Nationalist African Cinema: Legacy and Transformations by Sada Niang (review)

Nationalist African Cinema reinscribes a proper historicity into African Cinema. It shifts our focus to a period of African cinema, from 1960 to 1975, which appeared condemned to sink into the quicksand of cinematic history. Sada Niang instead claims that this collective of filmmakers was in fact inventing a tradition whose legacy is still very palpable today.¹

Nationalist African Cinema is a welcome corrective to the superficial readings and poorly researched movies about that period of African cinema. It undermines the perception of that cinematic period as a cultural throwaway, instead highlighting valuable cinematic experiences with a strong sense of place, time, sensation, and wisdom. In summary, Nationalist African Cinema depicts an indigenous cultural production that was always interested in the world, and always contemporary.

The form of cultural experientiality highlighted by Niang renders unreal terminologies such as postnational and postcolonial, notions of temporality out of sync with the reception and aesthetic relationship of this collection of films. After all, Niang is working his way through an ongoing polemic in recent academic writings on African cinema obsessed with a fresh start and the new, and arguing against those who pose contemporary African cinema in opposition to old, tired formulas.²

Niang opens up a space to complicate this overspecialization of recent African cinema scholarship focused on a contemporary generation of African filmmakers who mainly operate within the digital explosion, who are producing high-concept quality films, and who are constantly innovating and rewriting African cinematic grammar and marketing strategies. This creative industry comes packaged with new digital forms of media production and distribution, thus propelling the idea that contemporary African filmmakers must cultivate marketing savvy about the intricacies of global filmmaking and commercial trends in order to insert their productions into a larger global network of consumption and thereby increase their media exposure, positioning themselves as important assets in the building up of a new African soft power.³

Niang’s case study interrogates this assumed paradigm shift from old to new media foisted upon African cinema. Similarly, he challenges the idea that African cinema from 1960 to 1975 exhibited poor aesthetics compounded with chauvinistic attitudes and didactic approaches, turning it into a heavy-handed political practice masquerading as filmmaking. Niang argues that these assumptions have created a vision of Africa as a static place of tradition and have confirmed the figure of the African as the quintessential other.⁴

Niang demonstrates that African cinema was from the beginning in constant conversation, appropriation, and sometimes rebellion with external influences coming principally from the West, where it has borrowed visual techniques and tropes from Italian neo-realism, the French new wave, Hollywood genres such as the western, and Bollywood cinema, and is therefore a cinema that has always synthesized and recombined, integrating all these influences as an expression of deep mutual interest between Africa and these other national cinemas. Niang’s perspective, which reflects my own interest in African cinema, is that the debate over African cinema’s newness is really about African modernity and the constant search for fresh ways of expression to map out the terrain of what constitutes progress on the continent. The gist of that perspective is the notion that progress in African modernity is not forward-flowing movements following a well-defined teleology, but the capacity of African tradition to absorb and reappropriate external influences, and therefore a constant recombination and layering of what is already there and what is constantly being reinvented.

Niang offers a long list of African filmmakers, such as Ousmane Sembene, Moustapha Allasane, Djibril Diop Mambety, and Alphonse Beni, who have contributed to this process of recombination and layering. Reading about Alphonse Beni had an added sentimental value for me, having grown up in Cameroon during the surreal moment his films came to encapsulate. I and my cohort watched ourselves represented in a way that captured a place, time, and sensation that were a long time in the making...