Modernity and the African Cinema: A Study In Colonialist Discourse, Postcoloniality, and Modern African Identities (review)

Recently scholars have begun to research the history, structures, styles, and limitations of African cinema, revealing significant aspects of the African colonial and postcolonial experience and engaging the discussion on the impact and nature of globalization in local contexts. Femi Okiremuete Shaka's book, Modernity and the African Cinema, seeks to contribute to those debates on globalization as well as offer some historical context for the emergence of African cinema and its contribution to the development of modern film practices. Shaka argues that African cinema is a hybrid product of centuries of the Euro-African encounter, dating at least to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and perhaps to the classical period. The unequal nature of the exchange—with Europeans holding a technological and military advantage over Africans for centuries—accounts for African filmmakers' ambivalence toward modernity, intrigued by its potential benefits, but suspicious of its meaning for valued African customs.

The most intriguing part of Shaka's book is the author's effort to distinguish between two major film genres and their disparate impacts on subsequent African cinema—colonial instructional cinema and colonialist African cinema. The former Shaka regards positively, portraying Africans as intelligent, capable of learning modern production techniques and science, and carrying out their own development projects. The latter Shaka views as thoroughly racist diminishing Africans to the status of primitive peoples incapable of even the most basic aspects of social organization. Shaka argues that both genres influenced Africans and African cinematic practices. The former demonstrated African abilities to build their own societies and their own film industry. The latter adversely affected African psychologies inducing a lack of confidence in Africans' abilities to pull off the project of development.

Shaka does not say much about African cinematic practices. Outside of a few readings of selected African films, most of the work centers on defining African cinema and tracing colonial film practices. In the author's analysis of African films we learn little that is new and it rarely goes deeper than scene description. The book is plagued with poor editing, confused dates, incorrect references to films, and historical inaccuracies. It is not the case that "much of the African continent was under the colonial authority of the Roman Empire" (131), and the Brazzaville Conference did not take place "after the establishment of the Free France regime in Paris," nor did it initiate "a lot of liberalization in French colonial policy toward Africa" (394). Shaka's claim that there was no film culture in French colonial Africa, but a thriving one in British-ruled Africa is overstated as French officials often noted the large crowds and enthusiasm of Africans for the cinema. The last point reflects a subtext of Shaka's study that views British rule in Africa as beneficent in comparison with the French or Belgians, since, the author claims, the British were scrupulous to preserve African customs whereas the others were inclined to substitute their cultures for preexisting indigenous ones.

In conclusion, Modernity and the African Cinema offers little that is new and would have been better served by a more careful reading and editing process before publication. The numerous historical inaccuracies and confusion among film references detracts from the potentially interesting aspects of the study. The author's effort to vindicate British imperial practices in comparison to rival imperialisms is archaic and misplaced. Greater attention to and analysis of African filmmaking practices would have gotten us closer to the unfulfilled promised understanding of modernity and African identities in the post-colonial period.