Journal of African Media Studies. Volume 2 Issue 1

JAMS 2 (1) pp. 3–7 Intellect Limited 2010 Journal of African Media Studies Volume 2 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/jams.2.1.3/2 EDITORIAL TOWARDS INTERPRETATION OF SCREEN MEDIA IN AFRICA It is an exciting time to be working on African film. With a wealth of freshly published monographs as well as new journals such as the Journal of African Media Studies and the Journal of African Cinemas, there are now sufficient materials and forums to sustain debates. The contributors to this special issue respond, in the wake of this new work, to Kenneth Harrow’s (2007) appeal for new perspectives on African film. They focus, for example, on largely unexamined audio-visual forms (animation), films (Un Amour d’Enfant [Beye, 2004] and U-Carmen eKhayelitsha [Dornford-May, 2005]), institutions (the Rwanda Cinema Centre), contexts (Tanzania), infrastructure (distribution and exhibition in Senegal) and concepts (childhood). ‘Film culture’ is as important to the authors as ‘film as culture’, and they explore, for example, film festivals, informal distribution structures and mobile cinema projects. Notably, many of the contributors are also actively involved with the making, distribution or exhibition of film. Paula Callus is involved in the archiving and programming of African animation, as well as in the training of African animation filmmakers; Piotr Cieplak has made a film, Memory Places (2008), about genocide memorial sites in Rwanda; Lindiwe Dovey is founding director of the Cambridge African Film Festival (https://www.cambridgeafricanfilmfestival.co.uk); and Barrie McClune works at California Newsreel, one of the longstanding distributors of African film (https://www.newsreel.org). Manthia Diawara, in the first comprehensive monograph in English about African Cinema – African Cinema: Politics & Culture – pointed out that ‘African films […] are not usually considered entertaining; they are reserved for sociology classrooms’ (Diawara 1992: 33). Similarly, K. Martial Frindéthié, in one of the most recent books in the new wave of publications on African Cinema – Francophone African Cinema: History, Culture, Politics and Theory – argues that ‘many instructors persist in restricting films, especially African films, to departments of history and anthropology, where they are usually analyzed as artefacts for comprehending “strange” communities’ (Frindéthié 2009: 3). To counter what he calls the ‘museumification of 3 Editorial African cinema’, Frindéthié suggests that African films and critical theory need to be read through and against one another. African films, he rightly says, are filled with ideas that beg interpretation. There is now general acknowledgement, then, that what is urgently needed in African film studies is more sustained and sophisticated interpretations of the films themselves. This process will be greatly aided by new projects that are digitizing African films, such as M-Net’s newly launched African Film Library (https:// www.africanfilmlibrary.com/), since one of the main restrictions to such an approach has been the lack of accessibility of African films (even to scholars in the West). Femi Okiremuete Shaka, in Modernity and the African Cinema (2004), emphasizes the incontrovertible fact that African cinema is thoroughly a product of the European-African contact that began in the fifteenth century. He, appropriately, invokes an image from one of the first films made by a subSaharan African in sub-Saharan Africa – Ousmane Sembene’s Borom Sarret (1963), with its horse-drawn cart sporting modern tyres – to underscore the fundamental hybridity of modern African societies. It is towards this heterogeneity and hybridity of diverse African contexts that the contributors to this special issue also turn, engaging with instances of local filmmaking, distribution and exhibition in Africa. That each author focuses on a particular national context – Senegal, Rwanda, DRC, Burkina Faso, South Africa and Tanzania, respectively – without reifying the explanatory power of the ‘nation’, sets a model for the necessary shift away from a hegemonic concept of ‘African Cinema’ to explorations of individual (African) films as well as local and regional examples of African film production, distribution and exhibition. All the authors are particularly wary of the concept of ‘authenticity’ (in line with Murphy 2000 and Harrow 2007), and draw on multidisciplinary perspectives to establish the hybrid, cross-cultural and dynamic nature of many African films, cultures and traditions. ‘African Cinema’ has never been an uncontroversial descriptive label. