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African Film: Re-Imagining a Continent
Josef Gugler
2003
James Currey, Oxford
216 pages
Reviewed by Tom Odhiambo
History is an important element of any undertaking relating to African art and culture and the story of African film, predictably, is the ‘story of the white man’, with the native African as the listener, the audience or an appendix. In African Film, Josef Gugler recovers/re-imagines and re-represents the historical experiences of Africans before, during and after colonialism through a perspective that celebrates the peculiarities and diversity of the continent.
This study by Gugler, professor of sociology and director of the Centre for Contemporary African Studies at the University of Connecticut in the United States, is an intensive overview of 17 selected African films with the oldest being Kongi’s Harvest (1970) and the latest being Kini and Adams (1997). A number of the selected films are from West Africa, which has been the most prolific in terms of the number of films produced in Africa. A few of the films discussed are from South and southern Africa, which has certainly been quite productive since the end of apartheid.
In general, all the 17 films are from Africa south of the Sahara, which partially undermines the books professed intention to prod us into "re-imagining Africa". The book is divided into six sections ranging from one that deals with "Recovering the African Past" to one that looks at the African film "Between the African Mass Market and International Recognition". Structurally, Gugler places the films within the African historical trajectory by paying attention to the specificities of different periods beginning with the pre-colonial to the moments of colonial occupation and ending with the contemporary period.
The book makes an easy read, suitable both for those in tertiary institutions and the general reader. First, Gugler offers an introduction entitled "Seventeen Films in Seventeen Sentences" which gives the title of each film, the year of its production/release, the director/producer and the setting – either the location where the different films were shot or where their stories were set. He then offers a rough
| "African films offer us a window that presents views quite different from those we usually see through" |
economic and demographic guide to Africa south of the Sahara. To provide a comparative perspective, he adds similar figures for the United States, which definitely shows Africa performing poorly. For instance, consider that the gross national product per capita for Botswana, the highest in Africa south of the Sahara, was $3,630 in 2001 as opposed to the United States' $34,870 in the same year. Yet the US had approximately 284 million people at the time compared with Botswana’s 2 million. Alongside the table is a map of the continent detailing the countries and their capitals.
The Introduction is simply that, in which Gugler justifies his study. He notes that "African films offer us a window on Africa, one that presents views quite different from those we usually see through – the three windows on that continent readily available to Western viewers: television news, documentaries, and feature films produced in the West". Indeed Gugler’s study is one of the few texts to come out of America and Europe recently that does not fall into the predictable pattern of stereotyping Africa and essentialising African studies.
He follows in the footsteps of probably the most pioneering scholar of African film Françoise Pfaff in his emphasis on re-examining the existing images and views of the continent in the West, as represented by the camera lens. By doing what is undeniably a brilliant contemporary ethnography of the African film, Gugler has managed to bring to our attention the similarities and differences between African films while also pointing out, quite critically, the peculiarities of films made in different African regions with diverse social, economic, political, cultural and religious characteristics.
One of the critical strengths of Gugler’s study is the location of the films in their historical contexts. For instance, the films Yaaba (Idrissa Ouedraogo, 1989) and Keita (Dani Kouyate, 1995) are two films that forcefully capture what Gugler has called "Recovering the Past". Both films are located in the histories of the African and privilege the African man and woman as agents in the making of their own histories. The former highlights the life of an African village that the writer/director describes as "out of history".
Keita! The Heritage of the Griot is a classic example of how technology participates in the remaking and transmission of the West African epic of Sundjata to both present and future generations of Africans. Through this film the director manages to project two historically significant narratives within a single medium. First, the tale of the empire of Mali is recreated. Secondly, the part or role played in ‘reliving’ the historical import of the empire by the story-teller – the griot/griotte – is emphasised. The two films therefore manage to re-enact and project African historical realities from the past, into the present and the future.
It would appear surprising, at first glance, that Gugler analyses the two films in the same section as the settler romance Out of Africa (Sidney Pollack, 1985). However, it seems that the author grouped the three films together in order to demonstrate the contrast in the treatment of the themes of Africa and the Africans by European and African film-makers.
The next section deals with two films that celebrate the struggle against colonialism, featuring the films Sambizanga (Sarah Maldoror, 1972), based on a novel by the Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira, and Flame (Ingrid Sinclair, 1996). Sambizanga is not just the story of the anticolonial struggle in Angola waged by the MPLA, but it is also a biography of a society’s efforts to reclaim its freedom and dignity. Flame set in Zimbabwe and is special among African films – and even in Gugler’s book – because it recognises the role and contribution of women as active foot soldiers in the anticolonial struggle.
