Soft Power Cinema: Corporate Sponsorship, Visual Pedagogy, and the Cultural Cold War in West Africa

This essay explores the production of industrially sponsored, West African educational films, focusing on the years that witnessed piecemeal decolonization in the region. It argues that the links between the cultural Cold War and Cold War culture are especially vivid in this context: West Africa was the site of discrepant forms of colonization that still managed to share the general governmental mandate of teaching with nonfiction film, and it was increasingly the subject of corporate-sponsored cinematic experiments in Cold War cultural diplomacy. By emphasizing the region’s rich natural resources as well as its human diversity, these experiments helped to strengthen the Négritude movement, paving the way for a particular type of postindependence indigenous media-making that prized the geographical and cultural characteristics of individual West African countries while simultaneously establishing some of the conditions for a lasting and “unofficial” imperialism.