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Black Film Label: Negritude and Cinema

Matthias De Groof

Online publication date: 26 March 2010

To cite this Article De Groof, Matthias(2010) 'Black Film Label: Negritude and Cinema', Third Text, 24: 2, 249 — 262
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1. Joseph Gugler, African
Film: Re-Imagining a
Continent, James Currey,
Oxford, 2003, p 133;
David Murphy and Patrick
Williams, Postcolonial
African Cinema: Ten
Directors, Manchester
University Press,
Manchester–New York,
2007, pp 55–6
2. Femi Okiremuete Shaka,
Modernity and the African
Cinema: A Study in
Colonialist Discourse,
Postcoloniality and
Modern African Identities,
Africa World Press,
Trenton, NJ, 2004, p 376
3. Noureddine Ghali,
‘Interview with Ousmane
Sembène’, in Film and
Politics in the Third World,
ed J D H Downing, 1987
[1976], Praeger, New
York, pp 41–53
Third Text, Vol. 24, Issue 2, March, 2010, 249–262
Black Film Label
Negritude and Cinema
Matthias De Groof
African films and film-makers have frequently criticised Negritude and
its political derivations. Pioneering African film-makers exposed the fail-
ures and denounced the abusive rhetoric of authenticity that served as
principle – cosmetic principle – for several political regimes in Africa. It
was in this post-independence era that the Senegalese Ousmane Sembène
made a stand against corruption and neo-colonialism by adapting his
novels to the screen and criticising Senghorian politics. His film Xala
(1975) satirised the socialism of Senghor by showing how the privileges
of the elite are protected. In response, the Senegalese government
censored the film as it did with Sembène’s film Ceddo of 1977.1 Femi
Okiremuete Shaka contextualises:
Sembène… actively participated in both the political and cultural debates
that followed the emergence of the Negritude Movement, as well as partic-
ipating in the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists held
in Paris in 1956. Sembène is however one of the very few black Francoph-
one writers who right from the beginning of the Negritude Movement
criticized its key concepts.2
Noureddine Ghali continues by saying that:
Sembène is one of many later African writers who have criticized the
concept [of Negritude] vigorously, amongst other things for underpin-
ning the view that the European contribution to global culture is to be
technological and rational, while Africa can remain in acute economic
disarray because it is happy just ‘being’… The close affinity of the
concept with the racist view of Africans as happy dancing people has also
attracted critical comment. Sembène adds here that he was in Senegal for
the anti-colonial struggle – a veiled allusion to the fact this concept was
developed in intellectual circles in Paris – and that the concept of
‘Negritude’ meant no more to him than to his people in the development
of that struggle.3
About Emitai (1971) – his film depicting resistance fighters in a Senegalese
village of Diola and the massacre that took place there – Sembène states
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © Third Text (2010)
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09528821003722256
 250

rhetorically that he was unaware of the independence movement being

born from the so-called ideology of ‘Negritude’, because he was living
with his people, in the same conditions as them. On the relationship of
the Diola community with the gods in his film, Sèmbene asserts:

… they always wanted to mystify us. We were always hung up on this

notion of gods, on negritude, and a lot of other stuff. And throughout
this period, we were colonized…4

He adds:

I have tried to demonstrate that if the negritude movement brought some-

thing to birth, it was still the act of a minority [and] that the people had
already engaged in the struggle to be free.5

Sembène will partially abandon writing and eventually turn to the

medium of cinema in local languages for its popular potential and as a
means of liberation:

… what led me to the cinema is that it goes further than the book, further
than poetry, further than the orator. When I brought out Xala, each
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evening I had at least three hundred people all the time in the audience,
with whom I used to debate in small groups from time to time… I want
to bring back to my people their own situation so that they can recognize
themselves in it, and ask questions. For the Third World film-maker… it
4. Ibid, p 48 is a question of allowing the people to summon up their own history, to
5. Ibid, p 41 identify themselves with it… This is why the language used plays a very

