The history of documentary in Africa -- The Colonial era

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Content THE HISTORY OF DOCUMENTARY IN AFRICA THE COLONIAL ERA by Aboubakar Sidiki Sanogo A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CRITICAL STUDIES) December 2009 Copyright 2009 Aboubakar Sidiki Sanogo ii EPIGRAPH Semper novi quid ex Africa Pliny iii DEDICATION To my mother Traore Gâ Faty, who could not be here to see this day happen. To my father Moussa Sanogo, who was always there… To my wife Rada and my two daughters Fatima and Amina without whom this would not have been possible. To my siblings Sanata, Kady, Karamogoba, Bintou, Pasano and Fanta. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people have contributed to setting the stage for the research and writing of this thesis, as well as provided generous encouragement during my Ph.D. years and throughout the actual writing process. I would like to thank them. I would first like to express my deep gratitude to my dissertation chair, Dr. Marsha Kinder, for her generosity, her combination of intellectual rigor and empathy, which truly helped me through the difficult moments of the writing process. With her, I would like to thank my entire committee, Dr. Michael Renov, Dr. Priya Jaikumar and Dr. Panivong Norindr for their support along the way. Finally, I am indebted to Linda Overholt for her support throughout my years at USC. My research was made possible by an exchange program established between the University of Southern California and the University of Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle. I would thus like to express my recognition to Professors Peggy Kamuf and Natania Meeker for selecting me for the exchange and for being supportive when I needed to extend my stay in France for research purposes. At Paris III, thanks are due to Dr. Martine Azuelos who saw through the exchange in its first year. I am also grateful to Dr. Jean Bessière for supporting my request for extension. Finally, special thanks are due to v Ms. Chantal Serman, at the International Relations Office of Paris III for doing her utmost in helping with the logistics of my stay in Paris. My research in Paris was also facilitated by a number of people I would like to extend my gratitude to. First to Professor Michelle Lagny at University of Paris III who shared research material with me as well as provided bibliographic advice. Significant research was done at the Cinemathèque Afrique of Culturesfrance, and very special thanks are due to Jeanick Lenaour and her colleagues for making precious viewing material available to me. Thanks are also due to the Muriel Le Carpentier and her colleagues of the CNC branch located at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. They created the conditions for productive research there on colonial cinema. I would also like to thank Eric Le Roy at the CNC in Bois d’Arcy for facilitating my access to rare archival material. In London, I would like to thank Patrick Russell and Kathleen Dickson at the British Film Institute for their help with access to the archival holdings of the BFI. Thanks also to Toby Haggith of the Imperial War Museum for making material available for viewing. Finally, in London, my deepest gratitude goes to Nii Noi and Efua Nortey for their generous hospitality and enthusiasm about my project. Research was also conducted at the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en- Provence, and thus I am obliged to Ms. Evelyne Camara and her colleagues for their tireless effort to make material available to me. vi I would also like to acknowledge my indebtedness to friends who made a major difference during my USC years and beyond: Akira and Mia Lippit for their genuine generosity of spirit and heart, Alice Bardan for her tremendous kindness and help, and Alex Lykidis for his unique and precious companionship. I would like to thank my family in Burkina Faso, where it all began. To my mother, Traore Gâ Faty, who did not live long enough to see this, but was my first supporter; my father Moussa Sanogo on whom I can always count, my siblings Sanata, Kady, Karamogoba, Bintou, Pasano and Fanta for their support. Lastly, my foundation, Rada Bogdacenco, and my two daughters Fatima and Amina Sanogo, who all had to renounce a husband and a father for countless days so that this thesis could come into being. I have no words to say thank you. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS EPIGRAPH ii DEDICATION iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv ABSTRACT xi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1. The Lumière and the Birth of the Non-Fiction Film Tradition in Africa 9 The Lumière Africa Corpus 14 A. The Travelogue 16 1. Street Scenes 21 2. The Lumière “Official Cinema” Genre 24 3.The Picturesque 32 4. The Lumière in Egypt 35 B. The Human Zoo or the Menimal Genre 47 1. The Ashanti Village in Lyon 54 Implications of the Lumière Africa Film Corpus 70 CHAPTER 2. The Nineteenth Century in Africa: The Ante-Colonial and the Berlin Conference on Africa (or History’s Lessons for Nonfiction/Documentary) 77 The Age of Improvement and Revolution 79 Case Studies in Political Re-organization, Economic Reconfiguration and Cultural Experimentation 81 A. Ethiopia and Madagascar 82 B. Egypt 84 C. The Ashanti, Fanti and Bamun Experiments of the Nineteenth Century 86 The Age of Catastrophe: The Berlin Conference and Its Consequences for Africa and Its Film-Cultural Production 95 A. Explorers and Their Promotional Literature 96 B. Missionaries 102 C. The Economic Before the Berlin Conference 106 D. The Interpretation of Treaties 109 E. “Scientific” Racism 112 viii The Berlin Conference 113 A. General Presentation 113 B. Economic Dispositions of the Conference 117 1. On the Acts of Navigation 117 2. On Roads and Railroads 119 3. On the Ethics of Capitalism in Times of War 120 4. On Markets and New Economic Geographies 122 C. The Partition of the Continent and Its Political Control 126 D. The Language and Rhetoric of the Berlin Conference 131 1. On the “Rationale” of the Conference and the Absence of Africans 134 2. On the Violence and Reach of Language 137 E. Cinematic Allegories of the Berlin Conference 138 F. The Colonial Misunderstanding or Documentary as Historical Poetics 140 CHAPTER 3. Documentary in the Age of Colonial Occupation - The Case of Britain 151 Early Documentary and British Colonialism 155 A. Lobbying and Early Documentary Cinema 162 B. Other Key Figures and Institutions in British Early Documentary in the Colonial Era 167 Colonial Documentary in the Interwar Years 168 A. The Colonial Cinema of British Instructional Films Ltd. 170 B. Film Acts, Committees, Policies and Production from the late 1920s to WWII 175 1. The Cinematograph Act of 1927 176 2. The Indian Cinematograph Committee 179 3. The Colonial Office Conference and the Colonial Films Committee 181 4. The Empire Marketing Board and the British Documentary Movement (1927-1933) 189 C. Revisiting the Bantu (Mis?)Educational Kinema Experiment (1935-1937) 204 1. The Historical A Priori of the BEKE 205 2. Major L. A. Notcutt 209 3. The Missionary and Anthropological Background 210 4. The Philanthropic Discourse 217 5. The Experiment 218 6. The Originary Argument 219 7. The Film Production Process 220 8. The Exhibition Process 228 9. Final Remarks about the BEKE 233 Colonial Cinema Quarterly and Debates in British Colonial Documentary in Africa 236 A. History and Activities of the CFU 239 B. The Filmography of the CFU 244 ix C. The CFU and Its Implications for Film Theory and Historiography 251 CHAPTER 4. Documentary under Colonial Occupation: The French Case 264 Early Documentary and French Administration of Africa 267 A. Félix Mesguich, First African Film Director? 267 B. Pathé in Africa 271 French Colonial Documentary in the Interwar Years 280 A. The Twenties 280 1. Some Colonial Documentary Directors 291 2. Léon Poirier, a Colonial(ist) Auteur Between Two Decades? 292 B. The Thirties 310 1. Celebrating the Centenary of the Conquest of Algeria 311 2. The 1931 Colonial Exhibition and Documentary 312 3. Documentary and Censorship: The Laval Decree 315 3. La France Est Un Empire (1939) 324 French Colonial Documentary after WWII 334 A. Historical Context of the Establishment of the Commission des Films d’Outre-Mer (Commission on Overseas Films) 335 B. The Commission des Films d’Outre-Mer 336 C. The Société d’Application Cinématographique (SDAC) 343 D. The Crisis of the Colonial Documentary as Told to the Committee of Overseas Films by the Académie des Sciences Coloniales 354 E. Other Debates on the Status of the Cinema in the Colonies in the Late Colonial Era 360 F. Jean Rouch - A Cursory Look 364 G. A Very Brief Overview of the Filmography of the Late Colonial Era 366 CHAPTER 5. Documentary and the Tradition of Dissent in Africa 370 The Tradition of Dissent from the Moment of Conquest until WWI 371 A. Direct Confrontation 373 1. Military Resistance 373 2. Theologies of Liberation 377 B. Other Forms of Resistance 381 C. Pioneers of Documentary in Africa: Albert Samama Chikly 385 Documentary, the Interwar Years and the Tradition of Dissent 389 A. Pan-Africanism as a Tradition of Dissent 389 Documentary, WWI and II and the Tradition of Dissent 399 A. Documentary and WWI and the Tradition of Dissent 400 1. The Argument Regarding the Role of Africa in the Advent of WWI 400 2. African Participation in the War Effort 403 3. Cinematic Representation of the Great War 407 B. Documentary, WWII and the Tradition of Dissent in Africa 409 1. The Centrality of Ethiopia 411 x 2. Africans in WWII in the British Context 416 3. Two British Films about World War II 417 4. Africans and WWII in the French Context 425 5. Documentary Representations 427 6. Epilogue 429 Documentary, Decolonization and the Tradition of Dissent 430 A. The Political Party as Documentary Producer: The RDA 434 B. Pioneers of Documentary in Africa: Paulin Soumanou Vieyra 455 C. Présence Africaine in the Domain of Documentary 468 CONCLUSION 478 FILMOGRAPHY 487 REFERENCES 494 BIBLIOGRAPHY 507 xi ABSTRACT This thesis seeks to write a comprehensive history of documentary film in Africa, from the beginning of the cinema until the eve of independence in the late 1950s. It looks at documentary practice and theory as deployed in and on the African continent during the colonial era, covering the early, silent, and sound eras. Focusing on the British and French colonial empires, the thesis attempts to produce both an archeology and epistemology of documentary film in the period covered in Africa. Using textual analysis, historical contextualization, and symptomatic readings, the thesis explores the nature, character and features of the relationship between documentary and colonialism in an attempt to answer the question as to whether documentary film today carries within it aspects of the episteme of colonialism. Among other things, the thesis examines the work and trajectories of some of the canonical figures and moments in the history of the documentary, from the Lumière brothers to the British documentary movement, and casts new perspectives on them. By looking at them through the lens of the colonial, the thesis interrogates many of the orthodoxies of the discipline, ranging from theories and histories of early cinema, to consensual representations of the Griersonians, to attempts at theorization of documentary itself, especially in its early period. xii The thesis also brings into the film studies discourse new paradigms in the discussion of the history of cinema, and thus of documentary in Africa through an examination of the often neglected yet highly polysemic nineteenth century. This line of inquiry brings forth the staging of a space of agency for African continent throughout the colonial period until its end. This makes it possible to begin a re-examination of the history of documentary with Africa as a point of departure, and demonstrates that such an approach is theoretically fruitful, historically desirable and temporally overdue. 1 INTRODUCTION This thesis began as a project to write a comprehensive history of documentary in Africa since the beginning of the cinema. Initially intended to analyze that history from the days of the Lumière brothers till our contemporary times, the project was re-scaled and divided in two parts, one covering the period form the birth of the cinema to the advent of independence in Africa and the second, looking at documentary theory and practice in Africa since that moment. This dissertation is thus Part I of a two-volume project on the history of documentary in Africa. This restructuring has made it possible for the writer to look at the colonial moment in its own positivity (to use Foucault’s term), and produce meaning based on establishing relationships between this moment, the African continent, its inhabitants and the cinema. It may be the first time that the colonial moment is looked at in such a systematic way in a study of cinema with the entire continent in mind. To write a dissertation on the history of documentary in Africa as a student at the USC School of Cinematic Arts presented a major challenge: that the city of Los Angeles, the state of California and more generally the United States of America were not directly implicated in the colonial project on the African continent. The response to this challenge implied a physical relocation to a different continent, to Europe, in particular to Paris, the capital city of the second largest colonial empire of the time, in other words, moving to 2 the heart of empire itself. This relocation was facilitated by the exchange program established between USC and the University of Paris III, through the Departments of English, French and Comparative Literature of the two universities. This program made it possible to live in Paris, with a salary paid by the French government, and to teach English in one of the prestigious universities of the country, which comprised the largest film studies department in France. The project also entailed an engagement with film archives, archives of colonial films. The questions of funding and of method also implied a selection of zones of focus. Indeed, the African continent had been subject to colonial regimes from several Western European countries, Great Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain primarily. The question of manageability of the project made a selection inevitable, hence the choice to focus on Great Britain and France, the two largest colonial empires of their day. Even then, temporal and financial limitations implied more choices, making the process of dissertation writing fundamentally and of necessity a problem of selection. Most of the research for this project was conducted in France at a number of archives, libraries and research institutions. First among those was the Bibliothèque Nationale, also known as Bibliothèque François Mitterand, where the bulk of bibliographic and filmographic research for this project was done. One of the facilities of the library that truly made a major difference for this research was the library’s Audiovisual Department, which gathers the combined digitized holdings of the Bibliothèque itself, the television 3 and radio archives of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) and the digitized section of the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) / Archives Françaises du Film (AFF). Access to the digitized 1,425 Lumière films was made possible at this station, as was the digitized colonial films from the beginning of the cinema. When films were not available on digital format at the library, further research was conducted at the headquarters of CNC/AFF, which made it possible to view such as films as La croisière noire by Léon Poirier, or the RDA film. Outside of Paris, research was also conducted at Aix-en-Provence, at the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (CAOM) for access to original material written during the period of the colonial domination of the African continent. Chapter four of this dissertation on French colonial cinema owes a lot to this research. Research was also conducted for ten days in London, the capital city of Great Britain, which was the largest colonial empire of its day. The archives of the British Film Institute proved a treasure trove for the study of documentary in the colonial era and are the source of all of Chapter 3 of this dissertation on the British colonial documentary. Briefer research was also conducted at the Imperial War Museum, which provided material for aspects of Chapter 5 on WWII and documentary. This highly fragmented research process required a writing process akin to a montage that would bring together widely disparate elements and fields. Indeed, this dissertation 4 seeks to position itself at the intersection of several fields, and sees itself as entering into a conversation with a variety of fields. First in relation to the history and theory of cinema in Africa, it comes on the heels of the pioneering works of such writers as Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Férid Boughedir, Manthia Diawara, Frank Ukadike, Mbye Cham and Françoise Pfaff. While these works helped create the field of study known as “African cinema,” they focused primarily on the cinema in Africa in a post-independent context, with Africans as having wrestled the means of representation from colonialism. When the colonial moment is mentioned as in Vieyra, Diawara and Ukadike, it is to some extent presented as a prelude, as that against which the African cinema after independence defines as itself. Yet, by declining to look extensively at the period of colonialism, these works miss out on no less than 65 years of cinema in Africa, during which although colonized and dominated, Africans, like other viewers around the world, also developed a sense of cinephilia and modes of spectatorship that are et to be accounted for. These works thus do manage to sufficiently register the operations of the discourses and institutions deployed to frame Africans cinematically in that era, and thus are not able to untangle the rich theoretical and historiographic links between Africa and debates taking place in cinema in the years of colonialism. To some extent, the aporia of this approach is to unwittingly exclude Africa from debates on early cinema, silent cinema, and sound cinema until the 1960s. In other words, this thesis is partly a methodological experimentation in an attempt to study and account for African cinema in a more total way. It is an enterprise, which seeks to 5 examine the cinema in Africa not simply as a site of production, but also as a site of exhibition, circulation, “co-production” in the literal sense of the term (produced together), acting, directing, spectatorship in the period of colonial domination, etc. The thesis also enters into conversation with the history and theory of documentary film through the works of Erik Barnouw, Richard Barsam, Bill Nichols, Michael Renov, and Brian Winston among others. It acknowledges the immense contribution of their work to the study and interest in documentary by referring to them at different stages of the work, and by sometimes using their work as historiographic and theoretical crutches through which to think through documentary in Africa. Similarly, the thesis significantly opens up the historical and theoretical discussion of documentary film and video to the gigantic continent of Africa. It does so in several ways. First by implicitly interrogating the habit existing in the field of absenting, footnoting or devoting a few paragraphs (but never a chapter, or a full book or a theoretical concept) to or based on Africa as a model. Secondly, the thesis participates in expanding the domain of documentary studies by featuring in a prominent way the colonial moment. In doing so, it contributes into opening up a sub-field in documentary studies, which will ultimately involve access by students and researchers of thousands of films, which in the long run could be the object of theses, books, volumes, specialized conferences, refereed journals, etc. Indeed, this thesis also contributes by its very existence in fabricating a number of concepts through which both colonial documentary and documentary in Africa can be thought. 6 Through its temporal emphasis, this thesis enters into conversation with debates in early and silent cinema. Indeed, one finds as in documentary studies, that Africa is often not mentioned, or absented. Yet, although Africa was under colonial boots in much of the early and silent cinema era, it was the object of filming as well as provided spectatorship for films. It may to some extent be argued that the filming of Africa contributed significantly to the legitimation of the cinema as an art form as well as a public spectacle. Yet such insight is absent from most accounts of that period. Thus, to some extent, one of the underlying arguments in the thesis is the untenability of the closing off of early and silent cinema debates from discussions on Africa. This closing, as it shall be argued, also contributes to foreclosing the interrogation of a number of concepts in the study that period, such as the cinema of attractions, and perhaps delays the advent or emergence of new concepts. This study also makes it possible to see that colonial cinema needs not be reducible to a sub-set of documentary film studies. Indeed, it may be considered a field of study in its own right, bringing together fiction and non-fiction, features and shorts, amateur, auteur and commercial traditions. In that regard, this thesis is also a contribution to the burgeoning field of colonial cinema studies, cognizant that some of the notions it develops with documentary as its central focus, may be applicable to fiction, shorts or amateur films of that era as well. Indeed, it may be one of the only works to use a comparative approach to the study of colonialism in the cinema, i.e. looking at two 7 traditions of colonial cinema both in their own positivity (and throughout the entire colonial period) and in relation to each other. This dissertation is divided in five chapters. Chapter 1 is the first study to date on the body of films shots by the Lumière brothers in, on or about the African continent. This Lumière Africa Corpus, as we have called it, consists in about 100 films and marks to a large extent, the official beginning of the relationship between the African continent and the cinema, and thus with non-fiction filmmaking. Looking at the Lumière work within the context of their times and the discourses that traversed them, this chapter, through close textual analyses of the shot-films (or one-shot films) brings new light to this work and analyzes the implications of its examination from the perspective of Africa. Chapter 2 focuses on the nineteenth century, a period that has not historically been a central object of study in African cinema or even in the general history of the cinema in relation to Africa. Through an analysis of the major moments of that century, namely the Age of Revolution and the Age of Catastrophe, this chapter attempts certain archeology of the documentary in the African context, as well as foregrounds this century as an indispensable grid through which twentieth and to some extent 21st century documentary film production and theory may be read. 8 Chapter 3 focuses on the colonial documentary as theorized and practiced by Britain as the major colonizing power in Africa. Looking at films, institutions and discourses of colonialism from the days of early cinema to the end of the colonial period, this chapter takes an in-depth look at the British production and seeks to understand its implications for the study of documentary in particular, in the cinema more generally. In chapter 4, we look at the cinematic production, institutions and colonial discourses of France, which only came second to Britain, in terms of the size of its empire. As in the previous chapter, we deploy a chronological paradigm, which makes it possible to evaluate the evolution (or lack thereof) of the language of the colonial documentary in relation to the very nature of colonialism itself. The final chapter offers a reverse shot to the four previous ones. Indeed, while the four chapters emphasized Europe as producer and implementer of discourses, political and cultural practices in Africa, this chapter instead explores the tradition of dissent in Africa in relation to documentary in the age of colonialism. This involves analyzing the implications of African resistance to colonial conquest, the role and importance of Africa in the two world wars, the significance of Pan-Africanism in a discourse of documentary in Africa as well as the pioneering works of African documentary filmmakers and European filmmakers sympathetic to the plight of Africans. The chapter also looks at the importance of political parties, organizations, institutions and conferences in the advent of an independent Africa, perhaps inaugurating a new age for documentary in Africa. 9 CHAPTER 1. The Lumière and the Birth of the Non-Fiction Film Tradition in Africa The Lumière brothers are known as the inventors of the Cinématographe and consecrated in the history of the cinema accordingly. Louis and Auguste Lumière contributed many inventions to the world before and after the Cinématographe, in such areas as photography (they made and sold photographic plates in their factory at Mon(t)plaisir, in the suburb of Lyon, invented color photography and the Photorama) and medicine. 1 It was their father, Antoine Lumière, himself a photographer, 2 who pushed his sons in the direction of research on moving images, as he was reportedly fascinated by the advances made by Thomas Edison. 3 This would lead to the Lumière brothers' participation in what has often been presented as a worldwide race toward the invention of one of the most enduring and influential 1 According to Maurice Trarieux Lumière, grandson of Louis Lumière, the brothers deposited about 350 patents and presented about 250 reports and papers at the Academy of Sciences, the French Society of Photography and the French Society of Chemistry (Rittaud-Hutinet and Dentzer 5). Auguste, the older of the two brothers, in time, switched interest from chemistry to the natural sciences and worked on such fields as biology, physiology, pathology about which he published about 60 books and wrote and presented hundreds of papers. The younger brother, Louis, stuck with research in photography with an emphasis on mechanics, optics and acoustics (Rittaud-Hutinet and Dentzer). 