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

3. West African Anticolonial Film Politics, 1950s–60s

70 3 West african anticolonial film politics, 1950s–60s in 1959 at the second World Congress of Black Writers and artists, convened in rome, italy, paulin soumanou vieyra issued a bold proclamation: “We want a cinema in the service of the people.” for vieyra, the appropriation and adaptation of the cinema industrial complex in West africa was crucial for the region’s (and africa’s) economic and cultural development. “film, in this domain,” he explained, “has some enormous responsibilities in our land.” vieyra conceived of the production of african motion pictures as a “motor” for economic progress, a means for allowing “the african people to acquire a more just notion of their own condition” and as a way, through the export of those commodities, “to represent the true face of africa” with “authentically national films.”1 in other words, vieyra led the call for africans to articulate an anticolonial film politics that would transform the region’s emergent cinema industrial complex into an agent for the emancipation of subject peoples and the construction of modern african societies. in the mid-1950s he became one of the founders of West african cinema, and by the late 1960s he had clearly emerged as a central figure in the adumbration of african film practice and theory. vieyra can be viewed as occupying the countervailing position in the postcolonial period to Delavignette’s in the colonial period with respect to the elaboration of a colonialist film politics. He became such a force in the definition and building of the tradition of West african filmmaking that the journal Présence africaine, which had played an important role in galvanizing resistance to french rule in the late colonial period, devoted an entire issue in 2004 to him in celebration of half a century of african cinema. vieyra captured the spirit of the age and had the prescience to locate cinema at the center of the anticolonial struggle as well as to identify its potential as a key component of (re)constructing african cultures and economies after independence. vieyra conceived of the cinematic field as structured around the conjoined notions of materialism and representation, and he argued that africans had to offer a counterpoint to the extant practices instantiated by the imperial nation-state. a cinema in the service of the people had to be the antithesis to a cinema in the service of empire and in so doing transform the cinematic field of engagement along with african societies. in this chapter, the focus shifts to the strategic counterhegemonic film politics that african cultural activists elaborated in the transition from the late colonial West African Anticolonial Film Politics | 71 to the early postcolonial period. Commenting on this formative age for african cinema, françoise pfaff observes that “in order to challenge hegemonic Western iconography and assert their african identity, committed Black directors set out to emphasize africa’s cultural worth and diversity—historical, political, social, ethnic, cultural, ideological, and geographical.”2 However, it was not at all clear at the time what an african cinema aesthetic would look like or on what it would be based. Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s african theorists and cineastes debated what an african film and cinematic practice would and should be, just as french colonial rulers had debated the essence of their film aesthetics. african practitioners of the seventh art originated their tradition within the existing parameters of the cinema industrial complex as it was forged during the colonial period on materialist and representational grounds. Those boundaries constrained the range of possibilities for filmmakers like vieyra and sembène and also provided the markers against which change to the field could be measured. for the african cineastes of the first generation engaging with the repressive structures of the materialist element of the cinematic experience was inseparable from transcending the derogatory (mis)representation of the image-africa that dominated movie screens around the world. to forge a film praxis that could contribute to the fight of overcoming the colonial legacy and contribute to the development of an emancipated africa, those cultural activists involved in motion picture production had to question the extant cinema industrial complex as such. in examining the elaboration of an anticolonial film politics in West africa, the insights of the cultural critic and theorist Theodor adorno are particularly useful. according to J. m. Bernstein, adorno approaches the culture industry from “the perspective of its relation to the possibilities for social transformation. The culture industry is to be understood...