Still from Xala (1975), directed by Ousmane Sembène, © MTM


6. Ibid, p 46
7. Ousmane Sembène in
Samba Gadjigo, Ousmane
Sembène: une conscience
africaine, Homnisphères,
Paris, 2007, p 218
8. Bruno Bové, ‘Sembène
Ousmane (1923–2007),
une biographie’, in
Africultures 76, 2007
9. Murphy and Williams, op
cit, pp 94–5
10. Mineke Schipper,
Imagining Insiders: Africa
and the Question of
Belonging, Cassell,
London–New York, 1999,
p 193
11. Kenneth Harrow, ed,
Postcolonial African
Cinema: From Political
Engagement to
Postmodernism, Indiana
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University Press,
Bloomington, 2007, p 22
12. Idrissa Ouedraogo in Les
Fespakistes (2001),
directed by Eric Münch
and François Kotlarski,
Couleur Films, Artefilm,
Cityzen Television,
Burkina Faso
13. For an account on this
aspect, see Matthias De
Groof, ‘Intriguing African
Storytelling’, in Storytelling
in World Cinemas:
Narrative Forms and
Contexts, L Khatib, ed,
Wallflower Press, London,
forthcoming
14. In this film, a Parisian girl
projects her exotic idea of
‘the negro beauty’ on her
African partner who in turn
abuses her gaze while
similarly projecting his
exoticism about Europe on
her. He pretends to be a
prince or proclaims his right
not to work since his
girlfriend is the daughter of
an industrialist. In a
meantime, the film shows
the reality of the
exploitation of black
labour. At the end of the film
a text appears saying ‘fifteen
years after independence
and still the same fantasies’.
The film also shows the gap
between Africans and Afro-
Americans who do not share
the values proposed by
Negritude. Afro-Asiatic
251
important role: that is why I use the national language, Wolof, which is
the language of the people.6
This choice of film medium for the masses came together with its imple-
mentations on the ground. Sembène travelled with his films to remote
villages, in a way that paralleled the Soviet film trains. Whereas the
struggle in Emitai is still anti-colonial, in Xala it becomes a class strug-
gle. According to Sembène, the struggle against injustices was not racial
but social. On the literary and cultural level, Sembène considered himself
first as a worker and only afterwards as a black man, ‘Ma lutte est de
classe, ma solidarité n’est pas de race.’ (‘My struggle is with class, my
solidarity is not with race.’)7
Sembène rejects negro-essentialism as well as assimilative approaches
by African elites.8 ‘He saw in Negritude a deliberate obfuscation of
contemporary realities in favour of an essentialist vision turned towards
the past.’9 Sembène has always therefore dissociated himself from theori-
sations of Negritude. The divergent approaches to Negritude by its
initiators never allowed a common ideology to emerge and this is what
made Sembène say he was ignorant about Negritude: ‘For me, it is like
the sex of the angels.’10
African film-makers some fifty years later did not share with
Negritude the same forms of Surrealist expression and existentialism.
Theirs was instead a radicalised cinema of engagement because of the
political situation that had abused Negritude ideology. Film-makers
could not afford to unwind in sentimental and subjective explorations of
individual sensations and personal relations when matters of life and
death were at stake. By means of social and didactic realism in African
cinema, issues relating to Negritude and racial pride gave way to
preoccupations with political transparency:
The project of the early film-makers was to expose the failures of their
abusive authoritarianism. By the 1970s, when Sembène attacked neo-
colonialism, most famously in Xala (1974), others like Dikongué-Pipa,
challenged a patriarchy associated with traditional society, as in Muno
Moto (1975) or Le Prix de la liberté (1978). By then négritude was
viewed as passé or compromised.11
Idrissa Ouedraogo – author of the films Tilaï (1990) and Samba Traoré
(1992) – repeats Wole Soyinka’s famous words: ‘A tiger does not shout
its tigritude’, and he adds, ‘Il bondit sur sa proie et la dévore’ (‘It leaps
on its prey and devours it’).12 Jean-Pierre Bekolo also seems to parody
afrocentric or negritudinous attitudes in his irony towards African
authenticity, especially in Aristotle’s Plot (1996)13 and Ben Diogaye Bèye
seems to pervert the Negritudinist gaze in Les Princes noirs de Saint-
Germain-des-Prés (1975).14 ‘However, Negritude, even when defined as
“the whole of cultural values of Black Africa”, could only provide us the
beginning of the solution to our problem, not the solution itself’, says
Senghor.15
Is there a link between ‘African’ cinema and Negritude, beyond the
cinematographic criticism that film-makers direct against the cultural
politics of Negritude? ‘Negritude was a culture before being politics’,
says Senghor. ‘The “Slave Trade” was firstly due to cultural contempt.
And the most effective instrument of our liberation will be Negritude,
 252
relations seem to have more
success. However, Bèye’s
consideration of his own
gaze might also be
considered as a
performance of Negritude
as strategy; with the jump
cuts between the feet of the
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actor Wasis Diop, who has
an elegant gait, and an
anonymous Parisian crowd,
Bèye appropriates the right
for blacks to be different.
Furthermore, the
juxtapositions change into
sequences focusing on
blacks within the crowd,
appropriating then the right
of equality. The music that
is first used to accompany
Wasis Diop and enhance the
contrast between him and
the crowd is now also used
for the latter.
15. Léopold Sédar Senghor,
1959, in Césaire et
Senghor: un pont sur
l’Atlantique, Lilyan
Kesteloot, L’Harmattan,
Paris, 2006, p 121
16. Léopold Sédar Senghor, Ce
que je crois: negritude,
francité et civilisation de
l’universel, Grasset, Paris,
1988, p 143
17. René Depestre in the film
Lumières Noires (2006),
directed by Bob Swaim,
produced by Entractes,
fifty-one minutes
18. African Screens: New
Cinemas from Africa, film
festival curated by Manthia
Diawara at the Haus der
Kulturen der Welt, Berlin,
26 October 2008
19. Murphy and Williams, op
cit, p 111
more exactly, Poïêsis: Creation.’16 This is why the Cameroonian film-
maker Jean-Pierre Bekolo asserts that ‘Africa has only one problem: how
it’s represented all over the world… If the problem is the image then the
solution is also the image.’ Many other similarities of the kind can be
found. Although Sembène was anything but a follower of Negritudé, his
struggle for dignity constitutes the heart of his projects, from Borom
Sarret (1962) to Moolaade (2004). We should recall that dignity is the
central theme of Negritude as well as of African cinema. Souleymane
Cissé says that:
… the first task of African filmmakers is to affirm that people from here
are human beings, and to communicate those values that could serve
others. The generation that will follow us, will open itself up to other
aspects of cinema.
Similar to Negritude, the project of African cinema not only consists in
affirming human dignity, but aspires to share values on a universal scale.
As René Depestre analyses:
When rereading the texts of Césaire, Senghor, Alexis and other partici-
pants in the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1956 at the
Sorbonne, we understand that the Congress was not a meeting between
persons with black skin. It was rather an effort to bring new values to the
conscience of all peoples.17
In the panel discussion on Negritude during the film festival African
Screens,18 Manthia Diawara confirms that, despite political dissent,
Negritude manifests itself unconsciously in the generation of film-
makers who make films about the gap between tradition and modernity
and about the quest for traditional values.
In his film Sources d’inspiration (1968), which provokes reflection on
the artist’s role in newly independent African countries,19 Cissé quotes
Aimé Césaire, as does the Malian/Mauritanian film-maker Abderrah-
mane Sissako in his film La vie sur terre (1998):
Beware of crossing your arms in the sterile pose of a spectator, for life is
not a show on stage, for a sea of troubles is not a proscenium, for a
screaming human being is not a dancing bear.
Sissako quotes Césaire as a statement on the cinematic visualisation of
otherness, which explains his decision not to make a spectacular film
but rather a slow-paced film that respects the rhythms of his father’s
village.
In Muna Moto by Dikongué-Pipa (1975) an initiation ritual serves as
a flashback during Ngando’s pondering on the injustice that has been
done to him by his uncle who took his girlfriend as his third wife, thereby
trading a dowry of imported goods that Ngando could not possibly
afford. The dowry serving as a commodity instead of a symbolic gesture
exemplifies the societal change and symbolises the abuse of tradition.
Ngando’s dilemma between following his personal will and reconciling
himself to a compromised tradition (enhanced by the voiceover of his
deceased father asking him to submit to the tradition) is resolved by the
 253
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Still from Emitai (1971), directed by Ousmane Sembène, © MTM

