Cinema and Development in West Africa: Film as a Vehicle for Liberation

Introduction: Cinema as Art and Industry

1 introduction: Cinema as art and industry ireturned to Dakar, senegal, in the summer of 2011 to complete research for this project and took my usual path walking along avenue Hassan ii (ex-albert sarraut) through the place de l’indépendance toward the administrative building in the basement of which is housed the national archives of senegal. for years a movie theater stood at the southwest corner of the central plaza, although it was clearly run down and did not offer many showings. now, though, the building was gone, replaced with a pile of rubble. Barely concealing the rubble was a fence that seemed to offer more perils than protection from the debris. no evidence remained that this location once offered audiences celluloid entertainment. instead, the ruins blended into the generally decaying architecture that characterizes this once majestic space. in fact, much of downtown Dakar resembles the plaza—a mixture of crumbled buildings, others in better repair, frozen in 1970s architectural style, and some in a perpetual process of construction. Downtown Dakar was at that moment bustling with new construction projects promoted by then-president abdoulaye Wade and financed by international lending agencies, China, and morocco, among other outside sources. much of the money appeared destined to develop a tourist infrastructure—hotels and a cultural park, financed entirely by China, which would contain “the seven Wonders of Dakar,” one of which was to be a new site for the archives near the location of the historic train station, scene of the 1947–48 railway strike. This strike was one of the heroic moments in the saga of the anticolonial struggle, immortalized in ousmane sembène’s 1960 novel God’s Bits of Wood. Weaving unceasingly through this urban landscape were multitudes of people headed to work, shopping, or school or going out in search of a job; still others wandered , hustled, or sat on the sidewalks in no apparent hurry to be anywhere else. in fact, there were far too many of the last groups, although they had been made less visible in the city center with president Wade’s construction boom. it’s been more than fifty years since senegal and the other countries of french West africa achieved independence (celebrated in the plaza that bears its namesake), but the scenes of contemporary Dakar, marked by coterminous signs of renewal and decline, belie the heritage of that half century. it is a composite of hope for a self-directed future leading to economic development and cultural regeneration and of frustration as those aspirations have been blunted by a neocolonial system that has trapped senegal and 2 | Cinema and Development much of sub-saharan africa in a dependent relationship with their former colonial overlords and fostered a vicious cycle of impoverishment and nondevelopment. it is ironic that one of the seven Wonders of Dakar, the realization of senegal’s first president léopold sédar senghor’s longtime dream of a museum dedicated to black civilizations (musée des civilisations noires), has only been made possible with a grant from the government of the people’s republic of China. The image of the building that used to show films reduced to rocks and dust on the place de l’indépendance, replete with its central water fountain from whence water does not flow, evokes the central theme of this book—the struggle by early african filmmakers to found a truly independent african cinema that would simultaneously contribute to the cultural renaissance of africa’s peoples and play a central role in postcolonial economic development. This aspiration is still very much alive, but it has been severely mitigated by the vicissitudes of a global imperialist capitalist system that relinquished formal colonial rule in africa but did not give up its ultimate domination of africa’s peoples and societies. african filmmakers struggle today to ply their craft under conditions that their predecessors would easily recognize from the 1960s. This is both encouraging and disheartening. it is encouraging because despite the seemingly insuperable odds that confront them, african cineastes have continued to strive for aesthetic innovation and to find a means to use film as a vehicle to foster the material improvement of the lives of their compatriots. it is disheartening because the evidence for progress, at least in the arena of structural development, is minimal at best. This book seeks to tell the story of the early years in that battle, as cultural activists from francophone West africa sought to invent...