Globalizing African Cinema?

by Mbye Cham

Berlin 1884 – confab aspirant globalizers Britain, France, Belgium, and a recently unified Germany, and the partitioning of and scramble for Africa. This gathering marks a significant moment in the process of formal colonialism in Africa, in particular, and the systematic incorporation and subjugation of Africa into a world structure in formation dominated by European capital, systems and technology.

Berlin 1989 – the ‘peoples revolution’. The fall of the wall and the dismantling of barriers of various forms in other places. This new space was hijacked in order to let loose the hitherto geographically circumscribed forces and ideologies of capital, technology and domination to roam easier around the world under a new moniker, globalization. Two moments, separated by a hundred years, in the same city, with worldwide implications! Is this a case of history repeating itself? What are the implications for Africans and African cultural industries such as cinema in particular?

Globalization has become the buzz word of the fin de siècle and is likely to continue to ooze from the lips, pens and keyboards of twenty first century humanity for quite sometime. Globalization raises a number of very important issues facing Africans today, and these challenges must be addressed consistently with imagination and conviction. I have no problems with a genuine egalitarian internationalism, predicated on respect for and acceptance of difference and diversity. But a predatory globalization, as conceived and promoted in dominant corporate and economic discourses, with their accent on a borderless, unfettered free market capitalism and their muffling of socio-cultural implications of dreary standardization, a narcissist super-power nationalism and erasure of local cultures and practices, presents problems and challenges which call for rigorous critical engagement and viable alternatives.

Globalization is presented as an innovation, a rising tide that will lift all boats. Thomas Friedman [The Lexus and the Olive Tree] describes it as a process that involves the inevitable “integration of markets, nation-states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before – in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations, and nation-states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before, and in a way that is also producing a powerful backlash from those brutalized or left behind by this new system.” Mobile capital, mobile labor, mobile technology. Doug Henwood, on his part, sees globalization as “a euphemizing and imprecise substitute for imperialism.” Thus, it is not really a new thing. Rather, the changes are incremental instead of fundamental. This is an extremely important point that should be borne in mind in any discussion of globalization. For Africans, in particular, globalization is the empires’ new clothes. Little has changed of Africa’s position from colonial to globalization eras, and the implications for African cultural industries and cinema are compelling.

Although the dominant accent has been on the economic and technological face of globalization, it is, like imperialism, all-encompassing, with a political, social and cultural face. Unlike imperialism, with its identifiable targets/manifestations/personifications, globalization is amorphous and elusive. Its presence is pervasive, constantly in motion, and not tangible. Hence, the enormity of the task to engage and control it. Answers to questions like ‘who do we shoot?’, ‘where and who do we picket and demonstrate against?’ may not readily come by in relation to globalization. They are there, however, as events in Davos and Seattle 1999 and similar antecedents in Europe and elsewhere may have demonstrated.

Is globalization per se a bad thing? Even though I have expressed a death wish for the term globalization, the idea of cross border/cultural connections and exchanges of various forms and scales is something good for humanity and recognized as such by Africans across broad time spans and geographic spaces. African systems of thought enshrine ideas of common local, regional and global humanity and the imperative of connections. We find examples in sayings like abantu ngabantu ngabantu (people are people only through other people), among the Nguni of Southern Africa, and nit nitay garab am (the human being is the cure of the human being), among the Wolof of Senegambia. Recent formulations such as Negritude, The African Personality and African Renaissance also privilege notions of globalization shaped in part by local, regional, and national African specificities and contributions to global systems. As such, I don’t think it is in the best interest of Africans, nor is it their desire or is it possible to retreat from the world and its technologies. Our contribution to and investment in global humanity is too precious to abandon. 
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