traditional ritual that Ngando remembers from when he was initiated. In

20. Léopold Sédar Senghor,
Pour une relecture africaine
de Marx et d’Engels, Les
Nouvelles Editions
Africaines, Dakar–Abidjan,
1975, p 33
21. Alphonse Mbuyamba
Kankolongo, ‘Le
mouvement de la
Négritude a inspiré les
poètes congolais des années
1960’, Le Potentiel, no
3524, 2005; Albert S
Gérard, European-
language writing in sub-
Saharan Africa, vol 1,
Akadēmiai Kiadō,
em
[]acr om
[]arc
Budapest, 1986, p 548
22. Olivier Barlet, ‘“Nous
aussi avons marché sur la
lune” de Balufu Bakupa-
Kanyinda’, in Africultures,
12 December 2009
this ritual, Ngando is represented by a dog that gets up and walks away.
It is the force of the ritual that enables Ngando to revolt against a
compromised tradition. When watching closely the ritual performed in
Muna Moto, we might not want to see the film as simply challenging ‘a
patriarchy associated with traditional society’ and to suggest that the
film considers Negritude to be compromised. Instead, the director recalls
the need for a genuine relation with tradition that allows an encounter
with modernity that is truthful to one’s own cultural identity or, as Seng-
hor would say, ‘it is time to recreate ourselves in the revival of our ances-
tral cultures and by developing ourselves according to our lines of
forces…’.20
In his film We Too Walked on the Moon (2009) Balufu Bakupa-
Kanyinda establishes a dialogue between two Negritude poets, Aimé
Césaire and Tshiakatumba Matala Mukadi, whose ‘poetry of the histor-
ical event’ situates itself in continuation of Césaire’s lineage.21 The poems
are taught to Congolese pupils in a classroom decorated with icons of
African history and its diaspora. Recalling these icons situates the film in
the ‘present of the memory’22 and reminds us that ‘no race has the
 254
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Anne Ransquin, 35mm photo taken on the set of We Too Walked on the Moon (2009), directed by Balufu Bakupu-
Kanyinda, collection of the artist

monopoly on beauty, intelligence or strength,23 a reminder that still holds

its place in the Congolese classroom, as a necessary means of undoing the
inferiority complex inherited from the mental integration of Western
imagery that constituted the initial raison d’être of the Negritude
movement. In We Too Walked on the Moon, Bakupa-Kanyinda
celebrates ‘the bravery of the dream, the courage of those who preceded
us, of those who think we can reach the moon’.24
In choosing ‘Black Star Line’ as the name of his production company
(referring to Marcus Garvey’s ideology of return), Bakupa-Kanyinda
relates strongly to Mamadou Diouf’s definition of Negritude:

Césaire’s words ‘I discovered my identity by meeting Senghor’ (the latter

defining Negritude in his turn as the entirety of the cultural values of the
23. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un black world) perhaps constitute the essence of Negritude. They indicate
retour au pays natal,
Présence Africaine, Paris,
that understanding the black world is the possibility for blacks in the
1983 (1939/1947/1956) Diaspora to create an identity. The imaginary or real return to Africa
founds the identity of all blacks. Africa is the true locus of memory for all
24. Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda
in François-Xavier blacks, according to Negritude.25
Dubuisson, ‘Je me sens
redevable de mes poètes: When creating the spirit of Black Star Line, says Bakupa-Kanyinda, we said
Entretien à propos de
“Nous aussi avons marché
to ourselves that even if the body would not return to Africa, the spirit will.
sur la lune”’, in Africa is an allegory in itself, which is not limited to its continent.
Africultures, 2010

25. Mamadou Diouf in Negritude is a chapter of pan-Africanism… This chapter is not closed
Lumières Noires, op cit because muses and new channels are emerging. Negritude has dated since

