, a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back only to the 1960s. The initial position of Africa in this civilization of cinema was that of a receiver/consumer of film products made primarily in and by the west. Many of these films also used and continue to use Africa and Africans as resources to invent and disseminate images and discourses of Africa and Africans radically at odds with the histories and actual realities of Africa and Africans. In spite of its youth and the variety of overwhelming odds against which it is struggling, cinema by Africans has grown steadily over this short period of time to become a significant part of a global cinema civilization to which it brings many significant contributions. More specifically, it is part of a worldwide film movement aimed at constructing and promoting an alternative popular cinema, one that corrects the distortions and stereotypes propagated by dominant western cinemas, and one that is more in sync with the realities, the experiences, the priorities and desires of their respective societies.

As such, a significant portion of the films that constitutes African Cinema share a few elements in common with radical film practices from other parts of the third world. These include practices such as Third Cinema as articulated by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Imperfect Cinema as developed by Julio Garcia Espinosa and of Cinema Novo as articulated by Glauber Rocha and others. They also exhibit similarities with the work of independent African American and Black British filmmakers, and Indian filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray and Mirnal Sen. These parallels are manifested not only at the level of form and theme, but also in their production, distribution and exhibition practices and challenges.

A significant development in African film culture, in the last two decades, especially, is the turn toward the subject of history. Since its inception in the 60s and 70s, a significant portion of African cinema has focused and continues to focus on issues of racism, colonial exploitation and injustice, tradition and modernity, hopes, betrayals and disaffections of independence, immigration and many other social justice issues. Historicizing these issues, as well as creating narratives based primarily on events, figures and subjects of history, has emerged in recent years as a prominent trait of African film culture, as a cursory glance at African film production in the past two decades will demonstrate.

The subject of African history is one that has commanded the attention of a steadily growing number of films by Africans in recent years. Many of these films are devoted primarily or in part to a critical engagement with and interrogation of the African past for the purpose contesting, visioning and re-visioning, to invoke Rosentone’s categories , aspects of that past from African points of view. These films also take up history as a way of reflecting on and coming to terms with the many crises and challenges confronting contemporary African societies, as well as the future. Stories of the African past, it is generally established by now, have been rendered predominantly from the perspective of Europeans who colonized and dominated much of Africa. These dominant European versions focus predominantly on the story of Europeans in Africa and present these as authentic histories of Africa. In these versions, Europe is presented as the bringer of history and civilization to an a-historical Africa. History is thus pressed into service to rationalize and justify the project of imperial and colonial expansion as well as a civilizing mission which is portrayed as benevolent, benign and sanctioned by God. As such, these versions of history erase and exclude stories of Africa before the advent of Europeans and Arabs.

Like many African oral artists, creative writers and historians, a good number of recent African films present versions of the African past from African perspectives which contest and subvert official as well as popular European accounts, and which present more complex and balanced histories, especially the histories of slavery, imperialism, colonialism and post-colonialism. Their subject matter as well as time spans are broad, covering individual figures as well as collective movements and events in the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods of African history.

The approaches and styles encountered in these films are also diverse, ranging from linear realist approaches to ones that are non-linear, symbolic and, sometimes, experimental. While their interrogation and reconstruction of history draw partially and in critically transgressive ways from sources such as official documents and narratives as well as traditional Euro-centric scholarly accounts, their foundation is the African heritage of oral traditions and memory. Documentary as well as fiction, these films are less interested in a history that merely celebrates a glorious past for European consumption, what Mazrui calls “romantic gloriana”, than in a critical and purposeful reflection on and interrogation of the ways history – its varied constructions and uses – is inextricably implicated in systems of domination, subjugation and liberation of Africans, and is as well inscribed in the African present and future.

In this essay, I want to offer a sketch of the evolving parameters, approaches, strategies, styles and uses of this new history film in Africa with special reference to three films: Asientos (1996) by François Woukoache of Cameroon, Sankofa (1992) by Haile Gerima of Ethiopia and Sarraounia (1986) by Med Hondo of Mauritania. But first, a brief survey of the field in general.

The genesis of this current African cinematic preoccupation with history and its implications for the present and the future can be traced to the early works of the man who is popularly referred to as the “father of African cinema”, Ousmane Sembène. Sembène’s entire oeuvre – literary as well as cinematic – deals with history, even when the more immediate subject matter may be betrayals and challenges of the post-colonial present. His style of reconfiguring African historical experiences draws significantly on his own biography and experience as a veteran of the French colonial military, as well as a trade union activist, in order to tell the stories of Africans under French colonial domination, their struggles of resistance and efforts to reclaim their own histories and cultures and to build a different future.

These films also deconstruct effectively French founding principles of “égalité, fraternité, justice.” His 1971 film, Emitai, is a narrative about the responses of the Jola people of the Cassamance region of Senegal to French military pillage and massacres during the Second World War. In Camp de Thiaroye (1988), he returns to the subject of Africans in the French colonial military, retelling, this time, the repressed story of the December 1944 massacre by the French military of a group of demobilized African soldiers just returned from fighting for France in Europe. Sembène’s 1977 feature, Ceddo, demonstrates the depth of Sembène’s historical vision, for in this film he goes beyond the dominant model of Europe and Christianity as the sole external colonizing force in Africa to include Islam and Arabism as the flip side of the same colonial coin. Ceddo recasts the history of Islam, Christianity and slaving activities in the Senegambia region.

