Over the past several decades historians and social scientists have begun to explore the relationship between Africa and the cinema during the colonial era. Some scholars have taken a closer look at movies shown to audiences in colonial Africa. They have stressed the role of images to convey political, commercial or health messages and also to control African spectators. Researchers have analyzed movies produced by missionaries and administrators aimed specifically at local audiences. These films were influenced by fundamental assumptions about the unique ways in which Africans would process moving images, given that they were foreign to their culture. Others have focused on movies, fiction or documentaries, filmed in Africa for European audiences, considering the role of African actors. Attention has also been paid to the various contexts of movie-showing and to movie-entrepreneurs, mainly Europeans, and their motivations and strategies.1 Analyzing the multiple cinematic discourses on Africa has indeed become a major theme of study, joining similar academic explorations of other forms of media including the press, advertising, colonial exhibitions, and artifact. “Colonial Cinema in Africa” is a contribution to this growing body of scholarship. The author, Glenn Reynolds, has already published extensively on this topic after writing a dissertation on the film policies of mining companies in South Africa.
As often, titles can be misleading but publishers, rather than authors, are usually at fault. “Colonial Cinema in Africa. Origins, Images, Audiences” would have benefited from a more precise subtitle. Apart from the two first chapters, and a few hints here and there, the book mainly deals with Central and Southern Africa during the inter-war period. It addresses questions of film production in Africa by Westerners for Western audiences, of the representation of African people in film, of debates on movies for Africans, and the impact of movie-shows on audiences. Studying the whole continent and different regimes of colonization over time and space would have indeed been complex, although this approach can be useful by bringing to light similarities and differences in policies.2 By focusing on Central and Southern Africa, Reynolds adds to a long list of publications on the topic of cinema in the African context. These two regions are the best researched for various reasons, mainly the availability of rich archives from the 1920s on, the activities deployed by mining companies and the economic importance of these colonies.
While utilizing colonial archives, Reynolds also draws much from and pays tribute to previous research, both older studies by Powdermaker, Gutsche, Notcutt and Latham as well as more recent ones, including Ambler, Burns, Kerr, and Smyth. Drawing on the un-translated books on the Belgian Congo of Ramirez & Rolot and Convents would have provided the author with a better understanding the missionaries’ policy in central Africa.3 Reynold’s study is very well documented4 but often based on secondary sources, which sometimes results in the reproduction of small mistakes made by other researchers (for example the misuse of the word indiennes p. 60). The book, nevertheless, discusses important issues from a Southern Africa perspective and tries to distance itself from previous studies.
This 200-pages long book is divided into seven chapters, neither entirely chronological, nor clearly thematic; some chapters overlap, exploring similar issues from various perspectives. This is explained by the fact that four chapters derive from already published papers, dating from 2003 to 2009. The first two chapters deal with general questions while the others concentrate on Central and Southern Africa. Some illustrations add a lively aspect to the book, reinforced by numerous examples and citations, which render the atmosphere of the shows.
Chapter one aims at painting a broad picture of the expansion of movie-showing all over Africa, from Egypt to South Africa, under various names: heliochromoscope, kinetoscope, bioscope, etc. The author emphasizes the role of European audiences before 1914, and the subsequent development of African audiences in the interwar period. Europeans were indeed, for cultural, financial, and political reasons, active as movie-goers. But, as studies about Senegal, Togo or the Gold Coast have shown, from very early on both entrepreneurs, such as Alfred Ocansey (whom he cites) and audiences were also Africans. Reynolds then uncovers lesser known Africans active as employees for Western film-makers or working independently. He rightly questions the difficulty for historians to analyze African perceptions of movies, the multiple reactions going from fear to fascination to laughter, the necessity to go beyond the “putative inability to comprehend” the images or the stereotype of the frightened audience (p. 25). Throughout the book, he returns to this issue, central to the film-showing policies of mining companies. Quoting various sources, he convincingly demonstrates that there were a multiplicity of interpretations, depending on the cultural context, the environment or the individual, as attitudes towards movies were as diverse as the circumstances and places where they were shown. Obviously, they also changed over the years, when seeing a film, for men especially, became a common leisure activity either on a mining compound or in cities. In essence this chapter, dwelling both on movie-shows and some early examples of film shooting including Africans offers a useful overview.
