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Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Number 21, Fall 2007, pp.
74-81 (Article)
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SELF
REPRESENTATION
IN AFRICAN
CINEMA
Souleymane Cisse, Film still from Yeelen, 1987

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Journal of Contemporary African Art

s I recently paged through a voluminous

book, Anthology of African and Indian
Ocean Photography, I could not help but
think about the aesthetic links between still photography and film in Africa. A crucial question we
must ask ourselves, therefore, is what happened
when Africans got hold of still and motion-picture
cameras to represent themselves? Did they inherit
the stereotypes of Africans forged by Europeans,
or did they try to find a new language? There are
aesthetic links between African photography and
film that, if explored, will yield a new appreciation
of both media in Africa. It is my aim here to show
that black-and-white photography in Africa provides a powerful metaphor for pursuing the aesthetic signifiers in African cinema.
1

African Cinema in Black and White

Looking at the photographs in the anthology, one

can see the African youth movement toward
modernity framed by the still camera. Each photograph by Seydou Keita, Malick Sidibe, Samuel
Fosso, and Philip Kwame Apagya is filled with
energy, desires, and a kind of modernist melancholia that constitute its aesthetic source and
pleasure. Furthermore, the subjects in Sidibe's
work in particular seem to imitate actors and pop
music stars from B-movies and magazines from
the West. The dress stylestight shirts, Afro-hair,
bell-bottom pants, and platform shoesand the

body languages of the characters are filled with

cinematic vignettes of the life of hip youngsters in
Bamako in the 1960s and 1970s. The mise-en-scene
is perfected, with outdoor and studio props like
motorcycles, telephones, records, and turntables
that are signifiers of the pop-culture period in
Bamako. The characters occupy the center of the
photographs like Hollywood heroes and individuals who have conquered history.
My biggest surprise is that I found no strong
continuity between these photographs and the
African cinema coming out in the 1960s and
1970s. Only a handful of films in the seventies
gave a nod to the modern African style and aesthetics I have referred to here. Tooki Bouki (1975)
by Djibril Diop Mambety, like Sidibe's photographs, borrows from the mise-en-scene of
the Western and B-movies, as well as from the
French Nouvelle Vague. The poetic connotations
in the representation of the youth in Tooki Bouki
signal to the same symbols of freedom and independence emphasized in the black-and-white
photographs.
Den Muso (1974) by Souleymane Cisse is
another film with fascinating intertextual connections to the photography of the 1960s and 1970s in
Africa. Den Muso tells the story of two young peopleTenin and Sekoucaught in the struggle
between tradition and modernity. Tenin's father
represents traditional nobility and wealth, while
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Sekou's family is from a poor background. But

Tenin and Sekou are united through the modern
youth culture as signified by free sex, the music of
a young Salif Keita and the Super Rail Band of
Bamako, the dress styles, and the motorcycles that
have become the new symbols of mobility in the
city. Tenin's parents are filmed like the studio portraits of the men and women in Seydou Keita's
classic portraits of the Bamakois clad in their
embroidered grand boubous, with a red curtain in
the background. The recourse to Keita's style of
portraiture to represent traditional Bamako contrasts nicely with the use of Sidibe's style to connote the new and the challenge to tradition.
Both Sekou and Tenin are characters straight
out of a Sidibe photo album. In his Afro-hair, tight
shirts with long collars, and platform shoes, Sekou
looks like a rebel against all that Bamako represents. He quits his job in the beginning of the film
and becomes a pickpocket. He is a playboy without a conscience or a commitment to anything in
life, except for the clothes he wears. He changes
girlfriends several times in the film. In one classic
scene la Malick Sidibe, shot at the beach by the
river, the youth, dressed in their bikinis, drink tea,
and play while Sekou rapes Tenin not too far
from them.
Tenin is portrayed like the beautiful women we
see in both the photographs of Keita and Sidibe
with their hair braided or in Afros, and wearing
miniskirts or nicely tailored dresses. Interestingly,
Tenin is mute, which signifies the voicelessness of
women in a patriarchal African setting. When she
becomes pregnant, she is rejected by both her
father and Sekou. At the end of the film, she sets
fire to a house with Sekou and his new lover
inside, and kills herself. Den Muso thus gives us an
idea of the situations and stories that the youth in
Sidibe's albums might have been dealing with.
The film interpellates the Bamakois spectators
by intercutting between tradition and modernity
through the representational techniques of Keita
and Sidibe. The scenes with Tenin's parents are
mostly shot insidein the style of Seydou Keita
while the cinematography outside reveals Malick
Sidibe' Bamako. Seeing Den Muso today makes
the spectator relive the Bamako of the 1960s and
1970s as the photographs of Malick Sidibe and the
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Journal of Contemporary African Art

old songs of Salif Keita and James Brown are able

to do. For that reason alone, it has become a cult
film to treasure in Bamako.
The Evolution of Photography
and Film in Africa