Revisioning the Algerian war of independence from France is central in numerous films such as Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina’s 1975 epic, Chronique des Années de Braise (Chronicle of the Years of Embers), in Slim Riad’s Al-Tariq (1968, La Voie), and more recently, Mohamed Chouick’s Youcef ou la Légende du Septième Dormant (1993) and Rachida Krim’s Sous Le Pied Des Femmes (1997, Where Women Tread) which foregrounds the participation and experiences of Algerian women in the armed struggle, experiences which are confined mostly to the background in numerous male-directed films on this subject.

In a somewhat different vein, but with memory as its motor force, Moufida Tlatli’s brilliant Les Silences Du Palais (1994) revisions and rewrites a certain moment of Tunisian history, the period of the ‘beys’, the last rulers of Tunisia. She does this from a female perspective and in refreshingly imaginative ways that privilege and foreground individual lives and desires. These films present more complex and balanced accounts of the nature and implications of the participation of women in these struggles for liberation. More significantly, they indict the regressive tendencies of their male compatriots who, in many cases, retrogress by insisting on pushing women back and restricting them to domestic spheres once the armed phase of the struggle is over. Hence, the imperative of a second liberation struggle for women in these narratives.

The armed struggles of Africans against various European colonial powers have provided rich narrative material for a number of African filmmakers who preserve this glory moment of their history on film, and also use it to speak about the pressures and challenges of the post-liberation moment. Portuguese colonialism in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique and the armed resistance to it is the subject of a number of films. A most significant figure in this sense is pioneer female filmmaker, Sarah Maldoror, who has, perhaps more than any other African filmmaker, documented and worked on other documentations of the liberation struggles of Africans against colonialism. After working as assistant to Gillo Pontecorvo in his epic Battle of Algiers (1966), Maldoror went on to make Monangambee (1970), a parody of colonial ignorance shot in Algeria, and based on a short story by Angolan writer, Luandino Vieira, who, at the time, was imprisoned by the Portuguese colonial authorities in a labor camp in Tarrafal in the Cape Verde Islands. Maldoror’s next film on the armed resistance in Guinea-Bissau was Des Fusils pour Banta (1971), a film shot in the guerrilla battlefields Guinea-Bissau. Her first feature film, Sambizanga (1972), shot in Condgo-Brazzaville, remains to this day the most imaginative and moving portrait of the initial phase of the Angolan liberation struggle against Portuguese colonial domination. A most important feature in Maldoror’s re-writing is the manner in which she restores and highlights the role of women in the struggle, something that was somewhat muffled in the novel, The true Life of Domingos Xavier, by Luandino Veiera, from which the film is adapted.

Like Maldoror, Flora Gomes of Guinea-Bissau also undertakes the task to preserve and move beyond the experience of armed struggle in Guinea-Bissau in his critically acclaimed first feature, Mortu Nega, made in 1989, some fifteen years after independence from Portugal. Triumphalist as well as skeptical, Mortu Nega celebrates the heroism of the freedom fighters, especially that of the female comrades, and at the same time questions and indicts the betrayal of the ideals for which people were mobilized and motivated to fight. Liberation and independence brought negligible changes in the life circumstances of the majority rank and file, but the few elite who replaced the ousted colonialists profit from their positions. His other well-received film, The Blue Eyes of Yonta (1992), as well as his most recent feature film, Nha Fala (My Voice, 2002), to some extent, takes up this issue again and extends it to explore the meaning of the liberation struggle for the younger generation who did not witness it. “A luta continua,” these films seem to be saying.

Mozambicans and their numerous supporters from different parts of the world have also produced a significant number of films that document as well as revision their experiences with Portuguese colonialism and its legacies. Ranging from the support and mobilization documentaries such as African American Robert Van Lierop’s classic A Luta Continua (The Struggle Continues, 1970) to the first feature by Ruy Guerra, Mueda: Memoria E Massacre (Mueda: Memory and Massacre, 1979) on the 1960 massacre of six hundred people by the Portuguese in the village of Mueda, to the more recent reflections on the aftermath of the post-liberation debacle with apartheid-South African supported RENAMO, these films provide perspectives on the oppression, exploitation and resistance of Mozambicans that stand in stark contrast to the manipulative dominant narratives of afro-communism and anti-communism propagated by the Portuguese as well as the apartheid South African state. Because the interval between the events and their documentation on film was, in many cases, very brief, some of these films, as well as the many others that deal with the South African resistance to apartheid , can also be seen as instances of what Michael Green, in reference to similar moves by novelists in South Africa, labels “the present as history.” Here, filmmakers, like novelists in similar contexts, “… charted the events of the day with an immediacy born of the almost instant recognition of their ‘historical’ significance.”

South African cinema in the post-Apartheid moment has yet to probe more profoundly the rich and troubled history, both distant and more recent, of this part of the continent. To be sure, there are many films that allude to aspects of the past, however, the history film as a genre, particularly films from the points of view of the historically oppressed majority, is yet to emerge in South African film culture. Hollywood and Hollywood clones, such as John Badenhorst’s Slavery of Love (1998), have thus far usurped the task. Perhaps, the few projects currently in process that I am aware of as well as the South African National Film Foundation identification of history and stories of liberation as subjects for priority funding will begin to effect a significant turn in this direction in the years to come. In the meanwhile, one has to look to a few short films as well as a number of series commissioned by various bodies and organizations for such narratives of memory and exorcizing the past. A number of these were inspired by the proceedings and revelations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission under the chairmanship of Bishop Desmond Tutu. Examples would include Sechaba Morojele’s Ubuntu’s Wounds (2001), a film which probes the issue of memory, revenge and forgiveness. Sechaba’s film resonates interestingly with Raoul Peck’s 1988 film, Haitian Corner, as well as fellow South African writer, Achmat Dangor’s novel, Bitter Fruit. Khalo Matabane’s The Young Lions (1991), the story of three friends and anti-apartheid activists who endured and survived prison and torture, also deals with the recent past. One of the comrades is suspected by the other two of snitching and betraying them, and the film shows their encounter years later to talk about the experience and reconcile.