2 Antoine Lumière started his career in Paris as a billboard painter and a singer in a café. He would later move to Besançon and Lyon (1871) and set up a photo shop. He photographed the who’s who of the city of Lyon and his clients included Paul Savorgnan de Brazza, a French explorer of Italian descent, who played an important role in the colonization of Africa. 3 Charles Moisson, chief mechanic at the Lumière factory and builder of the original Cinématographe, recounts the following anecdote about the catalytic moment: “During the summer of 1894, the Lumière father came to my office where I was with Louis, and he pulled out of his pocket a strip from the Kinetoscope and literally said to Louis: ‘This is what you should be doing because Edison is selling this at unbelievable prices and the concessionaires are trying to manufacture these strips here in France, because they want them at better price.’ This strip, that I still have in front of my eyes, and which was about 30 cm long was exactly like the current film strip, with four perforations per image… It showed a scene at the barber’s…” (qtd. in Rittaud-Hutinet, 19). 10 technological, political, social, economic and cultural apparatuses in history 4 . With their new camera, they set out filming first their immediate environment (their factory, their family, their workers) and later opened up the dissemination and production process to the world at large. There was thus a gradual move from the private to the public, from family to world that encapsulates their story (theirs was a family business in an already industrial age) and that of their times (acceleration of relationship to time and space). Several dimensions of the Lumière will be of interest to our study on the archeology of nonfiction/documentary film in Africa. We shall consider the Lumière as signs traversed by several discourses structuring our times since the late 19 th century, and indeed through much of film history and historiography. They were first and foremost scientists who invented a machine they named the Cinématographe and which was adopted worldwide and set one of the key foundations of what is understood to be cinema now. In other words, the Lumière were structured by the scientist discourse of the nineteenth century that believed in the ability of science and technology to improve the human condition, to be the harbinger of teleological progress, to be a victory of man over nature, to be an ultimate sign of civilization. Less we forget, the cinema was invented largely as part of a series of experiments in the attempt to understand the mechanisms of movement, of human motion through a decomposition and recomposition of movement. In that sense Jules Janssen, Etienne Jules Marey, Louis François Daguerre and others are important 4 Tom Gunning warns us against this teleological approach to the writing of the history of early cinema. Indeed according to Gunning, several recent and not so recent authors, “for all the originality and sophistication of their new works (…) conceive of their research in terms of a story whose ending we already know: the invention of the cinema.”(31-44) 11 predecessors of the Lumière. Moreover, the first nonfiction films were scientific films. These features participate in a strain of discourse that saturates the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century and bleeds over forms and figures of representation to the point of influencing the very definition or at least some of the features of documentary, which construe it as being in adequation to reality. This scientist discourse will also have a tremendous impact on the kinds of films the Lumière will make in and about the African continent. In addition to being scientists, the Lumière were also businessmen 5 (their factory 6 appears in one of their very first films). Thus, from the beginning, they linked the science and technology of the cinema with economics, in a move to capitalize on their invention by being savvy businessmen 7 in their choice of subject matter, the ways in which they commercialized both their apparatus and the films they made, as well as creating a constant cinematic spectatorship that linked up, depending on where they went around the world, with other commercial cultural ventures of their times including fairs, expositions, exhibitions, theaters, etc. 5 The fact that they were businessmen played no small part in the invention of the Cinématographe itself. Indeed, at least twenty years before them, Arthur Louis Ducos, a.k.a. Ducos de Huron (1837-1927), a competitor of theirs, anticipated the Cinématographe when he registered a patent on March 1, 1864 for “an apparatus designed to reproduce photographically any scene with all the transformations it goes through during a given time.” Due to lack of funding, the apparatus was never built (Rittaud-Hutinet and Dentzer 32). 6 The Lumière factory employed 300 people and was considered “one of the most important factories in the world” (Rittaud-Hutinet and Dentzer 17). 7 According to Louis Lumière, by 1900, i.e. five years after its invention, the Cinématographe brought to the Lumière family profits worth 3 million ancient francs (Sadoul Louis). 12 The third aspect of the Lumière that will be significant for our study is their position as producers/authors. The Lumière counted among the first filmmakers and Louis and Auguste shot many of the early films 8 . But more importantly, they were orchestrators, organizers, people who recruited, trained and sent operators around the world to show the new invention and to bring back images. So, in the end, the entire body of 1,425 films 9 can be labeled as Lumière films. And a thorough analysis of this corpus will reveal, in spite of the diversity of subject matter, the countless locations and countries where the films were shot, the over twenty operators that they had, a tremendous coherence bearing the imprint of the Lumière house. In relation to Africa, the principle of coherence will be used to address the Lumière output, especially since Alexandre Promio 10 , one of their three most important operators along with Algerian-born Félix Mesguich and Francis Doublier, shot films in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia 11 , foregrounding a fundamental consistency. 8 Although the term filmmaker was not in use at the time, this is what they did de facto. Louis Lumière is credited for having shot up to 50 films, mainly between 1895 and 1896. He shot mainly family films and in his own words, all the films shown in 1895 (Sadoul, 104). Some of his films include L’arroseur arrosé, Discussion de Monsieur Janssen et de Monsieur Lagrange, Photographe, etc. Auguste is acknowledged by his brother Louis as having shot one film entitled Mauvaises Herbes [Weeds] (1896) (Sadoul, 104). 9 According to Aubert and Seguin, “only 20 films are missing” (13). 10 Alexandre Promio attended the June 1895 screening of the Cinématographe at the Photographic Congress in Lyon. A journalist at the daily Le Progrès, he started working for the Lumière in early 1896. Trained by Louis Lumière and Charles Moisson, he quickly made himself indispensable by successively becoming an instructor to newly recruited operators, in charge of centralizing the Lumière films shot around the world in view of further distribution, and later “démonstrateur, propagandiste itinérant” (“itinerant demonstrator and propagandist” – my translation) “in charge of presenting and promoting the Cinématographe in the main countries in the world” (Rittaud-Hutinet 141). 11 According to Jean-Claude Seguin, who co-edited with Michelle Aubert La production cinématographique des frères Lumière (the comprehensive book on the entire Lumière production), Alexandre Promio is responsible for more than half of the entire Lumière filmography (5). 13 The Lumière brothers invented the Cinématographe in a country and disseminated it around a world that was subject to a specific political dispensation, especially in relation to the African continent. France and indeed most countries in Western Europe were involved in an imperial and colonial project that sought to dominate and administer the countries they conquered and have unhindered access to their natural and human resources. This political context overdetermines the Lumière relationship to Africa and it will be the task of this chapter to tease out the ways in which their production is inflected by colonialism. This colonial political context saturated both the empire and the metropolis from a cultural standpoint as well. In that regard, it will be put in a conversation with another cultural context that has been the grand narrative of the cultural history of the period, i.e. modernity. We shall explore the ways in which colonialism is inextricably imbricated with modernity, its contemporary twin, in the very practice of the Lumière in Africa. Finally, the Lumière operators, in their encounter with Africa, were experimenting with a new medium, the cinema. In that regard, our analysis will also seek to bring out moments and instances in which fundamental questions related to the specificity of the medium arise in the process of the encounter between the operators, the apparatus and the African context. 14 The Lumière Africa Corpus The inventors of the Cinématographe (not of moving pictures, as this is the subject of passionate debates among specialists) 12 were first in disseminating it across the globe almost immediately after the famous December 28, 1895 screening at the Grand Café on Boulevard des Capucines, in Paris 13 . While films such as L’arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat [Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat], Repas de bébé [Baby’s Dinner], La sortie des usines Lumière [Workers Leaving Factory] or L’arroseur arrosé [The Sprinkler Sprinkled] are now widely known, both to general audiences and film specialists, the existence of a body of films shot in and about Africa and Africans has so far received less to little attention. Indeed, the Lumière brothers’ operators reached the coasts of Africa within a year after this groundbreaking screening. There exists an impressive corpus of Lumière films in and about Africa, consisting of over 100 out of 1,425 films shot worldwide. This should not surprise considering the geographic proximity of the continent as well as its colonial 12 The question of the invention of cinema itself has been the subject of many books, articles, seminars and conferences. There is no agreement as to who invented the cinema. Historians have traced the archeology of the cinema back to Chinese shadows and ancient Egypt. For some, the Lumière are only at the tail end of a process started several centuries earlier, which involved scholars, magicians, scientists from different countries and continents. On the invention of the cinema, Louis Lumière himself had the following to say: “What have I really done? It was in the air. The works of Jansen, Edison and mostly of Marey and his students had to one day or another lead to this result.” (quoted by George Necker on November 6, 1935, cited in Rittaud-Hutinet). 13 Although this is the date that most history books have recorded, it was by no means that of the first screening. It is now known as the first paid public screening (in French: premiere projection publique payante - PPPP). The official Web site of the Institut Lumière, based in Lyon, lists 12 screenings prior to the famous Boulevard des Capucines one, with the first dating back to March 22, 1895 and the last to December 11, 1895, for such institutions as the Society for the Promotion of National Industry, the Society of Scientists/Scholars at the Sorbonne (April 16, 1895) among others. 15 status at the time of the December 22, 1895 screening. The Lumière Africa film corpus was shot in Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, France, Britain and Switzerland, from March 1896 - less than three months after the Boulevard des Capucines screenings - until 1903, when one of their chief operators, Alexandre Promio, made his last trip on their behalf to the continent of Africa as part of a delegation of reporters accompanying the French President Emile Loubet. The exact years of the Lumière Africa Film Corpus are 1896, 1897 and 1903. The Lumière production house can thus be considered the first to have consistently put Africa on cinematic screen and displayed it for the purpose of audiences in Europe and elsewhere. Algeria, which was the most filmed of all countries in Africa, was a French settlement colony just off the coast of Marseilles, whereas Egypt and Tunisia were part of the Mediterranean border of Europe. The filming of Africans in Europe however precedes by several months the arrival of the Lumière 14 on the coasts of Africa. Perhaps it was not necessary for the Lumière to immediately go to Africa, since Africa came to them within the frame of colonial exhibitions 15 . 14 I will hereby use the generic term of the Lumière to discuss the films shot by their operators. In actuality, all the Lumière films shot on the African continent are attributed to Alexandre Promio. 15 It should be noted that the Lumière operators never went south of the Sahara. Thus, in light of current knowledge on the topic, neither West, Central, East nor Southern Africa was visited by the Lumière brothers. This “oversight” could be symptomatic of the “importance” they attached to that region. 16 The Lumière output on Africa can be divided into two broad categories/genres: the travelogue and the human zoo 16 . The travelogue was mostly shot physically on the African continent when Alexandre Promio, the Lumière operator, went there alone in 1896 and returned in 1903 for a longer stay. The human zoo genre however was shot primarily in Europe, when Africans were brought over from Africa in order to be exhibited at the Zoological Acclimatization Garden of Paris and in Lyon, the symbolic birthplace of the Cinématographe. Two other films within this category were filmed as part of the Geneva National Exhibition in Switzerland. A. The Travelogue The very first Lumière film about Africa in general and blackness in particular dates back to March 8, 1896, less than three months (about 70 days) after the Boulevard des Capucines screening. The film is entitled Nègres dansant dans la rue [Negroes Dancing in the Street] (Lumière film catalogue number 252). Shot in London, on Rupert Street, in front of the Solférino Restaurant, this film was the second Lumière film ever shot in Britain, after Entrée du Cinématographe [Here Comes the Cinématographe], shot the same day (March 8, 1896) at the Empire Palace at Leicester Square. The summary of the 16 I take the term human zoo from the work of Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and their colleagues at ACHAC (Association pour la Connaissance de l’Histoire de l’Afrique Contemporaine), who are doing pioneering work in France in relation to revisiting the history of France with the postcolonial critical apparatus. This is not insignificant in a country like France where in the year 2007 there is still reluctance in accepting postcolonialism in academia and in the general public discourse. One of their books, soon to be translated in English, is entitled Zoo humains: Au temps des exhibitions humaines. This title is all the more central in that the motif of the human zoo will be one of the founding, most widespread and enduring tropes for the representation of Africa in cinema, television and other media. 17 film in the Lumière catalogue goes as follows “A group of white musicians in blackface dancing in the street, in front of a restaurant.” 17 A moment of pause is needed before proceeding. In the very first Lumière image of Africa/blackness, referential Africa is already absent, evacuated for a stand in. It is already strongly symbolized, mediated. The second point is that the question of race makes its royal entrance in the cinema as a signifier of radical difference. As in The Jazz Singer, three decades later, blackness is erased by virtue of its being performed 18 . In this 46 second street scene (one of the key sub-genres of the travelogue), the camera is in a fixed position 19 and shows the street and the pavement (middle ground-background). On the street, men are shown dancing. On the pavement, men and boys are standing and watching the show, most with their hands in their pockets. There are six dancers, all men, dressed in white pants, dark waistcoats and playing different instruments (guitar, banjo, clarinet, etc). When the film begins, two men, one from frame left and another from frame right enter the visual field. They jump back and forth, stretching their legs back and forth. One of the men, holding a conductor baton, almost stumbles (as if he was 17 This is my translation. The original French goes as follows: “Une troupe de musiciens blancs, grimés en Noirs, joue et danse dans la rue” (Aubert and Seguin). 18 We understand that minstrelsy may be considered remote from a direct African experience. Indeed, it was first developed in the United States and later migrated to Europe via England. It was even initially performed by whites as in this film. But it caricatured descendants of Africans in the New World at a moment when the experience of the traffic of slaves from Africa had barely ended. It is therefore difficult to argue that it has no relationship at all with Africa. In addition to this, it deals with the question of blackness, at a time when the racial overdetermined the geographical and even the historical. Finally, it participates in creating and disseminating images that will affect the perception of both continental and diasporic Africans. 19 The Lumière camera at the time weighed only five kilograms. It did not have a viewfinder and the pan had not yet been invented as an aesthetic device. 18 drunk). Their movements, although carefully choreographed look random, undisciplined and awkward. They sing, move and dance to the other side of the visual field (camera side), wearing top hats and other headpieces, reminiscent of the slavery period. The choreography goes as follows: first, they dance in semi-circle, forward and backward, and stick out their legs. We can follow the actions of each of the men in the scene: Man 1, the man with the baton (the conductor) is also wearing white epaulettes. He does an acrobatic movement with his baton (throws it on his nose). We can already see acrobatics as a defining feature of cinematic qua media representations of Africans. Man 2, the man with the banjo, who is on the extreme left of the frame. He moves back and forth with his torso pushed backward as if drunk, taking uncertain steps, while holding a banjo that seems bigger than him. He is the incarnation of the clownesque, a second major representational trope of Africans and their diasporic descendents. Man 3, the man with a flute, is less mobile, clearly wearing a cork on his face and looking heavier, almost stupid and awkward. Mainly playing his flute, he stops, sings, and then looks right of the frame. Man 4 is the second man with a banjo. He moves a lot in the frame, forward and backward, left and right, and seems more in control of his instrument. 19 Man 5, the guitar player, is the second most mobile musician in the frame. Going in and out of the frame, he sticks his legs out back and forth. Man 6, who appears less on screen, is holding no instrument, and only dances. He is out of the frame for most of the 46 seconds of film. Like man 5 and man 1, his entering and exiting the frame makes us aware of the off-screen space. The very first film referring to Africa and blackness is always already a representation, an interpretation of what Africans and their descendents look like, behave like in the eyes of Europe. While the Lumière did not invent minstrelsy, by featuring it so prominently in their catalogue, by not even acknowledging in their title (even if they do so in the summary, it is the title that attracts spectators) that it is not blacks or Africans, but rather whites in blackface, they make themselves complicit with a more general structure of feeling that accepts the idea that blackness can be represented in a derogatory manner. They offer a royal entry in the cinema of a socio-cultural practice to which the medium adds at least two dimensions: first, its ability to travel across borders contributes to the availability of these images globally. It also gives them a lifelikeness, which affords it an index of veracity in the eyes of unknowing spectators and enshrines it in the consciousness. Through this film, the Lumière production house officially signs in its entry in the business of giving cinematic form to representations of Africa and blackness on the terms 20 of the culture around them. The result of this is visible in the film itself as it is a spectacle in which we can see the audience in the frame enjoying itself, smiling, some passersby stopping to enjoy the show, people trying to move away from other spectators blocking their view. Through this perhaps unconscious self-referential moment in cinema, where the subject being filmed is simultaneously being enjoyed by spectators in the pro-filmic space, they usher in a mise en abîme of spectacle, which will become a feature of the Lumière output as well as a defining feature of modernity in cinema later in the second half of the twentieth century. In addition to this, the tropes of awkwardness, stupidity, heaviness, slowness, out of control-ness and of course of dance and music entertainment make the film a condensation of structures of feeling of the period with regard to race. For the first time perhaps, race is used as a currency for the invention of form in cinema, of filmic language. Later examples of these will be seen in the work of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) and Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer (1927) among others. It is partly against this legacy that black cinema in the United States and elsewhere in the diaspora as well as African cinema will define and constitute themselves. The bulk of the other films in the travelogue genre of the Lumière Africa corpus can be found in the films made directly in Africa, first in late 1896 and 1897 in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia, and later in 1903 in Algeria and Tunisia. It may be broken down into genres such as street scenes, city life, picturesque scenes, colonial subjects at work and official 21 visits, parades, squares and monuments. Several examples will be taken to illustrate some of these genres. 1. Street Scenes Street scenes fascinated the Lumière operators, especially when they were out of their country. In some regards, these scenes were even more fascinating when they were located in places considered culturally remote from Europe. With this frame of mind, one could see the fascination exerted on them by street scenes in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia respectively. In Algeria, such streets as Rue Bab-Azoum [Bab-Azoum Street], Rue Mascara [Mascara Street], Rue Sidi-Bou-Medine [Sidi-Bou-Medine Street], Rue de France [France Street] were all central characters in the Lumière travelogue archive. The first street scene film about Africa was entitled Rue Bab-Azoum (Lumière catalogue 210), shot in Algiers, Algeria’s capital, by Alexandre Promio in December 1896 20 . In this 46-second film, Promio’s camera set up is brilliant. The camera is set up in Bab-Azoum Street in such a way that he has in the background a tall white building with the inscription “Bains” (Baths) and in the foreground, the curvy street that allows him to easily capture the movement of people and vehicles. Thus, we get a foreground of people going and coming about their business (cars, chariots, people) moving from right to left of the frame (graphic dynamism) whereas in the background, in front of the bath, more activity/movement is taking place. People are standing and talking, entering and exiting 20 The exact date is not known. According to Michelle Aubert and Jean-Claude Seguin, the editors of the Lumière film catalogue, shooting took place between December 15 and 25, 1896. 22 the bath. There is a sort of triangular camera axis, with the entering and exiting lines constituting the two sides of the triangle. We see Algerian men with donkeys and women wearing headscarves, while European men are walking about. The dressing style of the Algerians clashes strikingly with that of the Europeans, creating a perfect Orientalist image. The added dimension of the bath conveys the mental image of nudity in the Orientalist mind, while the women are actually protected from head to toe. The desire for nudity, the subliminal disrobing of Algerian women can be seen in the way in which Promio set up the shot. We do not see the interior of the bath, but it is left to our imagination to do the rest of the work. It is a graphically symbolic pornographic film in full accordance with Orientalist paradigms. This is one of the reasons why the title is somewhat misleading, because the film may be construed as being more interested in the pornographic imaginary of the bath, than in Bab-Azoum Street per se. Outside Algiers, Promio shot other streets in the city of Tlemcen. Rue Mascara (Lumière catalogue 203) also stands out in Promio’s filmography. Men, women, children, the old and the young go about their business on Mascara Street. Different people pass through the frame, cross the visual field, look inquisitively at the camera and exit the frame. But one boy attracts our attention. He walks from the middle ground of the frame to its foreground. As he approaches, he notices the camera, becomes self-conscious and steps leftward. Then, as he walks forth and grows more confident, he takes steps in the 23 direction of the camera. We see his face very clearly as if he was refusing anonymity and invisibility and claiming a presence in the film. He de facto decides how he would like to be seen on film, which was not the intention of the operator. Then, a toddler with a hood over the head also attracts our attention. The first boy is forthcoming in terms of his relation to the camera. Is he able to read the camera without knowing how it works or is the camera simply part of the larger economy of the gaze that he is already familiar with? The boy has the longest screen time and because of this, one wonders whether he is responding to instructions from the cameraman, especially if we consider his double change of pace. It is as if the camera was waiting for him. The fact that there is another boy (the toddler) in the film may add weight to this hypothesis. In light of this, one could wonder what roles children played in the filmography of the Lumière, in terms of being a consistently filmed subject matter and perhaps also in terms of helping build an audience for the Cinématographe. The most striking thing about this film however is the relationship of the filmed to the camera. People try to domesticate the camera that is attempting to appropriate their image, their lives. They look back at the camera, at the cameraman. This is important to note because in these early days of the cinema, when the language of medium had not yet been fully established and codified, filmed subjects attempted to wrestle control from the camera and put it on the same footing as themselves, in an equal partnership in the production of their image. This is significant in relation to the colonized because this 24 relationship would be lost later, particularly in the fiction film, until perhaps such time as the colonized would have access to the means of cinematic production themselves. Other titles referring to street scenes include films Promio made in Egypt, such as Rue Sayeda-Zeinab [Sayeda-Zeinab Street], Rue Ataba-el-Khadra [Ataba-el-Khadra Street], Rue Sharia-el-Nahassine [Sharia-El-Nahassine Street], and in Tunisia Rue et porte Bab- El-Khadra [Bab-El-Khadra Street and Gate], Rue Sidi-Ben-Arous [Sidi-Ben-Arous Street] and Rue El-Halfaouine [El-Halfaouine Street]. 