Film in Africa, Africa in Film:
Challenging Stereotypes
By Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda
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If one is concerned about the alienation of Africa, which is currently saturated with foreign and strange images produced elsewhere, then production issues are not limited only to financial support, technical expertise or artistic passion. Financial success at the box office or in the bank is not the only goal of production. Television and the movies are the best means of conveying memory and popular culture. To produce a film in Africa is an act of resistance. It is about looking at the world's stories and giving one's opinion about them, capturing and inquiring about collective memory, attracting, entertaining and informing. It is also about making Africans realize that cinema is a powerful tool for development. Since cinematography was invented, the stereotypical African has been portrayed all over the world as a debased individual. Africans have been the victims of false historical and cultural ideology, whose best propaganda is cinema (and its by-product, television). On every screen in the continent, big or small, western movies prevail. Cinema is wonderfully subversive under its beautiful lights of entertainment. Africa, without its own "mirror", does not know who it is anymore. Children's heroes are no longer Mandela, Biko, Lumumba, Nkrumah or Sankara, but blonde women and men with blue or green eyes. In Hollywood, Egypt is not even considered to be in Africa! Where are the African movies that truly reflect African culture? Africa produces an average of ten movies per year and broadcasting is still a difficult problem there. Why would a peasant in Kasai, Democratic Republic of the Congo, grow a product that is not consumed? Most African TV stations are not interested in African movies. When they finally agree to broadcast some, it is often because a western institution helped to produce them. "I do not know what my song is for, but I can bury it", says the poet Xavier Ramilla. What are African movies about? Is it a peacefully exotic, comically fatalist or pathetic Africa? Are they about a contemplative world of staggering beauty, with the African as a hungry shadow? This is the Africa often filmed and narrated through "tales" with ineffective nostalgia. Then there is the Africa affected by AIDS and poverty—would this poverty be truly absolute even in the imagination? African history is sometimes so different from the stories that appear in African movies. During the last two years, I have travelled the continent, seeing locally produced films. I have met producers, technicians, actors, moviegoers, theatre owners, broadcasters and unscrupulous businessmen involved in African cinema. These meetings helped me in many ways, especially in better understanding African cinematic production. Filming in Africa is a political undertaking, challenging directors. In 2002, a Central African filmmaker had proudly co-directed the "first Central African movie" after 42 years as an independent country. However, Equatorial Guinea has no film production, although its neighbour Gabon has an active cinema centre and co-produced several African films. Angola and Congo-Kinshasa should have played important roles in African filmmaking. However, the former has suffered 25 years of civil war and the latter has danced a self-destructive soukous for four decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, during the Mobutu years, Zaire had a full cinema infrastructure, but the movies that were produced were all about one subject—the all-powerful Mobutu and his evil counter-revolution. Today, filmmaking there is non-existent. In South Africa, white filmmakers, ignoring the movies of Sembene Ousmane and influenced by Hollywood and Europe, make commercials and movies using the beautiful natural settings the country has to offer. The films they want to make implicitly carry the old perception of their black "fellow countrymen". Some South African directors, despite the creation of the National Film and Video Foundation and a new generation of better-trained directors, only want to fight with the other side, whom they accuse of monopolizing all the resources, as during apartheid. "In the rainbow, there is no colour black", underlines Ramadan Suleman, the talented and uncompromising director of "Fools", who is trying to find his place in this paranoid world of the South African white-black relationship. Film production in Senegal, Mali and Burkina Faso is healthy. In Ghana and Nigeria, cola nut merchants, whose recent acquisition of the camcorder allows them to saturate the market with popular cheap productions, overshadow the efforts of serious directors. Filmed in a hurry, their stories lack basic narrative structure. These producers of "video photo stories", inspired by "journal photo roman", don't care about the mediocrity of their stories on witchcraft, fetishism, gangsters, sects, etc. And why not? The stories provide laughter and pleasure to the viewer. In Lagos and Accra, thousands of these videos are produced each year. Sometimes VHS cassette sales reach 200,000. Perhaps there will be "Lagoswood", just like India's "Bollywood". In Jos, Nigeria, some studios are fully equipped with a film laboratory—yet nothing is produced there. Is filmmaking in Africa excluded from the world of art and cinema? Would the meaning of the art of cinema be contrary to the one of history? While the political and economic history of Africa was shaped beyond its control during the last five centuries by foreign forces, African cinema was born out of the African's freedom, out of his own fully personal creation, out of his choices. Why wouldn't a serious director cooperate with a successful video producer? To film in Africa is also to be freed from the illusions of our contradictions—these pseudo-elitist confusions. Some African directors despise documentaries, which they know will not land them on the red carpet in Cannes, becoming the "first Negro" to receive the Palm d'Or, even though Africa needs documentaries to give its own view of the continent. To others, anything not shot on 35mm film is not considered cinema. What is an African film? Who defines it and by what criteria? Some films representing Africa in prestigious festivals have been made, thanks to generous grants from France, the European Union and other foreign patrons. Many African Governments ignore the real economic and cultural stakes of cinema. They are sufficiently satisfied with Hollywood movies! In 2002, I finished a documentary called "afro@digital". It is a "manifesto" of the African digital mind. With a small digital camera, I travelled across Africa, from Dakar, Gorée Island, Ouagadougou, Bobo Diaoulasso, Abidjan, Cotonou, Lagos, Johannesburg and Cape Town to Robben Island. I examined the promise that digital technology would give to the creator of the African "video photo story". Now Inteleki, an old Greek word meaning "how to blow life into inanimate matter", is central for African directors. "Take a bone", says John Akomfrah, a Ghanaian director. "You know by using it a certain way, the bone can become a weapon." With digital technology, it becomes possible to boost creativity, to produce more without sacrificing quality, to inquire again about African memory and enrich it. A new world opens up for cinema: capturing and re-mapping the image of Africa by reducing the high expense of analogue technology. But an African director still needs to know what he is doing and needs to have a story to tell in order not to suppress his song, his part of African history. |
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