Also of interest here is a number of films, mostly made for TV dramas, that have emerged recently in South Africa, revisiting certain moments and figures of the distant and more immediate past. The 1999 courtroom drama series Saints, Sinners and Settlers readily comes to mind. Five films make up this series: The Real Estate Man: The Trial of Dingane by Micky Madoda Dube, The Good Doctor: The Trial of Dr. H. F. Verwoerd by Robbie Thompson, Days of the Two Suns: The Trial of Xhosa Prophetess Nongqawuse by John Matshikiza, The Reluctant Settler: The Trial of Jan van Riebeck by John Matshikiza, and To the Bitter End: The Trial of Lord Kitchener by Minky Schlesinger. Three other films of great significance and masterful artistry (while steering clearly away from the sometimes troubling comic overtones of some films in the above series) are Zola Maseko’s The Life and Times of Sara Baartman: The Hottentot Venus (1998), A Drink in the Passage (2002), adapted from Alan Paton’s short story of the same title, and Lindy Wilson’s The Guguletu Seven (2000).

The SACOD-produced four part series, Landscape of Memory, also offers critical perspectives on many aspects of the struggles for liberation and reconciliation in Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Of particular interest is the film by Richard Pakleppa, Nda Mona (I Have Seen, 1999), which takes a critical look at the internal dynamics of the SWAPO-led liberation struggle against apartheid South African colonialism. Those labeled as collaborators and traitors and who survived the punitive actions of the guerilla movement remember their experiences and narrate them on film. These voices stand in opposition to the official post-liberation arguments to forget, reconcile and move forward. Juxtaposing these opposing voices, the film dramatizes a clash of memories and throws up a different dimension to the question as to what happens when local/individual memory and state discourse come into conflict in what Richard Werbner terms “the making of political subjectivity.”

Nda Mona foregrounds the other side, so to speak, of the SWAPO-led liberation struggle, that is, the actions against its own adversaries or those tagged as such, in much the same ways as the post-apartheid South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission insisted on laying bare the actions of the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups and individuals some labeled as “crimes.” Are these instances of blaming the victims? Are such interrogations of actions taken in the heat of struggle ideological and premature, especially in light of the fact that the story or stories of the struggle from the point of view of the combatants have yet to be told? These are some of the questions raised in relation to films such as Nda Mona and others that are seen to place in the background the narratives and actions of the colonial state that the liberation movements were fighting against. In Zimbabwe, Flame by British-born and Zimbabwe-naturalized Ingrid Sinclair has occasioned similar debates.

Further up north, memory work in a number of films by Ethiopian filmmakers tends toward a radical break with a feudal past that is projected as fetishized nostalgia, and a more recent bloody experiment in socialist transformation. The thread that runs through Haile Gerima’s Harvest: 3000 Years (1976) and Imperfect Journey (1994), Salem Mekuria’s Deluge (1995), and Yemane Demissie’s Tumult (1996) is a project to revision the foundational narrative of a 3000 year Solomonic Ethiopia in light of the experience with feudalism and a failed revolution and their legacies. Harvest: 3000 Years casts a critical glance at the ways the feudal state under Haile Selassie, especially, manipulated legend and myth to perpetuate allegiance to a glorious past that was able to keep the vast majority of Ethiopian peasantry under feudal control.

Made at a moment of transition between the end of the feudal regime and dawn of the revolutionary regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam, Harvest contests and subverts the reigning feudal narratives and also anticipates, somewhat prophetically, the still unfinished struggle against similar forces of subjugation in the post-feudal era. Tumult, for its part, revisits the 1960s failed attempts by students, in alliance with segments of the military, to topple Haile Selassie’s regime. Deploying a class analysis, Demissie chronicles the psychological fallout of this moment for individuals. The competing narratives of history that the film eloquently presents provide a solid foundation for better understandings of the continuing struggles in contemporary Ethiopia. This is also what Salem Mekuria accomplishes in Deluge, which revisits, from a more personal point of view, a more recent moment in 1970s and 1980s Ethiopia under the “Dergue” of Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Mekuria’s second major work, Yewonz Maibel (Deluge, 1995), is a moving personal journey back to the post-Haile Selassie Ethiopia and the 1978-79 bloody moment of the Red Terror campaign of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia against his opposition. The human toll of the conflict that pitted relatives, families and close friends on different sides, as well as the difficult but necessary process of healing and reconciliation in the ’90s, when the film was shot in Ethiopia, are highlighted in the film. Using her first person voice as the narrative vehicle, Mekuria reconstructs the events of the moment with the aid of personal correspondence with and memories of her brother and her best friend, photographs, archival footage of the period, paintings and music. Mekuria’s brother, Solomon, and her best friend, Nigist Adane, grew up together and started out as comrades in a common struggle to bring down the feudal monarchy, but ended up on different sides in the new revolutionary order under the dictatorship of the military. Solomon is executed by Nigist’s party which is allied to the Dergue, but she herself ends up losing her life at the hands of the same Dergue, all on ideological grounds. Through this personal and self-reflexive narrative, the recent history of a whole nation and region is laid bare and reinterpreted, and its implications for the future of the region are made explicit.

