History of Film In Africa

By Immanuel Mwalabu
What is Film in Africa?
● A series of moving picture recorded with sound that tells a story

● It is a way of defining, describing and interpreting African experiences with those

forces that have shaped their past and that continue to shape and influence the
present
When Did it start?
By Colonialists in the early 20th century depicting africans in a negative
manner as “exotic” others
Examples:
Kings of the Cannibal Islands (1909)
Voodoo Vengeance(1913)
When was the first entirely African Film made?
Sembène Ousmane's La Noire de...
also known as
Black Girl
Is about African woman
who has to work
as a maid in France
1960s to 1970s
The armed struggles of Africans against various European colonial powers have
provided rich narrative material for a number of African filmmakers who preserve
this glory moment of their history on film
Examples
Battle of Algiers (1966) Sarah Maldoror

Monangambee (1970) Sarah Maldoror

1980s to 1990s
Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen (Mali, 1987) was the first film made by a Black
African to compete at Cannes
Nigerian cinema experienced a large growth in the 1990s with the increasing
availability of home video cameras in Nigeria, and soon put Nollywood in the
nexus for West African English-language films
2000s to Present Day
● Contemporary African cinema deals with a wide variety of
themes relating to modern issues and universal problems
● Migration and relations between African and European countries
is a common theme among many African films
Examples
Waiting For Hapiness (2002)
Pumzi (2010) Kenyan Film
Final Words
● These films recover and re-articulate aspects of African popular
memory and subaltern voices to preserve as well as reconfigure
past events.
● The histories of Africans as well as former colonies – written,
authorized and validated by non-Africans – have been
characterized by “exclusions, erasures, silences, distortions and
arbitrary fictions,”
● in Africa “When an old person dies it’s like a library burning down.”

Malian sage