African Film’s Televisual Turn

There is an ongoing debate over how best to qualify the popular audiovisual narratives that are being released in large numbers across many countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In her 2013 history of Ghanaian film, for example, Carmela Garritano enumerates the reasons she titled her book African Video Movies rather than African Video Films. The word movie, she says, conjures different associations than film and better “captures the aspirations and ambitions of video producers in Ghana.”¹ By contrast, in his discussion of the Nigerian film industry, Alessandro Jedlowski notes that while “Nollywood is often referred to as cinema[,] . . . [it] produces something that is located between cinema and television.”² Yet other scholars write of “home videos,” “video films,” and “cinema” in their examination of related phenomena in different locations across Africa. There is, in a sense, not much contradiction between the positions taken by both Garritano and Jedlowski. Many (though not all) filmmakers working with video do indeed aspire to create “movies”; however, relatively few of those “movies” circulate through theatrical exhibition.³ Given the fluidity of the media product itself and the associated terminology, it would be helpful to begin thinking of frameworks for understanding how to position these popular audiovisual narratives in relation to television, on the one hand, and cinema, on the other. In what follows, I examine what could be described as the televisual turn in African film from the late twentieth to the early twenty-first century. I also identify some indicators for distinguishing between different kinds of films, depending on their propensity for televisual recurrence or ability to foster viewing habits typically associated with television.

Cinema screen space is limited in much of sub-Saharan Africa. In 2006, for example, Burkina Faso reportedly had twelve cinemas, Niger had five, and Namibia had three.⁴ By contrast, television is relatively widespread, even in poorer countries. In some instances, as recently noted by Marie-Soleil Frère for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, television has surpassed radio to become the most widely consumed medium.⁵ Though radio is frequently more accessible than television, television has become the primary form for consuming electronically recorded fictional narratives around Africa. In any case, when asked what “films” they have watched recently, many Africans are more likely to refer to filmed narratives that they have watched on television. To take one example, Nollywood films are most frequently watched as home video, and for this reason, Jedlowski calls Nollywood “small screen cinema.”⁶ The same is true for the output of the popular film industries that have emerged in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to name just a few. Many of the online platforms for African films that have come into existence in the past few years likewise allude to the primary site of spectatorship in Africa by adding the word TV to their name. Thus, for example, in the case of Nigerian video films, we now have iROKOtv, IbakaTv, NdaniTv, TheOkinTv, and NaijaTv, among many other online platforms established to make these films available to audiences around the world. This definitional uncertainty when it comes to separating television from “non-television” is not peculiar to Africa. William Uricchio observes that in today’s world, it is often difficult to know where one medium begins and another ends.⁷

Instead of revisiting familiar distinctions between art and commercial cinema, or between platforms of exhibition, I explore a different axis of differentiation, which pertains in particular to the function of audiovisual narratives on the media landscape. Specifically, I wish to propose that we differentiate audiovisual narratives according to their potential for televisual recurrence. For my purposes here, I define televisual recurrence as the ability to attract similarly constituted publics to the same or similarly themed and styled audiovisual texts on a fairly regular and recurrent basis. Heeding Lisa Gitelman’s call for attentiveness to the social and cultural dimensions of media, I foreground television’s capacity for generating a particular kind of sociality by periodically convening a locally diverse pool of viewers for shared engagement with an audiovisual text in a domestic...