Motor, Mirror, Reinvention: Paulin Soumanou Vieyra on the African Cinema to Come (1956–1961)

Revisiting Paulin Soumanou Vieyra's earliest published writings and talks, which were conceived at the dawn of decolonization, this article characterizes Vieyra as a visionary thinker of the African cinema to come, which he saw as both a motor of African development and a mirror of its constraints—but also, crucially, as a potential source of reinvention. Dating from between 1956 and 1961—a period of intense struggle and untold possibility—Vieyra's early projections encapsulate the radical potentials of "anti-systemic worldmaking" (Adom Getachew) inherent in this transformational moment. While Vieyra's emphasis on industrialization, rational organization, and the universality of technology followed the developmentalist doxa of his day, his programmatic statements on the future African cinema also challenged such widely held assumptions, as this article will show, suggesting the possibility of alternative developmental trajectories and technological indigenization. And while Vieyra was a fervent proponent of national liberation, he also imagined alternative political, legal, and economic forms that might enable the emergence of an independent African cinema. In particular, writing from within a state of continued entanglement under circumstances of unaccomplished liberation, he not only envisioned a radically altered relation between France and its Overseas Departments—a "cooperation" worthy of its name—but also, and perhaps for the first time, articulated the demand for the restitution of moving images. Propagating cinema as a motor of African development, Vieyra's early writings also anticipate the critical turn against development as "Western culture-systemic telos" (Sylvia Wynter), which germinated in the 1960s and 1970s throughout the decolonizing "Third World" and has been reprised with renewed urgency today, in the face of global climate calamity, by African thinkers such as Felwine Sarr. Vieyra's early writings, this article proposes, may help us chart different paths—and even suggest routes of escape.