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The cinema of sub-Saharan Africa began to emerge in the early 1960s, at the height of the process of decolonization. During the colonial era, cinematic images of Africa had been dominated by countless jungle epics, from the Tarzan series to The African Queen (1951) and the various adaptations of H. Rider Haggard's deeply racist 1885 novel, King Solomon's Mines.1 Effectively, Western cinematic representations of Africa helped to reinforce the dominant Hegelian vision of Africa as a continent with no history and no culture.2 Therefore, it came as no surprise that African filmmakers in the 1960s and 1970s set out to counter such demeaning and caricatural representations of Africa. At the second meeting of the federation of African filmmakers (FEPACI) in Algiers in 1975, this commitment to the development of an African cinema that would be radically different to previous cinematic representations of Africa was made explicit: not only should African films represent Africa from an African point of view, but they should also reject commercial, Western film codes.3 However, many African directors have retreated somewhat from such radical calls over the past two decades, worrying far more about the problems of forging a popular African cinema and creating a viable African film industry. The reality of "Africans filming Africa" has not produced a unified, 'authentic' African cinema. Rather, it has produced a series of complex and often contradictory visions of the continent. Therefore, it is one of the aims of this article to examine the representation of Africa in a number of African films in order to explore the different assumptions and concerns that emerge from these works. The films to be discussed are Djibril Diop Mambéty's Touki Bouki (1973, Senegal), Ousmane Sembene's Xala (1974, Senegal), and Souleymane Cissés Yeelen (1987, Mali), three radically different works with contrasting visions of Africa: Touki Bouki is experimental and non-realistic; Sembene's film is deeply political and satirical; and Yeelen employs a mythical structure to explore the role of knowledge and power in Bambara society.
10.2979/blackcamera.12.2.19
The second aim of this article is closely linked to the first: namely, to address the critical reception of African films, focusing in particular on the Western critic's relationship to African cinema. A great number of critics, both from Africa and the West,...