Dictionary of African Filmmakers

Introduction: Mapping the Field—Feature Filmmaking in Africa

There is no single entity called “African cinema,” and the films produced in Africa over the past hundred years offer at best a very partial (if totally fascinating) image of the history and current development of the continent. Africa itself can be defined unambiguously in geographical terms: an enormous land mass, stretching over 4,500 milesatitswidestpointandmeasuringsome 5,000milesfromnorthtosouth,withwhich are associated a range of widely spread and totally diverse islands, from Madagascar and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean to St. Helena in the South Atlantic and the Cape Verde Islands and the Canaries in the North Atlantic. But as soon as we depart from the geography of the continent, problems of definition—both cultural and national—become acute. The heritage of colonialism is everywhere apparent. Arbitrary boundaries inherited from the colonial era divide some communities into two, while elsewhere artificially yoking together totally divergent groups into newly defined nation-states. To the north there are recurringtensionsbetweenArabsandnon -Arabs (as in the issue of the Berber communities) and between Muslims and Christians (particularlyinNigeriaandSudan ).Tothesouth there is the anomaly of the white population of South Africa and the question of its place in a wider Africa. Across Africa the all-too-prevalent dictatorships drive artists and intellectuals into exile, and at the same time the whole continent is shaken both by mass migrations of whole populations fleeing recurrent wars and famines and by tens ofthousandsofmostlyyoungmenannually seekingtoemigratetoEuropeforeconomic survival. African cinemas—and the writings about them—inevitably reflect these tensions and ambiguities. At the time when the cinematograph and its successors were first introduced into Africa—as early as 1896 in Algeria and SouthAfrica,1897inMoroccoandTunisia, INTRODUCTION: Mapping the Field— Feature Filmmaking in Africa 2 Dictionary of African Filmmakers 1903 in Nigeria—the continent was suffering the aftermath of the 1894–1895 Berlin conferenceonthepartitionofAfrica,where European states carved out African empires for themselves. Before the outbreak of World War I, France had annexed Algeria , set up protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco, and established its two “super colonies,” French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, while Great Britain had conquered Sudan and unified Nigeria. Local filmmaking in Africa is one of the developments which has occurred as this process of colonization has been gradually reversed and independent African states have emerged. The first feature film (now unfortunately lost) was made in South Africa in 1910, the year in which “Louis Botha became prime minister of a British Dominion with a population of 4 million Africans , 300,000 Coloureds, 150,000 Indians , and 1,275,000 Whites.”1 Egypt became a (notionally) independent monarchy in 1922, and the first experiments with filmmaking occurred there in the mid-1920s. When, beginning in the late 1950s, former French colonies began to achieve independence , one of the first actions of the many new governments was to set up a local film production monopoly, modeled on the lines of the Parisian Centre National de la Cinématographie and equipped with the requisite French-language acronym. The exception was Morocco, where the new government discovered a Moroccan film center—the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM)—already in existence and fully functional. The center is still the focus of Moroccan film activity today. The first locally produced feature films tended to be made by foreigners. Feature production in South Africa between 1916 and 1925 was the product of an Anglo-American enterprise headed by U.S. businessman Isadore W. Schlesinger. Early film production in Egypt was largely the work of cosmopolitan expatriate elites in CairoandAlexandria.InAlgeria,Morocco, and Nigeria, the first locally produced features after independence were directed by Europeans or Americans. But gradually the directingrolewastakenoverbyAfricannationals . Egypt led the way with the founding of the locally financed Misr studios in the mid-1930s. This, as Kristina Bergmann aptly notes, was a moment of transformation for Egyptian films: “at first financed by Lebanese and Greeks, shot by Italians, designed and acted by the French, films then became Egyptian.”2 Elsewhere we find the beginnings of indigenous film production occurring in the wake of independence: Algeria , Ghana, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Morocco ,Senegal,Somalia,Sudan,andTunisia in the 1960s; Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon,Congo, theDemocraticRepublic of Congo (ex-Zaire), Ethiopia, Gabon, Libya, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius , Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe in the 1970s. Other African countries gradually followed suit: GuineaBissau and Kenya in the 1980s; Burundi, Cape Verde, Chad, Tanzania, and Togo in the 1990s; and, most recently, the Central African Republic in 2003. Whatever the complexities of its funding and whatever foreign...