Though photography and film follow different

modes of production and entail different costs,
they are related aesthetically and politically as far
as representation is concerned. They share the
same illusion of verisimilitude provided by the
camera, which set them apart from other modes of
representation, such as oral storytelling and sculpture. A brief overview of the circumstances in
which the two media developed in Africa is therefore required here to show why other African films
did not follow the example of Den Muso.
Both photography and film were introduced in
Africa by European explorers, colonial administrators, anthropologists, and missionaries in
search of the primitive and the exotic. It is revealing, therefore, that the early photographs and
films of Africans by Europeans were concerned
with documenting nudity, tribal marks, religious
customs, and polygamous African chiefs. The
Africans in these documentaries lack subjectivity
and personal style; they are reified and framed by
an outsider's gaze. In a sense, primitive photography and film were interested in asserting and
maintaining the superiority of the European over
the African.
The history of African cinema is recent compared to that of its photography. To take the specific case of Mali, for example, there were photographers such as Mountaga Dembele and Seydou
Keita who had mastered their craft as early as the
1930s and 1940s. One might even say that Malian
photography had achieved two golden agesone
with Seydou Keita in the 1950s and the other
spearheaded by Malick Sidibe in the 1960s
before there was even one feature film produced
by a Malian director. The cost of film was one reason for the delay in the birth of African cinema.
Another reason was the fear that an African with
a movie camera would subvert the colonial order
of things.
The case of Mali is significant for other reasons
as well. From the beginning the aesthetic choices

Souleymane Cisse, Film still from Yeelen, 1987

of photographers were different from those of

filmmakers in the colonial era; furthermore the
markets in which the art was consumed were in a
complete opposition to each other. Mali was a fertile ground for French ethnographic films on the
tradition and cosmology of the Dogons. French
filmmakers like Jean Rouch and Marcel Griaule
had no competition from African directors while
the former were busy filming the Dogons in their
authentic tribal dwellings. Their desire to privilege
primitive African cultures at the expense of those
lived in the urban setting cemented an ideology
and aesthetic of filmmaking in Africa that is still
influential.
Photography meanwhile was evolving in the
cities, with African photographers increasingly
replacing their European counterparts. Malian

photographers were opening studios in Bamako,

Kayes, Segou, and other emerging cities where the
black-and-white photographs coincided with the
modern desires of new population.
So, while the aesthetics of filmin the hands of
Europeans and for a European consumption
remained primitive and ethnographic, the art of
photography evolved with African cameramen
and consumers of African images. In other words,
film was stuck in an "authentic" African traditional language that could be opposed to European
modernity, while the photographers were busy
documenting the birth and stylized expressions of
modern Africans. A look at the black-and-white
photographs of Seydou Keita reveals the cosmopolitanism of the subjects, as well as their optimism vis-a-vis modernity. After all, the people
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Souleymane Cisse, Film still from Yeelen, 1987

who left the rural areas to come to Bamako or

Kayes to become new heroes or heroines in a
changing world wanted above all to show the
world that they had succeeded. They were searching for modernity; that was the reason why they
put on their best clothes and jewelry to be photographed and captured on film as symbols of
modern Bamakois identities.
African Cinema in Search of an Aesthetics

It was only in the 1960safter many countries

had won their independence, and more than sixty
years after the invention of the movie camera
that a few Africans were able to make their own
films. They were suddenly encouraged on the one
hand by the cultural policies of newly independent countries that needed to produce their own
images, and on the other by the French Ministere
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Journal of Contemporary African Art

de la Cooperation, which had reversed its policy so

as to support Africans to make films.
At that time, the artistic policies of many of the
newly independent countries mirrored those
espoused by European Marxist and African
Diaspora intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre,
Aime Cesaire, and Frantz Fanon. They embedded
art in the project of nation building and believed
that its true function was to be revolutionary and
to reflect the social reality of the people. To quote
Sekou Toure, "it is the responsibility of the State to
create a cinema which, in turn, emphasizes the
positive things in the revolution in order to motivate people and prepare them for changea cinema which is unabashed about its educational role,
and its power of transformation."
A look at Sembene Ousmane's filmsfrom
Borom Saret (1963), to Mandabi (1968)reveals
2