2. The Lumière “Official Cinema” Genre A large portion of the Lumière filmography is devoted to officialdom, the filming of the institutional power of government, the people who exercise power over others, and the entire regime of mise-en-scène of political power. From its very beginning then, the cinema or at least Lumière cinema can be said to have flirted with the apparatus of political power. Kings, queens, presidents, princes, monarchs were filmed in both their private and public lives 21 . Although the Lumière could not necessarily refuse if asked by a monarch (it would be a crime of lèse-majesté), they inaugurated a set of relations with political power that will have staying power throughout the history of our medium. The first kind of relationship is that of celebration, celebrating political power, as opposed to interrogating it, at least initially. 21 Alexandre Promio was no doubt the chief architect of this relationship with the powers-that-be. He is the Lumière operator who may have met the largest number of kings, queens, and royalty. 25 Thus, the Lumière filmed coronations of several monarchs, including Russia’s Tsar Nicolai, and featured Kings Charles I of Romania, Guillaume II, Emperor of Germany, King Norodom I of Cambodia among others. They also traveled with French heads of state on their trips in and outside their country, almost inventing “embedded” filmed journalism. Finally, they filmed military parades that celebrated the military might of the countries in which they filmed. When shot in the colonies, this became a tacit or even explicit celebration of colonialism. The filming of monuments and squares bearing the traces of or devoted to the triumph of colonialism is part of the relationship the Lumière had with this particular political dispensation. But is the “official cinema” of the Lumière only a reflection of its times or does it contribute to producing its times as well? One may at least advance that the filming of officialdom has contributed greatly to the early legitimation of the cinema as it led to its acceptance by the ruling classes. Even fifty years later, the recipe was not out of date as the filming and broadcasting of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II of England led to the massive entry of television sets into British households. This brings to mind the question of the transmission of the heritage of figures of legitimation of art forms. In Africa, the “official cinema” of the Lumière stretches across the two major periods of filming in 1896 and 1903. Place du Gouvernement 22 [Government Square – Lumière catalogue no. 200] is the first in this category. We get a shot of Government Square in 22 Shot between December 15 and 25, 1896, this film was screened on January 30, 1898 in Lyon under the title Alger, place du gouvernement [Algiers, Government Square] (Lyon Républicain, January 30, 1898). 26 Algiers and see mostly Europeans walk across the square. The statue of the Duke of Orléans 23 stands tall and behind it, a building that looks like a mosque, all white. The posture of the statue in front of the mosque positions the Duke as commander of the Muslim world and makes this film a cinematographic treatment of a colonial relationship in which France is the dominant power in Algeria. 24 We see one Algerian man walk into the frame “by accident’ and immediately walk out. It is not clear whether he walks out on his own volition because he is “interrupting a shot” (that would mean an awareness of the photographic/cinematographic process) or whether Alexandre Promio asked or ordered him out of the frame. In either case, the exchange is interesting in terms of the relationship of Africans to the Cinématographe. It is by no means a monolithic one. For more clarity, it might be judicious to distinguish between responses to the camera (the apparatus) itself and responses to the images it projects on the screens. Two Europeans, also aware of the camera’s presence, walk from left to right of the frame, notice the camera, and walk back, looking back at the camera as they exit the frame. The reaction of the Algerian man can be contrasted with that of the two Europeans. While the Algerian exits the frame immediately (as if an intruder), the two Europeans quietly walk across it. There seems to be an economy of a dialectic relationship between entitlement 23 The Duke of Orléans Ferdinand-Philippe Louis participated in the battles for conquest of Algeria. According to Paul Joannen (qtd. in Aubert and Seguin) the statue, made by famous Italian sculptor Carlo Marochetti, was erected at Government Square in Algiers on October 29, 1845. 24 After independence in 1962, Algerians renamed the square Place des Martyrs [Martyrs Square] foregrounding the fact that historical places and events are the site of struggle over meaning. We see here the colonized attributing different meanings to the same historical event. 27 and intrusion, mediated both by the presence of the European operator (Promio) and by the cinematic apparatus (a product of Euro-American science and technology). These actions happen in the foreground whereas the Duke of Orléans statue mounting a horse and the mosque behind it are in the background. Foreground and background represent two discursive spaces within the frame, all articulating a relationship between colonizer and colonized, with primacy given to the colonizer. The next major series of films in the “official history” genre in the Lumière catalogue in Africa can be found during Alexandre Promio’s second visit to Africa in 1903. For this visit, the Lumière operator was literally embedded in the delegation of then French President Emile Loubet and devoted 16 films to it 25 . They range from the President disembarking in Algiers, to films about his breakfast, medal award ceremonies, etc. The first film is entitled Débarquement de M. le President à Alger 26 [Mr. President Arrives in Algiers] (Lumière catalogue number 1355) and is more in the actuality genre. It shows canoes full of people floating toward the shore. We see the quay on the right side of the frame. Before going on to discuss the actual content of these films, it is important to first examine the importance of this trip within the French context in general and the colonial context in particular. The French newspapers of the time gave ample publicity to this trip and discussed its importance in historical terms. According to the Parisian daily Le Temps, dated April 17, 25 Promio also followed President Loubet to Tunisia as part of the same trip. 26 This film was shot on April 15, 1903. 28 1903, this was the first time Mr. Loubet visited Algeria. The daily goes on to describe the visit in the following terms 27 : The first contact between the President of the Republic and Algeria happened as could be expected. A profound and sincere enthusiasm was expressed by the population whose patriotic feelings were aroused by the arrival of the President (…) The President and the ministers who accompany him are also delighted to sanction a task in which our nation vividly expresses its genius and its vitality, and to bring to this new France in the process of becoming, the message of solicitude of the motherland for its children… The daily added that the purpose of the presidential visit was to put African issues at the center of debates in the Republic, for the “constant and rapid development of this Other France is now the most important factor of our national future.” The stakes of the trip are really high. It is a trip related to a re-evaluation of the relationship between France and her African colonies. One of the striking aspects of this is that the Lumière operators were not asked to come along to “cover” the trip. Instead, they requested themselves to be part of it. Once again, we can see ideology at work when one makes oneself available to ideology, by voluntarily signing on to the project. 28 La Vie Illustrée, another major French daily of the time, summarizes the stately visit as follows: 27 “Le premier contact du président de la République avec l’Algérie a été comme on pouvait l’attendre(sic); enthousiasme profond et sincère de la population, dont tous les sentiments patriotiques sont excités par l’arrivée chez elle du chef de l’Etat; joie non moins grande du président de la République et des membres du gouvernement qui l’accompagnent d’avoir à consacrer une œuvre où notre nation a manifesté d’une façon si éclatante ‘son génie et sa vitalité’ et d’apporter à cette nouvelle France en création le témoignage de la sollicitude cordiale de la mère patrie pour ses enfants” (Le Temps, Paris, April 17, 1903) 28 The notes from the register of presidential voyages say the following about this trip: “Voyage to Algeria, April 1903. List of newspapers that requested to be part of the trip (“qui ont demandé à se faire représenter” [my translation]): Lumière Photorama. Name of representative: Alexandre Promio (Archives de France, Voyages présidentiels, cote 1AG4 qtd. in Aubert and Seguin) 29 Mr. Loubet, President of the Republic is returning today from his long and exhausting trip to Algeria and Tunisia. (…) It is probable that people will talk for a long time under the tent about the White Sultan who brought the gospel. Even the elements seconded the President’s efforts (…) In these faraway lands made desolate by drought, Arabs from the South are convinced that they owe the divine rain that Allah blessed them with to the intercession of the President of the Republic. Allah is Allah! Muhammad and Loubet are his prophets... 29 This is the general context of the trip that the Lumière via their chief operator embark in. They physically choose to align themselves with dominant power, and more especially, the commander-in-chief, the person who embodies all the tenets, creeds and colonial ambition of the French republic. In these two comments, a wide range of representational features available in French culture at the time with regard to Africa is laid out. This goes from supposed superstition of Africans, the alignment of whiteness with the divine, the desire in addition to actual physical domination, to also conquer the “hearts and minds” of the colonized (part of the hegemonic process at work in the colonial enterprise). Through form of representation, media such as cinema and the press become literal Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) in the colonial context, that operate at the levels of affect, signs and representations. They play a double function both in the colony and in the metropolis. In the metropolis, their function is to convince and reassure citizens of the necessity and benevolence of the colonial project, while in the colony, they hammer in its inevitability. 29 “C’est aujourd’hui que M. Emile Loubet, président de la République revient de son long et fatigant voyage en Algérie et en Tunisie… Il est probable que l’on parlera longtemps là-bas, sous la tente du Sultan blanc qui vient apporter la bonne parole. Les éléments eux-mêmes secondèrent les efforts du président de la République (…) sur ces contrées désolées par la sécheresse, la pluie est venue avec lui. Et les Arabes du Sud sont persuades que c’est à l’intervention du président qu’ils doivent la rosée bienfaisante que répandit Allah. Allah est Allah! Mahomet et Loubet sont ses prophètes (… )” (La vie illustrée, Paris, May 1, 1903, qtd. in Aubert and Seguin 78). 30 The film Le cortège [The Parade] (Lumière catalogue 1357) illustrates this hegemonic function of cinema, particularly of the Lumière official cinema. It first strikes one as interesting in terms of its aesthetic approach, being a technical response to a political question: How to present, how to film a column of troops escorting the President? One notices in this film that Alexandre Promio’s style evolved tremendously. During his first visits, his shots in Algeria were rather frontal, more in the regime of direct recording, even if he set up his scenes. He did not necessarily or openly seek aesthetic effect in terms of camera movement or angle. In this film, the camera is set up on the sidewalk to film troops passing from left to right of the frame. The camera is positioned at a low angle in such a way that the passing troops would appear imperious, domineering, in control. This may be the result of his filming several official ceremonies and parades around the world in the course of his multiple travels 30 . He thus puts this international “aesthetic” experience at the disposal of the colonial enterprise of his country. The shot is meant here to be received by the French as reassurance that the boys are doing a great job abroad protecting the visiting President and the assets of France overseas. It is a sign that they can be trusted, that the colonial enterprise is going well, following its natural course. 30 There are two very famous accounts of Promio’s experiences of filming parades, one in Spain (during his very first trip outside of France with the Cinématographe in 1896) and the other in Chicago. We shall relate one. In Spain, he managed a few days after his arrival to have access to the Royal Court and obtain permission to film a parade. Being a showman, he felt that filming a “mere parade” would be uninteresting. Instead, he asked a Spanish Army General to have canons fired. The General refused. Two days later, an order from the Queen of Spain herself demanded that six canons be loaded and fired for the Cinématographe, to the dismay of Spanish officers surprised that “the Cinématographe has such an influence on the Royals” (Rittaud-Hutinet, 141). This shows us that the pleasure of the spectator was more important to Promio than the “mere recording of reality.” 31 What we actually see in the film are white soldiers mounted on black and white horses, following each other. One is able to clearly see their faces. They are trotting. To their right, men in civilian wearing top hats and mustaches walk. One cannot see the French President in the shot, only the majesty of the French army, and by extension the might of France. The horse-mounted troops are holding a saber in their right hand, a gun on their shoulder, trotting self-confidently. Other films following the French President in Algeria include M. Le Président au Palais d’Hiver [The President at the Winter Palace], Arrivée de M. le Président sur le terrain de la revue à Alger [Arrival of the President at the Parade in Algiers], Arrivée à la revue d’Alger de la délégation anglaise [Arrival of the English Delegation at the Algiers Parade], La remise des décorations [Medal Giving Ceremony]. Each of these films participates in the mise-en-scène of state protocol. It is particularly interesting to notice that Africans are nowhere in sight in these films, or are rendered invisible, marking the effective domination of the land by France. The film on the arrival of the English is revealing from this standpoint. We see a building with stairs in the heart of the frame, leading to a platform where officials are sitting in a row, the French president in the middle. The English delegation walks up the stairs and greets the president. At the bottom left side of the stairs, we can spot three Algerian men looking at the Englishmen climbing the stairs. There is an interesting circulation of the gaze here. The Algerians looking at the English climbing up the stairs give us the impression that the English are ascending to a higher plane, the skies may be. One can perceive even some form of envy (desire for 32 power) at play in the Algerians’ gaze. The Englishmen do not look at them. The Algerians are in the background. Yet they exchange comments about the scene, eyeing each other. One of the men puts his right hand to his forehead. The Lumière operator followed the French President across Algeria, to such cities as Cheragas, Pointe-Cascade, Saint-Denis-du-Sig and Sidi-bel-Abbes. As we finish our examination of the Lumière “official cinema,” we notice that there is no significant ontological difference between the films of official ceremonies and those that directly evoke the Orientalist fantasies discussed below. They are both sides of the same coin. It is the military and political occupation of Algeria that fuels the Orientalist fantasy. 31 No subjectivity of Algerians comes through these films. We are thus reminded in this film that the realm of culture cannot be completely separated from that of politics. 3. The Picturesque Part of the Lumière filmography in Africa also included a body of films emphasizing the picturesque, most specifically films that conveyed an idea of radical difference from Europe. One of the most significant events that took place during the same visit by French president Emile Loubet illustrates this. It consisted in adding “local flavor” to the 31 Indeed, Edward Said reminds us that “the period during which the institutions and the content of Orientalism were expanded coincided exactly with the period of Europe’s greatest expansion: from 1815 to 1914, the direct European colonial empire stretched from 35% to 85% of the Earth surface. All continents were affected, but Africa and Asia more than others.” [my translation] (Said 56). 33 “serious” diplomatic visit of the president. It also fulfilled the function of demonstrating the submission of Africans and their culture as they were asked to produce their own difference, and thus a parade of camels was organized for the president and filmed in southern Algeria, in the Kreider camp, by Alexandre Promio on April 21, 1903. The show included a simulacrum caravan attack, involving the kidnapping of a bride 32 . The film is entitled Défilé des chameaux avec les bassours [Camels Parade with Bassours]. We see the desert plain. In the horizon, the infinite desert merges into the sky, which takes infinity literally to a higher level. This set up alone evokes the infinity of French power that rules over this immense land. In the middle ground, we see Algerians in Muslim garbs sitting in a row, a row too long for the frame to contain, bleeding into off- screen space. In the foreground, we see a parade of camels with bassours on their backs. Algerian men pull the camels and cross the frame in the foreground. The camera is very close to them and so we get a magnified view of them, which conveys a heightened sense of spectacle. Proximity and spectacularity seem to go hand in hand in this case. The slowness of the procession also invites us into the spectacle, interpellates us. The place of this film in the sequence of events that marked the French president’s visit to Algeria is also significant. It seems to suggest that after laborious days of work, the president is entitled to some entertainment, and where else but in the desert could this take place? Since there is no desert in France, so the camera brings the desert home. And Algeria is a colony of France, which makes the desert French as well. 32 In L’Illustration, Paris, no. 3140, May 2, 1903 (qtd. in Aubert and Seguin 305-308). 34 For us to understand the full import of this parade, we need to look at the description of the bassour given by a French author. 33 The bassour is a real cage made of several stalks of baskets ingeniously interlaced and covered with rich fabrics out of which hundreds of pompons made of multicolor wool fall. This is where the Arab hides his wives and his riches, where he randomly stuffs his children and his carpets, his provisions and his utensils for the road or the kitchen. It is at the same time his safe and his gynaeceum, his food storage and his nursery. It is clear that the film and the general context both contribute to producing the Orientalist fantasies already present in French society. Through his positioning of the camera, the Lumière operator produces this fantasy cinematically through the way in which each plane of his frame is about a specific Orientalist fantasy. While the article evokes the figures of chaos, lack of separation of spheres, theft of women, the film evokes nomadism, the desert, infinity, camels, all features and escapist figures of the Orientalist imagination. Other films that Promio made in Algeria can be of interest to us on a purely cinematic ground. Indeed, one’s interest is caught when the Lumière operator sets up his camera on a moving boat and thus manages to obtain a traveling shot. Although this was not the first traveling shot in the history of cinema 34 it is one of the first pieces of evidence that 33 The original French quote goes as follows: “Le bassour est une véritable cage faite de plusieurs tiges de paniers ingénieusement entrelacées et recouvertes d’éclatantes étoffes d’où tombent des centaines de pompons aux laines multicolores. C’est là dedans que l’Arabe cache ses femmes et ses richesses, enfouit pêle-mêle ses enfants et ses tapis, ses vivres, ses ustensiles de route ou de cuisine. C’est tout à la fois son coffre-fort, son gynécée, son garde-manger et sa nursery ” (Le panorama. Paris: L. Baschet / L. Henry May, sd (1895-1900), qtd. in Aubert and Seguin). 34 It was Promio who reportedly invented the first traveling shot in the history of cinema, on the Grand Canal in Venice during his voyage to Italy (Rittaud-Hutinet 142-143). 35 experimentation with the lateral traveling shot took place in Africa, in the film entitled Panorama du port d’Alger [Panorama of the Port of Algiers]. 4. The Lumière in Egypt It is important to slightly differentiate the Lumière Egyptian footage from the rest of the films made during this Promio trip, because the Egyptian context is overdetermined historically, geopolitically, epistemologically and culturally. Thus, when Promio reaches Egypt in 1897, it is, unlike Algeria and Tunisia, not a French colony, although French involvement had been historically important in Egypt with the invasion by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798. Following French expulsion by the Ottoman, Mamluk and British alliance in 1801 and several decades of Ottoman rule, the British wrestled control of Egypt and administered the territory under a protectorate. The country was officially managed by the descendants of the Khedive Muhammad Ali, but owed allegiance to the British. However, French involvement continued through commercial relationships and climaxed with the financing, engineering and building of the Suez Canal in 1869. But this colonized Egypt was primarily Arab and Islamic, had been so for several centuries. It was this Arab culture that Europeans were intent in subduing, but which strongly resisted. Construed as being part of the Middle East, it thus becomes not only the 36 site of the elaboration and projection of Orientalism in the colonial era, but also the center of the Orientalist dispositif. 35 However, Orientalism does not exhaust the question of the history of Egypt. There is also indeed, the issue of Ancient Egypt, which is the domain of a science, articulated with Orientalism, but which has its own positivity, that is, Egyptology, which also deals with what is known as the classical age of Egypt. This field has been the site of fierce political, historical and epistemological battles. Some of the key questions of Egyptology include: Who were the Ancient Egyptians? What race were they? What are the links between Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations? Did Ancient Egypt influence or even set the parameters for Ancient Greece and Rome? Did the Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle plagiarize the Ancient Egyptians? These questions become overdetermined with the racial-imperial structure of feeling of the nineteenth century, for which it was important to posture white Europeans as the main (and perhaps only) movers of history, as being entitled to colonize. Ancient Egypt became a cornerstone in debates pertaining to the intellectual and theoretical justifications of the colonial project. As a result, the process of doctoring the history of Ancient Egypt began and took several forms including obscuring and rewriting the history of the Ancient Egyptians. In the words of Peter Gran: "Obscure and religious, ancient Egypt makes no sense. It is the function of Egyptology to make Egypt make no 35 Edward Said reminds us that “Egypt being saturated with meaning in the arts, sciences and government (…) by conquering Egypt, a modern power could naturally show its might and justify history, according to which the destiny of Egypt was to be annexed, preferably by Europe.” (Said 103) 37 sense" (xxxi). The words of Martin Bernal (1: 241) best capture the question of the role of race in Egyptology at the time of imperialism: If it had been scientifically "proved" that Blacks were biologically incapable of civilization, how could one explain Ancient Egypt, which was inconveniently placed on the African continent? There were two, or rather three, solutions. The first was to deny that the Ancient Egyptians were black; the second was to deny that the Ancient Egyptians had created a "true" civilization; the third was to make doubly sure by denying both. The last has been preferred by most 19 th - and 20 th - century historians. In short, Promio’s pointing his camera at Egypt evokes such questions as power, precedence, history, epistemology, copyrights avant-la-lettre, colonialism, competing colonialism, resistance to colonialism. Filming Egypt in the age of colonialism is thus not an act devoid of consequence, especially when one counts among the first to do so, because as is often the case, most pioneering work sets the ground for later work in the same domain. In other words, Promio was one of the first to originate the cinematic archive of filmed Egypt. It is within this complicated vortex of discourses that we must see the work of Alexandre Promio in Egypt. The Lumière operator shot 35 films in Egypt 36 from March 12 through April 18, 1897, over the course of 37 days. As in the Algerian films, he shot places of officialdom, including Place Mehemet Ali [Mehemet Ali Square], Place de la citadelle [Citadel Square], Place du Gouvernement [Government Square - Lumière catalogue no. 371] and Place de l’Opéra [Opera Square]. 