Not all Ethiopian filmic revisioning of history posit total rupture with the past. Many embrace and celebrate those aspects of the past deemed heroic and usable in the present. The proud history of resistance to foreign domination, particularly the fact that Ethiopia is one of two African countries that were never formally colonized, is a central theme in Ethiopian historiography, and it is one that has imposed itself in different ways in most Ethiopian films. Theo Eshetu’s Il Sangue Non E Acqua Fresca (1998, Blood Is Not Fresh Water) uses the filmmaker’s grandfather, Tekle Tsadik Mekouria, a historian in his own right, as the principal narrative vehicle for re-telling the story of Ethiopia across broad time spans, events and achievements. An impressive mosaic of images, archival footage, personal testimonies and humor is mobilized with great skill and imagination to speak about Ethiopia of Solomonic origins, her ancient and proud heritage of culture, religion and art, and the experiences with Italian fascist invasion in 1936, seemingly to avenge their defeat half a century earlier in 1896 at the Battle of Adwa. This is the same glory moment in Ethiopian history that Haile Gerima retells and claims not just for Ethiopia, but the whole of Africa, in his recent film, Adwa: An African Victory (1999).

The kind of critical embrace and celebration of such glory moments of African history and their projection into the present and the future, evident in Gerima’s Adwa: An African Victory, as well as in many other films such as Jean-Marie Teno’s Afrique, Je Te Plumerai (1991), informs the recent masterpiece of Raoul Peck, Lumumba (2000). The heroic figure of Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minster of the Congo and great Pan-Africanist, looms so large in the consciousness and memory of Raoul Peck, that he devotes two different films to the life and times of this exceptional revolutionary hero. Peck made a first documentary in 1991 based on stories about Lumumba his mother narrated to him while growing up as a child in the Congo at the time of Lumumba. Almost ten years later, in 2000, he came out with a fiction feature on the same figure that has, among many other things, re-ignited a long repressed debate in Belgium regarding Belgian colonial terror in the Congo and her complicity in the brutal murder of Lumumba. Peck’s Lumumba is the latest in a series of well crafted and highly acclaimed films that re-write African history from African points of view.

Another equally great work is the 1998 film, Pièces d’Identités by Congolese filmmaker Ngangura Mweze. The distinction, charm and effectiveness of this film derive from the focus and precision of a captivating story, its mastery of film language, the sophistication and elegance of the visual style and the complexity and sharpness of its critical evocation and analysis of the past and the present, as well as the imaginative blending of tradition and modernity. Mani Kongo’s journey in search of her daughter from Congo to Belgium and back, opens up the different and diverse world of African immigrant communities in present-day Brussels. At the same time, it opens up for memory, scrutiny and re-interpretation the Belgian colonial past and its legacies.

Like Peck’s Lumumba, Mweze’s film is simultaneously entertainment, sociology, anthropology, history, politics and art. In it we encounter old and new Africa, old and new Belgium and the new products of the myriad encounters between all of these over the years. Hybrid identities and the ways they give shape to notions of globalization are evoked in many ways in the film. Another important film on history in the Congo is Monique Phoba’s Un Reve d’independence (1998) on the subject of Congolese medical assistants during the period of Belgian colonization of the Congo. Phoba uses the case history of her own grandfather and family history to critically portray and reflect on Belgian colonial practices and 37 years of independence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

If Peck’s Lumumba reiterates Patrice Lumumba as a heroic figure of African history, Bassek Ba Kobhio’s Le Grand Blanc de Lambarène (1995) reiterates the figure of Albert Schweitzer as non-heroic. Universally acclaimed for his sense of philanthropy and concern for the welfare of the African wretched of the earth, Albert Schweitzer is celebrated in dominant European accounts of his life and work as a missionary figure who gave up bourgeois comforts and privileges for a life of struggle to save and bring civilization to “natives in the heart of darkness,” deep in the ‘jungles’ of central Africa in Gabon.

Ba Kobhio’s film offers a radically different account of this philanthropist-missionary as he takes a subversive look at Schweitzer’s motivations, methods, styles, work and relationships with and attitudes toward his adopted environment from the point of view of the “natives.” Seen from the perspective of Kumba, the young boy who grew up to fulfill his aspiration of becoming a doctor, an aspiration considered unrealistic and unachievable for a native by Schweitzer, the film presents Schweitzer as racist, condescending, patronizing, arrogant, dictatorial and completely detached from and insensitive to the desires, aspirations and culture of the local people he has come to save. Kumba fittingly rebukes Schweitzer when he says, “The independence of the people has never been your concern. You only wanted to share their hell in the hope of reaching your heaven.” In short, the film rewrites the relations between Schweitzer and the host population as colonial.

Significantly, Le Grand Blanc de Lambarène also tells the story of post-colonial disillusionment by chronicling the path taken by the protagonist/narrator, Kumba, from a young man aspiring to become a physician to actually becoming one and then becoming a leader in the struggle to end colonial rule and also a leader in the post-colonial government. It is a film as much about Schweitzer in early twentieth century Gabon as it is about the hopes and betrayals of independence in late twentieth century Africa. The style of history film that would respond to Ali Mazrui’s label of “romantic gloriana”, a proximate of the traditional Hollywood costume drama is practically absent in much of African cinema, except, perhaps, for the epics of Egyptian filmmaker Youcef Chahine and two historical epics by Nigerian filmmaker, Adamu Halilu. His 1976 film, Shehu Umar is a vast chronicle of the life and times of the eponymous turn of the century figure whose life story he traces in this narrative about Islam in West Africa. The film is an adaptation of the novel Shaihu Umar, written in 1955 in Hausa by Alhagy Sir Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa, the first Prime Minister of Nigeria. Halilu followed this film in 1979 with another 165-minute epic entitled Kanta of Kebi, the story of a Hausa hero who fought against the invasion of the town of Kebbi by the Songhai in the fourteenth century.