that they derived their aesthetic resource from the

socialist cultural policies of African independences,
and that they emphasized a social transformation
in the story at the expense of characterization and
plot construction. In both Borom Saret and
Mandabi, the main characters are antiheroes who
are sacrificed to the need of the people to rise
against the system that is oppressing them. In fact,
the narratives of both films enfold against their
protagonists: we identify less with the cart driver
in Borom Saret because he remains blind to the
system that exploits him; we take our distance
from him, to paraphrase a Brechtian expression,
because of his failure to rise up and change his
social environment. In Mandabi, too, we are as
angry with Elhadj Dieng, the main character, as we
are with the system and the people who are bent
on robbing him. Sembene positions the spectator
to reject the pompous attitude of Elhadj Dieng,
who is, after all, nothing but a paper tiger, a sexist
pig, and a reactionary.
For Sembene, who is only interested in an ideal
reality-a reality that is symbolized by justice and
democratic principles in his narrativesfilm
becomes a tool for social transformation and revolutionary grandstanding, and the hero turns out
as less important than the group that shapes him.
There are no high mimetic stories or epic narratives in Sembene's Africa. By adopting the
oppressed masses as the "heroes" in such films
as Mandabi, Xala (1974), and Ceddo (1978),
Sembene seems to be robbing the African specta-

tors of the narrative pleasure that they are so

accustomed to in the art of traditional oral storytelling and popular Western cinema. Clearly,
therefore, the revolutionary cinema that Sembene
is proposingidealist, anticolonialist, and against
"archaic" African traditionsfinds its echo more
in the Utopia of Pan-Africanism as theorized by
men like Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba,
and Fanon than in the reality of the people.
Aesthetically speaking, it is therefore fair to say
that the Sembenian cinema alienates the majority
of African spectators by depicting men like Elhadj
Dieng, who symbolized traditional nobility, as
caricatures and demagogues, on the one hand, and
literate Africans as assimiles and worthless, on the
other hand.
When we turn to the input of the French
Ministere de la Cooperation for aesthetic consideration in African cinema, we find that it made every
effort to counter the Brechtian film language proposed by Sembene. The Bureau du Cinema was
created at the Cooperation in 1963, with JeanRene Debrix as its director. It soon became the
most important source for African film production, providing many Francophone Africans with
the first opportunity to realize their dreams as
filmmakers. As early as 1975, 185 filmsshorts
and featureswere made in Francophone Africa,
four-fifths of which were produced with the financial and technical help of the Bureau that prompted Debrix to brag that "any African director who
thinks, as Louis Malle puts it, that he 'has a film in

Ousmane Sembene, Film still from Mandabi, 1968

Ousmane Sembene, Film still from Ceddo, 1977

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in these films. The slow narrative pace, the abundance of long takes, and long shotsat the
expense of a dynamic editing for character psychology and individualismalso link these
African films to ethnographic cinema.
At their worst, what Debrix calls "magic" and
"sorcery" in this kind of film can simply be dismissed as bad anthropological cinema that reinforces the stereotypical themes of Afro-pessimism,
or Africans' lack of capacity to adjust to the modern world. In 1968, in a celebrated statement,
Sembene argued that Rouch's camera depicts
Africans as insects. Still today, what reassures
European television and film festivals are African
directors taking the place of the entomologist
/anthropologist, and showing Africans like insects
caught outside of human history and trapped in
Afro-pessimism.
At any rate, the Sembenian film language that
critiques neocolonialism and imperialism has
completely disappeared from the grammar of
African cinema produced in France or by television channels like Arte in the last decades. It is not
as if Africans no longer need to worry about
underdevelopment and regional conflicts as
induced by the structural adjustments of such
financial institutions as the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Ironically, Africans are the audiences most
alienated from African cinema today. They fail to
identify with characters who are inarticulate, disempowered, and portrayed by nonprofessional
amateur actors. With African cinema caught in
this kind of Afro-pessimism, one wonders why
European critics and producers continue to
bestow awards and lavish praise upon the films
that are considered "authentically" African.
4

