Fantômas sous les tropiques: aller au cinéma en Afrique coloniale by Odile Goerg (review)

Odile Goerg’s new book on the development of film culture in colonial Africa is a brilliant work of scholarship that makes an important contribution to the ever-expanding field of African popular culture studies, and it should also be of great interest to scholars of postcolonial African filmmaking. Her research covers a wide array of sources, ranging from colonial archives to novels and memoirs, to personal interviews with African interlocutors who grew up steeped in the film culture of their homeland. Much of Goerg’s evidence is drawn from Anglophone and Francophone West Africa, but the author also cites from sources relating to East, Central and Southern Africa, spanning the British, French, Portuguese and Belgian colonial possessions in these regions.

Within months of the first Lumière screenings in France in 1895, cinema arrived on the African continent, with screenings held in Cairo and Alexandria. Over the next two decades, periodic screenings in hotels and cafés would follow in major African cities before the interwar period witnessed the emergence of the first custom-built film ‘theatres’. These mostly open-air buildings began as modest affairs but, as the popularity of film grew, mega-cinemas with space for audiences of 1,000 or more began to make their appearance.

Throughout the colonial period, there was a pronounced unevenness in access to cinema. Given the technical requirements necessary for even the most rudimentary screenings, it remained largely an urban affair, limited to the major colonial administrative centres. In some colonies, white and black audiences were explicitly kept apart, either in separate movie theatres or in separate sections of the cinema, but more commonly they were kept apart on the basis of their unequal financial means. If white Europeans initially occupied most of the seats in the covered areas of the cinema, with Africans exposed to the elements in the uncovered sections, they soon found themselves joined by an emerging black middle class. This was not always appreciated by racist colonizers: at a 1938 screening in Bamako, the future Senegalese writer Birago Diop received a punch to the head for his ‘insolence’ in demanding equal treatment (pp. 41–2).

Despite the rapid growth in the popularity of cinema in the interwar period, it remained a luxury open primarily to the better off in colonial society. However, in the wake of the Second World War, cinemas began to spread from the European-built city centres to the suburbs, opening up the medium to more popular audiences. This brought about two interrelated developments: audiences began to consume film in new ways and cinema owners began to schedule films designed to cater for more boisterous audiences. Young men acted out the on-screen roles of the tough cowboys in American westerns while audiences sang along with the musical numbers that were central to the Egyptian and Indian melodramas that became a staple of popular film-going in many parts of the continent. The post-war period also brought rural audiences into contact with film as many colonies saw the growth of mobile cinema enterprises.

From early on, the colonial authorities fretted about the influence of the new medium of film, which carried a ‘threat of destabilisation’ (p. 8). Film offered colonized audiences the opportunity to view new worlds, to imagine different social relations and to interact with a wide cross-section of their compatriots. Moreover, in the aftermath of the Second World War, cinemas were often used by emerging African political parties to hold mass meetings. Distributors largely avoided politically charged material, but, as the colonial authorities would discover, even the most seemingly innocuous forms of escapist cinema held hidden dangers: gangster movies and westerns represented instances of transgression against authority that inspired the young African men in the audience. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the growing popularity of Egyptian cinema engendered fears that their imagined or genuine expressions of pan-Arabism...