Such narratives of heroism in ancient Africa coincide with similar moves in African historiography of the 70s which tended to focus on the grandeur of pre-colonial empires and grand figures. African filmmakers still look back at such moments of the past but with different formal strategies and ideological goals. For example, in Keita: Heritage of the Griot (1994), Burkinabe filmmaker Dany Kouyaté goes back centuries and re-enacts the Mande ‘master’ narrative, the epic of Sundiata Keita, the thirteenth century founding figure of the Mali Empire. However, Kouyaté is interested less in re-telling the entire epic – he only limits the narrative to the point where Sundiata leaves for exile – than in using it as a springboard to reflect on the imperative of producing more imaginative and productive uses of heritages of the past for the present as well as the future.

A pronounced absence in African films about history is a sustained focus on issues of slavery. With the exception of a few recent works with slavery as a primary narrative focus, such as Roger Gnoan Mbala’s Addangaman (1999), John Badenhorst’s Slavery of Love (1998), Haile Gerima’s Sankofa (1993), François Woukoache’s Asientos (1995), Med Hondo’s West Indies: Les Nègres Marrons de la Liberté (1979), Ola Oalogun’s Black Goddess (1975), and Mahama Johnson-Traoré’s Reou Takh (1972), African filmmakers have, in the main, shied away from this aspect of African world history. Many have referenced this aspect of the African historical experience in films with other narrative and thematic focus, for example, Med Hondo’s classic Soleil-O (1970), but only a handful has taken up the issue as a central subject. One has to look to the work of Diaspora Africans in the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America, as well as Hollywood, for a more significant corpus on this question. I want to defer a discussion of the reasons for this gap in African cinema for another project. However, there are signs of change, judging by some of the products of the last decade, especially. Reou Takh (1972) by Mahama Johnson Traoré, Black Goddess (1978) by Ola Balogun and Asientos (1995) by François Woukoache are related by their overarching concern with slavery and its legacies for Africans as well as people of African descent in the Diaspora. However, the representational codes deployed by Woukoache stand in radical contrast to those used by his predecessors, notwithstanding the imaginary flashback to slavery times in Reou Takh and in Black Goddess. All three films privilege a search motif. Reou Takh anticipates partially the much-heralded Roots TV series of the late 70s in the US to the extent to which it has an African American return to a now independent Senegal in search of his roots.

Black Goddess is a kind of Roots in Reverse. The temporal location of the film is the present, and it tells the story of a Nigerian who goes back to contemporary Bahia in Brazil in search of descendants of his family captured and taken away during the slave trade. To help his search, he carries with him the piece of a pair of twin carvings that are his family heirloom that remained in Nigeria. The other piece was carried away to Brazil by a member of the family who was captured and enslaved. Armed with this carving, he succeeds in reconnecting with family on the other side in Bahia when the other piece is produced and identified. Asientos is also an exercise in reconnection, but an imaginary one this time.

In Reou Takh, an African American returns to Gorée Island in Senegal. Standing at the “Door of No Return” in the Slave House and ambling around other places on the island, the African American protagonist of the film engages in a series of imaginary flashbacks to the times when the island was active as a slave fort, the last point of contact with Africa for the millions of captured Africans on their way across the Middle Passage to the New World of plantation slavery in the Americas. His encounters with contemporary Senegal, especially in the capital city of Dakar, also reveals the cruel legacies of colonialism, a proximate cousin of slavery, in the social inequities, conflicts and injustices rampant in the society. Reou Takh reconstructs the African past and speaks to her present in the same breath. Asientos repeats this feat, but with signal differences. It retraces the institutions and practices of slavery and inserts them within prevailing discourses of race and capitalism, all from the point of view of a young African attempting to come to grips with this repressed chapter of history. The film visually revises the image of Gorée Island and, thereby, extends its significance for the present. Like Reou Takh, its most apparent concern is slavery and to the extent to which the latter is emblematic of human suffering, the film posits possible parallels with contemporary abuses of human beings in Africa, in general, with visual references to recent events and tragedies in Ethiopia and Rwanda. It ruminates on the past while linking it to the present, and it poses questions about the future. Unlike the linear realist narrative mode of Reou Takh, Asientos undertakes the task of re-memory, reconstruction and reconnection by means of a skillful and highly imaginative blend of collage (of disparate images, sounds and silence), of documentary and invention, juxtapositions, contrapuntal montage, poetry, direct address and rhetorical questions. Its visual style and rhythm endow the film with formal elements that mark it as different, if not ‘new’, relatively speaking. However, in spite of its novelty, Asientos bears certain formal and stylistic marks of Djibril Diop-Mambety’s 1972 classic Touki Bouki as well as Med Hondo’s Soleil-O (1970) and Haile Gerima’s Sankofa (1993).

The film that has thus far been hailed as, perhaps, the most imaginative and compelling revisioning of the story of slavery and resistance from an African point of view, is no doubt Haile Gerima’s Sankofa (1993) which foregrounds race and gender in a Pan-African re-narration of the experience of slavery. At the beginning of Sankofa, an off-screen poetic voice combines with Kofi Ghanaba’s “atumpan” drums along with a montage of diverse images and sounds to invoke and exhort the spirits of the dead, the maimed, the damaged, the raped, the brutalized to RISE UP and TELL their story. Embodied in this verbal and non-verbal call, addressed primarily to the present heirs of a brutalized past, is Gerima’s belief and faith in the ability, indeed, the imperative, of the Black wretched of the earth to assume positions of primary agency in the construction of a different present and future order by interrogating and learning from the past. What the past can do for the present and the future is, indeed, what Sankofa is mostly about, and as the Akan proverb states, Se wo were fi na wo sankofa a yenkyi (It is not a taboo to go back and fetch it if you forget). We are permitted to return and retrieve. Sankofa starts in the present (a present that articulates and resonates with the past), then flashes back into history (a history momentarily interrupted to call forth the present) and “ends” in the present (a present projected into the future). Thus, Sankofa is as much about the past as it is about the present and the future of Black people all over the world.

