Most Americans have seen Africa only through non-African eyes. Our knowledge of the continent comes almost exclusively from images selected and shot by Western media. National Geographic specials, nature documentaries, Hollywood films, the nightly news, often tell us more about the cultural bias of the people doing the filming than about the people being filmed.

The African-produced films in the Library of African Cinema offer many Americans their first chance to see Africa through African eyes. These eight initial releases, and the new films which will follow them each year, are the first collection of African feature films available to American viewers on video. In them, Africans tell their own stories rather than figure in stories told by others. This New African Cinema is a vital addition to the cinematic literature of the world.

Through these films we can unlearn stereotypes absorbed during a lifetime of television and movie-going. They challenge a Eurocentric point of view and encourage us to adopt a more global perspective. They invite us to learn new cultures, new visual languages, new ways of framing and editing our world. They help us put ourselves in other people's shoes--or at least behind other people's eyes. They free us from the prison of our own preconceptions.

Europeans' fascination with Africa and with cinema both date from the late 19th century. While the Lumières and Edison were appropriating the visual world through the invention of cinema, other entrepreneurs were appropriating Africa through colonization. Traders, anthropologists, missionaries--the Great White Hunters of wealth, knowledge, and souls--brought back gold, elephant tusks, Benin bronzes, as well as moving images of what had been to them the "Dark Continent."

Not surprisingly, these two parallel Western explorations--film and colonialism--fused symbolically in one of the most popular genres of the early cinema, the "jungle melodrama." In turn-of-the-century Nickelodeons weary industrial workers thrilled vicariously to the adventures of intrepid white explorers as seen through intrepid European cameras.

Hollywood soon embraced this genre. Over a 70 year period the studios produced more than 49 Tarzan movies. Later, in the 1950's and 60's, productions such as Mogambo (1953) and Hatari! (1961) rediscovered "the jungle melodrama," this time shot in technicolor and cinemascope on exotic African locations.

These "romances of the African forest" invariably depicted Africans as an undifferentiated Other. Face-painted warriors danced frenzied rituals, grunting unintelligible languages, inflamed by some primeval hostility. Audiences could uncritically identify with the "reasonable," "civilized" colonialists and enjoy a sense of moral superiority to the "natives."

The "jungle melodrama" appears to be so deeply rooted in Western movie-goers' imaginations that it has withstood, with only minor modification, the independence struggles of the last thirty years. For example, the recent box-office success, Out of Africa (1986), despite feminist overtones and a mildly skeptical tone, never questions the basic legitimacy of the colonial adventure. Gorillas in the Mist (1988), as its title implies, is more concerned with the ecology of apes than the economy of Africans. Ironically, even sympathetic films like Cry Freedom (1988) and A Dry White Season (1989) present Africans' struggle for freedom through the stories of white, liberal heroes rather than Africans themselves.

The Western media still brings us an Africa colonized by the Western imagination, whether liberal or reactionary. Africa has served as a backdrop against which Europeans could project their dreams of adventure and self-sacrifice, or (as in Conrad's Heart of Darkness) their nightmares of a world void of civilization and meaning. Perhaps the time has come to wake up--to the Africa of the Africans.

With independence in the late 50's and early 60's, Africans could begin to construct their own images of themselves. New nations required new images and the recovery of forgotten myths. African filmmakers saw their task as adapting the Western medium of cinema to the urgent task of defining an authentic modern African identity.

During the past thirty years, African cinema has developed three broad trends, taking their inspiration from the recent anti-colonial struggle, the distant pre-colonial past, and the current post-independence era.

1. One group of filmmakers has tried to tell the story of colonialism from the point of view of the colonized rather than the colonizer. They have searched for a "usable past" which can give the present the confidence and perspective needed for nation-building. Ousmane Sembène, widely regarded as the father of African cinema, pioneered this strand in films like Emitai, Black Girl and his most recent work Camp de Thiaroye as has Med Hondo in Sarraounia and Soleil-O.

2. Another group of directors has championed a "return to the sources," a rediscovery of the pre-colonial past. These filmmakers have tried to adapt the myths, legends and oral story-telling techniques of the past to the screen, passing down the "wisdom of the ancestors" into the Information Age. Gaston Kaboré's Wend Kuuni, Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen and Idrissa Ouedraogo's Yaaba all attempt to "reinvent" cinema as an indigenous African art form.

3. Many of these filmmakers have also engaged in a vigorous "social realist" critique of post-independence African society. Here the enemy is more often within than without. Gaston Kaboré's Zan Boko attacks government corruption and censorship, Cheick Oumar Sissoko's Finzan denounces the oppression of women, Amadou Seck's Saaraba explores the alienation of urban youth, and Sembène's Xala satirizes the neo-colonial bourgeoisie.

While these African films have not been widely distributed in this country, neither have they been extensively seen at home. The multinational media conglomerates monopolize the screens of Africa's cities with popular box office hits from the U.S. and Europe. A remarkably efficient network of "video theatres," often only a VCR hooked up to a generator, distribute pirated copies of Hollywood hits and Indian "musicals" throughout rural Africa within weeks of their opening in New York or Bombay.

Hence, even after independence, Africa is still being colonized by foreign images. The problems of distribution and exhibition are of urgent concern to the filmmakers banded together in FEPACI, the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers, and has been the subject of heated discussion at the biennial Pan-African film festival in Ouagadougou. The Library of African Cinema's attempt to overcome a similar distribution bottleneck in this country through targeted video distribution may offer valuable experience which African filmmakers can use to get their work more widely seen at home.

(from California Newsreel's first Library of African Cinema catalogue, 1990)

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