This paper was originally presented at FILM AND HISTORY, An International Conference, July 6-8, 2002, University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Part of the research for this essay was made possible by the
generous support of the Howard University-Sponsored Faculty Research Program in
the Social Sciences, Humanities and Education, and the National Endowment for
the Humanities.
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
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
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[3],
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
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 Cassamance region of
Re-visioning
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
Like Maldoror, Flora Gomes of
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 (1970, The
Struggle Continues) 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 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[4], 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.”[5]
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.
Also of interest here is a number
of films, mostly made for TV dramas, that has emerged recently in
The SACOD-produced four part series,
Landscape of Memory,[6] also
offers critical perspectives on many aspects of the struggles for liberation
and reconciliation in
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
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 fetischized 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,
and the competing narratives of history that the film eloquently presents
provide a solid foundation for better understandings of the continuing
struggles in contemporary
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
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
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
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. The journey from
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 that “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 is 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
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
primary narrative focus, such as Roger Gnoan Mbala’s 1999 Addangaman, John Badenhorst’s 1998 Slavery of Love, Haile Gerima’s 1993 Sankofa, François Woukoache’s 1995 Asientos, Med Hondo’s 1979 West
Indies: Les Nègres Marrons de la Liberté, Ola Oalogun’s 1975 Black Goddess, and Mahama
Johnson-Traoré’s 1972 Reou Takh,
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 1970 Soleil-O, 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
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
In Reou Takh, an
African American returns to
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 1993 Sankofa which foregrounds race and gender
in a PanAfrican 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
In
contrast to dominant narratives on slavery which tend to be apologetic and
patronizing, and which project a generally homogenized, historyless, 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
Similarly,
Joe (Nick Medley), who also experiences a severe identity crisis, arrives at a
different sense of self only after embracing the heritage of her mother, Nunu,
of whom he was ashamed and who he tragically murdered along with 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 in Sankofa. The call
of the poetic voice-over and the call of Kofi Ghanaba's “atumpan” drums, the
call of history, has 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 1998 Through The Door Of No Return, profiles these Diaspora Africans who
responded to the call of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of
In
contrast to Sankofa and few other
films which indict
The
films of Med Hondo, Soleil-O (1970),
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
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,
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
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 unsilenced 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