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26. Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda
in Dubuisson, op cit
27. Senghor, Ce que je crois,
op cit, 1988, pp 17–18 ;
Senghor, Liberté 5 : Le
Dialogue des cultures, Le
Seuil, Paris, 1992, p 36
(Les contes des veillées
noires refers to a work by
Léon-Gontan Damas,
Paris, Stock, 1943)
28. For an account of this
aspect, see Matthias De
Groof, ‘Critique
Saignante’, in Africultures,
forthcoming issue Films
d’Afrique et de la critique.
29. Taking a perspective
similar to that of Negritude
on Africa as a whole,
Ousmane Sembène states:
‘As a modern state, we are
trying to fuse these cultures
[which belonged to
linguistic groups] into one.
We are in search of a new
culture, an African culture
that will embrace all ethnic
group cultures… That is
where cinema can play an
important role.’ In
Teaching African Cinema,
Roy Ashbury, Wendy
Helsby and Maureen
O’Brien, BFI, London,
1998
30. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un
retour au pays natale, op
cit, p 42
255
it met the needs of a certain moment and worked as a mainspring, but as
Césaire said, it is not frozen in time. It acts as an affirmation of existence,
in a Sartrean way: ‘Je suis nègre donc je suis.’ I feel good with the term
nègre.26
Other links between African films and Senghor’s Negritude can be
found. Les contes des veillées noires and les chants gymniques, which are
channels of African cultural and spiritual expression that helped Senghor
to find his Negritude,27 constitute the themes of Ça twiste à Popenguine
(1994) by Moussa Sene Absa and L’Appel des arènes (2005) by Cheikh
Ndiaye. The girl in La petite vendeuse de soleil by Djibril Diop Mambéty
recounts the opening of La belle histoire de Leuk le lièvre, a story
handed down to us by Senghor. This story, in which animals consider
the youngest ones the most intelligent, is placed in the royaume
d’enfance (kingdom of childhood), Senghor’s recurrent poetic theme.
Moreover, themes of Negritude relating to the African mask can be
recognised in terms of cinematic masquerade.28 The mirror of the Afri-
can fetish can be transposed to the reversed gaze of African cinema. The
expression of an imaginary Africa – a desire to express a cultural
consciousness of an imaginary entity – or unity is present in allegories of
Africa throughout the history of African cinema.29
However, before continuing our attempt to unravel similarities
between Negritude and African cinema, a question imposes itself. Will
reflection on Negritude, rather than Negritude itself, reveal to us some
openings towards thought on African cinema? Starting from the premise
that Negritude is not limited to the writings of its three apostles –
Senghor, Césaire and Damas – we could reconsider the critique against
Negritude and ask if such reconsideration could perhaps provide food
for thought on African film. Two possible means to do so can be
advanced. The first will consider Negritude, as well as African cinemato-
graphic expressions, not as necessarily essentialist but as particularistic.
The second will approach Negritude not as a simple inversion of occi-
dental values (values that it would be advisable to reject as purely tribu-
tary to the occidental and Eurocentric episteme) but as a strategy. This
approach allows us similarly to perceive African cinema as no longer
simply a tributary to occidental cinema in its technique, aesthetics and
narration, but to consider it as a strategy that goes beyond the mirror-site
or an ordinary ‘game of the gaze’ in a cinema of acculturation.
Let us first follow the first way of thinking on particularism versus
essentialism. The reproach against Negritude for being essentialist has
also been a constant in criticism of African cinema, which we considered
as authentic and unitary, as representing a certain African essence or as
the projection of an occidental imagery, in other words, as suffering
from the mirror-effect of a European auto-conception. The alternative
would be to interpret Negritude as an expression of particularism rather
than an expression of essentialism. Negritude goes beyond a racial vision
on the world. Césaire expresses this idea in the following words: ‘I
belong to the race of the oppressed.’30 We notice the same move to step
beyond the biological notion of race into a more political one in African
film. Sembène tells Ghali that:
Xala was shown at the Bombay festival last January and the Indians told
me that the film’s content applies to Indian society. They have all these
 256

beggars and bourgeois, and they had to have a film get to them from
Senegal to allow them to identify with something on their doorstep.31

In agreement with Césaire’s Negritude, the films by Jean-Pierre Bekolo

and his generation use particularism as a springboard for universalism.
In order to return the double gaze of rejection and assimilation that
proceeds from the status of liminality inherited from colonialism, Bekolo
adopts a strategy that seeks a particular cinema. Particular in its narra-
tion, aesthetics and themes, it nevertheless wants to be understood,
ideally by everybody. In making a ‘different’ cinema, Bekolo puts his
finger on the particularism of dominant cinematic storytelling as having
a tendency to universalism, and yet without believing in a uniformly
Africanised cinematic language. As Césaire strikingly says: ‘plus nègre on
est, plus universel on est’ (‘the more black one is, the more universal one
is’).32 In other words, the sole universality possible is the recognition of
particularism. The right to recognition is perhaps the sole essence attrib-
utable to Negritude. Consequently, the act of seeing performed by
Bekolo’s films does not only restore an existence that had been denied
and of which African film-makers consider they have been deprived. In
Aristotle’s Plot, for instance, Bekolo sets himself the task of denouncing
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narrative codes as prescribed by Aristotle: he asks himself whether an

