Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers (review)

Offering interviews with twenty African filmmakers from seventeen different countries, Frank Ukadike's Questioning African Cinema is an important resource, for its intelligent and sometimes quite animated discussions with directors as well as the useful biographical sketches and filmographies that frame each entry.

The interviews are particularly interesting as a follow-up to Ukadike's important 1994 study, Black African Cinema.In that book and as an interviewer in the present volume, Ukadike reveals himself to be an opinionated film critic, and the interviews provide an interesting opportunity for the filmmakers to disagree with his previous interpretations of their work. This is particularly illuminating in his discussion with Malian director Cheick Oumar Sissoko, whom Ukadike had taken to task for his attack on female excision in Finzan (1990), a representation Ukadike saw as failing to consider the origins and history of African cultural traditions. In his interview, Sissoko, who shows himself well aware of Bambara cosmology, replies by contending that most people who practice excision are themselves unaware of the reasons why they do so. He vigorously defends Finzan as a depiction of women's struggle to take control of their own lives.

Similarly, Ukadike gently criticizes Burkinabe filmmaker Idrissa Ouedraogo for making films whose primary appeal is to an international audience (according to Ukadike, Ouedraogo's Yaaba (1989) is "one of the few African films that have been widely received in international commercial screenings with good box-office returns," 152). Ouedraogo replies by emphasizing the realities of making films in a poor country like Burkina Faso, where, by his estimate, 85% of the population live in villages without cinemas or even electricity. Thus, he concedes that African films are condemned to be somewhat "elitist," made for an urban population, with a primary market outside the African continent. In the face of this almost insoluble problem, Ouedraogo urges each African country to adopt a national film policy that would reduce the cost of production and postproduction in order to make African films available to Africans themselves.

Ukadike often points out in his interviews that "Africa" is not a single entity. Rather, it includes a diversity of perspectives shaped by its fifty-five different countries and even more numerous languages and cultures. Filmmakers from former British colonies, as well as Francophones from Cameroon, are vociferous in their criticism of French support for African cinema, which they see as a continuation of French cultural domination. They also perceive French influence and a distinct Francophone bias in FESPACO, the biennial Pan-African film festival held in Ouagadougou (Nigeria's Brendan Shehu says of FESPACO, "anything that is not approved by their colonial masters is not to be allowed" [Ukadike, 163]). Some even go so far as to question the ability of Francophone cultural elites to make truly African films. As might be expected, Anglophone directors, who now receive little support from their former colonial masters, advocate greater reliance on market forces. This is at the center of a diatribe by Nigeria's Chief Eddie Ugbomah, who finances his own productions through Nigeria's large population base and its tradition of filming Yoruba theater (a form of popular cinema that is belittled by other directors interviewed). The economic optimism of the Nigerians is shared by Ethiopian Haile Gerima, who operates his Sankofa Organization, named after his own successful film, from his African diaspora base in the United States.

Filmmakers from smaller and more linguistically divided countries, like Burkina Faso, on the other hand, are more likely to advocate multinational distribution networks and production facilities shared among Africans. Despite the continued discussion of such projects, however—Ukadike's interviews take place over the entire course of the 1990s—little seems to have come of these ideas, hampered by lack of funding as well as by radically differing government policies.

If there is any consensus among the many divergent viewpoints, it is that African films should be made by Africans and based in African cultural values and practices. How this...