Journal of African Cinemas - 2-3: Artistic Epistemologies: Black Cinema and the Idea of Africa, Dec 2024

This article attempts to foreground the Pan-African concerns in Souheil Ben-Barka’s Amok (1982). This film has been consistently ignored in African cinema scholarship even though it documents one of the most authoritarian political regimes in South Africa, i.e. the Apartheid political system. Although the film was made in the 1980s, a time best known for the establishment of national African cinemas, its primary concern is beyond the notion of nationhood, opening up therefore the possibility of reading and thinking about African films beyond national boundaries. Grounded in the Pan-Africanist cinema agenda and deorbiting from narrowed national concerns, Amok offers an intriguing way to explore African cinemas’ different trajectories. That said, the article focuses on how the film thematically and aesthetically reverberates with Pan-Africanism while concomitantly subscribing to the transnational cinematic turn. The article also examines how the film, given its time of production and transnational orientations, brings to the fore the limitedness of the current research on Moroccan cinema as a potential transnational film industry that started to take shape only at the turn of the century with no critical attention to earlier cinematic experiences despite their transnational underpinnings.

Nollywood’s global diffusion is presently dependent as much on American corporations like Netflix and Amazon – prominent sources of streaming versions of Nollywood films – as on continuous Afro-diasporic practices of bootlegging and gift exchange. But its past was at least as haunted by Hollywood as its much-streamed, multiplexed present. This article considers the longstanding imbrication of Nollywood and Hollywood as generative of multiple, contested ‘images of Africa’, arguing that we must resist binary oppositions between the two geocultural sites of cinema and instead insist on a productive and persistent entwinement.

National film industries owe their existence to consistent filmmaking. Filmmaking can be self-funded or sponsored by companies, non-governmental organizations, crowdfunding or governmental agencies. This article discusses the experiences of Kenyan women filmmakers with these models. It also teases numerous problematic issues associated with donor funding, which is the prevalent source of financial support for local filmmaking. These include a lack of creative freedom and the imposition of unpopular ideologies. The article responds to the questions: what are the funding routes available to Kenyan women filmmakers? What registers of the idea of Africa are motivated by these different funding routes? The article interviews five Kenyan women filmmakers, qualitatively analysing their responses to shape the discussions of the state of funding women filmmakers in Kenya and the emergent concerns with fund-motivated ideation.

The article examines the documentary Zimbabwe’s Forgotten Children: A Struggle for Survival (2010) and the narrative film Everyone’s Child (1996) for similarities in depicting Zimbabwean orphans and vulnerable children. The article uses these two case studies to discuss intra-genre possibilities in documentary and fiction cinema’s approaches to filmmaking. It shows that while the actual events filmed are different, and the films belong to different genres, they share similarities in their organizing idea, storytelling techniques and characterization. The article tries to make sense of the films’ comparable verisimilitude to the historical realities of childhood and the HIV pandemic in Zimbabwe. In doing so, it demonstrates the need to rethink genre, not necessarily by dismissing existing conventions but by examining what intra-diegetic commonalities may exist at the levels of realism and verisimilitude, organizing ideas and subject matter.

This article explores how New Nollywood films promote and preserve Nigerian cultures, particularly languages, taking The Wedding Party 2 as a case study. It addresses three questions: (1) how extensively are Indigenous Nigerian languages featured in New Nollywood films, notably those with increased visibility through theatrical releases? (2) In what ways does the language usage in these films contribute to showcasing and preserving the array of cultures found across Nigeria? (3) Taking The Wedding Party 2 as a case study, how does this popular film from New Nollywood either align with or challenge the prevailing patterns in the industry’s utilization of Indigenous languages? The article uses two datasets, revealing an increase in Nollywood films produced in English and a corresponding significant decline in local Indigenous Nigerian languages. The study makes a case for emerging linguistic trends such as transliteration, code-switching and language performativity in New Nollywood cinema and their significance in mediating emergent cultural trends.

Scholarship on the history of cinematic forms has tended to overlook pornography as a subsector and a cinematic discourse. Iterating Haseenah Ebrahim’s concept of ‘small cinema’, this article argues that South Africa’s local Black porn exemplifies the scholarly, industrial and legal marginalization of Black porn cinema and, consequently, actuates the precarious sexual citizenship of the local Black porn community. I provide a theoretical framework for discussing Black porn as a form of identity marker and its consumption as an act of self-identification which may rally porn-consuming individuals into active sexual communities. With this, a new assemblage of sexual citizenship is realized.

This article analyses selected documentaries about queer experiences in Uganda and Nigeria. It focuses on counter-discourses on Africa’s heterosexual normativity, advancing three perspectives. The first concerns globalization and rapid cultural exchanges enabled by various forms of mobility, which bring cultures into contact, promoting interferences. The documentaries analysed here reveal that queer African cinema and the identities it brings to light reflect the continent’s long history of interaction with the rest of the world and the exchanges therein. The second focuses on the evangelical efforts towards the politics of queerness, which also align with the legislation of sexuality in Uganda. Thirdly, the article demonstrates how the media sometimes perpetrates the vulnerability of queer identities, as represented in cinema. The debates around queer sexualities that these documentaries raise interrogate religious patronage and public antipathies towards queer identities in Africa. The article concludes that the pro-queer documentary films discussed play advocacy roles, opening new fronts for resistance against oppressive experiences.