African story also has to arouse fear and pity. In showing that a different
cinema does not exclude understanding by a universal audience, he
follows Césaire’s maxim that culture is ‘neither escape from the world
nor egoistic withdrawal into oneself’.
What about of the second way of thinking, strategy versus tributary
to the West? The understanding of Negritude as inscribing itself in the
colonial mode of thought in reversing its hierarchy of values is maybe a
reiteration of the reduction of the other to a variation – and in the case of
Negritude to an inversion – of the self. The alternative would consist of
interpreting Negritude as a strategy rather than a mode of thought that is
a tributary to occidental logos. Of course, it is not desirable to reduce
African film to its strategic aspect. However, we will limit ourselves to this
perspective, strategy as heuristic principle, without seeking to recuperate
all African cinemas to this thought. In his 1965 text Vues sur l’Afrique
noire, ou assimiler, non être assimilés, Léopold Sédar Senghor formulated
very precisely what is at stake in the strategy of Negritude, as it is in Afri-
can cinema: ‘to assimilate or become assimilated’. Négritudinists asked
themselves: ‘How can we change and surpass the intervention of the other
to our advantage?’ In the case of the film-makers this becomes: ‘how can
31. Ghali, op cit, p 43
we appropriate and use cinematographic technique to our advantage in
order not to be appropriated by dominant imagery?’
32. Aimé Césaire: une parole
pour le XXIème siècle,
(1094), directed by Euzhan In 1895 the first 100 cameras from the atelier Lumière in Lyon were sent
Palcy, 164 minutes to Africa to build the image of African people and to justify the colonisa-
33. Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda, tion. And as far as I’m concerned as a film-maker of African descent, I
‘The nigger who dared to have to take care of this tool because I know what cinema did with me,
conquer the sky’, in not for me, but with me, as an image.33
Avenue Lumumba, ed
Annett Busch, Graham
Foundation for Advanced Which meanings can we generate with film, which meanings can it bear
Studies in the Fine Arts,
Chicago; deBuren Extra
for us? We will tackle the question of what film could signify by entering
City, Antwerp, 2009 into the process of African film-making and its possible intentions.
 257

The process of cultural appropriation proper to African cinema has

been anticipated within the Negritude movement as ‘active assimilation’.
We can perceive this in the particular appropriation of French in
Negritude poetry as well as in the films of Bekolo, in the cinematographic
techniques of Sembène, in the transformation of its grammar by
Mambéty, and in the influence of Afro-American Jazz and Western film
genre on numerous African film-makers. This is no longer the double gaze
of colonialism that prevails – the one that combines assimilation and
refusal – but something other that combines appropriation with transcen-
dence, to the extent that many film-makers proclaim cinema to be an Afri-
can invention. Bekolo states in Aristole’s Plot that cinema was born in the
third century before Christ; Mambéty asserts that cinema was born in
Africa because the image itself was born in Africa. He continues:

The instruments, yes, are European, but the creative necessity and ratio-
nale exist in our oral tradition… Oral tradition is a tradition of images…
Imagination creates the image and the image creates cinema, so we are in
direct lineage as cinema’s parents.34

We could also think of Dani Kouyaté, who says that the griot (the tradi-
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tional storyteller) has always been a film-maker, of Gaston Kaboré, who

purports that African cinema escapes the opposition between tradition
and modernity, and finally of Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda, who affirms:

I made a film called 10,000 Years of Cinema because I’m convinced that
10,000 years ago, here in Africa, a griot made cinema. The griot is the
narrator, the storyteller. Even though there is no camera, when he tells
stories, we can see images. This is what I call the greatness of Africa. This
is cinema: the desire for the other. I will end up by quoting Djibril Diop
Mambéty who said that cinema is Waru in Wolof, and Waru means
‘amazement’.35