36 This is the largest number of films made by any Lumière operator in the same place at one time. 38 Place Mehemet Ali (Lumière catalogue number 361) films the eponymous square, which is the heart of European life in Egypt. 37 One of three films shot in Alexandria on 9-10 March 1897, Place Mehemet Ali films Europeans and Egyptians walking by, stopping, talking in the square and looking at the camera. Technically speaking, Promio places his camera on a platform and shoots the square from above, thereby colonizing the space cinematically. More than the content alone, it is the articulation of form, content and context that is most significant, because it foregrounds the spatial exercise of power through the occupation of a square named after the Egyptian dynasty, and is thus representative of an anti-colonial Egypt, subject nonetheless to the British Crown. Promio uses the same style of shooting (from the perspective of platform) for another Square scene, in Place de la citadelle (Lumière catalogue, number 370). We have in the background a huge white building (citadel) built in 1166 by Haladin. It is a mosque, the Muhammad Ali mosque. Below the mosque, one can see a square where throngs of people come and go, by foot and carriages. Further exploring the expressive potential of the Cinématographe, Promio’s camera gives us a shot from above, which delivers a comprehensive view of the square and allows the camera to take a lot in. As a result, people in the frame look smaller, and appear to be moving all over the place, in a sort of chaotic swarming. As in the previous film, the Lumière operator achieves two effects: a cinematic possession of the land, and the framing of the people in the entomological mode. 37 “Mehemet Ali Square is the center of European life. It is 567 feet long and 96 feet large, shaded with trees, and with the equestrian statue of Mehemet Ali, founder of the reigning dynasty in Egypt (…) The square has suffered from the 1882 rebellion” (Baedeker 13 – my translation). 39 Place de l’Opéra 38 (Lumière catalogue number 372) shows traffic on Opera Square. Egyptian men are riding donkeys whereas Europeans, wearing suits, ties and top hats, are walking or riding horses. Egyptians tend to the horses and pull them. One notices a clear division of labor. Two Europeans, aware of the camera’s presence walk towards it. It becomes increasingly clear that the scene was set up for them, following the mode of a photo-album, here thus a film-album. The Cinématographe puts itself at the disposal of colonial inhabitants of colonized lands to make a mise-en-scène of their purported superiority. Upon further viewing, it becomes clear that it is about three European men ordering Egyptians around, demanding that they show their submissive position, by playing the role (or by being) the hands of the European men. The body language is quite explicit. Europeans smile, walk nonchalantly, with their hands in their pockets, whereas Egyptians are shown working hard, tending horses. The film starts with a mise en place of the three men and their horse carriers. The men come toward the center of the frame and move back to its background. As they move back, passing coaches ride across the frame in close proximity to the camera. We thus have two planes of action, the foreground, which is closer but where the “action” is of relatively little narrative import, and the background, where the action is the backbone of the shot. 38 It is important to note in passing the cataloguing mistake in the book La production cinématographique des frères Lumière edited by Michelle Aubert and Jean-Claude Seguin in relation to this film. In the catalogue, the film is listed under the following category: Theme: Discovery of France (Paris and Ile de France). It is clear that the cataloguers were thinking of the Parisian Opera Square, revealing perhaps an inability to think of an Opera Square outside of France. 40 At the end of the film, the three men, perhaps responding to a command from the operator, walk toward the camera, smiling. As they get close to it, they turn back to look at their Egyptians horse tenders. We have here a case of staging of the main action in depth, and the action moving slowly from background to foreground through the movement across space of the three protagonists, who stand out graphically with their black costumes and white skin, whereas the dresses of the Egyptians come out in the black and white film as grayish/whitish. This further emphasizes their merging into the background, both literally and figuratively, making Europeans the agents of action. The poetics of space is thus put in the service of the narrative of domination and spectacle, for the project is to display one’s power over the “natives.” The horse is the intermediary, the currency for this hierarchical economy. The film is also an entire orchestration of the gaze, in terms of where to look, what to look at when and where to put emphasis in terms deciphering the thrust of a narrative. This profoundly aesthetic and technological question is articulated and even fostered by a fundamentally colonial problematic: how to represent a colonial situation in cinema, the relationship between colonizers and colonized within the vocabulary of cinema? Or rather to what extent does the colonial question incite questions of aesthetics and representation in cinema? What does cinematic language owe to the colonial moment? To what extent has film aesthetics been influenced by colonialism? 41 Place Soliman Pacha (Lumière catalogue number 373) also participates in the same discussion but adds an additional dimension. We see a European man riding a horse and an Egyptian man desperately running, trying to keep pace with the horse. This single moment encapsulates the colonial top to bottom situation, its topos. It not only reifies the colonial situation, but also in a sense justifies it, by mummifying (Egypt again) a historical moment into a transcendental one. If they run after our horses, dress so differently from us, drive us, then this must be their fate; our mission is indeed to be there. This leads to an interesting discussion on the question of temporality in cinema, especially in terms of the relation between the ephemeral and the perennial, and the stakes of the cinema as an art of time, which freezes time in a way. Indeed, by the time the scene is filmed it is no longer there. Yet this ephemeral/perennial dialectic plays itself out at the level of reception, of the spectator, because once the scene is in the can, it can be replayed indefinitely, and the key role of repetition in institutionalizing things, mainstreaming things, reifying things can never be underestimated. The impression/illusion of reality that is the dominant mode of reception of the cinema adds an additional layer to the issue. What we saw is what was, what is, and possibly, what must and will be. The cinema thus seems to collapse past, present and future into one. This constitutes a danger in relation to the colonial moment, which is, after all, a moment and nothing more. 42 The Lumière Egyptian filmography also includes street scenes, scenes of signifiers of progress, and scenes from the Orientalist imagination. The films related to signifiers of progress include films on bridges and dams, whereas the films pertaining to the Orientalist imagination can be seen to relate to the pyramids, villages and donkey shots. It is in fact difficult to separate the two, since one of the premises of Orientalism was precisely to convey the backwardness of the Orient, its regression. In that sense, signifiers of progress are but the other side of the Orientalist coin. Barrage du Nil [Dam over the Nile] (Lumière catalogue number 378) is the first of the signifiers of progress category. The camera is positioned by railroad tracks, which cross the dam. In this scene, we see a group of Egyptian men, animals with their owners mounted on horses or donkeys. Behind the Egyptians, we see two Europeans in a rail cart. To the non-vigilant eye, their appearance in the frame may appear random. But as they move closer to the foreground, we get a close view of them looking at the Lumière operator and make a sign of the head. As in previous shots, Egyptians are pushing the rail cart faster and faster. Behind the rail cart, we can see an Egyptian man running after the cart. They exit the frame and we see more Egyptians moving forward with their animals. Then we see the two European men reappear, in their hand-pushed rail cart. The same Egyptian man pushes them at a higher speed until the film stops. It is clear that the scene was actually set up to film the two Europeans riding their rail cart off and back into the frame. Once again, an action initially staged in the background of the frame, grows to become the most important aspect of the action for the spectator. This is a dual regime of 43 narration, whereby part of the film is clearly and openly staged whereas the other part is more in the “slice of life mode.” It is a mise-en-scène of colonial domination, even in this small playful scene. The Egyptians in the films are clearly not playing, as they are either working, going to work or pushing a rail cart with Europeans jubilantly enjoying just sitting and being pushed up and down the rails of progress and having it filmed for posterity. Alexandre Promio also made a series of films on the impressive Kasr-el-Nil bridge. The films are Pont de Kasr-el-Nil [Kasr-el-Nil Bridge] (Lumière catalogue number 365), Sortie du pont de Kasr-el-Nil (chameaux) [Exiting Kasr-el-Nil Bridge (camels)] (Lumière catalogue 366), Sortie du pont Kasr-el-Nil (ânes) [Exiting Kasr-el-Nil Bridge (donkeys)] (Lumière catalogue 367), and Kasr-el-Nil (Lumière catalogue 368). Kasr-el-Nil was one of the most important bridges in the world at that time, crossing the longest river in the world. In the first installment of the series, Pont de Kasr el-Nil, we see various people crossing the bridge in both directions. A long line of traders with their camels and their carts are headed to the market with their merchandise (hay, etc.) In Sortie du pont de Kasr-el-Nil (chameaux), a follow-up to the previous scene, we see a caravan of camels with hay on their backs. What is striking here is the narrative continuity between these two films. If in the previous scene we saw the camels crossing the bridge, this time we see them exiting the bridge. There is the sense of a before and an after, a spatial organization of temporality. This is buttressed by the next film in the series Sortie du pont de Kasr-el-Nil (ânes) where we now see donkeys exiting the bridge. 44 This is the first of such formal exercise that one sees in the Lumière Africa corpus and is possibly one of the very first instances of attempting continuity editing without the use of an editing machine. It takes place in camera, but only makes sense when shown in sequence, unlike contemporary cameras when pressing the pause button and then pressing the record button establishes continuity in camera (even if there may be a jump cut). This raises yet another question. Was it impossible to stop the Lumière camera from running once it had started? Given that most of the films lasted on average between 42 and 48 seconds, what prevented the operator from stopping say at second 25 and restarting again? Why did they not think of or perhaps experiment with the possibility of filming two different actions within the 48-second framework? Clearly, it was technically possible, because the camera was operated with a handle, and the operator could have stopped rotating the handle anytime. The last series of films shot in Egypt relate to the confluence of discourses of Egyptology, Orientalism and colonialism. We will simply emphasize two films, Les pyramides (vue générale) [Pyramids (General view)] (Lumière catalogue 381) and Descente de la grande pyramide d’Egypte [Going Down the Great Pyramid of Egypt] (Lumière catalogue number 382). In Les pyramides (vue générale), the camera is set up in such a way as to have in plain view both profile and facial views of the Sphinx with the Great Pyramid behind it, the two majestic icons of Egypt and Egyptology. This is a shot in which several layers of 45 history can be perceived, to an extent that we may speak of a shot standing in for time itself, a physical representation of time. We can perceive the Ancient Egypt of Black Africans, Arab Egypt, and colonized Egypt (the Egypt of Napoleon/Champollion) and that of the British. On top of all these, we have the Cinématographe, which is the marker of yet another sheet of history. In this shot-film, the cinema becomes the Benjaminian angel of history, (perhaps in spite of itself), looking back at the past and seeing the proverbial “pile of wreckage” of history. Although a product of the “storm…we call progress” as well as recorder of the same, the camera cannot help but stare fixedly back at these monuments to time. An additional dimension of the shot-film is the passing of camels and humans in front of the Sphinx, this key object of fantasy about Ancient and even contemporary Egypt. The passersby can barely be seen; their heads are chopped off by the frame as are parts of their bodies, but the total effect is a picture perfect Orientalist postcard film. It is the cinematic figuration of the image of Egypt in 1897 for Europe: camels, pyramids, the Sphinx, in short, a mise-en-scène of alterity. In Descente de la grande pyramide d’Egypte, we get a closer shot of the Great Pyramid. The relationship between men and building structures seems to be central to Alexandre Promio. He seems to need men to cross his frame (to animate it) as he shoots buildings and monuments, merging the notions of stasis and movement in his practice (coming as he does, from a background of still photography and now using a motion picture camera). 46 For the film, he has Egyptian men climb down the Great Pyramid one after the other. It is not clear what the men were doing up the pyramid, but we may guess that Promio was simply interested in seeing Egyptians dressed in their jellabas climb down the pyramid to create an Orientalist fantasy. This mise-en-scène is problematic in another way. Indeed, it may create in the mind of the viewer, a collapse of temporality whereby contemporary Egyptians, under colonial domination, merge into a maze of endlessness of time with Ancient Egypt, in a timeless embrace, one of endless repetition that subliminally calls for the arrival of Europe to lodge industrial time between them. There is also in the film the ethical question (perhaps not so pertinent in a colonial context - which is in and of itself a violation of the most basic ethical principles - or even in relation to the filmic practice of Promio himself, as we have seen throughout this chapter) of having older men walk down the pyramids while they are not in great shape. They clearly risked their lives, most likely without being paid, for Promio to get the shot. The people going down the pyramid also engage in a relationship with the camera/man. They look in his direction to seek validation that they are doing properly what they were asked. There are 14 men, and as they go down, they laugh and jump, offering a perfect Orientalist spectacle of innocence and carefree-ness. It is possible, as we conclude this section, to look at the Lumière as participating, within the boundaries of the cinema, as part of the language of cinema, in enhancing, aiding and 47 abetting the colonial project. They have indeed done so by requiring of their filmed subjects to produce their difference (their purported backwardness), by orchestrating narratives of alterity in space and time, by disseminating these images around the world, and thus disseminating colonialism through the cinema, by making films on the terms of the colonial state of things ( mapping of the world, mapping of cultures), by benefiting from the laissez-passers, the communication apparatus of colonialism, and even to a large extent benefited from it economically. Such was, arguably, the return on the investment in the travelogue genre, bringing images of their travels back home(which could be considered a colonial act in and of itself), to allow those who stayed to travel vicariously, prosthetically and usher, in the same move, the first globalization of the moving image. B. The Human Zoo or the Menimal Genre Alongside the travelogue, the second most important film genre that the Lumière developed in relation to Africa is the human zoo genre, which we will name in a neologism, the menimal genre. We will call menimal, the genre in which the frontiers between the human and the animal are blurred, whether physically, psychologically or even intellectually, in which humans are put in the continuum of animals with a stronger emphasis on the animalistic than on the human dimension. This is a genre of film that was made within the framework of the colonial or universal exhibitions of the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. These exhibitions were two fold. On the one hand, they showed what were considered the latest technological, industrial, and scientific innovations of the 48 time. The Eiffel Tower was inaugurated during one such exhibition. The Cinématographe was also exhibited at such events. But the other dimension of the exhibitions, which worked in a dialectical relationship with the previous one, is that one had to equate this progress with Europe, to annex progress and give it a geographic and racial boundary (Europe, America, and whiteness). As a result, every geographic area or race outside the above boundaries was considered immune or slow to progress, backward, stagnating, and requiring European intervention. We create the disease for which we are the cure. Africans, Asians, Indians, everybody was called upon to come and display their difference, participate in the mise-en-scène of alterity. Initially, there was a physical separation (fences) between the people displayed and those who came to observe them. These were literally human zoos. Later, the fences were removed, but they were already in the minds of the observers. And so, for over fifty years, people from lands remote from Europe, were displayed for the pleasure of European audiences. These zoos were equivalent to the cinemas of today in terms of mass spectacle. The Lumière made three sets of films in the menimal genre. The first set was shot on May 7, 1896 at the Geneva National Exhibition in Switzerland, the second at the Zoological Acclimatization Garden of Paris, between June and July 12, 1896, and the last one at the birthplace of the Cinématographe itself, i.e. in Lyon, between April 17 and July 20, 1897. The films made during the Geneva exhibition include Cortège arabe [Arab Procession] (Lumière catalogue number 310), Danse égyptienne [Egyptian Dance] and Les tirailleurs [The Tirailleurs] (Lumière catalogue number 1264). 49 Aubert and Seguin summarize Cortège arabe as follows: “A procession of different ethnic groups parade in front of the screening room of the Lumière Cinématographe during the exposition.” The camera is set in a fixed position on the side of the street. The foreground is the street. The middle ground is peopled by European women, men and children. Dressed in suits, dresses and hats, they are standing in front of a pavilion with the following inscription on its top: “The Divan des fées” (a mix of French and English). Posters can be seen on both sides of the pillars of the pavilion. The only thing that the eye can discern is the term “Cinématographe” written in bold black characters, indicating that the Lumière camera was being exhibited and was showing films there. In the background is the pavilion itself. We cannot see the apparatus being exhibited in the frame, but we can assume that it is the one being used to film what we are currently seeing. There are up to 16 people standing in front of the pavilion being filmed, and posing for the camera. All of a sudden, in the foreground, the punctum of race erupts in the frame, as if to remind the Lumière that we are in a colonial moment. We first spot a procession of Black Africans wearing black and white boubous on the right side of the frame moving progressively toward the center of the frame. At second 07, two East Asian men also burst into the frame. Walking from frame left toward frame right, two men are dressed in East Asian clothes. We can see their features clearly because of their proximity to the camera. Meanwhile the Africans are getting closer to the center of the frame. 50 As the East Asians exit the visual field, two European women and a toddler leave the group of people standing in front of the Lumière pavilion and cross the street in the direction of the camera, as if instructed to do so. As they cross the street, we see a contingent of Arab men wearing Muslim hats and dresses, walking in the same direction as the East Asians (frame left to right). The Black Africans are still proceeding from right to left of the frame. We have a racial procession ballet as Europeans who occupy the center of the frame move forward toward the camera. The two women and the toddler have to stop in order to let the group of Arabs pass. It is a group of 29 people, including two women and one Black man. What is immediately striking is that the group seems to be followed (as in supervise) by a Frenchman. One cannot help but wonder if some decided to flee and/or stay in Europe during or after the exposition. The group is accompanied by musicians, as we can see drums and flutes in the procession. The groups of Black Africans and Arabs (very likely North Africans) at some point take over the entire frame. The two European women and their toddler manage to cross the street by walking across the group of Arabs, turn around and look back in curiosity at the procession. One of the Arab men looks in the direction of the policeman who “accompanies” them and makes a gesture with his right foot as if mocking the guard/policeman. There is here a racial dynamic of covered hostility anticipating moments of police brutality in the years to come. 51 As the procession continues in both directions, there is a meeting point between the tail end of the group of Arabs and that of Black Africans. Some of the Africans look left. After the Arabs totally exit the frame in all directions, some Europeans start crossing the street, as if they had been waiting for the groups to pass. But in the background, the second group of Black Africans is clearly visible. Dressed in white and black boubous, they pass in front of the Europeans standing by the Lumière pavilion. Once the Black Africans completely leave the screen, the street becomes animated again. People start moving from behind to the front of the camera, while others move from the distance (background) to the foreground, closer to the camera. There is a compelling play of size and volume in motion, in such a way as we get “medium” and “long” shots within the same frame. The shot-film ends as follows: left of the frame a man wearing a hat looks directly at us, at the camera/man. On the right side of the frame, a man with a top hat crosses from left to right. A mix of people in the middle and background decreases in size as our eyes move toward the background. From the time the second group of Africans crosses the street as European men and women start appearing in the frame in all directions, and start doing things for the camera, the latter also becomes a spectacle as well, setting up as well as rewarding spectacle. 52 After watching the film, it is clear that the title is misleading as is shown in this summary. What we see is not only an Arab procession, but also a procession of different ethnicities including East (Southeast?) Asians and Black Africans. It seems that the title Cortège arabe was given by default, because the initial set up of the film was to have Alexandre Promio film the Europeans standing in front of the Lumière pavilion. Race burst into the frame and claimed space, blocked the “main” vision and exited. Another important dimension of this film is the question of the procession, that is, what these different ethnicities were doing prior to coming into the frame of the Cinématographe. The purpose of their presence at the exhibition was precisely to be exhibited as in a zoo. For all intents and purposes, they had almost the same ontological status as the Cinématographe apparatus itself, i.e. they were considered less than human, lesser humans, meant to be exhibited as part of the same regime that called for the exhibition of the Cinématographe. Like the latter, they also had at best their own pavilions, but more likely, they had a recreation of their “natural” environment (houses, flora, fauna) as was the case in most exhibitions at the time. A second important film in this genre is Les tirailleurs (Lumière catalogue 1264). This is a film about the African soldiers conscripted in the French army to conduct battles on various fronts during the colonial era. The film here follows them during one of their parades in the streets in the course of the Swiss National Exhibition in Geneva. 