In Celebration of Idrissa Ouedraogo (1954–2018)

In Melissa Thackway’s introduction to her interview (in this issue) with Idrissa Ouedraogo, she cites him as saying: “We shoot as a matter of urgency. Whatever the style of the films, we all share the same desire to give African audiences and people back their pride.”

The remarkable thing about Ouedraogo’s work is how it was so representative of its times. In the 1980s, Ouedraogo formed his own production company (Les Films de la Plaine) and began to make films; by the late 1980s and 1990s he was meeting with his major successes (Yam Daabo [1987], Yaaba [1989], Tilaï [1990], Le cri du Coeur [1994]). He continued to make feature films until 2006. By then he had turned increasingly to television production, working in Ouagadougou until his recent death in February of 2018.

By the time Ouedraogo had started on his career, FESPACO had been in existence for more than a decade. The first generation of great African filmmakers had left their mark, and we can note of few of the major films that preceded Ouedraogo’s work, including Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972), Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973), Sembene’s Xala (1974) and Ceddo (1976), Dikonge-Pipa’s Muno Moto (1975), and Cissé’s Finye (1982), made the same year as Kaboré’s Wend Kuuni. Cissé’s Yeelen (1987) appeared in the same year as Ouedraogo’s first major success, Yam Daabo (1987). Following Ouedraogo’s Yaaba [1989] and Tilaï [1990] came Bassek ba Kobhio’s Sango Malo, and then in 1992 a slew of critically important films: Blue Eyes of Yonta (Flora Gomes); Hyènes (Djibril Diop Mambéty); Afrique, je te plumerai (Jean-Marie Teno); Quartier Mozart (Jean-Pierre Bekolo); Guelwaar by Sembène; and Cheick Oumar Sissoko’s Finzan.

Looking back at Ouedraogo’s place in this abbreviated history of African cinema, we can say that he formed part of that second generation of film-makers who were coming into their own. FESPACO’s role signaled the arrival of a body of works that conveyed the desire of African filmmakers to establish their place in the world of cinema, and whose works were identified to some extent as Third Cinema. It was also deemed a cinema of resistance, a cinema expressive of the peoples of West Africa, expressive of their history and culture. The filmmakers were considered exponents of a cinematic and political language that reflected and met the needs of an African audience. An African cinema had been born in the 1960s and 1970s, and now it had blossomed into a glorious tree of the savannah: it was recognizable in its own landscape, with its own poesis, its own compelling voice and regard.

Looking back, we can also see, only now, how that blossoming was also something of a turning point, where the possibilities of imagining a unique cinema to be called African, or more specifically “Africain”—a film heavily inflected by francophone voices, industries, and histories—would begin to cede to financial and commercial pressures. This would eventually lead to a radically different approach to filmmaking, resulting in something less amenable to the all-encompassing label “African” and more to the echoes of a movie industry driven by commercial considerations. This new African cinema was to be dubbed Nollywood, and its first major success, Living in Bondage, was to appear in that same anna mirabilis for African films of 1992.

The list of films cited above, when considered closely, evoke a passage from the period of a cinema of opposition, of national liberation and its immediate aftermath, to a period of postcolonialism, when the ululations in celebration of independence metamorphosed into tones of disillusionment. Examples of this disenchantment include The Blue Eyes of Yonta, where the younger generation turned away from the original revolutionary leaders and now wished to enter into their own world of modernity; and Mambéty’s Hyènes in which we would see emerge the critique of neoliberalism and globalization.

Ouedraogo’s importance lay in his emphasis on the qualities of an African aesthetic that...