Claiming that cinema was invented in Africa twenty-three centuries

ago amounts to saying that cinema has always enlightened what has
been consistently called ‘the continent of darkness’. Accordingly,
African film-makers, as well as thinkers of Negritude, placed their
image of Africa within history. This strongly counters the occidental
idea of a backward Africa without a past (a claim made ever since
Hegel). ‘Our task consists in giving an understanding that whites lied
with their images’, says Souleymane Cissé.36 Of course, African films
were only born sixty years ago, and this in a situation of oppression
and marginalisation in which the African is understood as the ‘other
than…’, La Noire de…, as Sembène titled one of his first films. This
34. N Frank Ukadike and situation of alienation forced the African to make an attempt to think
Djibril Diop Mambéty,
‘The Hyena’s Last Laugh, a of the self by way of the image and stories which were imposed by the
Conversation with Djibril centre and, by extension, the techniques which the coloniser possessed.
Diop Mambety’, The appropriation of the image, the mastering of cinematographic
Transition, no 78, 1998,
pp 136–53 techniques is the neutralisation of that situation of alienation. In this
35. Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda
perspective, referring to twenty-three centuries of African cinema meta-
in Les Fespakistes (2001), phorically advances the assertion that African (filmic) storytelling does
op cit not inevitably and necessarily have to be a reaction to the intervention
36. Souleymane Cissé in Les of the West. The other is not indispensable for the African to define
Fespakistes, op cit him- or herself.
 258
37. Y a pas de problème!
Fragments de cinémas
africains (1995), directed
by Laurence Gavron
38. Jean Baudrillard and Marc
Guillaume, Figures de
l’altérité, Descartes, Paris,
1992, p 57
39. Jean-François Bayart, The
State in Africa: The Politics
of the Belly, Longman,
London–New York, 1993,
p 27
40. Jean-Pierre Bekolo,
‘Interview with Ukadike’,
in Questioning African
Cinema, Conversations
with Filmmakers,
Nwachuku Frank Ukadike,
University of Minnesota
Press, London–
Minneapolis, pp 217–38
41. Oswald de Andrade,
Manifesto Antropófago,
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Revista de Antropofagia, no
1, 1928 (year 1).
‘Anthropophagic Reason’ is
defined by Andrade as ‘the
philosophy of the
technicised primitive’ (see
Robert Stam, ed, ‘Of
Cannibals and Carnivals’,
in Subversive Pleasures:
Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism
and Film, Johns Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore,
MD, 1989); and by
Haroldo de Campos as
‘mastication, digesting, and
rewriting of the outsider’
(see ‘Concrete Poetry and
Beyond’, in Review: Latin
American Literature and
Arts, no 36, January–June,
1986, p 44). Rogério
Budasz describes it as
‘recycling and
incorporating otherness’
(see ‘Of Cannibals and the
Recycling of Otherness’, in
Music & Letters, 87:1,
2006, p 2) in which this
absorption generates new
meanings, while Robert
Stam depicts it as
swallowing, carnivalising
and recycling the foreign
presence from a position of
cultural self-confidence (see
Robert Stam and Ella
Shohat, eds, ‘Modernist
Anthropophagy’, in
Unthinking
Eurocentrism:Multicultural
ism and the Media,
Routledge, London–New
York, 2008 (1994), p 307).
In other words, cinema, as well as poetry, literature and European
languages, is an intrinsic part of African culture. Claiming the invention
of cinema is therefore related to a certain openness of the particular to
the universal: the particular that does not turn itself towards its differ-
ence or its differentiation but, on the contrary, assumes the liberty to
transcend hegemony. From this follows the openness of African cinema,
confirmed by Abderrahmane Sissako: ‘We are more universal than
Europeans are… The other is less different for the African than is the
African for the others’.37
Indeed, this allegation that cinema had its birth in ancient Africa, and
not in the modern France of the Lumière brothers, seems objectionable
to Westerners due to their false opposition between adaptation and
authenticity. The inauthentic imitation, perceived as arrogation, is a
condemned value for Western thinking, because it is not original. Even
nowadays, this kind of appropriation is ‘rejected in a monstrous succur-
sal of Occidentalism’, as Jean Baudrillard says.38 Yet cinema has not
been borrowed and cannot be a derivation: dependence and assembling
do not exclude autonomy, according to Jean-François Bayart.39 African
cinema is the result of hospitality towards the technique and its narrative
potentialities, genres and aesthetics, an absorption and transmutation of
its use, which implies a total liberty of storytelling.
What is film – the content or the container? Although the container can
have some content, I felt that the content should be invented in Africa,
like the rap singer compelled to disrespect the rule of law when he places
his fingers on the record and stops it from playing normally as he manip-
ulates it to create a different kind of rhythm… an entirely new art form
and aesthetics.40
Aesthetics, like technique or language, is thus no longer reducible to a
vehicle for or of unilateral universalism.
This relation to the appropriation of otherness, theorised in
Senghor’s motto as ‘to assimilate, not to be assimilated’, is closely related
to the metaphor of ‘anthropophagy’41 employed by the Brazilian writer
Oswald de Andrade in his Manifesto Antropófago (1928), inspired by
Montaigne’s sixteenth-century essay on cannibals. Andrade proclaimed
anthropophagy as a process of absorption and blending of other
cultures.42 He argued for a critical ingestion of European culture and the
‘reworking of that tradition in Brazilian terms’.43 In the same decade of
Negritude, the metaphor of anthropophagy came to ‘play an important
role in the Brazilian artistic and literary cultural movement during much
of the twentieth century’. Anthropophagy:
… is understood to be a modernist process formulated in Brazil, in which
artists and writers attempted to understand the configuration of Brazilian
identity amongst its forming cultures (African, Indian and Portuguese)
which cultivated a symbolic practice of incorporating the Other’s value to
construct its own.44
Not only values but also the techniques and information of the devel-
oped countries (such as the technology of film) are devoured, negotiated
and adjusted for the sake of survival by learning from the oppressors and

