Globalizing African Cinema? cont'd.

What do these trends portend for local, regional specificities, forms and values in cultural production? Are we witnessing the progressive meltdown of the local in the face of a narcissist super power American nationalism masking as the global norm? Are we seeing a Euro-Americanization of cultures around the world, a new more powerful, nimble and insidious form of expansion, domination and control? It may seem so in many domains, but in the area of cultural practice, I think the issue is more complex as it touches at the heart of an enduring creative tension between the local and the global. I don’t believe the two are mutually exclusive entities, just like conceptions of tradition and modernity as polar opposites erase the dynamism inherent in these, while also fixing Africa in a static, traditional mode and the West in a dynamic, modern mode.

The pressures on African cultural producers, filmmakers, in particular, to jump on the bandwagon of a normative global film culture and to check their local cultures at the door are, indeed, enormous and seemingly insurmountable. However, I see in recent films such as Lumumba by Raoul Peck, La Genèse by Cheikh Oumar Cissoko, Mossane by Safi Faye, Pièces d’Identités by Ngangura Mweze, Mamlambo by Palesa Lelatkla-Nkosi, La Fumée Dans Les Yeux by Francois Woukoache, Le Damier by Balufu Kanyinda, Les Silences du Palais by Moufida Tlatli, On the Edge and Rage by Newton Aduaka, and many others too numerous to list here, instances of creative and productive deployment of individual and local specificities and cultures to navigate the world. I also see in these works the magic that can result from a skillful and critical use of new technologies to narrate African experiences in different ways. Rather than surrender to an overbearing global norm and an attempt to live up to Euro-American and commercial expectations which could well turn out to be a dead end, I see purposeful and imaginative appropriation of the full range of resources and experiences of Africans, past and present, in their encounters with each other and with others from around the world.

Like the Senegalese writer and filmmaker, Ousmane Sembène, I insist on the right and imperative of Africans to assume the world from their own diverse positions, to creatively and productively claim and appropriate on their own terms those elements and products of humanity – regardless of origin – deemed vital and useful for their own projects. Acts of claiming and appropriation proceed from positions of various specificities – cultural, geographical, historical, individual, gender, class, race, sexual, etc., and it is from the imprints of the specific that any significant moves to the global can be made. Africans are historical beings, diverse, dynamic and always in motion. So also our cultures. Leopold Senghor at one point in time spoke of the grand notion of a civilisation de l’universel, a civilization of the universal. He also imagined a great global banquet, a global smorgasbord at which all cultures from around the world would answer present with offerings specific to each for mutual nourishment of humanity at large. Granted some may see this as utopian in a contemporary world of predatory, zero sum, winner-take-all capitalist globalization, but Senghor’s metaphor for a global humanism founded on local, national and regional specificities, a celebration of diversity, parity and exchange, may have a thing or two instruct us about the resilience, the generative and staying power the local. 
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