Souleymane Cisse, Film still from Yeelen, 1987

his stomach,' can find the means to make that film

in freedom at Bureau du cinema."
Debrix, who described himself as a student of
Abel Gance, wanted to be at the origin of a new
cinema created by Africans and distinct from
Western film language. For him, Western filmmakers had reached an impasse because they
allowed rhetorical and dialectical styles to take
over their films, subjecting the art of cinema thus
to Cartesianism and to the precepts of literature
and theater. Under the spell of a notion that an
African contribution would save cinema by restoring to it "sorcery," "magic," and "poetry," Debrix
seized the opportunity offered him by his new job
to become the architect of this new cinema.
The reality is that while the Bureau and other
French political and cultural institutions enabled
some of the best-known African directors to make
films, they also trapped these directors into a selfrepresentation that remains reassuring to the
Western imagination of Africa as primitive. At
best, African films like Yeelen (1987, by
Souleymane Cisse), and Tilai (1990, by Idrissa
Ouedraogo), by attempting to correct European
representations of Africa, have legitimized the
search for anthropological aesthetics in their narratives. Critics are justified therefore to point to
the appropriation of Negritude and prirnitivism
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Journal of Contemporary African Art

Conclusion

Perhaps one positive reaction to the hegemony of

a Francophone African cinema out of touch with
its audience is the emergence of Anglophone
videos. This also brings me back to my discussion
of the links between cinema and African photography. Like the black-and-white photographs of
Seydou Keita, Malick Sidibe, Samuel Fosso, and
Philip Kwame Apagya, the Nigerian videos are colored with the desires and fears of the African mid-

die classes. The videos reveal beautiful houses with

lush living rooms, refrigerators, television sets,
telephones, and cars. The narratives often revolve
around love, betrayal, and the power of religious
faith versus greed and money. Most importantly,
the videos, like the photographs, address Africans
as their primary audience. This crucial aesthetic
choice reflected in the videos contrasts sharply
with Francophone cinema's intention to address
only Europeans.
Personally, I feel that we have to be careful
about an uncritical endorsement of Nigerian
videos, too. Like the Francophone films, they also
contain their share of primitivism. Their stories
are often trapped in outdated or invented traditions. Furthermore, they have not yet achieved the
technical and aesthetic perfection of the blackand-white photographs of Seydou Keita and
Malick Sidibe. Most of the videos are limited in
terms of poor shooting and editing. But in spite of
their imperfections, the videos draw audiences
because they tell stories with characters who are
involved in situations that everybody can identify
with. Like the photographs, the videos show
Africans as agents of their own history, as cosmopolitan figures, and as actors in the global world
something that is lacking in Francophone cinema.
I believe that both Nigerian videos and
Francophone cinema can learn a few things from
the classic era of African black-and-white photography. For one thing, when it comes to aesthetics,
every universalism has a local basis. The early success of photography in Africa was grounded in the
fact that each photographer had adjusted his camera to the taste of his people and environment.
The African photographer did not content himself
with the notion that photography has a universal
languageas Francophone filmmakers are fond
of saying about filmrather they created a black
aesthetic of photography.
The photographers, like the tailors and barbers
who are popular from Bamako to Cotonou, succeeded in their communities because they provided consumers with the best products. If the world
is discovering Seydou Keita today, it is because he
perfected his art for the Bamakois first. I believe
that the Nigerian video makers too are well aware
of the technical and aesthetic requirements of

their audience, and realize that they must work

hard to rise to their level to survive. The fact is
that, as a mass consumer product, no cinema can
afford to ignore its audience.
I have had heated debates with African filmmakers who refute this argument as simplistic. For
them, the problem is complex because African
movie theaters are colonized by American and
Asian films that leave a very small market share for
African films. They argue that they have to play
the game of French and European institutions as
long as there are no alternative production facilities in Africaas long as there are no Africans to
invest in film. The African filmmakers see festivals
like Cannes and Berlin not as French or German,
but as universal sites for film language. For them,
survival depends not on African audiences, but on
the taste of the organizers of these festivals and
programmers of European television.
Some African filmmakers in Paris even suspect
that racism is behind the recent success of
Nigerian videos in Europe and America, which
they argue is related to the desire to turn back the
wheel and to once again ghettoize Africa cinema.
They see paternalism in European and American
praise of African videos that would have no artistic merit if they were made by filmmakers in the
West. Perhaps these critical African filmmakers
have a point insofar as the politics of production
and distribution is concerned. But how about
black-and-white photography as a model?
Manthia Diawara is the Distinguished Professor of
Film and Comparative Literature and Director of
the Institute of African American Affairs at New
York University.

Notes
* Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography (Paris:
Revue Noire, 1998).
2 Ahmed Sekou Toure, La Revolution Culturelle (1965),
p. 365.
^ Manthia Diawara, African Cinema: Politics and Culture
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 26.
4

Ibid., p. 174.

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