The theme of "Fighting Colonialism" appears to be rephrased as "The struggle for majority rule in South Africa" in the next section. Here three films are analysed: The Gods Must Be Crazy (Jamie Uys, 1980); A Dry White Season, adapted from Andre Brink’s book of the same title, (Euzhan Palcy, 1989); Mapantsula (Oliver Schmitz and Thomas Mogotlane, 1988); and Fools, based on Njabulo Ndebele’s novella of the same title, (Ramadan Suleman, 1990). It is obvious that Jamie Uys’s film is included in this section for comparison purposes because although it engages obliquely with the struggle against white rule in South Africa, it is in the main the story of the white man’s realisation of the reality of political, social and economic conditions under the National Party. The other three films examine the responses by black South Africans to apartheid era oppression and suppression.
A Dry White Season focuses on the "heavy price" paid by individuals who were involved in the anti-apartheid struggle; Mapantsula highlights township life – Soweto was its setting – in South Africa and the everyday trials of living in a gangster-infested society that is also under siege from an unjust government; while Fools seeks to examine the responses by individuals to life in South Africa under apartheid.
Section Four engages with the "Betrayals of Independence" that engulfed Africa in the late 1960s. Two West African literary texts, Kongi’s Harvest by Wole Soyinka and Sembene Ousmane’s Xala provide the scripts for the first two films in this section namely Kongi’s Harvest (Ossie Davis, 1970) and Xala (Sembene Ousmane, 1974). The two films critique the corruption and moral depravity of post-independence African political leaders. The two authors offer some kind of moral questioning of the legacies of those politicians who, in the years before independence, had criticised the colonial administration for injustice but epitomised ‘localised injustice’ now that self-rule has been achieved. Tableau Ferraile (Moussa Sene Absa, 1997) is an indictment of social corruption and the practice of polygamy by the class of wealthy Africans. The Blue Eyes of Yonta (Flora Gomes, 1992) is a script on the "urban underclass", particularly those who dreamt of material comfort after independence, only to end up wallowing in abject poverty.
"The exploited and neglected peasantry" is a really an appendix to the previous section as it highlights the plight of a large section of the African populace that has increasingly become a government statistic rather than a ‘people’. Finzan (Cheick Oumar Sissoko, 1990) recreates village life and the tribulations of its women. Kasarmu Ce (Saddik Balewa, 1993) once again brings village life on to the film screen although this time with the theme of communal allegiance to religious practices and moral corruption taking the centre stage.
"Between the African mass market and international recognition", as the sixth section is titled, is a take on modern urban life. Kini and Adams (Idrissa Ouedraogo, 1997) deals with friendship between adults and La Vie est Belle (Mweze Nyangura, 1987) is on the pleasures of life in African cities. The one page "Epilogue" poses the question: "Can we re-imagine ourselves as citizens of the world who have a measure of responsibility towards our fellow human beings, wherever they may be, whatever their nationality, whatever their race?"
Gugler’s book achieves three important tasks in the field of African studies. First, it once again reminds us of the significance of interdisciplinary studies for Africa. For instance, the importance of being sensitive to the historical relationship between history, literature and film for African films is emphasised. Secondly, by revisiting these films, most of which have been analysed in scholarly works before, Gugler reminds us of Africa’s efforts to engage in dialogue with the rest of the world. It is important that the rest of the world appreciates these films not in the conventional European/American understanding of the film as merely a commodity to be consumed but also as representing the face of African experiences in particular historical moments which are also connected to events in the rest of the world. Urbanisation, modernity, globalisation, female genital mutilation, religious fundamentalism, political misrule, misappropriation of public resources, rural underdevelopment, or urban poverty and misery are just some of the issues that these 17 films deal with and which resonate with other human experiences all over the world. Therefore, they cannot be understood as peculiarly African, a point which Gugler seems to be suggesting. Thirdly this study poses a critical and urgent question to African and Africanist scholars about the fate of African arts and cultures in the 21st century in the face of a rapidly globalising world where capitalism and market forces increasingly determine artistic and cultural production and circulation.
This book provides great insight into the history of African film; the politics and economics of film-making in Africa; the relationship between different forms of cultural production in Africa which sees film producers using both oral and written African historiography to make documentaries and features films of and on the continent. For the student of African culture, African studies, and African film, Gugler’s book provides an invaluable resource in the extensive bibliography that follows the ‘introduction’ to each section and the various analyses of each film. African Film adds to the stock of recent publications including Africa Shoots Back by Melissa Thackway and Focus on African Film edited by Francoise Pfaff. This is a worthwhile book both for those generally interested in Africa and the many individuals who specialise in African studies, be it culture, anthropology, sociology, politics, gender issues, literature, music, art, film among many others, but most significantly it adds material of immense importance to the existing archive available to scholars of Africa.
Tom Odhiambo is a post-graduate researcher with the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg |
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