53 The camera is on the side of the street (sidewalk), mingled among the public, almost the same set up as the one with the minstrels in London. The colonial setting is glaring as evidenced in the white helmets and white uniforms of the French commanders. The camera is actually located on the side of the commanders and thus doubly on the side of power, both of onlookers and of French officers. In the foreground, we can see about ten people including three officers with their proverbial colonial helmets. The middle ground is the road/street on which the parade is taking place from right to left of the frame. In the background, a group of civilians standing or sitting by the street is watching the parade. Behind them, trees along the road and a big house. During the first seconds of the shot (it starts after the event has begun), a portion of parading troops can be seen exiting frame left. The movement of the parade animates the frame. In a set up where the camera is static, movement occurs inside the frame. An officer stands on the side with a French flag looking at the troops. Another officer is standing in front of the parading soldiers. Then behind this officer, rows of parading soldiers 39 . It becomes clear after a second viewing that the officer holding the flag supervises/oversees the parade. Thus, the troops pass him, one after the other. It should also be added that the troops are preceded by a mounted officer. 39 Making one of its first entries in the cinema here, the theme of the parade will become important in later years, especially in totalitarian regimes in Italy and Germany as well as Communist Soviet Union and usher in a propagandistic iconography that will range from the cinema of Leni Riefenstahl to famous Stalinist parades in Moscow. Arguably, the cinema has contributed a lot to extending the power of the state over the households and the movie theaters. Through the filming of the parade ritual, the State implicitly validates its usefulness in the eyes of the public (the people) by claiming to protect them. It also has a silencing effect on them since it shows the power that the State has the monopoly of, and the violence it could unleash as a result thereof. In the colonial setting, this takes an additional meaning, that of celebrating the “grandeur” of a nation, by parading troops from conquered foreign lands on domestic soil. 54 In summary, the parade can be described as follows: a) An officer stands on the side holding the national flag. b) The parading troops (blacks) are preceded and flanked on all sides by white officers. The first is mounted on a horse, dressed in his white colonial uniform. The second is walking in front of the troops and behind the horse. On the left side of every two rows, a white officer is posted. Behind the last rows, two mounted French officers ride their horses, whereas behind them, an African soldier can be seen walking. After the soldiers pass, the officer holding the flag looks to the right, beyond the frame. Naturally, we cannot see what he is looking at, as the pan and the reverse shot have not yet been invented. Perhaps he is signaling to another officer that the parade in over. Once again, the notions of conquest, of parading the defeated on metropolitan soil, are put on display by the Lumière, thus foregrounding the inevitability of the “greatness” of Europe. 1. The Ashanti Village in Lyon The films shot as part of the Ashanti Village series, are more strictly in the frame of the human zoo genre. Indeed, the practice of bringing people from Africa, recreating their living conditions in Europe and displaying fauna, people, architecture, food habits on the same plane, for Europeans to see, was common at the time. It participated in the highly lucrative business of exhibiting, interpreting otherness for one’s own designs. An industry of alterity came to exist in Europe over the course of at least 70 years. The 55 Ashanti village that the Lumière would film in Lyon 40 participates in that economy of alterity from monetary as well discursive qua representational standpoints. These films were shot in France, in the city of Lyon, the birthplace of cinema. The first time Africans are filmed in the symbolic birthplace of the cinema, they are in a zoo. 14 films were shot between April 17 and July 20, 2007 in a series that would “document” various aspects of Ashanti “life” in the purely ethnographic tradition, starting inevitably from their dances, to parades, to the schooling of their children, the way they wash their children, and ending with their eating “habits.” The 200-strong delegation comprised the Ashanti Chief Botchey, his wife Akossia, sculptors, blacksmiths, jewelers, weavers, basket makers and Mr. Oko the elementary schoolteacher with his students, among others (Le Lyon Républicain, Lyon, May 18, 1897). We remember that the first film that they Lumière shot on March 8, 1896, which featured blackness as an evocation of Africa and its diaspora, was centered on the theme of dance and music by minstrels. One year later, in the Ashanti village series, the Lumière devoted 7 out of 14 films (half) to the theme of dance. In the first film, Danse du sabre I [Saber Dance I] (Lumière catalogue number 444), a crowd of Ashantis of all ages and sexes make up a U-shaped “enclosure.” In the middle, we can see two men dancing, holding knives/sabers in their hands. One immediately wonders if the U-shaped set up was 40 The Ashanti, stemming from the then British colony of the Gold Coast (contemporary Ghana) had been on the human exhibition trail for at least a decade. They were exhibited in various European countries: France (twice in Paris, in 1887 and 1895, and from April 17 to July 20, 1896 in Lyon, France), Britain and Germany. The city of Lyon was no stranger to colonial exhibitions. Two years earlier, in 1894, a colonial exhibition took place there that prominently featured a Senegalese village, this time at the Parc de la Tête d’Or (Aubert and Seguin). 56 “organic” or rather impelled by the Lumière operator who needed the fourth dimension of the circle to set up his camera. The dance itself is well choreographed, slow and elegant, pleasurable to the sight. There is a clear awareness of the camera on the part of the people being filmed. One of the dancers/fighters grabs his saber/knife and looks in the direction of the camera as if trying to “do-it-well” for the camera, or responding to instruction from behind the camera (either from the manager of the village or from the operator of the camera) 41 . The second combatant makes a U-turn and faces the camera (he seems to be responding to an instruction). He turns around a second time and shows his knife/saber to the camera, turns around one more time and continues to dance/fight. The crowd of women, drummers, children and men prods the two fighter/dancers. It is clear that right from the start, the Ashanti are put in a position (ethnographic) in which they are asked to display their moving, sparring and dancing black bodies. Cinematically speaking, one can speak of filming the moving and dancing body as a precursor of the figuration of the body in the cinema. It validates the cinema’s contention that it is about motion, (kinema means motion). In relation to Africa and the colonial context, it gives cinematic form to a structure of feeling and thinking that seeks to reduce the humanity of Africans to the bodily. We see a simultaneous double movement here in terms of an inscription of corporeality in the cinema (in its semi-nude form) together with 41 The Ashanti village actually had a Secretary General named Mr. Bonnamour (Le Progrès, Lyon, May 24, 1897 qtd. in Aubert and Seguin), reminding us that the display of alterity is also a career. 57 a reification/cinematization of discourses of otherizing Africans by synecdoche (i.e. having the part account for the whole, the body for the entire being). This film does it in three ways at least, because it isolates three elements, which until today stand in countless cinematic and media representations as signifiers for Africa: dance, music and war 42 . One film encapsulates all three tropes. A final trope that may be added is that of the massification of the continent, that is, an inability to seek individual subjectivity when it comes to the representation of Africans. They are often seen as a crowd, as a mass, as a mass-crowd. In Danse du sabre II [Saber Dance II] (Lumière catalogue number 442), we witness a slight evolution in the mise-en-scène. This time, the dancers are asked to face the camera and let the camera accept their bodies. It is an almost an erotic relationship between their bodies and the camera, as if the latter was figured as a woman to be conquered by the muscular and highly choreographed dance moves. Though the set up is the same (people standing and sitting in U-shape), muscles are more prominent in the shot and attract the cameraman who asks the dancers to display them for him. 42 The saber dance is a war dance. Apparently, part of the seduction of the Ashanti for European audiences lied in the fact that they had defeated the British in 1828 and in their purported “love of blood and barbarity” (“leur amour du sang et de la barbarie”) (Aubert and Seguin). The staging and success of the saber dance is thus predicated on this trope of bloodthirsty Africans. The fascination of the Lumière for this can be seen in the fact they devote two films to the saber dance as if it was important to be close to the danger of blood thirst without being a victim of it. It is a de facto zoofication of Africa, because even the cinematic approach to it carries with it practices of the zoo where there is at once fear and fascination for an animal that may aggress us but we know that we are protected by the fences, a vicarious facing of danger. Indeed the ludic dimension of the dance may contrast with the bloodthirsty trope, with the notion that at anytime, blood could be gushing in all directions. 58 During the first seconds of the film, the dancers face each other and move to the rhythm of the drum. The crowd participates in creating the spectacle through their encouragement of the dancers. In the foreground, one man dressed in a long, black dress gives directions to the dancers as to how to perform for the camera, thus directing the content of the spectacle itself. It can be argued that there are at least two directors here, perhaps even one director and an operator, as if the Lumière operator was at the disposal of the person who orchestrated this entire mise-en-scène of difference. One may be in a position to ask the following: what makes this a Lumière film and not a film by the Ghanaians who orchestrated and performed this mise-en-scène? If they do not decide where the camera is placed, they do decide what the camera sees (given that the cameraman only records what they want to have him see as their ‘authentic’ culture). We have a case where the man behind the movie camera is largely not knowledgeable about what is being shown to him. The Ghanaians could perhaps have writing, choreographic and mise-en-scène credits. Here responsibility for what is in the frame is at best co- shared, at least initiated and conceived by Africans. In second 7-8, the dancer with his back to the crowd turns his head back toward the camera, as if responding to a call. His partner/adversary also looks in the direction of the camera, following which the two dancers change their dance style. Standing one behind the other (in-depth staging), they openly dance for the camera, combining physical and choreographic prowess). The man in black cloth gives instructions to the dancers on several occasions from the right hand side of the frame, while the crowd prods them, 59 clapping hands, as the two dancers dance in circle. The film ends in a freeze frame 43 of the two men facing each other as the crowd prods them. Danse de jeunes filles [Young Girls’ Dance] (Lumière catalogue 443) films young women in the foreground dancing in a circle and jumping whereas elder women in the middle ground accompany them with claps and songs. In the background however, the man in black cloth (by now it is clear that it is Mr. Oko, the schoolteacher who is at once choreographer [to both men and women] and teacher, and potentially co-director). Mr. Oko enters from frame left. Holding a stick, he directs the girls as to how to dance for the camera. He stops behind them, observes and gives instructions as needed. Then he looks straight (toward off-screen space to the right), gives directions (or at least says something) and looks back at the camera. Then we see two men enter the frame from the right hand side who seem to be fighting. The two men exit the frame and Mr. Oko turns around laughing. Through the way he handles his stick, it is clear that he is directing the two men in terms of how to enter the frame, directing them as actors staging a fight for the camera. After laughing at the two men (the knowing laughter of someone who has a sense of staging for the camera), Mr. Oko exits frame left, but we can still see his stick in the frame, pointed toward the two men. Then, one the men zooms across from frame left to 43 The Lumière perhaps invented the freeze-frame by default. Indeed, since their film ran about 48 seconds, once the film ended, regardless of what action was talking place, there would be a freeze frame of that action. As we know, the freeze frame is a cinematic stoppage of the passing of time, a way for cinema to have its say on the endless unfolding of time. It does isolate a moment in time and makes it available for us to see and study more quietly. It is an attempt (albeit awkward) to master and conquer time. 60 right and reaches Mr. Oko, raises his hand as if to hit him. Perhaps, Mr. Oko asked him to come over to his side so he would show him how to go about fighting on screen. This scene is really cardinal and perhaps unique at this early stage of cinema. It does not only show two simultaneous actions, the dance, staged in the foreground and middle ground, and the mise-en-scène of a fight in the background. The film may also perhaps be remembered as one of the first in which someone outside the Lumière operator directs action in the pro-filmic space itself. It may be that Mr. Oko, although not in control of technical dimension of this film, was in fact the brain behind the artistic and dramatic dimension of it, in terms the mise-en-scène of both the dance and the fight. In other words, this reflexive film might reveal to us that Mr. Oko of Ghana, may perhaps be, not only the first film director to come out of Africa, but also and simply one of the first film directors in the entire history of cinema. In that case, one may advance that the beginnings of African cinema may be traced back to the beginning of the cinema itself, that is, as far back as April - July 1897 in Lyon, France. The other titles in the dance filmography of the Lumière on the Ashanti village include Danse de femmes [Women’s Dance] (Lumière catalogue number 444), Danse du féticheur [Healer’s Dance] (Lumière catalogue number 445), Nègres Ashantis: danse d’hommes [Ashanti Negroes: Men’s Dance] (Lumière catalogue 564) and Nègres Ashantis: leçon de danse [Ashanti Negroes: Dance Lesson] (Lumière catalogue 565). The theme of the procession also resurfaces in Défilé de la tribu [Procession of the Tribe] 61 (Lumière catalogue number 446), in which the Ashanti king Botchey, along with his wife and his court walk in a slow and solemn procession 44 . But even in admiration, and perhaps as a necessary dimension of this admiration, discourses of otherness have the last word. 45 Another clearly distinguishable theme in Lumière Ashanti filmography is that of the relationship of Africans with water, with three films devoted to swimming and bathing. Once again, there is a concern with displaying the black body in contact with water, the racialization of the body and its “naturalization,” i.e. the notion that it somehow entertains a symbiotic relationship with nature. This notion that ethnographic cinema and even some of African cinema will take up can see its beginnings in this film 46 . In Baignade de nègres [Negroes Swimming] (Lumière catalogue number 12), the camera is set up on a platform surrounded with water. It is a mini lake. Around the platform, in the background, replicas of African houses can be seen (reed and triangular rooftops). Behind the houses, modern European buildings stand in front of trees, also here to convey 44 This parade was apparently a hit in Lyon and spectators requested an encore (La Mascarade Satyrique, Lyon, May 9, 1897, qtd. in Aubert and Seguin). 45 “People ask for an encore of the slow procession, which he [Chief Botchey], executes solemnly around the village, with his parasol, his flyswatter and his scepter holder. O, Napoleon! What would you have said if you had seen the hand of justice, the insignia of your imperishable glory, travestied into ivory and ebony to serve as an attribute to an Ashanti chief?” (La Mascarade Satyrique, Lyon, May 9, 1897, qtd. in Aubert and Seguin). 46 Films that come to mind include the nostalgic beginning of Jean Rouch’s Moi un noir (1958). In a different mode, René Vautier’s Afrique 50 can be cited, which even as it defends the rights of Africans cannot help but use this trope. Finally one of the first African filmmakers trained in France (a classmate of Vautier and a student of Rouch at IDHEC) Paulin Soumanou Vieyra in Afrique-sur-Seine (1955) also uses the “black boys in water” scene (which he gets from Vautier) in order to evoke the time of childhood and innocence in Africa prior to his arrival in France. The latter is cast as the space of adulthood. So even here, the ethnological episteme is present. Less we forget, Afrique-sur-Seine was produced by the Musée de l’Homme, one of the headquarters of French ethnology and the institutional home of Jean Rouch. 62 the idea of nature. With the set up alone the contrastive and hierarchizing discourse is clear. Nature (trees, lake, reed rooftops) contrasts with technology, the domestication of nature (solid brick buildings). At the level of dress, the mise-en-scène is equally expressive. Europeans are dressed in suits costumes (progress), whereas Africans are semi-naked from the torso up (nakedness as nature). There is a platform left of the frame where an undifferentiated number of Africans are standing, with their naked torsos (the sexual signifier is added here). Further down on the left side, a group of Europeans are standing and observing the scenery. In the water, we can see two canoes, a small one with one passenger and a longer one with eight passengers. Then we see a group of young African men jump into the water. In the background, we see the hand gesture of a white man throwing something in the water. 47 After the group of men, a group of children also jumps in the water in search of the same ‘hidden treasure’ of coins. The European man orders them in and out of the water, and the scene continues with others jumping and coming out of the water until the film stops in a freeze frame on a boy jumping off the platform. The film evokes the idea of frogmen, amphibious beings at ease both on the ground and in water, in other words, in complete synchronicity with nature. 47 It is not clear in the film what he is throwing. But research shows that it was common practice during such swimming scenes to throw coins inside the lake and ask African boys to find them in the water. The “pleasure” of the exercise lied in seeing them moving their bodies in the water and competing to find as many coins as possible. This demeaning scene evokes the famous battle royal scene in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. 63 Then two films are devoted to a woman bathing her toddler. In Toilette d’un négrillon, I 48 [Bathing a Pickaninny] (Lumière catalogue number 449), an African mother is asked to produce difference, her own difference and that of her child in the simplest and commonest act: washing her baby 49 . The set up is simple: the camera position is low and close 50 It is also striking that this is one of the first and extremely few non-crowd scenes in terms the approach to filming Africans. This is indeed as close as one gets to a “close up” of a group sitting in a row. In the frame, we have four women sitting in a row with two children (a baby and a toddler). The woman sitting leftmost of the frame is breastfeeding her baby and looking straight at the camera. A second woman is washing her baby. The baby is standing in a basin full of water, while his mother’s right hand puts a sponge in a bucket and washes him. Left of her, two young girls are sitting and looking straight at the camera. All four women have an impassible gaze, but it is clear that their gaze is also in conversation with someone behind the camera. There thus seems to be two things happening: a) sitting in a row, washing and breastfeeding children for the public to see both at the site of the exhibition and later during the screening of the film and the fact of being subject to commands from the Lumière operator; b) being annoyed at being the object of spectacle for performing a normal human activity. We see here, even perhaps at the level of illiterate women 48 Note the derogatory way in which African children are referred as. The closest English equivalent would be pickaninny, also tremendously demeaning. Moreover, it is important to note that in French the term négrillon rhymes with grillon, which means locust. 49 What is significant here is that the obsession with difference knows no boundary. It seeks and covers every corner, leaves no stone unturned, down to the prized moment of intimacy and emotional nurturing that a mother may share with her child as she washes it. 50 This is actually a novelty in technique. The Lumière operators often set the camera up at a certain distance and a certain height. Rarely does the camera go this low, at least in these early days of 1897. 64 unaware of pseudo-scientific discourses of difference, the lodging, through their gaze, of a sharp critique of the entire episteme and structure of feeling responsible for their presence and exhibition in this very space. The gaze becomes the site of articulation of the critique of the voyeuristic and exhibitionist attitude of the camera Left of the frame we see the shadow of a man standing by the camera. As the film rolls the mother washing her baby looks at the camera and responds to directions that she pick up her child and have it stand for the camera. Like any baby, this one cries as he is being watched, as the mother looks straight at the camera. The obvious driving question of this film is: Are African (black) babies different from European (white) babies? Of course not, but the film doggedly seeks to produce that difference. There is a palpable desire (an oxymoron) in the camera, in the cinema to produce an African alterity, from the very start, at the level of childhood, a racialization of childhood. But this literal live and cinematic ‘experiment’ fails miserably as evidenced in the newspaper account of the event. 51 The colonial discourse of forced and constructed racialized alterity collapses in the face of childhood. At the discursive level, we can analyze two strains of thoughts going in the head of the reporter, and possibly the audience and even the operator as well. On the one hand, there is the need to produce that difference, otherwise how else would one justify the human zoo. At the same time, faced 51 “…in particular, that is, live, an amusing scene was shot: an Ashanti baby receiving from the hands of her mother the soothing bath, which, grants him, as it does English ‘babies’ [in English in the original French text], the best of health for a long time. You should see the grimacing darkie. You may think you were in front of a European baby, the way the little black boy wriggles about in the dark hands that hold him in the basin.” (La Mascarade Satyrique, Lyon, May 9, 1897, qtd. in Aubert and Seguin). 65 with childhood, one’s constructed racism is momentarily shattered because the resounding absence of difference is obvious. Indeed difference is not immanent, but there needs to be a difference, because one’s identity, one’s understanding of one’s place in the wider world is predicated on the reifying of this putative difference. Hence the schizophrenic commentary of the text, and the potential schizophrenic audience response to this film and to others as well. In the same movement, one may see the singular importance of the cinema at the level of ideology, the way in which the cinema is (in this case) and can be (in others) an important instrument at the service of ideology in constructing ways of seeing, which in the long run may become ways of being, of interacting with one another. Toilette d’un négrillon, II [Bathing a Pickaninny II] (Lumière catalogue number 450) is a sequel to the previous film. The set up is slightly different. The woman who was sitting on the left side of the frame and breastfeeding her baby is no longer there. 52 In her place, we see that a crowd of women (we are back to crowd scenes) has gathered to observe the filming of the woman bathing her toddler. This time she is more in the foreground and looks at the camera several times, as she dries her child. She holds him straight toward the camera so that his nudity can be properly seen/filmed, according to the camera’s desire. Throughout the film, she keeps looking, as she dries different parts of the little boy’s body. When it is all over, she picks up the boy who had been crying throughout and the film stops running as the boy is halfway between the basin and her lap. 52 Breastfeeding was of course part of the process of producing difference. As we watch cows breastfeeding their calves, thus we should watch African women breastfeeding their babies. In the process, free enjoyment of the sight of the woman’s breasts is in perfect order. 