Indeed, Sankofa resonates with Child of Resistance (1972), Bush Mama (1976), Wilington 10, USA 10,000 (1976), Harvest: 3000 Years (1976), Ashes and Embers (1982), Adwa: An African Victory (1999), Gerima’s films, which all foreground African and Black subject positions to tell stories of oppression and, more importantly, of active resistance, of self-affirmation, and of liberation. In all these films, Gerima privileges not only African and Black points of view, but equally significant is his imaginative deployment of Black habitus, the use of a broad range of the artistic resources of African and Black traditions of narrative, of music and of movement to construct filmic narratives that are at once complex, multi-layered, multi-textured, multi-lingual and extremely compelling. In Gerima’s work, form, or more generally, representation is of paramount importance, aesthetically and politically, for it is the ways in which he avails himself of the full range of the artistic heritage of a broader Pan-African world to construct his narratives that constitute much of the force and originality of his work. This is certainly the case with Sankofa.

In Sankofa, Gerima, an Ethiopian, appropriates an indigenous Akan (West African) metaphor of past present future to re-tell the story of slavery from Pan-African subject positions, and the result is a refreshingly innovative and extremely engaging and complex filmic version of this moment in Black history, a version that is radically different from dominant Hollywood and academic narratives of slavery. Sankofa details the brutality and inhumanity of slavery from the point of view of a Black woman, Shola (Oyefunmike Ogunlano, an African American), who seamlessly interweaves her own personal narrative with that of the other subjugated Blacks in the Lafayette slave plantation. Additionally, Gerima approaches the brutality and inhumanity of the slave system in ways that position the spectator to transcend it in order to focus more on the humanity, culture, creativity, strength, resilience, will and liberatory struggles and actions of those subjected to its regime of oppression and dehumanization. More significantly, it posits these characteristics (the humanity, culture, creativity, strength, resilience, will and struggle) as potent cultural armor, the most enduring legacy of the past, still useful and enabling for the present as well as the future.

In contrast to dominant narratives on slavery which tend to be apologetic and patronizing, and which project a generally homogenized, history-less, passive Black victim-object who resigns him/herself to the condition of slavery–usually masked as benign and a form of salvation from African barbarity–and who occasionally may make demands, through some mild actions, for better treatment by “massa”, Gerima’s Sankofa offers a more complex perspective. Sankofa problematizes, subverts and, ultimately, negates slavery’s claims of absolute control of the minds and bodies of those it subjugates–a perspective that permeates most dominant narratives. It constructs the subjugated as complex subjects with histories, desires and differences, and it represents them as individuals with a clear sense of self and other, actively resisting and contesting and, at times, collaborating with an inhumane system, but more often actively articulating freedom and struggling for liberation.

Subjugation in Sankofa is a temporary condition. The narrative thrust is toward struggle, change and liberation, and the spectator is put on alert from the very beginning to orient her/himself to this direction. Whereas dominant narratives adopt a linear mode to freeze slavery in the past, fix it predominantly in America and, thus, posit a radical rupture between Africa and the Diaspora that slavery created. In part, Sankofa critically deploys the Akan metaphor of unbroken spiral – “sankofa” – in order to connect the past to the present and to erase geo-cultural boundaries between Africa and the Diaspora. Hence, Gerima’s sustained focus on the internal dynamics of the subjugated Black community in the narrative. The amount of screen time occupied by white slave masters and their essentialist discourses is limited, as is their staying power. They appear only to eventually fade away, be eliminated and give way to Black subjugated voices in all their diversity and complexity, for Sankofa is, indeed, their story.

The narrative strategies adopted by Gerima in Sankofa enhance the profoundness and complexity of the story. Non-linearity, constant temporal and spatial shifts, use of mythic elements such as the buzzard to enable such shifts, contrapuntal montage, repetition, multiple layering of sound, music and voices, shifts in narrative points of view even while privileging that of a female captive, Shola, stories within stories, flashbacks, memory–all these are skillfully conflated to invent a film language that most effectively and appropriately captures and conveys the heartbeat of this story of struggle, of change and of liberation. It is in the area of narrative technique and form that Sankofa distinguishes itself, and Gerima’s skill and bold inventiveness with film language enable him to make spectators see and discursively experience slavery in new ways.

Nunu (Alexandra Duah of Ghana), Shango (Mutabaruka of Jamaica), the numerous courageous field hands and the Maroons constitute the principal agents of this movement, and their stories are filtered through the voice of Shola, a central figure who, along with Nunu, incarnates the metaphor of the past present future. Mona, the contemporary model who has “forgotten” her Africaness or Blackness – she protests that she is an American – is able to construct a different sense of her identity only after she returns mentally to the past, inhabits the body and soul of her soul sister of slavery times, Shola, and learns from the struggles of the latter and the people around her, such as Nunu and Shango.

In Mona, reincarnated as Shola, the present and the past come together. Mona physically returns to Africa as a model/tourist, to Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, the site of operations of slavery, and descends into the dungeons of the castle like the other white tourists to hear the guide narrate aspects of the story of the castle. But unlike these other tourists, she receives a different lesson in history. She is confronted with and captured by the spirits of captive Africans of history and is obliged to make a mental journey back into this history across the Atlantic Ocean. When she emerges from the depths of the dungeon from her communion with Shola, she has undergone an epiphany, one that enables her to see, experience and read the meaning and significance of the castle for herself, in particular, in new ways.