Chewing and processing the
desired parts of the ‘Other’
is very distinct from an
identification (Heloísa
Buarque de Hollanda, The
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Law of the Cannibal or
How to Deal with the Idea
of “Difference” in Brazil,
20 April 1998: New York
University). On the
contrary, the need to absorb
the other is not mimicry but
a strategy to renovate and
revitalise one’s own society
and to rework its cultural
products. See Budasz, op
cit, p 12.
42. ArtThrob, Back on track:
African participation in the
São Paulo Bienal, 1998,
available from: http://
www.artthrob.co.za/
sept98/news.htm
43. Haroldo de Campos,
‘Concrete Poetry and
Beyond’, op cit, pp 38–45,
in Budasz, op cit
44. ArtThrob, Back on Track,
op cit
45. Léopold Sédar Senghor, ‘Les
noirs dans l’antiquité
méditerranéenne’, in
Ethiopiques, revue
socialiste de culture négro-
africaine, no 11(Culture
et Civilisation), 1977,
pp 30–48
46. Aimé Césaire, ‘Discours
sur la négritude’, in
Première conférence
hémisphérique des peuples
noirs de la diaspora,
Présence Africaine, Florida
International University,
1987, p 79
259
mastering their ways and weapons, and in this way reflect the conscious-
ness of the relationship between knowledge and power.
This ‘anthropophagic’ relationship between the same and the other is
expressed by African film-makers in their appropriation of cinemato-
graphic techniques and by Negritude’s assimilation of the French
language. These strategic processes are already evident in the composi-
tion of the word Negritude itself, the suffix ‘-itude’ implying the idea of
an attitude, of a claimed pose, in relation to the state or the intrinsic
quality. Therefore, we could alter Ouedraogo’s phrase that criticised
Negritude to: tigritude is leaping and devouring.
[Negritude] is an attitude and a method, again, a spirit which, signifi-
cantly, makes less the synthesis than the symbiosis between modernity
and Blackness. I say ‘Blackness’ and not Negritude because it is more
about the Black spirit rather than the Black experience.45
The concept of Negritude bears reference to something that does not
necessarily have to express its idea. Contrary to the Western perspective,
from Plato to Hegel, on art as an expression of an idea, African art
according to Negritude is not a material manifestation of its idea but
considers itself the expression of the thing. This is why we cannot limit
ourselves to looking for films that express the ‘idea’ of Negritude but
must look for those that are Negritude. The conception of this ‘Negri-
tude’ quality or state – formulated by Senghor as ‘the whole of cultural
values of the black world’ and by Césaire as ‘the consciousness and
acceptance of oneself as being black’ – is thus variable and dynamic. The
expression – cinematographic or other – can thus transgress this -itude of
a certain moment or period but remain the expression of Negritude, even
if the etymon nègre is no longer perceived as an ‘essence’ but as an
attribute to which we do not want to be reduced but from which we
cannot detach ourselves: an attachment whose signification is inaccessi-
ble, significant but without signification, and that transgresses the logic
of an anti-racist interpretation of Negritude in the 1930s and ’40s that
attributed meaning to skin colour. This is why Césaire could say in 1987
that ‘Negritude [was not a historical impasse, but] the seizure by
ourselves of our past and, through poetry, through the imaginary,
through the novel, through art, the intermittent fulguration of what we
can become’.46
After having focused on the process of assimilation in African
cinema in relation to Negritude, we now continue to consider the ques-
tion of meaning of cinema by considering its teloi that are similar to
those of Negritude. The aims that African film-makers allot to them-
selves are diverse but nevertheless all related to those of Negritude.
First, there is the artistic aspect as purpose in itself; second, the re-
establishment of dignity (Sembène-Senghor); the rehabilitation of foun-
dations (Césaire); the affirmation of existence (Nasser Ktari, Assande
Fargass); and finally the participation in the universal (Bekolo-Césaire).
Other recurrent themes in both are nostalgia, the claim to the right of
speech, revolution and the destabilisation of the language of the colo-
niser and many others.
We can recognise those Negritude aims and intentions of African
cinema in ‘Third Cinema’, which is a cinema of opposition towards all
 260

forms of colonisation, neo-colonisation, cultural imperialism or politics

of oppression.47 Teshome Gabriel defines it in this way: ‘an alternative
cinema, a cinema of decolonisation and for liberation’;48 ‘Third Cinema
also refers to the formerly subjugated peoples’ shared desire to use film
to reappraise their history, restore popular memory, and denounce
social ills as they counter existing misrepresentations and affirm a new
sense of identity’. The ‘Film Policy for Nigeria’, for instance, is explicit
and conservative: ‘to encourage the exploitation of our heroic past and
cultural heritage in the production of films…’. Above all, according to
Jonathan Haynes,49 it is a matter of creating for the outside world an
exemplary and positive image that turns out to espouse the characteris-
tics of state propaganda and that manifests an inferiority complex. The
manifestos of Algiers in 1975 and Niamey in 1982 are more ambitious.
There, the FEPACI (Fédération Panafricaine des Cinéastes) announced
cinema as a tool for reflection, awareness and the redefinition of iden-
tity and dignity. This strategy of politics through culture, put forward
by Frantz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral, was inspired by the Negritude
movement.
Parallelisms can be discovered between African film and Negritude in
the modes of representation that were put at stake. Cinema and Negri-
Downloaded At: 14:42 13 November 2010

tude share the mechanism of projection, the techniques of implied narra-

tive framework, the mobilisation of visual resources and dramaturgy.50
Negro-African poetry is ‘an image or analogical, melodic and rhythmical
images in their entirety’,51 ‘a luxuriance of images’,52 according to
Senghor who understands poetry as all artistic creation, including film,
by relying on the etymological sense of the word poiësis which means
‘creation’.53
Poetry is made by repetitions, by editing and movement, all charac-
teristics essential to cinema. No poem is more cinematically apt than the
famous one by Léon Damas. The same word or group of words is
repeated in a verse or stanza but with changes of place and context in its
47. Melissa Thackway, Africa etymological meaning.
Shoots Back: Alternative
Perspectives in Sub- Ils sont venus ce soir où le
Saharan Francophone tam
African Film, Indiana
tam
University Press and James
Currey, Bloomington– roulait de
Oxford, 2003, p 39 rythme en
48. Teshome Gabriel, Third
rythme
Cinema in the Third World: la frénésie
The Dynamics of Style and des yeux
Ideology, UMI Dissertation la frénésie des mains la frénésie
Services, Ann Arbor,
des pieds de statues
Michigan, 1979, p 3
DEPUIS
49. Haynes, op cit, p 64 combien de MOI
50. Lydie Moudileno, Parades sont morts
postcoloniales: la depuis qu’ils sont venus ce soir où le
fabrication des identités tam
dans le roman congolais,
Karthala, Paris, 2006
tam
roulait de
51. Senghor, Ce que je crois, rythme en
op cit, p 119
rythme
52. Ibid, p 147 la frénésie
53. Ibid, p 150 des yeux
 261