66 After being asked to show how they play, dance, swim and bathe, Africans are now asked to perform for the cinema two other major scenes: the scene of eating and that of learning, both articulated around African childhood. It seems that the only thing that is missing to make it a complete animal zoo would be asking them to mate in front of the public. Moreover, the putative difference of Africans is so “pronounced” and “popular” that it requires an episodic form (part 1, part 2), a serialization, and a sequelization. Two films are thus devoted to the scene of eating, Repas de négrillons I and II. In Repas de négrillon I [Pickaninnies Eating I] (Lumière catalogue 447), the set up participates in a cinematic mise-en-scène of zoological difference and is so demeaning that one almost resists describing it. But we shall force ourselves to do it for the reader to understand the psychology of cinematic racism, the way in which the cinema itself dehumanized Africans from the very start. The children are very ill at ease as they sit to eat for the camera. They are not given the opportunity to sit around the food in a circle that would give them more space and comfort to eat. Instead, they are required to sit in an almost straight line with the food in front of them. It is a group of six children sitting in front of a bowl (potentially fufu, a staple Ghanaian dish) and stew. The set up thus creates conditions for the children to fight like dogs over the food live on camera, in front of the camera, for the camera. As a result, there is the visual impression that the children are a swarming around the food like bees around their hive. We have a direct figuration in cinema of animal iconography, which, clearly, in terms of graphic montage, at the level of mise-en-scène itself, creates the thought that Eisenstein theorized about. This, added to 67 the fact that the children are eating with their hands out of the bowl, adds to their zoofication in the eyes of Europeans. In the sequel, Repas de négrillons II (Lumière catalogue number 448), the camera position changes a bit to accommodate a second group of children sitting on the left side of the frame. Cinematically we can see an attempt at narrativization within the medium itself. Since the camera cannot pan left, the operator chooses to change its position in order to have the second group of children better emphasized in the frame. After being asked and put in a position of fighting over the food, the children are now explicitly required to go to the bottom of the bowl and scrap it, to lick their hands and play the clowns in front of the camera. We can see upon further viewing that the two groups are in fact gendered, with girls on the left side of the frame, and boys in the right, as if this was meant as an “experiment” seeking to “observe” “differences” in manners of eating. But the narrative economy of the gaze in the film, as manifested by the children looking at the camera as they eat, reveals that the camera is no fly on the wall, but instead explicitly instructed the children to eat in a certain way. These instructions are given to their teachers (standing behind them) who are required to make them stick to the “right cinematic path.” There is a clear clash between what the spectator sees and the instructions given to the children by the teachers. From a spectator’s point of view, it is evident that the bowls, 68 which did not contain enough food for this many children, are now empty. We see them empty. In normal circumstances, the children should be able to stand up and leave. But in these contrived cinematic set ups, it is important to show that the children are insatiable and that nothing would stop them from trying to eat more. As a result, they fight among each other over an empty bowl. It becomes a game for them, they laugh and “get a kick out of it.” But as they pretend to eat, they are asked to look in the direction of the camera and display their “animality.” This absolutely unethical way of treating children is nothing short of criminal. This film is clearly a mind pacifier for the colonizer because it “displays” the unbridgeable gulf that separates them from the colonized. This is what makes it an openly ideological film, an ideologically explicit film. Never have the Lumière so closely and openly adhered to and partaken in the mise-en-scène of the colonial project! The cinema is now completely and unequivocally aligned with and articulated to the “fait colonial.” How to finish the examination of the Lumière Africa corpus without looking at the film on education, since in the eyes of colonialism, it was through education that the so-called “least advanced races” could be elevated by European civilization. We see the Lumière embracing this theory in the film entitled Ecole de négrillons [Pickaninnies at School], which is the first time Africans are referred to in relation to intellectual activity. The set up goes as follows: In the foreground, we see the schoolteacher, Mr. Oko, whom we have encountered across different films, different genres, as a choreographer and a film 69 director among other things. It is important to highlight his versatility, the fact that he is multi-talented to the point where he is able to navigate the parameters of the colonial setting, of the zoo, familiar as he is with both African and European cultural idioms. Mr. Oko is thus sitting on a chair at a table. Holding a book, he is filmed from the profile. To his right, at the center of the frame are rows of pupils holding their school slates and notebooks. The teacher points his finger at different pupils who answer his questions. Then he stands up, and walks left to right of the frame, back and forth. As he does this, he also looks into his notebook and either reads out or teaches on the basis on the notes inside. He asks questions and explains. This is clearly a mise-en-scène of the notion of the so-called benefits of colonization. It is a spectacle for the audiences to see the ‘great work’ done by the famous civilizing mission. The newspapers of the time report that French mothers were fascinated by the “children of the black continent and took them as examples to stimulate their children into working. 53 Yet even as the claim to “civilize” is present, the Africans are never to reach it. Indeed, although the news report acknowledges that these African children work pretty well, and better than many European children and although, even as we have demonstrated, Mr. Oko of Ghana, was able to wrestle control of the directorial imprint on some of the Lumière films, together, they will never be able to reach more than a “naïve 53 “It is certain that the degree of naïve civilization, which these children of the black continent have reached is interesting in many ways. The school, led by Mr. Oko, the native teacher, captivates the mothers who do not hesitate to take these blacks as models for the sometimes lazy little white children.” (Le Progrès, Lyon, May 8, 1897, qtd. in Aubert and Seguin 178). 70 degree of civilization,” being always already assigned to the back of the Darwinian train of evolution. And thus, the highly successful zoo 54 was closed, locked up, covered with armored plating and heavily guarded. It would take a long time to bust it open and set the captives (physical, mental, cultural and political) on both sides of the fence free. Implications of the Lumière Africa Film Corpus The time has come to discuss some of the implications of the Lumière Africa Film Corpus. Indeed, the preceding study has demonstrated that in the process and context of filming Africa between 1896 and 1903, the Lumière have not only produced a multifaceted discourse on Africa but have also been subject to, reflected, refracted and figured cinematically the discourses of their times. It is now appropriate to work out some of the consequences of all this in terms of the fundamental questions that result from it. a) On the Notion of Nonfiction in Cinema On the notion of nonfiction cinema, we may contend that the Lumière production raises philosophical questions as to the meaning of the term ‘nonfiction’, when applied to this series of film. Indeed is it still possible to refer to this as nonfiction, as a naïve record of 54 “The weather was nice yesterday afternoon. The black village of the Cours du Midi was well attended yesterday as usual. The public does not get enough coming to spend good moments there, to the point where several families have already requested subscriber cards for the entire duration of the exhibition”(Le Progrès, Lyon, May 8, 1897, qtd. in Aubert and Seguin 178). Thus, one went to the Ashanti village, i.e. to the zoo, as we would get a subscription to the theater or the movies today. It was a “pleasant” hangout. 71 what was in front of the camera (which is one of the major myths of early cinema), especially with regard to the Lumière filmography? In both the travelogue and the menimal genre, we have shown the high level of sophistication of the mise-en-scène of the pro-filmic time and space. This mise-en-scène was rooted in an acceptance and enactment of the premises and “fatum” (inevitability) of imperialism, colonialism, Orientalism, Africanism, and Egyptology among other things. In light of the above, would it not be appropriate to rename the category or qualify it? b) On the Question of the Beginning of African cinema The question of the beginning of African cinema is also raised as is raised that of what counts as “director” in early cinema. The Lumière operators were de facto film directors 55 , and chief among them was Alexandre Promio, responsible for half the entire production of the Lumière. We have shown the dexterity of Promio in terms of mise-en- scène, from experimenting with editing in the pro-filmic space itself to editing in continuity and staging almost everything he filmed. If we accept the premise of the operator as a film director, what of the status of Mr. Oko, the schoolteacher from Ghana who is seen live, in the pro-filmic space, choreographing fight and dance scenes, giving directions, in other words, guiding the artistic and dramatic aspects of the film. This ad minimum definition of film directing, especially at this early stage of the cinema, and within a context in which, the Lumière operator is unfamiliar with the cultural idiom 55 According to Paul Génard, the Lumière operators who were also referred to as cinématographistes were at once “technicians, directors, operators, reporters, producers, exhibitors, projectionists and commentators” (Rittaud-Hutinet 7). 72 being put on scene, seems to us to qualify Mr. Oko as a film director. In that case, he would be considered as one of the first film directors to come out of Africa, alongside Félix Mesguich, the Algerian-born Lumière operator who shot films in Russia, France and the United States for the Lumière, but none on an African subject. We will revisit the film career of Félix Mesguich in the next chapter, as he returns to Algeria to make films after he departs from the Lumière production house. c) On the history of colonial cinema in Africa That the Lumière flirted with, adhered to, figured, aided and abetted the colonial project has been demonstrated in our study. The natural consequence of all this for the history of colonial cinema itself, was that the chief Lumière operator, Alexandre Promio would go on, following his departure from the Lumière house and a failed attempt at setting up his own company in France, to found the cinema unit of the Government General of Colonial Algeria. From propagandist of the Lumière Cinématographe, Promio ended up heading the colonial propaganda film infrastructure in Algeria after WWI. 56 But this is by no means the only implication of the Lumière Africa production on colonial cinema. The Lumière corpus also laid out the matrix for much of the form and politics of colonial cinema. The travelogue, the coalescence of scientific and racial discourse in 56 According to Jean-Claude Seguin, Promio founded the “Service Cinématographique du Gouvernement Général d’Alger” in 1919. Seguin agrees with us, although in an understated tone, that “it is probable that Alexandre Promio, like any colonist, shared this globally positive impression of colonialism” (Seguin 228). He adds that the goal of this cinema unit was “to contribute to the knowledge of the territories and their riches, and was clearly oriented toward propaganda” (236). 73 cinematic form will find multiple articulations in colonial cinema. This arguably starts with the Lumière and perhaps, last through the entire span of colonialism. There is no clear evidence that we have completely emerged from this moment in 2007. But this do not mean that the Lumière were alone in filming Africa from 1896 until 1903. Many other films were made on Africa by others in England, Belgium and other colonial empires and European countries. But the symbolic importance of the Lumière in the history of cinema, and access to their significant body of work guided our choice here. We thus consider their films, with necessary prudence, as metaphors for early cinematic production on Africa. d) On the Study of Early cinema The Lumière Africa Film Corpus also shows us that the study of the Lumière body of films has unfortunately so far focused largely on those that specifically dealt with the Euro-American experience. The blind spots of this approach have been revealed in our study. Indeed, by insisting on the Lumière Euro-American cinema, the historiography of early cinema has primarily dealt with the Lumière in largely hagiographic terms that emphasized the Euro-modernist narrative of progress. This is a major historiographic problem because it shows the writing of history implicitly and explicitly aligning itself with imperial and colonial power. By overtly silencing an entire realm of Lumière production, they make it seem to the non-specialist that no such thing exists. They de 74 facto “disappear” a fundamental element in the understanding and processing of the history of cinema in particular and of history itself in general. By failing to see, articulate and systematically theorize the Lumière production in and on Africa, they fail to make the necessary links between the Lumière and political power, the Lumière and economic power, the Lumière and the culture that surrounded them. Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault have rightfully coined the term cinema of attractions to characterize the films that included the Lumière productions. But they do not reveal everything that was on at the “attractions.” The human zoo was also part of, and actually, a major part of the attractions that brought in money, business, etc. It also served to “confirm” and “advance” scientific theories. In other words, the term “cinema of attraction” only incompletely captures the complexity of these politically and ideologically charged and marred “attractions.” Our study has shown that the menimal genre must be included or at least articulated with the cinema of attraction to give a more complex account of these early days of the cinema. To his credit, Tom Gunning has called for such an approach to the study of early cinema: Introducing the term “the cinema of attractions,” we theorized that the spectator, the area of preoccupation of much of film theory in the 70s and 80s needed to be rethought historically, with the acknowledgement that different regimes of spectatorship could be isolated… (31) But the spectatorship regime of the human zoo, 57 which was part and parcel of the culture of attraction, has been largely overlooked. Numerous examples can be taken to buttress 57 The Lumière used the term exhibitions for the Cinématographe screenings, conveying their familiarity with this zoo-anthropological vocabulary. Indeed the Lumière family’s philanthropic deeds included endowing the Chair of Zoology for a marine expedition on June 22, 1895. 75 our argument. In Switzerland alone (a country acknowledged for its avowed neutrality and one that had no colonial empire), the city of Zurich was home to no less than 62 Völkerschauen (ethnic spectacles, African villages, i.e. human zoos) between 1878 and 1960 (Brändle 221). These exhibitions took place in open-air settings, vaudeville theaters, zoos (with animals and humans exhibited side by side) on the lake. There were even shows for schoolchildren at the circus and at the Panoptikum (Brändle 221). These sadistic human shows had their share of casualties. The members of an African village show in Lausanne, Switzerland, who were fed with only husked rice, caught beriberi and two of them, Bocari and Sana Bolou, died. 58 But these men had no respite even in death. During their burial, the cemetery was reportedly full of onlookers, and journalists apparently reported on the Muslim burial ceremonies as yet another spectacle (Brändle 225). In Paris, human exhibitions had to do with a convergence of science and spectacle, which made them even more pernicious because they become part of the epistemology of our times, from the latter part of the nineteenth century itself. The Parisian Zoological Acclimatization Garden, which was opened by Napoleon in 1860, ended up being more successful for the humans who were paired with the exhibited animals. These human exhibitions boosted attendance to over 1 million tickets sold in 1877 (Blanchard, Bancel and Lemaire 64). 58 During one such exhibition in 1897 in Tervuren, Belgium, seven Congolese would die of pneumonia. Their names were Ekia, Zao, Gemba, Kitukwa, Mpeia, Sambo and Mibange. 76 The pervasiveness and ubiquity of these shows is enlightening in terms of the kind of spectatorship this involved, but also profoundly sobering as to the extent to which it was part of the culture of spectatorship. In Europe alone, the following places and dates were highlighted by Nicolas Bancel and his colleagues in Zoo humains: au temps des exhibitions humaines (15) as having hosted these “African village” and similar shows: Antwerp (1894), Barcelona and Budapest (1896), Dublin (1907), Düsseldorf, Saint- Petersburg and Freiburg (1903), Geneva (1903), Gent (1913), Glasgow (1892), Göteborg and Vienna (1896), Hanover, Köln, and Lausanne (1903), Leipzig and Liege (1905), Milan (1906, 1909), Munich, Oslo, Moscow, Warsaw, Naples, Copenhagen (1899), Palermo, Payerne (1903), Prague (1893), Rotterdam (1909), Stockholm (1892), etc. Could the study of early cinema, especially in relation to its spectatorship, ever be the same after this? 77 CHAPTER 2. The Nineteenth Century in Africa: The Ante-Colonial and the Berlin Conference on Africa (or History’s Lessons for Nonfiction/Documentary) This chapter is a flashback. It takes a detour to the nineteenth century and addresses extra-cinematic determinants of filmic practice and theorization in Africa. It takes as its premise that it is impossible to understand the history of documentary in Africa without first exploring the nineteenth century, the century of the encounter between Africa and the cinema. In terms of magnitude and scale, the end of the nineteenth century represented perhaps the era of catastrophe for the continent, more than WWII for others. If one were to paraphrase Adorno on his statement on the arts after WWII, one could say that there should be no art after the nineteenth century, as far as Africa is concerned. The century began with the occupation of Egypt by Napoleonic troops and ended with the almost total conquest of the entire continent. We shall thus deploy the nineteenth century as a category of analysis for the historiography of the cinema in Africa from which it has been virtually absent. This is very paradoxical since the destiny of the African continent was, for a large part, sealed in the nineteenth century, for at least two centuries to come. In that sense, the hermeneutics of Africa and its cultural production in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries finds many of its conditions of possibility in the long nineteenth to paraphrase Eric Hobsbawm. Many of the themes and forms of colonial cinema as well African cinema since independence derive from actions, decisions, attitudes and epistemes of the nineteenth 78 century. Thus, if temporally the nineteenth century may seem quite remote, epistemologically we may be yet to emerge from it. This study is, in that sense, more interested in the epistemological regimes than in the strictly chronological. Epistemological regimes do not end with the blind and relentless passage of time. They often survive it. To a large extent, they stand in defiance of time, in defiance of death itself. It may be that time is precisely what they seek to stand against, that which they define themselves against, against the evanescence of time, its ruthless drive to cover everything on its way. Epistemological regimes seek eternity while time (perhaps the only eternal category) reminds humans, animals, nature of their respective mortality. Thus, epistemological orders are more apt to account for stability, continuity and permanence. At the same time, although they aspire to the eternal, no epistemological regime can achieve it. In that sense, they are profoundly historical, not only in the fact that they end, but also in the very fact of their existence, because they are shaped and in limited by history. The work of Foucault has precisely navigated these two ends of the dialectic, on the one hand showing that the change in centuries did not mean change in terms of epistemological regimes, and on the other hand, using the breaks of history, in history, to articulate the very historicity of these epistemological regimes, their impermanence. Our study in this chapter will follow along analogue lines. As a historical period, the nineteenth century has yielded various epistemological regimes, and these can be seen as spatially contingent, although with imperialism and 79 colonialism, they were able to travel to the furthest corners of the world. We shall look at two moments of the nineteenth century in so far as they related to the African continent. The first moment, is what historians of Africa have called the Age of Improvement (Ajayi) or of Revolution (M’Bokolo). It posits Africa as the motor of its own history and of the changes that took place over the course of the century as a result of this status. The second moment, is what we shall call the Age of Catastrophe (my term), to argue the conditions of possibility, the planning and implementation of the total imperial and colonial project on the continent. We shall thus epistemologize the historical and historicize the epistemological. The Age of Improvement and Revolution Africa was not always under domination, although the current regime of representation of the continent may suggest otherwise. Most historians of Africa 59 concur that the nineteenth century was a landmark moment in the continent. This century could be globally considered the era of radical reconfiguration whether looked at from within or without, whether in the first or second half of the century. Historian Adu Boahen reminds us that in the wake of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that drove millions of Africans to the Americas and de facto depopulated the continent, up to 59 This chapter is indebted to the work of these historians who have worked tirelessly to produce an alternative historiography of the continent and whose general approach, needless to say, I am largely in agreement with. In my mind, a historiography of documentary and non-fiction film in Africa needs to be articulated with these new historiographic approaches. It is hoped that this chapter is only the first step toward opening up the larger debate on the relationship between cinema and history in the African context. The larger project here is to see what new questions can be generated in the general field of cinema and history by taking the Africa nexus as the point of departure for our reflection. 80 80% of the land mass of Africa was controlled by Africans. 60 The remaining 20% were occupied by Europeans. They consisted mainly in the coastal areas of Senegal (Saint- Louis and Gorée), the city of Freetown (founded to host freed slaves) and its outskirts (in contemporary Sierra Leone), the Southern regions of the Gold Coast (contemporary Ghana), the Abidjan littoral (in today’s Cote d’Ivoire) and the island of Lagos (in today’s Nigeria) on the West Coast of Africa. In North Africa, only Algeria had fallen into the hands of the French by 1830. In Central Africa, the Portuguese controlled a few coastal areas of Angola and Mozambique and only Southern Africa had a strong and sustained European presence beyond the coast. There was not however, according to Boahen, not a single foot of European-occupied land in East Africa 61 (“L’Afrique” 21). On these independent lands, countless groundbreaking experimentations at the political, social, defense, economic, cultural levels took place that would prompt historian J. F. Ajayi to refer to the nineteenth century as the Age of Improvement. Elikia M’Bokolo, another eminent historian of Africa, concurs on the significance of the radical transformations taking place on the continent, by going even further: For most of Africa, the 19 th century was the era of revolutions politically, as well as economically and socially. If the economic transformations can be partly traced to external factors, the main drive for political transformation is to be found in Africa (Afrique Noire 13). 60 “In 1880, on a surface area that reached 80% of its territory, Africa was governed by its own kings, queens, clan or lineage chiefs in empires, kingdoms, communities and units of varied importance.” (Boahen “L’Afrique” 21-23). 61 It should be added to this account that Egypt had also fallen under the rule of Napoleon for a few years (1798-1803) and was for a long time under the dominion of the Ottoman empire. We shall revisit Egypt’s case later in the chapter. 81 We shall thus explore the features and implications of some of these experiments for an epistemology an African nineteenth century. Case Studies in Political Re-organization, Economic Reconfiguration and Cultural Experimentation The experiments at the political level occurred on the heels of intense militarization and warfare in the course of expansion, reconstitution, or disintegration of kingdoms and empires. M’Bokolo gives us details pertaining to the nature of political organizations in various regions of the African continent. He argues that around 1800, the State was neither the privileged nor the most widespread political formation in Africa. Instead, alongside kingdoms, empires and city-states, there were numerous kinds of political formations based on lineage, villages and clans 62 . M’Bokolo adds however, that toward the 1880s, larger states started coming into being occupying incredibly vast amounts of land and bringing together infinitely diverse populations as a result of war, conquest and massive displacements of populations. On the question of the sizes and types of political formations, historian Sékéné Mody Cissoko agrees with M’Bokolo in the following terms: "In other words, prior to colonial intrusion, Africa was solidly shaped by a multitude of political sovereignties. Some were the equivalent of tiny political entities while other territories were larger than the largest European States of the time" (81). 