Similarly, Joe (Nick Medley), who also experiences a severe identity crisis, arrives at a different sense of self only after embracing the heritage of his mother, Nunu, of whom he was ashamed and who he tragically murdered along with his father Raphael, and after negating the teachings of Father Raphael. These are two examples of the nature of the discourse of subjugation and change that Sankofa engages. It is a process that anchors itself in history and in African cultures, and it is a complex sense of history and culture that Gerima represents in complex and aesthetically challenging ways. The call of the poetic voice-over, the call of Kofi Ghanaba’s “atumpan” drums and the call of history have been heard by many in the Diaspora, and some of these are the ones seated on the cliffs of Cape Coast Castle facing the waters of the Atlantic awaiting others like Mona, the most recent “arrivant.” Significantly, Gerima’s wife, Shirikiana Aina’s Through The Door Of No Return (1998), profiles these Diaspora Africans who responded to the call of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, in 1957 for African Americans to consider Ghana a home to which they can return. Aina’s film not only explores the personal histories, vision and motivation of these returnees but also, most importantly, asks the Ghanaian hosts if they “remember us”, i.e. those that were taken across the ocean centuries earlier?

In contrast to Sankofa and few other films which indict Europe and her agents as major culprits in the tragedy of slavery and the slave trade, the most recent film by Ivoirian filmmaker, Roger Gnoan Mbala, Addangaman (1999), focuses exclusively on the part played by Africans in this tragedy. Addangaman positions itself as a radical departure from its few predecessors in that its subject matter and target of criticism and indictment is the indigenous African ruling elite which deployed its military and coercive powers to wage war on and subjugate rival populations some of whom were then sold into slavery. Mbala tells the story of one such despot somewhere in Africa in the seventeenth century, highlighting the role played by the legendary female military regiments, the Amazons. Using a love story to anchor his revisioning of this aspect of African history, Mbala also dramatizes the resistance by individuals and communities to these indigenous despots.

Another recent film that also brings to the fore and interrogates the African role in the slave trade, albeit in a different register, is the docu-fiction, Middle Passage (1999) by Martiniquan fimmaker, Guy Deslauriers. Middle Passage revisions the experience of slavery from the point of view of the captives holed up in the slave ships as they make their way across the ocean to the new world. Deslauriers is also the director of L’exil de Behanzin, a 1994 feature about the Dahomean monarch, King Ahydjère Behanzin, who, after many years of resisting the French, was subdued and forced into exile to Martinique in 1890 by the French.

The films of Med Hondo, Soleil-O (1970), West Indies (1979) and Sarraounia (1986) inscribe themselves within a different current of revising history on film. Mohamed Abid Hondo (popularly know as Med Hondo) is generally regarded as one of the most talented, vocal and rather uncompromising advocates for a genuinely revolutionary African and Black cinema, both in terms of subject matter and technique. The ensemble of his cinematic oeuvre constitutes a significant segment of African and Third World cinema ‘movement’ whose project is to redefine and reorient the use of cinema in the context of the historical as well as contemporary experiences and challenges of these societies. His work also registers a certain shift away from much of mainstream African cinema in many respects, particularly in matters of thematic focus, approach, tone and temperament. The dominant preoccupation in films ranging from his first feature Soleil-O (1970) to Les Bicots Nègres: Vos Voisins (1973) to West Indies: Les Nègres Marrons de la Liberté (1979), for example, is the conditions and struggles of immigrant workers and populations in France whose experiences with French nationals and institutions are figured as a metaphor for slavery, colonialism and their legacies in Africa and the Caribbean. This focus on the Black experience in France, seen from the perspective of history and Hondo’s transgressive deployment of a broad range of cinematic, linguistic and musical codes, combine to confer on his work a kind of enduring relevance and poignancy well beyond the temporal setting of the narratives. One only has to cast a quick wink at the present climate in France, with the ascendancy of Jean-Marie “the-Holocaust-was-a-detail-of-history” LePen and his far right neo-Nazi primitive nationalist program and the insidious nod and complicity of the Gaullist right and segments of the liberal center-left, to be convinced of the staying power and prophetic dimension of Hondo’s early and mid-1970s narratives. Sarraounia is the fourth feature length film by Med Hondo. The result of seven years of constant struggle with insufficient financial resources and extremely difficult conditions of production, Sarraounia is hailed as one of the first truly African cinematic epics. Neither historical nostalgia nor a romance of past glory, Sarraounia is a song in praise of dignity, determination, difference and devotion to ideals of freedom, justice, tolerance, understanding and love. It is also a study on the mentality of terror, as well as a lament about closed minds and their dehumanizing consequences.

