One small dose of African film history

“Co-production with the West is often tainted with paternalism, and it is an economic dependency which, as such, gives the West the right to view Africa in a way that I cannot bear. Sometimes, one is also coerced into consenting to commercial concessions. In a word, Europeans often have a conception of Africa that is not ours.”

(African cinema: politics & culture, Manthia Diawara)

The words above were said by Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, who is considered one of the most important African directors, with titles like La Noire de..., Ceddo, and Xala. They attest to the importance for groups of people (whether nations, ethnicities, diasporas, etc.) to be able to portray themselves through media, in an increasingly mediatized world.

Many books on African cinema describe the struggle for him and other directors to be able to have a cinema that they could call their own. And that's because films were used by colonial nations “to maintain their respective spheres of political and economic influence” (The Cinema of Apartheid, Keyan G. Tomaselli). “History”, Tomaselli continues, “is distorted and a Western view of Africa is transmitted back to the colonized”. Thus, in the beginnings of cinema in Africa, this medium was used to portray viewpoints beneficial to colonial powers, facilitate assimilation, and maintain their hegemony.

Even after the colonies' independence, it was a French governmental agency that financed many of the movies made by directors from francophone Africa. This was viewed by many as a neocolonialist tool. African cinema historian Victor Bachy has stated that such aid was part of a dependency structure of African states on France. After a bad experience filming Le Mandat with the French Centre National du Cinéma, Sembène stopped making movies with France, and many followed his footsteps.

And so began the production of many anti-assimilationist and anti-colonialist African movies. Filmmakers started emphasizing the importance of cinema in the political, economic and cultural development of Africa. This included not just criticizing ex colonial powers, but also their on governments, like in the movie Xala.


-Érica