62 M’Bokolo notes that paradoxically, it was these small political formations that were able to put some of the longest and fiercest resistance to European imperialism ((Afrique Noire 13). Yet it is important to note that these formations were often read as anarchical in European histories about Africa. Could there be a relationship between resistance and representation at work here? 82 That the management of such expanses of land and human diversity required the invention of new systems of control and government, the creation of an effective bureaucracy, economic reorganization, the building of infrastructures such as roads, the use of writing, the development of census techniques, the advent of new religions, the production of new identities as a result of the incredible diversity is not lost on M’Bokolo (14). In other words, new political forms were required to address the needs of the new political contexts stemming from the reconfigurations that took place over the course of the century. We shall look at a number of political formations that displayed various dimensions of political reconfiguration, economic experimentation and cultural innovation. A. Ethiopia and Madagascar The Kingdom of Ethiopia was several centuries old and one of the very first Christian states in the world. Yet in the early nineteenth century, it witnessed the increasing decline of the Emperor’s authority and the rise of regionally dispersed feudalism. This period, which covered the first half of the century, was labeled by some as one of the darkest moments in Ethiopian history. Indeed, following the Bible, it has been referred to as the Masafent, an allusion the period in the Book of the Judges where everybody did as they pleased (Pankhurst 416), as evidence of the disarray in which the kingdom found itself. 83 Yet with the coming to power of Emperor Tewodros II in 1855, events would take a different turn. He first turned his non-permanent army, which had been living off ransacking populations into a paid, modern professional military. By calling on conscripts from the various provinces of the empire, he integrated and unified the army in a way that thwarted previous feudal allegiances to regional leaders. Since every army needs weapons, he chose to modernize his armament by fabricating weapons locally. He allowed protestant bishop Samuel Gobit to send him artisans from Switzerland. When, upon their arrival, the artisans offered him Bibles, Tewodros II replied that “he would have preferred an English powder keg” (Pankhurst 433). In 1861, he ordered them to fabricate a canon, mortars, and shells and, a while later, “canon balls could be seen rising in the sky and exploding aloud to such an extent that they caused a thousand echoes in the hills” (Pankhurst 433). After generously thanking them for successfully carrying out the assignment 63 , he required of them to build even more powerful weaponry, i.e. a canon that could shoot a 1,000-pound shell. The finished canon, called the Sebastopol, weighed 7 tons and took 500 people to operate. Tewodros II was however not only interested in warfare. He was also involved in a vast project of public works that involved the building of roads. It is reported that the Emperor himself led by example by getting to work from dusk till dawn, moving rocks and stones with his own hands and leveling the ground and that work would not stop until the Emperor did (Pankhurst 434). 63 Tewodros II reportedly gave each of the canon builders “ceremonial dresses, horses, mules, golden harnesses, and 1000 dollars…” (Pankhurst, 433). 84 His work at unifying the country, reorganizing the army, and personal involvement in the welfare on his country caused Tewodros II to be remembered by many as a major reformer and innovator in Ethiopian history. His work laid the foundation for later Ethiopian history that would see the country defiantly resist imperialist attempts of conquest from all sides in Europe, and defeat Italy during the famous battle of Adwa in the last decade of the century. Further down in the Indian Ocean, the same drive toward unification and centralization can be found in Madagascar with the founding of the Merina kingdom by Andrianampoinimerina who ruled his country from 1792 to 1810. The king succeeded in putting the 18 ethnic groups of the island under one dominion for an expansionist drive that would be carried forth by his son, King Ramada II who would expand the kingdom to get access to the sea in order to do business with Europeans (Mutibwa 456-457). B. Egypt The Egypt that Alexandre Promio filmed for the Lumière brothers during his trip to Africa in 1897 is quite remote from that of the beginning or the largest part of the nineteenth century for that matter. According to Anouar Abdel-Malek, Egypt was under Ottoman rule for three centuries prior to the colonial moment (362). But the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century coincided with the rise of Egyptian nationalism. This was marked by the drive toward national unity, the desire to make land 85 available for a nationalist project and two major rebellions against the presence of Napoleonic troops. Taking place on October 21-24, 1878, and March 20 - April 4, 1800, respectively, both uprisings were crushed without mercy. The year 1805 however saw the election of Muhammad Ali as Vice-King or Wali by a coalition of the peoples of Cairo and Alexandria together with the notables, the Ulamas and the Shaykhs and other elites of the time. This foundational event marked, according to Anouar Abdel-Malek, Egypt’s embrace of the modern. Indeed, Muhammad Ali’s project was: “To provide Egypt with military, political, economic and cultural institutions that would make it the center of the Islamic Empire instead of Turkey… Through the engagement of Muhammad Ali and of Ibrahim (…) Egypt would emerge as Islamic, Arab and African” (Abdel-Malek 365). We shall dwell on the economic and the cultural. Muhammad Ali posited the economic as the condition of possibility for the political. He felt the need to build a state with a powerful army and extremely efficient economy that was to be modern and self-centered (Abdel-Malek 374). He would thus create between 1818 and 1830 a number of gun and canon factories. In terms of civilian economy, he created thirty cotton spinning mills in Lower and Upper Egypt, which produced enough textiles 64 for domestic consumption, totally replaced foreign imports and generated 100% profits for the public treasury (Abdel-Malek 375). Other industrial infrastructure included three wool-spinning mills, a silk factory, numerous linen factories across the country, 17 indigo factories, 2 major glassworks, a tannery and a paper mill in Cairo. 64 Lest we forget, textiles were one the economic engines that fueled the Industrial revolution. They accounted for at least a quarter of British export throughout the 18 th century. 86 Culturally speaking, he created a nationwide educational system including a major university, a range of scholarly institutions and pedagogical projects premised on “modern humanistic, scientific and rationalist values” (Abdel-Malek 383). This intellectually stimulating setting helped give rise to powerful press and publishing institutions with the founding of the Al-Wakaial gazette as early as 1822. The leadership of Muhammad Ali and his son Ibrahim created a liberal intellectual atmosphere that made Egypt the ultimate land of asylum for persecuted intellectuals. C. The Ashanti, Fanti and Bamun Experiments of the Nineteenth Century We remember that alongside Egyptians, Algerians and Tunisians filmed by Alexandre Promio, the Lumière brothers filmed a group of Ashanti in the city of Lyon in what I referred to as the menimal genre 65 . Enough has been said about the ways in which the Cinématographe constructed them as lesser beings on level akin to animals true to the social Darwinist heritage of the nineteenth century. But what do we know of the Ashanti kingdom they originated from? According to a British diplomat visiting the Ashanti kingdom in early 1820, the Ashantehene (King of the Ashanti) ruled over 47 peoples and nations (M’Bokolo, Afrique noire 16). As in many of the political formations discussed above, the military was a 65 It is important to note here that neither the French National Center for Cinematography (CNC) nor the Association Frères Lumière seem to know which Lumière operator filmed the Ashanti in Lyon. It is my project to seek to identify this operator and possibly some of the descendents of those who were exhibited and filmed by the Lumière in 1897 in Lyon. 87 cornerstone of the Kingdom. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it counted about 80,000 soldiers and used guns imported from Europe. The year 1874 saw the introduction of the Snyder and Martin Henry guns. The multi-national and multi-ethnic Ashanti Kingdom was organized in the form of concentric circles featuring a) the metropolis (Kumasi), b) internal provinces and c) external provinces. As the seat of government, the metropolis was renowned as “cosmopolitan and opulent…, [a place where] court nobility, high officials, gold and kola merchants as well as numerous Muslim and European foreigners, visiting or permanent residents” (M’Bokolo, Afrique noire 19) met and exchanged. The kings had a grandiose vision for their country. In 1817, i.e. 80 years before his subjects encountered the Lumière in Lyon, Ashantehene Osei Bonsu sought to adapt aspects of European architecture and wanted to build a palace exclusively devoted to culture. Before Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia, he built an important network of polysemic roads that were not only useful for the economy, but also had strategic value, as they allowed the king’s messengers to reach the four corners of the kingdom in no time and disseminate his orders (M’Bokolo, Afrique noire 19). According to M’Bokolo, as early as 1816, Osei Bonsu initiated, on his own volition, a vast modernization project that involved technical collaboration with the Dutch. His successor Kwaku Dua I (1834-1867) went even further for he had in mind to build a 88 nationwide railroad network by attracting European foreign capital (M’Bokolo, Afrique noire 20). The project however never materialized. The Fanti, longtime adversaries of the Ashanti, also had their share of innovation in this brave nineteenth century. Under threat from the Ashanti and instrumentalized by the British in their project to conquer the Gold Coast (contemporary Ghana), the Fanti formed a confederation to protect themselves against both domestic and foreign foes and adopted a constitution that can be considered very innovative for its time. According to Adu Boahen (“Tendances” 87) the goals of the confederation as outlined in the constitution were: a) To promote friendly relationships between Fanti sovereigns and leaders. b) To form an offensive and defensive alliance against a common enemy c) To build a vast network of roads that would cover the entire territory of the Confederation. The roads were supposed to be 15 feet wide and be bordered on both sides by deep gutters d) To create schools for the education of the children of the Confederation and seek the service of competent teachers e) To promote industry and agriculture, by introducing new plants susceptible to generate profit in the future f) To develop and encourage the exploitation of mines and other natural resources in he country g) To educate both sexes. 89 Article 22 of the constitution clearly outlined the educational project of the Confederation: “Technical schools shall be attached to the different national schools and have as their ultimate mission, to educate and train students in the trades of carpentry, masonry, woodworking, agriculture, blacksmithing, architecture, building engineering, etc." The Confederation constitution also clearly laid out the highest functions of government as well as codified the procedures for access to them. One of the articles stipulated the following: A President, Vice-President, a Secretary, an Under-Secretary, a Treasurer and a Deputy Treasurer shall be elected. The President shall be elected by a college of kings and shall be proclaimed King-President of the Fanti Confederation. The Vice-President, the Secretary, the Under-Secretary, the Treasurer, the Deputy Treasurer who are members of the Cabinet shall be persons of learning and high social standing. (Boahen, “Tendances” 89). Boahen adds that the Fanti Confederation was based on the writings of James Africanus Horton, one of the earliest African nationalists whose work calls for revisiting. Further away from the West African coast, in Central Africa, the Bamun Kingdom also proved to be one of the limelights of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in Africa. Under King Njoya I 66 who ruled from 1889 until 1933, the Bamun Kingdom was also the site of attention-grabbing innovation in several domains. One of his most significant contributions was the invention of writing system called shu-mom, 66 Jean-Marie Téno, one of Africa’s most important documentary filmmakers, addresses this question in his film Afrique, je te plumerai (1991). 90 which counted “510 characters, 83 letters and signs including 10 numerals [which were] later enriched by phonetic signs” (M’Bokolo, Afrique noire 28). This invention had consequences for communication between the state and the governed and was followed by the designing and implementation of a major public education project involving young and old, men and women. In the school that he built in his own palace, King Njoya himself sometimes gave lectures to avid learners. King Njoya also commissioned and supervised the writing of the key book on the history of the Bamun entitled Histoire et coutumes des Bamum. A pragmatic man, he converted to Islam and translated the Koran in Bamun. But with the increasing influence of Germany over the country, he also embraced Christianity. He would end up founding a new, national religion that would bring together the precepts of Islam, Christianity and African religions 67 . The tenets and precepts of the new religion were written in a book entitled Nkuet Kwate (Seek and Reach) and included the belief in one God, a millenarist vision, and the notions of justice and eternal salvation, with Bamun as the language of religion. In chapter 14 of Nkuet Kwate, he wrote the following about language and religion: God is able to hear the prayers of all the races in their own languages, without it being necessary to speak the language of olden times, for it was He who created all men and gave them the power to invent language. (qtd. in M’Bokolo, Afrique noire 29). 67 It should be added here that King Njoya’s approach to religion and culture in general could be seen as anticipating the theoretical works of Kwame Nkrumah in his book Consciencism; Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization and Development with Particular Reference to the African Revolution, or Ali Mazrui’s notion of triple heritage in the later part of the twentieth century. 91 It should be added that, inspired by Germans, he decided to modernize metallurgy in his kingdom and had his artisans manufacture a corn mill as well as a printing press for the dissemination of books in shu-mum. He was also a reformer in the field of agriculture as he took new legislation to encourage the creation of new plantations. He had new varieties of corn, groundnuts, and beans widely disseminated and introduced the cultivation of potatoes, tomatoes and promoted cotton cultivation (M’Bokolo, Afrique noire 29). A true renaissance man, Njoya also innovated at the level of public administration. With the invention of writing, the kingdom was able to have birth certificate records, a reliable taxation system. Court edicts and financial transactions were accurately filed and recorded. He also had maps of the country established along with that of Fumban, the kingdom’s capital city (M’Bokolo, Afrique noire 29). In addition to being the architect of an efficient bureaucracy, Njoya was also a patron of the arts as he encouraged artists and artisans to merge influences from the conquered peoples with Bamun artistic traditions and draw their inspiration from such mythological figures as the tarantula, the two-headed snake and the double bell among others (M’Bokolo, Afrique noire 29). The time has come to explore some of the implications of this brief panorama of innovative experiments taking place in Africa throughout the nineteenth century. 92 a) The first implication has to do with the debate on modernity in Africa, the nineteenth century being acknowledged as the ultimate century of modernity with the cinema as its pre-eminent cultural form. This chapter has shown examples of African-induced, self-produced, self-invented modernity. It has shown that, within Africa itself and prior to the colonial era, some of the founding features of modernity could be found. Such notions, ideas, practices and attitudes as cosmopolitanism, free trade, free circulation of people and goods (in other words, an acceptance of aspects of the capitalist idea), negotiations between European, Arab and African cultures, the importation and adaptation of products of the Industrial Revolution, the newspaper, the telegraph, railroads, the building of factories (textile, weapons), constitutional experimentalism, the modernization of the military for national defense were commonplace in different regions of the continent. These were modernizing elements stemming both from within African cultures and out of exchanges with Europe and thus did not call for the domination of the continent and the loss of its sovereignty. The apologists of imperialism used the argument of the building of infrastructure such as roads, railroads and modernization as justification for the conquest of the continent. This section makes it abundantly clear that contributing to building infrastructure in a country or continent need not have as a prerequisite its occupation, domination and exploitation and speaks to the theoretically uselessness of the imperial and colonial project from the perspective of Africa. 93 b) In relation to discourses on Africa and its cultural production (including the cinema), this section historicizes the principle of dominatio as a blanket characterizing feature of the continent in modern times. Dominatio is not, has never been and never will be a permanent feature of the African condition, if one may use this term. It must be seen as contingent temporally and spatially. In relation to filmic practice, this opens up new areas of explorations for filmmakers of a not so distant period of African agency that may yield genres and aesthetics of the heritage and heimat modes. Indeed, the Age of Revolution and Improvement was, in our modern times, that moment when the continent was master of its own destiny. It is hoped thus that this period along with such larger than life characters as Emperors Tewodros II and Menelik of Ethiopia, King Njoya of the Bamun, Muhammad Ali of Egypt, Osei Bonsu, Kwaku Dua I and James Africanus Horton, among many others, will be the subject of documentary and fictional narratives and explorations in film. c) Also important for our contemporary moment is that any approach to the African continent today, its history and cultural production, needs to take as a point of departure, that the innovative and the experimental are consubstantial with the continent. For Africans more specifically, whether scholars, creative artists, businessmen or statesmen, it implies that technological or scientific innovations taking place around the world today need not be seen as particularly impressive or out of reach. Thus being regarded as and accepting the idea of being passive 94 observers of a non-stop high-speed train they will never be able to catch up with is not a notion that is justified or explained. Similarly, it is also clear that while innovation and experimentation were dominant principles in nineteenth century Africa, these were not the only defining features of the continent. Indeed, numerous limitations existed as well, which largely facilitated the triumph of the colonial project. Historians have highlighted the fact that along more egalitarian and democratically leaning political formations, despotism and oppression also existed across the board and populations rebelled whenever an opportunity presented itself. Even within the ruling classes, problems of ambition, rivalries, succession, conflicts between dynasties, between kingdoms and states participated in weakening the continent (Cissoko 83). Other sources of difficulty involved the imposition of heavy taxations, the rejection, in the case of new and expanded states, of new leadership and forms of constraint, the human costs of the unification wars, conflicts between new and old leadership, etc. All these contradictions, conflicts and limitations would be deftly and masterfully exploited by the forces of colonialism unleashed in the wake of the Berlin conference. We shall now devote the second part of this chapter to this very colonial conquest, taking as focalizing event, the Berlin conference, which, in effect, wrote the script for this turn in African history that we have termed the Age of Catastrophe. 95 The Age of Catastrophe: The Berlin Conference and Its Consequences for Africa and Its Film-Cultural Production The period we refer to as the Age of Catastrophe, may be looked at as a chapter in a long- standing relationship between Africa and Europe. This relation may be traced back at least to the days of Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Another phase of this relationship could be said to coincide with the rise of Islam and the arrival of Moors and Arabs in Europe during the Middle Ages. This period is considered in Arab thought as a moment of intellectual and political renaissance. It has been argued that the identity of Europe was formed with that intellectual and political tradition as the “negative phase,” i.e. it was that against which European identity defined itself. 68 A third phase would arguably come with the voyages of discoveries, the rise of capitalism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade that would have Africa and Europe as two of the angles of the triangular trade. Each of these phases of relationship has its own singularity and should not necessarily be seen as merely incremental and leading inexorably to a specific destination. In other words, a teleological approach to this relationship must be rejected. At the same time, continuities and discontinuities, to paraphrase Foucault, need to be highlighted. 68 Historian Cheikh Anta Diop shares this position. “It is the chansons de geste, these literary monuments, the cultural foundations of modern Europe, that provide us with the undeniable evidence that Europe became aware of itself in a dialectic opposition with the Arab world…” (“Apport” 67). He goes even further and considers that the conditions of possibility of the great discoveries and voyages of the 15th and 16th centuries were premised on the assimilation by Europe (mainly Spain and Portugal) of Arab science. Hence the voyages of Christopher Columbus, Bartelomeus Diaz , Vasco de Gamma among others (67). We know the consequences of these discoveries for Africa which include the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 96 The nineteenth century would be both discontinuous and continuous in some of its aspects with the previous period. The idea of negative identification, or what I would call reverse mirror phase, following Lacan, could be seen as a continuous strain or mode of identification from the Arabs, to Native Americans and then to Asians and Africans over the course of several centuries. This mode of identification was a defining feature of the relationship between Europe and Africa, especially as Europe saw it. We shall revisit places in the course of the Berlin conference where this principle was operative in the deliberations and decisions of the conference. In all the previous phases, it could be argued that the interior of the continent was to a large extent unknown territory for Europeans. One of the specificities of the nineteenth century was a deliberate attempt to go beyond the coastal regions of the continent into the so-called hinterland. 69 We shall thus now discuss aspects of the historico-discursive context of the Berlin conference, with the idea of the hinterland as a catalyst. Here, the lead characters of this narrative were inevitably explorers (many sponsored by geographic societies), missionaries and traders. A. Explorers and Their Promotional Literature According to historians, the end of the 18 th century and the first decades of the 19 th century were dominated by British explorers. We know that one the very first recorded 69 Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch dates this moment to the year 1788, with the creation in England of the African Association, a British scholarly society comprised of politicians, scholars and patrons of the arts (L’Afrique 160). 97 experiences was that of Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who volunteered to work for the African Association, in replacement of David Houghton who had died in Africa trying to find the Niger River 70 . It is interesting that at this early stage, the major mode of apprehension of Africa was that of a mystery to be solved. Indeed, the idea of mystery, the iconography of mystery, the episteme of mystery still forms a dominant paradigm in the representation of the African continent. Mungo Park himself gave the following rationale for taking on such a project: I had a passionate desire to examine into the productions of a country so little known, and to become experimentally acquainted with the modes of life and character of the natives. I knew that I was able to bear fatigue; and I relied on my youth and the strength of my constitution to preserve me from the effects of the climate (…) If I should perish in my journey, I was willing that my hopes and expectations should perish with me; and if I should succeed in rendering the geography of Africa more familiar to my countrymen, and in opening to their ambition and industry new sources of wealth and new channels of commerce, I knew that I was in the hands of men of honour, who would not fail to bestow that remuneration which my successful services should appear to them to merit. (2) In some ways, one could say, alea jacta est as early as 1793, for many of the tropes in the European construction of Africa can be found in this small text. The desire for adventure, the dialectic of the knowable and the unknowable, the ethnographic impulse, the Hemingwayan themes of grace under pressure, the desire to face and taunt death, the construction of Africa as the space for one’s self-realization as a man, and, finally and more importantly for the Berlin conference, the desire to put African geography, natural and mineral resources as well as commerce at the mercy of Europeans. 