la frénésie des mains la frénésie

des pieds de statues. Léon-Gontron Damas, 1956

To conclude, we have to emphasise why the too facile relationship

between Negritude and the so-called Calabash cinema has not been
included in our reflexion thus far. The ‘Calabash’ categorisation is itself
already a certain stance that departs from a determined conception of
Negritude and that even opposes itself to possible new interpretations of
Negritude. Associations between the particular aesthetics of Calabash
cinema and Negritude eclipses the latter’s indisputable modern aspects.
That is the reason why I have approached Negritude as a continuous
movement in which we can situate the phenomenon of African film
which – in its modifying representations, as the Ethiopian film-maker
Haile Gerima would say – nevertheless always expresses what it under-
stands by the (variable) etymon nègre of the suffix ‘-itude’.
This is an expression of the attitude of reprendre, to ‘take up again’
or ‘to resume’, as intended by V Y Mudimbe as an image of the
contemporary activity of African art that ‘takes up an interrupted tradi-
tion, not out of a desire for purity… but in a way that reflects the
conditions of today’ and that reflects on its power to adapt according
Downloaded At: 14:42 13 November 2010

to changing post- and neo-colonial contexts, its re-imagination and

reinvention.54 This ‘resumption’ is not limited to the essentialist aspect
in the reformulation of Negritude’s etymon that is depicted by Senghor
as ‘Negritude of the sources’ and by Sembène as ‘the stage of
complexes’.
No, says Césaire in his Cahier talking about his Negritude. African
cinema, and definitely all forms of African contemporary art, will finally
54. V Y Mudimbe, The Idea of allow us to conclude by saying that Negritude does not convey a single
Africa, Indiana University
Press, Bloomington, 1994, concept. This could even be illustrated by a film-maker who refuses to
p 154 be called an ‘African film-maker’. Bouna Médoune Sèye tells us: ‘I’m a

Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Une Africaine dans l’espace (2007), video installation, Musée du
Quai Branly, collection of the artist
 262

55. Lumières Noires, op cit
56. My négritude is not a stone,
its deafness hurled against
the clamor of the day/My
négritude is not a pool of
dead water on the dead eye
of the earth/My négritude is
neither a tower nor a
cathedral/It plunges in the
red flesh of the soil/It
plunges in the ardent flesh of
the sky/It pierces the opaque
despair of its upright
patience, Shireen K Lewis,
trans, in Race, Culture, and
Identity: Francophone West
African and Caribbean
Literature and Theory from
Négritude to Créolité, eds A
Allahar and S N Jackson,
2006, Caribbean Studies,
Lexington Books, Oxford,
pp 39–40
57. Described by Jean-Pierre
Bekolo and Joëlle Esso,
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film-maker full stop’, and interprets the variable nègre as something he
does not want to be reduced to. The diverse interpretations and concep-
tions recuperated in this African history are what remains necessary so
that ‘black peoples could enter the great stage of history’, as Césaire
demands at the Congress of Black Writers and Artists.55
Césaire shows us that it is not a matter of rigid identity by saying that
‘ma négritude n’est ni une tour, ni une cathédrale… elle plonge, elle
troue’ (‘my negritude is not a tower, not a cathederal… it dives, it
digs’).56 In this regard, contemporary forms of négritude can be recogn-
ised for instance in ‘Ciné-gritude’, an exhibition of all Fespaco-laureates
(FESPACO prize-winners); the project Imagine Africa that takes as its
aim the unification of Africa by means of the imaginary, the representa-
tion, the media and education, from the basis of their politics of hospi-
tality; and the Afroback style consisting of an aesthetics as a form of
resistance.57 In sum, Negritude belongs to a cinematographic domain
that covers a period much longer than that extending from the 1930s to
the 1950s and that is geographically much vaster than Africa, even
reaching the realm of the extra-terrestrial, as glimpsed in the title of
Bekolo’s video-installation Une africaine dans l’espace (2007) and in the
latest film by Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda, We Too Walked on the Moon

Afroback comes from ‘the

necessity to tread the boards (2009).
by naming things which
others haven’t named,
which we still don’t name Translations from the French are by the author unless indicated otherwise in the
ourselves and which the notes.
other wouldn’t know how 4321 Anne
Jean-Pierre
Still from
Ransquin,
Emitai
Xala
Bekolo,
(1975),
35mm
(1971),
Unedirected
photo
Africaine
directed
taken
byby
dans
Ousmane
on
Ousmane
the
l’espace
setSembène,
ofSembène,
We
(2007),
Too©video
Walked
©
MTM
MTMinstallation,
on the Moon Musée
(2009),
du Quai
directed
Branly,
by Balufu
collection
Bakupu-Kanyinda,
of the artist collection of the artist

to name. This absence of

words shows us that the
African in relation to the
West has not yet defined his
model…’ In this Afroback
generation of artists living in
France, the ‘return to the
sources’ is an aesthetics that
goes along with a visionary
approach of Africa. This
‘back’ is not nostalgic but
strategic, says Bekolo.
Afroback appears in cinema
through this generation of
Occidentalised Africans
looking for their roots as an
identity quest. Mama Keita,
Serge Coelo, Abderrahmane
Sissako, Gaïté Fofana, Zeka
Laplaine, Alain Gomis… a
generation after the
Calabash cinema made by
‘villagers who seized
cameras’ and the engaged
film-makers of the
independences, Afroback is
also the schizophrenia in
which a generation decides
to regain the conviction that
the power and truth are in
Africa. This schizophrenia
had to be named in order not
to be a defect but a vision in
which a power is incarnated
that already carries the
Africa of tomorrow.