Chapter two focuses on what Reynolds calls “A scramble for Images”, parallel to colonial conquests (from 1890s), and beyond (1950s), the large production of movies by European (German, Italian) or American film-makers who, certain of their superiority, produced nevertheless often ambiguous images. Once colonial domination was asserted, state agencies were more (Great-Britain) or less active while private film-makers toured the continent to produce documentaries on topics such as wild-life, “tribal life”, and on political events. The most impressive may have been the “Endurance Expedition Film” (p. 51), covering a large section of the continent (expeditions of Leila Roosevelt in 1934–1935, John Brom well into the 1950s).5 While presenting the historical context, the author discusses the complexity of these movies, the way African people were depicted and the limited agency they had in this respect while sometimes being actively involved in the shooting.
In chapters 3, 5, 6 and 7, Reynolds concentrates on the development of African audiences, regarding migration and labor policies; the way entrepreneurs or other institutions, such as the Native Recruiting Corporation (NRC) linked to the Chamber of Mines, viewed movie-shows as a tool to educate, attract, and entertain manpower and therefore favored the production of specific movies for Africans, topics which have already been studied by other researchers. In chapter three the author studies “The Miner’s Compound Cinema Circuit”, including the work of missionaries (such as Ray Phillips), their collaboration with mining companies, the tensions between colonial authorities and private entrepreneurs regarding censorship, and the versatility of local reception. In chapter five, whose title, “From Red Blanket to Civilization”, duplicates a 1925 film by Taberer on the Transkei, Reynolds focuses on movies and migrant miners in South Africa to study the policies implemented by mining companies to attract workers, the types of propaganda conveyed by images (medical advices, glimpse of modernity), and the numerous people involved in the screening of movies (interpreters, headmen). Original sources are exploited to describe their actions and the way workers responded to this stimulus. Chapter six (“The Origins of British Film Policy in Africa”) and chapter seven (“Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment”), the latter dealing with the Copperbelt in the 1930s, both offer general approaches, reflecting Reynolds’ familiarity with previous studies and archival sources and his art of synthesis. The efforts to produce movies in the inter-war period did not meet the desires of the audiences, who were looking for Charlie Chaplin or action movies. As Charles Ambler has framed it: “African moviegoers had little patience for films on postal savings banks […] For them, movies meant the bioscope – the high-action products of Hollywood dream factories”.6 Indeed, among the most successful movies were the westerns, to which chapter four is devoted. It dwells on the figure of the cowboy, which has been extensively written about, and its impact on young male audiences which used it as a tool to assert their personality by copying clothing, attitudes or songs and enter a kind of modernity.7
The conclusion begins with a discussion of propaganda films produced during the Second World War. It ends on a quotation of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (2000) addressing a more general issue, which is still relevant: the very definition of “African cinema”. This is the topic of hot debates: should the history of national cinemas include colonial movies in their national narrative? This is the path that some researchers, mainly from the media studies perspective, seem to take.
Notes:
1 The studies are too numerous now to be cited ; see, for the British Empire, among many: James Burns, Cinema and Society in the British Empire, 1895–1940, Basingstoke 2013; Lee Grieveson / Colin MacCabe (eds), Empire and Film, London 2011.
2 That is what I tried to do in Fantômas sous les tropiques. Aller au cinéma en Afrique coloniale, Paris 2015.
3 Ramirez Francis / Christian Rolot, Histoire du cinéma colonial au Zaire, au Rwanda et au Burundi, Tervuren 1985; Guido Convents, Images & démocratie. Les Congolais face au cinéma et à l’audiovisuel. Une histoire politico-culturelle du Congo des Belges jusqu’à la République démocratique du Congo (1896–2006), Kessel-Lo 2006.
4 Chapter four, only 15 pages long, has 105 footnotes!
5 For more information on these expeditions, see Reynolds books: Images out of Africa. The Virginia diaries of the Africa Motion Picture Project, Lanham 2011; Africa's last romantic: the films, books and expeditions of John L. Brom / Olga Brom Spencer; edited and with an introduction by Glenn Reynolds, Berne 2014.
6 Popular Films and Colonial Audiences: The Movies in Northern Rhodesia, in: American Historical Review 106 (2001) 1, pp. 81–105, quote: p. 85.
7 I could add my contribution for Western Africa “Des cowboys dans la savane. Cinéma et hybridation culturelle en contexte colonial”, Afrika Zamani 20–21, 2012–2013 (published in 2015), pp. 69–94; and Ch. Didier Gondola, Tropical Cowboys. Westerns, Violence, and Masculinity in Kinshasa, Bloomington 2016.