An adaptation of a novel by Abdoulaye Mamani of Niger, who culled the material for his narrative from oral traditions as well as written documents, the film reconstructs and reinterprets an important and tragic moment in the history of West Africa and her encounters with European colonialism. The narrative is based on actual events that transpired in Niger and the surrounding Sahel sub-region in the waning moments of the nineteenth century, the high moment of terrorism, pillage, dispossession and subjugation directed at Africa and Africans in the name of progress, reason, God, country and civilization, the dawn of the age of empire and colony. This was also the moment of the British ransacking of Benin. In the wake of the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 in which European countries arbitrarily carved up the African continent into colonies and spheres of influence, France and England, in particular, embarked on a vigorous campaign to effectively occupy, establish and expand those spaces allotted to them in the Berlin agreement. As part of this program of effective occupation and colonial expansion, the French dispatched a military column under the command of Captains Paul Voulet and Chanoine from the French Soudan (present-day Mali) in 1898 to undertake the conquest of Chad in the east and to put a halt to the advance of Rabah, an Arab adventurer whose project was to set up kingdom in the heart of Africa. The scorched earth methods and wanton terrorist cruelty of this expeditionary force, composed of 8 French officers, 180 regular foot soldiers, 70 non-uniformed auxiliaries, 390 war captives and porters, 260 concubines and female cooks and their material, laid waste kingdom after kingdom in its path, instilled widespread panic, fear and destruction among peaceful villages, many of which actually welcomed them with open arms in hope of being spared their terror. While some kingdoms readily collaborated with the invaders in the hope of finally subduing their feared and independent rival, Sarraounia, and others capitulated without a fight, Sarraounia, queen and military leader of the Azna, mobilized her people and resources, military as well as magical, to confront the French force which launched a fierce attack on her fortress capital of Lougou. Overwhelmed by the superior firepower of the French, Sarraounia and her fighters retreated tactically from the fortress, and engaged the attackers in a protracted guerrilla battle which eventually forced the French to abandon their project of subduing her.

News of the savage atrocities of the Voulet-Chanoine expedition prompted the French military command headquarters to dispatch a seasoned ‘colonial hand’, Colonel Klobb, to go after Voulet and terminate his command. Rather than submit, Voulet killed Klobb, renounces France and resolves to push on, independent of any French authority. However, before he is able to embark on this lone adventurism some African foot soldiers revolted and shot him to death.

Having successfully resisted the French, Sarraounia abandoned her former palace and stronghold and set up a new settlement composed of the surviving Azna and resisters and refugees from the other neighboring kingdoms that were decimated by French military terror. Med Hondo follows these events of African and French colonial history to produce a counter-narrative which, in its scope, structure, style, tone and language, accomplishes the compound tasks of recovery, re-telling and re-interpretation in a manner that makes the past speak in new and different ways in the accent of a renovated sense of life and humanity. Paradoxically, if the film Sarraounia un-silenced and unburied an aspect of the African and French colonial past, contemporary French distribution and exhibition circuits worked to silence the film by withdrawing it from all but one minor theater in Paris three weeks after its opening in theaters owned and operated by Les Films de La Rochelle throughout France, while the normally loud and loquacious French television and newspaper film reviewers as well as critics remained silent. A conspiracy to shield the average French person from engaging a not-so-glorious moment of the land of liberté, egalité, fraternité? A debatable question, but one which mobilized more than a hundred critics, filmmakers, artists, academics, politicians, lawyers in France to petition in protest. Perhaps, Jean Suret-Canale captures it best when he expresses his anxiety “moins pour lui [i.e., Med Hondo] l’attaque directe…que l’étouffement insidieux, la consigne du silence.” A similar fate was also meted out to Ousmane Sembene’s Camp de Thiaroye (1988) when, it is reported, instructions were given to all French Cultural Centers in Africa not to screen the film in their facilities. Sarraounia relates parallel narratives of struggle, sacrifice, determination and vision, one historical and the other contemporary. The conflation of the past and the present in the story of the legendary Queen Sarraounia and in the story of the production, distribution and exhibition of the finished film itself is a revealing and instructive aspect of African creativity and resilience.

Like other Africans engaged in memory work and history, such as traditional oral artists, griots, creative writers, visual artists and scholars, African filmmakers have been increasingly undertaking the task of re-telling the African past and of looking at the present in the past from their own diverse subject positions. Such tasks take on the aura and weight of a cultural duty and obligation, for as Franz Fanon correctly observes, “Colonialisation is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.”

The histories of Africans as well as former colonies – written, authorized and validated by non-Africans – have been characterized by “exclusions, erasures, silences, distortions and arbitrary fictions,” and because of this, filmmakers and others have taken on the task of “purging their histories of imposed remembrances” and privileging the voices of hitherto suppressed subjects in order to construct different histories of Africa and Africans. Filmmakers engaged in such projects inscribe themselves within a tradition of radical counter historiography and discourse exemplified in the work of Cheikh Anta Diop, John Hendrik Clark, Walter Rodney, Basil Davidson and many others outside of Africa who have been engaged in similar styles of historiography.

As I have indicated elsewhere, a few common features run through these different film versions of history, as the preceding descriptions and analyses have, I trust, identified. These films recover and re-articulate aspects of African popular memory and subaltern voices to preserve as well as reconfigure past events. They seem to take to heart the perceptive observation by Malian sage, Amadou Hampaté Ba, that in Africa “when an old person dies it’s like a library burning down.” In their radical reconstruction of Euro-Christian as well as Arab-Islamic histories and how these are implicated in African history, these films also conflate Euro-Christianity and Arab-Islam as two sides of the same colonial coin, as cognate systems of cultural domination.

The national as well as the Pan-African nature and dimension of these histories, as well as the recovery and reconstitution of African women’s histories (mostly from male viewpoints because of the predominance of male filmmakers), are also highlighted in many of these films. These films deconstruct European ideologies of self and other, and construct and privilege of more diverse and complex African subject positions with particular attention to categories of race, ethnicity, religion and gender. Most importantly, all of these films affirm African agency and subjectivity, grounding their versions of history, as Stuart Hall observes in another context, not on archaeology and simple recovery, but on imaginative, purposeful production and re-telling, anchored in a fusion of individual vision with a shared collective memory to put in place what the late South African novelist Bessie Head calls a “sense of historical community.”