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, African filmmakers and critics alike critiqued the term for its assumption that both Africa and films made in Africa are homogeneous entities. This led, in the 1990s, to the adoption of the term ‘African Cinemas’, coined to acknowledge the diversity of content and style in films made across this vast continent of 53 countries and, by association, the heterogeneity of Africa itself. This slight adjustment, however, has not taken into account the diversity in mediums of production and how it is medium, more than anything else, that has revolutionized film production, distribution, exhibition and spectatorship on the African continent. For, with the rise in video film production from the 1980s onwards (particularly in Nigeria, but also in Ghana, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa, Mozambique, and Angola), African filmmakers have at last found something that they did not have previously: large African audiences. Even on a more metaphorical and connotative level, the term ‘African Cinemas’ seems to have run its course, with the term ‘cinema’ dating back to the Lumière brothers’ cinématographe and, before that, to the Ancient Greek term ‘kinema’, meaning movement. It seems important to now go beyond tropes of ‘movement’ (where ‘movement’ is a given in our contemporary, globalized world, in which one in six people is an international migrant or engaged in cross-border movement [see ‘The Impact of Diasporas’ description at https://www.leverhulme. ac.uk/grants_awards/grants/research_programmes/]), to tropes that register the ways in which digitization has enabled both the mediation of movement 4 Editorial and the re-materialization of media (through the ways in which digital media have enabled not only the global, but also the local production and circulation of audio-visual products). To borrow the words of the Burkinabé director Dani Kouyaté: ‘if the rhythm of the drums change, the dance steps must change with it’ (see Bolgar-Smith and Bradbury, this volume). The concept of ‘transculturation’ (see Davies and Dovey, this volume) is relevant to the kinds of theoretical and critical engagement of many of the contributors to this volume, in that it emphasizes the need for remembering the past while also adapting it for the purposes of the future. The Cuban ethnographer, Fernando Ortiz defined ‘transculturation’ as encompassing both ‘deculturation’ (the eradication of earlier cultures through the violent practices of colonialism) and ‘neoculturation’ (the creation of new cultures in the postcolonial period). Often the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, the ‘local’ and the ‘foreign’ do not sit comfortably together, and are disjunctive in their hybridity (see Davies and Dovey, this volume). Marina Bradbury’s focus on the representation of ‘childhood’ in Senegalese cinema also suggests a new paradigm through which to view African films and identities. The chief contribution of this article is that it moves away from the limiting and impossible debates about what is ‘African’ or not, to look at the specific formation of identities through childhood experience. By exploring the ways in which African directors draw on their own memories and experiences of childhood, Bradbury shows how they strategically use childhood to challenge ‘foreign views’ of Africa, and also reductionist definitions of ‘Africanness’. The concept of ‘childhood’ thus allows at once for a more accurate, but also more flexible and open interpretation of ‘Africanness’. While all the authors attempt to present ‘Afrocentric’ views in the sense of trying, wherever possible, to draw on autochthonous African scholarship and points of view, and by focusing on the idea of the ‘local’ (through the emphasis on local languages and local popular cultures in film), they also insist on the usefulness of exploring ‘outsider’ views. In his article about film cultures in Rwanda, Piotr Cieplak considers not only the development of new local film organizations in the country (such as the Rwanda Cinema Centre and the Rwanda Film Festival), but also low-budget, alternative films made about Rwanda by ‘outsiders’ (in this case, a British and a Kenyan filmmaker). He goes so far as to argue, in fact, that ‘it is precisely small, non-mainstream productions that may offer us an alternative way of perceiving what “African Cinema” is and can be’, and that while ‘being “other” does, inevitably, entail a lack of knowledge, […] it can also lend itself more positively to an increase in objectivity, and therefore the ability to mediate’. Similarly, Paula Callus, in her article about the animation filmmaker, Jean Michel Kibushi, looks at the ways in which Kibushi is ‘helping to build bridges between African and European cultures’, through collaboration with filmmakers in both his native DRC and in Belgium, where his studio is based. Cieplak and Callus both emphasize the need for recognition of the realities of the current difficulties of making and distributing films in many African contexts. Cieplak points to the ways in which foreigners have helped to build a film infrastructure in a society that has previously communicated in verbal rather than visual ways. And Callus argues that rather than seeing Kibushi’s reliance on foreign funding as a compromise, we might focus on the ways in which his access to European markets allows him to challenge the hegemony of Disney over the area of animation filmmaking. Similarly, Kate Bolgar Smith, in her article about the ‘Return to the Source’ genre of 5 Editorial African filmmaking, and in particular, the work of Burkinabé director Dani Kouyaté, looks at how Kouyaté himself (both in his transnational identity, as French and Burkinabé, and in the content of his films) suggests that what is needed is a rapprochement, on equal terms, between African and European cultures. Davies and Dovey challenge claims that the film U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (2005) is not sufficiently ‘African’, while unpacking the ways in which colonial and apartheid anxieties are mobilized and critiqued in the narrative and, specifically, the soundtrack of the film. And Laura Fair, in her groundbreaking ethnographic study of the preferences of film audiences in Tanzania from the 1950s to the 1980s, shows that what one considers ‘foreign’ is far more diverse than previously acknowledged. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with Tanzanians, as well as analysis of rare archival material, she argues that Bollywood films from India provided a popular alternative to Hollywood films in East Africa during this era. While all six articles, as well as the visual essay, focus on what traditionally would have been called ‘African Cinema’, the authors’ methodological and interpretive approaches – which take contexts as much as texts into account – suggest that what is necessary is a new framework within which to consider audio-visual products made and viewed in Africa by Africans. ‘Screen media’ would seem to be the best umbrella term to capture the diversity of the forms and formats discussed by the authors (which include documentary films, short films, animations, and filmed opera). Furthermore, the ‘high art’ connotations of the word ‘cinema’ (usually associated with celluloid production and a particular kind of screening environment) do not necessarily hold in Africa, where there is often little or no distinction made between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms, and where spectatorial conventions are, in some cases, very different (see Cieplak, Davies and Dovey, and Fair, this volume). By publishing these articles on ‘African Cinema’ in the Journal of African Media Studies, we hope that the unproductive boundaries between Film Studies and Media Studies (particularly in relation to Africa) will begin to erode. We hope to stimulate, in future, comparative discussion around, for example, African films, home videos, television serials, documentaries, ‘development’ films and short films made on mobile phones. Whereas ‘African Cinema’ is steadily becoming the preserve of the problematically named ‘World Cinema Studies’, with films often being divorced from their local contexts, our bid here is to assess (in line with Stuart Hall’s theories) not only the ways in which the cultural products under analysis have been ‘encoded’ with meanings by their makers, but also how their meanings are being ‘decoded’ in complex ways by African spectators. In other words, what we need now are studies of how African cultures are being mediated (by authors, mediums and audiences) in diverse African (and other) contexts. The well-known media ethnographer, Faye Ginsburg has emphasized the many dimensions of the term ‘media’ itself, pointing out that ‘The American College Dictionary defines it as “an intervening substance, through which a force acts or an effect is produced; [2] an agency, means or instrument.” It is related to “mediate”: “to act between parties to effect an understanding, compromise, reconciliation”’ (Ginsburg 2002: 216). As the participants in a conference on ‘African and Arab Media Audiences’ at the University of Westminster, London (30–31 March 2009) seemed to agree, such understanding, compromise and reconciliation are needed between those scholars undertaking qualitative and quantitative ethnographic studies of spectatorship 6 Editorial in Africa, and those scholars considering media producers, contexts of production and media texts themselves. In this way, to again borrow the words of Ginsburg, we will be able ‘to communicate something about that social or collective identity we call “culture,” in order to mediate (one hopes) across gaps of space, time, knowledge, and prejudice’ (Ginsburg 2002: 216). Lindiwe Dovey Department of African Languages and Cultures, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London REFERENCES Diawara, M. (1992), African Cinema: Politics & Culture, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Frindéthié, K. M. (2009), Francophone African Cinema: History, Culture, Politics and Theory. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. Ginsburg, F. (2002), ‘Mediating Culture: Indigenous Media, Ethnographic Film, and the Production of Identity’, in K. Askew and R. Wilk (eds), The Anthropology of Media: A Reader, Malden (MA) and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 210–235. Harrow, K. (2007), Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Murphy, David (2000), ‘Africans Filming Africa; Questioning Theories of an Authentic African Cinema’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 13:2, pp. 239–249. Shaka, F. O. (2004), Modernity and the African Cinema, Trenton and Asmara: Africa World Press. 7 #(&& +%,)$*&% !#'&##### $""(!)% &"!# &"!#'          "% '$%!  #!!&  ########################  ########################   %##)"*&!'#" $( 4 7 11100 9 77175 09 !!!          
   
    
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