Trash: African Cinema from Below by Kenneth W. Harrow (review)

“The trash was always there, only we never noticed it,” reads the first line of Kenneth Harrow’s latest study of African cinema, Trash: African Cinema from Below. Harrow’s engaging book offers readers a glimpse into the trash heaps, human waste dumps, squalor, and poverty that have often been depicted in African cinema since independence, but which have rarely been the object of critical study. The sociopolitical, historical, and artistic themes that can be associated with trash—or trashiness, or “les déchets humains,” as Sembene Ousmane’s famous film Xala (1975) depicts them—have for too long been discounted as critical points of study in the cinematic oeuvre of leading filmmakers across the continent. Harrow’s book seeks to fill in this gap in scholarship by presenting an innovative and untraditional way of looking at African film.

The author emphasizes that African cinema has undergone a transformation and should be considered as a “recovered” (récupéré) art demonstrating new forms and themes that posit essential humanist questions of our era (282). He proposes taking African cinema out of the critical discursive framework of the aesthetical and/or postcolonial and their typical topics—revolution/struggle/protest, social-realist, engagé—in order to look at the art in terms of how it is enmeshed in the socioeconomic global systems of the contemporary era, as a product to be consumed: “Trash is a stage in the trajectory attached to objects of worth in the economies of value, the economics of trash” (2). This is not to reduce African cinema to the label of “trash,” but rather to study what it shows about the developing world, the sociopolitical, environmental, cultural, and historical challenges that have faced and are facing the continent.

One of the most powerful transformations of African film in the last twenty years is the proliferation of Nollywood films. The Nollywood phenomenon’s success is rooted in its ability to offer trashy themes while making relative the aesthetics of a new art form: “Nollywood is not the answer to trash: it is the answer to African culture’s quest for a viable economic basis that rests upon an African audience and its taste” (60). Nollywood has succeeded in refashioning the Seventh Art into a consumed and commoditized product as it changes “the formulae” of what an African film is and should be. Films such as Osuofia in London (2003) and L’ assujetti (1999) have generated mass audience appeal both in and outside the continent. Harrow comments that “African politics drove the issues depicted in African films until Nollywood [came along],” making it obsolete to think of art and politics as mutually exclusive. Before the commodification and consumption of Nollywood film, “art and politics remained at loggerheads” (31). African film was only allowed to address the “exigencies” of the continent that “were frozen [in] terms of aesthetics and political commitment,” bending to the dualist “commercial versus serious cinema” way of thinking about African cinema production (31). In the face of rising costs, limited systems of distribution, and the closing of cinema houses all over Africa, Nollywood has succeeded in creating, out of trash, a new art form that is lucrative and appealing. So what does this say about African cinema, “high” and “low” art, and indeed all films produced and consumed in the global marketplace? This question is a defining one addressed throughout Harrow’s work.

Trash contains twelve chapters, spanning theories about the socioeconomic and global impact of trash on Africa and how it is represented in film. Harrow analyzes a variety of different films from the continent and the diaspora that take up these issues, emphasizing the many forms—from the metaphorical to the symbolic—that “trash” can take. Trash builds on Harrow’s Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism (Indiana, 2007) in which he states, “It is time for a revolution in African film criticism. A revolution against the old tired formulas deployed in...