70 According to Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Europeans only knew about the Niger River by hearsay. It was not clear whether it was the same river that [Roman geographer] Ptolemaeus or [Greek historian] Herodotus had mentioned. Along with the myth of the riches of Timbuktu, mentioned by the Arabs, but forbidden to Christians, these were two mysteries that scholars of the end of the century of Enlightenment sought to solve”(L’Afrique 160). 98 Mungo Park’s instructions regarding the Niger River were very clear as he candidly expresses it himself: My instructions were very plain and concise. I was directed, on my arrival in Africa, "to pass on to the river Niger, either by way of Bambouk, or by such other route as should be found most convenient. That I should ascertain the course, and, if possible, the rise and termination of that river. That I should use my utmost exertions to visit the principal towns or cities in its neighbourhood, particularly Timbuctoo and Houssa; and that I should be afterwards at liberty to return to Europe… (3) A cursory reading of Mungo Park’s adventures in Africa reveals his description of trade, river resources, natural life, agriculture, food preparations, etc. Mungo Park even called for the advent of Christianity in the West African region he visited: “How greatly is it to be wished that the minds of a people so determined and faithful could be softened and civilized by the mild and benevolent spirit of Christianity!” His account of the lead up to his first sighting of the Niger River is worth quoting: "The thoughts of seeing the Niger in the morning, and the troublesome buzzing of mosquitoes, prevented me from shutting my eyes during the night." And then, the climax of Volume 1 of Mungo Park’s travel to Niger: As I was anxiously looking around for the river, one of them called out, geo affili! (see the water), and looking forwards, I saw with infinite pleasure the great object of my mission - the long sought for majestic Niger, glittering to the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing slowly to the eastward. I hastened to the brink, and having drank of the water, lifted up my fervent thanks in prayer to the Great Ruler of all things, for having thus far crowned my endeavours with success (178-179). It is thus no surprise that that the Niger River would become the stuff of the wildest fantasies in Europe and that Britain would be the first power to exercise control over it. 99 Actually, the Congo and Niger rivers were both described by explorers before becoming, as we shall see later in this chapter, the center of the agenda of the various states present at the Berlin conference. The work of Henry Morton Stanley, David Livingston and Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza on the Congo and that of Mungo Park and others on the Niger were important in inciting European powers to want to have a hold on Africa’s resources. In some ways, their work could be compared with that of early writers in US literature known as doing “promotional literature.” Their writings helped promote the idea that Africa was meant to be taken over and that those who would do so would encounter boundless felicity. It is common knowledge that Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza (whom we also recall as a client of the photo shop of Antoine Lumière, the father of the inventors of the Cinématographe), widely publicized his expedition to the Congo, highlighting his exploits in the press as well and the riches of the region. He was quoted as saying: It would be hard for us to present a complete picture of the Mineral and agricultural riches of the Congo basin. If copper and lead abound in fabulous quantity, in the Viari valley, innumerable mineral deposits of iron can be found almost everywhere from Vivi to Stanley Pool, and gold has also been frequently sighted. Ivory and rubber abound. Forests are admirable…Incredibly fertile, the land yields an immense variety of produce 71 . A few days later, another daily newspaper, Le Constitutionel, dated October 7, 1882, quoted Brazza as saying with equal lyricism: "In Congo, there is virgin, rich, vigorous and fertile land. It is beautiful like India." 71 La République Française, October 2, 1882. 100 Reading some of the writings of explorers also invites an analogy with the early Lumière operators. Indeed, these operators as they took off with the Cinématographe to the four corners of the world could be seen as being in a position akin to that of early explorers and even to some extent to be retracing the steps of some of them. Very much like Henry Morton Stanley, the Lumière operators appear to have been such world travelers. In the introduction to his book entitled How I Found Livingstone; Travels, Adventures, and Discoveries in Central Africa; Including Four Months Residence with Dr. Livingstone, Stanley recounts being summoned by a man named James Gordon Benett, manager of the New York Herald, to Paris and being given the explicit mission of going to Central Africa (in order to find another explorer named David Livingstone, believed to be dead). But prior to his trip to Africa, Stanley would first have to attend the inauguration of the Suez Canal in Egypt, go to Crimea, Jerusalem, India, Baghdad 72 , etc. This crisscrossing of the world with a lot of cash at one’s disposal, visiting the world’s historical places and schmoozing with the powers-that-be were all practices, which were also part of the ethos of the Lumière operators, certainly that of Alexandre Promio. Reading the index entries to Stanley’s travel in Africa is also revealing for the many themes that would constitute the matrix of the prism through which the continent of Africa would be constructed by generations of Europeans and Americans. These themes included: difficulty of penetrating an African jungle; camp in the jungle; perils of the jungle (the jungle as motif) embassy from Simba (we think here of the Disney animation 72 We may think here of the instructions the Lumière gave their operators to take the Cinématographe to the “most important cities in the world.” 101 The Lion King); attack by a leopard ; shot at a wild boar; proximity of lions; hippopotami shooting (Hemingwayan themes of hunting-also the theme of a Jean Rouch film); encounter a lion; warlike demonstrations, march of warriors; arrayed for the fight (the ubiquity of war) Msuwa, horrors of its jungle; difficulties of the march to the Makata River; fighting with mosquitoes; battling with the floods; (the hostility of nature), severe attack of fever, the Doctor's prescription; attack of dysentery, formidable number of insects, the tsetse-fly (rampant disease); curiosity of the inhabitants (curiositas); attend a council of war, narrow escape from a crocodile, (imminent danger lurking) suspicious- looking natives ( the famous perfidy of natives), etc. As with previously cited Mungo Park and Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, the description and thus mapping of African physical geography was not absent from Stanley’s account. It was aspects of these accounts that wet the appetite of Europeans for the African continent, as outlined by Jean Pouquet. 73 We shall not reproduce these accounts here. Instead, a quote from J.-F. La Harpe in his Abrégé de l’histoire générale des voyages (1825) will suffice to convey what was at stake in the geographic project, underscoring the fact that the mere presence of explorers on African soil should have been read as impending doom. Indeed, taking a retrospective look at the history of the science of geography, La Harpe outlined what he saw as steps in the process of imagining, fantasmatically constructing and later dominating other cultures historically. 73 “In 1877, the world learnt that businessman-journalist Stanley had crossed all of Central Africa. The explorer turned his exploits into a real adventure novel, highlighting what major perspectives the lands he discovered offered. This was more than enough to trigger colonial chauvinism, exacerbate the appetites of the major powers who sought extra European extensions demanded by economic evolution…” (Pouquet 52). 102 It would be simpler to suppose among other peoples beings similar to the ones under [one’s] own eyes, but that would not be marvelous; the imagination needs to take flight. It takes extraordinary objects and great distances to give wings to the desires of the imagination. It is unfortunate that this play of fantasy has resulted in quarrels and wars. Greed is excited by narratives of so-called riches that other countries possess. The first step is to obtain these riches via exchange or commerce; but sometimes it is deemed more convenient or quicker to grab them, or to simply take over the countries that possess them. (…) Might, injustice and ruse unfortunately triumph in these conflicts. But in the same token (…) geography is enriched (xxvj-xxvij) 74 . This quote summarizes to a large extent the history of this phase of the relationship between Africa and Europe. It tells us that the discipline of geography, the practice of geography needs to be understood as a prelude to war and conquest. Those who read this text in 1825 could see that the desire to conquer Africa was always already inscribed in the project of explorers. It was only a matter of time… B. Missionaries Missionaries were no less useful than explorers to the imperial project that the Berlin Conference would immediately set off. Like explorers, they would help create the conditions of possibility, indeed the conditions of inevitability of imperial conquest. Missionaries were both contemporaries and followers of explorers. In some ways they were interchangeable, i.e. the difference between them could be considered more one of emphasis, or rather one of job description than of substance. A brief look at some titles of missionaries’ accounts shows that the two corporations were engaged in analogous 74 It is important to note that this was written almost half a century before Henry Morgan Stanley’s accounts reached the world. 103 tasks 75 . Missionaries also described the people, nature and countries they encountered. Like explorers, they often learned African languages to get their message across. While explorers called for the coming of missionaries as seen above, missionaries often used trails blazed by explorers in their progress across the African continent. There is no doubt that as European subjects, their imaginaries were also piqued by the exploits of explorers and that part of the missionary zeal drew some of its strength from the accounts of explorers who had “discovered” places that needed Christianity. In some cases, missionaries would use routes opened by explorers, but in others, their writings and reports through missionary journals would help provide better intelligence about African geography and thus help new explorers. In that regard, their combined works could be considered a work of recognizance and intelligence gathering for colonialism, wittingly or unwittingly. The nineteenth century was an era missionary romanticism, with the feeling of boundless potential for proselytizing. Thus, having constructed Africans as needing Christianity, they took it as their mission to travel the vast continent in search of lost and damned souls to save with the cross of Christ. This zeal could be considered another scramble for 75 Some of these titles written or translated in French included Esquisses sénégalaises: Physionomie du pays – Peuplades – Commerce – Religions - Passé et avenir - Récits et légendes by Abbott P.-D. Boilat, Histoire de Loango, Kakongo, et autres royaumes d'Afrique; Rédigée d'après les mémoires des préfets apostoliques de la Mission françoise; enrichie d’une carte utile aux navigateurs by Abbott L.-B. Proyart, Exploration du Zambèse et de ses affluents et découverte des lacs Chiroua et Nyassa: 1858-1864 by David and Charles Livingstone, translated from English by Henriette Loreau, L'armée et la mission de la France en Afrique: discours prononcé dans la cathédrale d'Alger, le 25 avril 1875, pour l'inauguration du service religieux dans l'armée d'Afrique by His Lordship Lavigerie, Archbishop of Algiers (althouh the latter is in already a colonized country, it sees no ethical problem with the relationship of the church and the army). 104 Africa, a missionary scramble for Africa prior to the politico-military-economic scramble. Thus, one of the chief missionaries, David Livingstone himself coined the term “colonial market” in reference to the way in which missionary saw the possibility for proselytizing in Africa. Indeed, there were even moments of saturation where some missionary groups had to be pulled out of Africa due to “oversupply. 76 ” Missionaries may have also anticipated the dreams of later colonial figures like Cecil Rhodes and his megalomaniac Cape to Cairo project. Indeed, “in many districts it was they who first left the beaten tracks, and their explorations inspired the boards of mission societies to undertake transcontinental projects… Thus the idea of an ‘Apostles’ Street’ from Cape to Abyssinia originated with the founder of the Pilgrim mission of Saint Chrischoma, near Basel” (Johnson, 177). The figure of David Livingstone emblematizes the articulation or rather the merger of the missionary and the explorer, for he was both. It is important to remember that Henry Morton Stanley first traveled to Africa in search of Livingstone who contributed at once to the evangelization, the geographization and thus the colonization of Africa. Anthony J. Dachs gives us a clear example in Southern Africa, where missionaries not only anticipated but also explicitly lobbied for the imperial occupation of Africa, appropriately referring to this phenomenon as “missionary imperialism.” He looks at the work of 76 According to Hildegard Binder Johnson, “The saturation of South Africa with mission stations resulted from the attractive climate and promise of evangelizing work among both Africans and white settlers in the Cape Colony and on the frontier under political conditions that, though turbulent, favored Protestant societies. Their competition made “the Colonial market… [become] literally glutted with missionaries. To use Livingstone’s words, and by 1868 the London Missionary Society had reduced its nineteen stations in the Cape Colony to eleven because of oversupply” (172). 105 British missionary John Mckenzie who sought to convert the Tswana and transform their society, to “civilize” them in other words. However, since the beginning of the Tswana’s contact with earlier missionary James Read of the London Missionary Society, they rejected conversion. They accepted that he settle on their land on the condition that he would “not preach or teach” (Dachs 648). The only form of interaction they initially accepted with missionaries was trade of firearms. It is interesting that the ethical principle did not prevail for missionaries who did not hesitate to sell guns in order to potentially recruit converts. The Tswana, seeing the sea change that missionaries had brought to their neighbors, did not want any part of it. John Mckenzie and his colleagues faced similar problems. Yet, instead of translating the failure of their missionary work to their London counterparts, they called for the intervention of the British government to turn Bechuanaland into a British colony. Within a context of competition between the Boer and the British, Mckenzie and colleagues developed the so-called “doctrine of the Road of the North” as the basis for their appeal to the British government. According to this doctrine, “the road along the Bechuanaland mission stations was the key to the balance of power between British colonies and Boer republics, between Afrikaner republicanism and Cape Dutch-English loyalty to the empire” (Dachs 649). Merging the missionary and the political, John McKenzie argued: On the whole the old feudal power of the native chiefs is opposed to Christianity; and the people who are living under English law are in a far more advantageous position to the reception of the Gospel than when they are living in their heathen towns surrounded by all its thralls and sanctions.” 77 77 This was pronounced in 1876 (qtd. in Dachs 650). 106 The discovery of gold in 1868 in Ngwato gave McKenzie and his colleagues more arguments to state the evident necessity of imperialism, inviting “John Bull’s attention to this delicious morsel of gold field.” (Dachs, 650). Following a rebellion in 1878, the missionaries called for the British army to intervene. The army, under the leadership of Colonel Warren, tellingly established its headquarters in the Kuruman mission station itself, thereby bringing together ideological and repressive state apparatuses. Indeed the mission press even printed leaflets calling for the surrender of the rebels. Following this incident and after unrelenting pressure and lobbying on the part of Mckenzie, who took his case for the creation of a British colony in Bechuanaland all the way to the metropolis in London, Britain would invade the land of the Tswana. The epilogue and thus “happy ending” of this story for missionary John Mckenzie was that he would be appointed Resident District Commissioner of the Queen of England in 1884, on the eve of the Berlin conference. It is now known that the conquest of Bechuanaland served as a model for that of Malawi and other areas in the region. C. The Economic Before the Berlin Conference The economic discourse was also one of the main catalyses for the conference, perhaps the most important. Indeed, the economic paradigm is central to any understanding of the relation between Africa and Europe. The Berlin conference was thus one of the crystallizing moments of this economic relationship. As explained earlier, it was first the 107 economic that got Europe interested in Africa since the end of Middle Ages. The voyages of discovery were commercial voyages that also involved African economic participation 78 . It was the economic that drove and fueled the trans-Atlantic slave trade for three centuries and deported millions of Africans outside the continent’s borders. The economics of the slave trade was central for Europe in that it fueled and financed the Industrial Revolution as has been well documented. 79 In the era that led to the Berlin conference, there was an increase of commerce between Africa and Europe, outside the slave trade, between 1820 and 1850. The mass production that resulted from Industrial Revolution elicited European need for such tropical goods as palm oil, ivory, gum resin, dyewood, among others 80 . This increased demand would lead to the increase of African export to Europe (Coquery-Vidrovitch L’Afrique 163). This increased trade however followed for the most part patterns of the slave trade with European trading posts located on the coasts of Africa and African traders going into the interior to find products for their business partners. There was indeed no firm control of 78 We learn from Walter Rodney that “African gold helped the Portuguese to finance further navigations around the Cape of Good Hope and into Asia ever since the 15th century. African gold was also the main source for the mintage of Dutch gold coin in the 17th century, helping Amsterdam to become the financial capital of Europe in that period; and further it was no coincidence that when the English struck a new gold coin in 1663 they called it the ‘guinea’. The Encyclopaedia Britannica explains that the guinea was ‘a gold coin at one time current in the United Kingdom. It was first coined in 1663, in the reign of Charles II, from gold imported from the Guinea Coast of West Africa by a company of merchants trading under charter from the British crown - hence the name” (Rodney 94). 79 According to Walter Rodney, “The most spectacular feature in Europe which was connected with African trade was the rise of sea-port towns - notably Bristol, Liverpool, Nantes, Bordeaux and Seville. Directly or indirectly connected to those ports, there often emerged the manufacturing centres which gave rise to the ‘industrial revolution’. In England, it was the county of Lancashire which was the first centre of the industrial revolution and the economic advance in Lancashire depended first on the growth of the port of Liverpool through slave trading” (Rodney 95). 80 Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch confirms that “commercial links between Africa and Britain [at that time] were a direct consequence of the Industrial Revolution” (L’Afrique 163). 108 African economies by Europe and this increased trade slowly made the trade in slave obsolete from a capitalist point of view. The trade in goods would slowly replace the trade in people. But the necessity to control this trade would lead to a change of attitude on the part of Europe toward the middle of the century. Indeed this intermediary phase would see the increasing involvement of European governments in funding explorations in the interior of Africa three decades prior to the Berlin conference. Hence the Heinrich Barth expedition funded by the British Foreign Office (Coquery-Vidrovitch L’Afrique 163-165), Henry Morton Stanley by King Leopold II of Belgium 81 , or Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza by the government of France. The episteme of that nineteenth century was rather strange, as it seems that different elements folded upon themselves and unto others, in fact a to and fro of different elements, mutually reinforcing each other. Regarding the articulation of the economic with the political in accelerating the imperialist spirit of the Berlin conference in this mid-nineteenth century, Hannah Arendt arguably provides the best explanation. According to Arendt, imperialism came into being when the bourgeoisie, the class that controlled the means of production in Europe, rebelled against the national limitations set against its economic expansion. Indeed, she adds: "Expansion as a permanent and supreme political goal is the central political idea of imperialism" (Arendt, 23). 81 Henry Morton Stanley was recruited in 1879 to explore the Congos for the benefit of the International African Association founded by King Leopold II. 109 The embrace of politics by the bourgeoisie (which had so far resisted any direct involvement in politics in spite of its de facto dominance of the economic realm) was premised on what Arendt refers to as the impossibility for it to renounce what was considered the “nature” of the capitalist system, which “structurally requires constant economic growth” (24). The bourgeoisie thus imposed this law of an unending expansion as the ultimate goal of foreign policy to the major European countries involved in the Berlin Conference. In that sense, from the perspective of European history at least, the imperial turn of the economic system that the bourgeoisie had put in place, seems to have been inevitable. In other words, imperialism was, according to Arendt, the political translation of the economic paradigm of the law of unending expansion, a fiat of capitalism, indeed perhaps a congenital feature of capitalism. This translation, it must be added, was very much helped by the economic depression of the years 1873-1895. D. The Interpretation of Treaties Treaties between African states and kingdoms and Europe also played a major role in accelerating the Berlin conference and its outcome. Indeed, these were often presented as “visible evidence” of European right to conquer lands that had been “relinquished” to them by African leaders and statesmen. There is a long history of treaties between Africans and Europeans dating as far back as the fifteenth century with the signing of a treaty of friendship between Mani Kongo, King of the Congo and that of Portugal. With the increase of commercial relationships between Africa and Europe, treaties would be 110 systematically signed between African leaders and statesmen and European merchants authorizing the latter to settle in various African territories and engage in commercial transactions. 82 This practice happened for centuries and did not seem to present any threat to the sovereignty of Africans. It is thus on the basis of this precedent that African leaders and statesmen signed treaties of friendship with explorers and other European emissaries. 83 In that regard, it is important to point out that in many African countries, land was considered sacred and thus was philosophically inalienable and could in no form or fashion be ceded or given away. Notions of property right over land in the European sense of the term did not come into play 84 . These treaties were in fact residence and exploitation permits. But in the Congo region, the land was symbolically represented by a small packaged mound of kaolin in which a modest monetary sum was placed. Thus, the land given to the European merchant was meant to protect them against all dangers (Bawele 113). It was thus with this semiotics of the treaty in mind that Makoko signed agreements with French explorer-agent Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, who interpreted 82 According to Belgian explorer Alexandre Delcommune, “At that time, every trading post which set up in any area of the lower Congo, first and foremost had to obtain from the princes of the area , an authorization to set up on a piece of land that he naturally chose himself. The river bank or one its affluents was always chosen to facilitate transportation and communication… The European would take the expanse of land he wanted and the boundaries of the land were determined by delegates of the princes” (qtd. in Bawele 112). 83 According to Elikia M’Bokolo, no less than 118 treaties were signed for the benefit of France between 1819 and 1880. This process was accelerated in the lead up to and after the Berlin conference and thus, in the space of five years (1880-1885), Henry Morton Stanley and his collaborators signed at least 257 treaties in the regions of Central Africa (Afrique noire 242). 84 This is still true in many African countries today. Indeed bureaucrats at the World Bank as we speak, are pulling their hair in their attempt to push for land reforms in several countries in Southern Africa and simply cannot understand a view according to which land cannot be privatized. In that sense, some of the actions of the World Bank of the twenty-first century could be considered direct offsprings of a nineteenth century European episteme. 111 them as a cession and relinquishing of territory. This question of interpretation along with the dramatic and tragic consequences it would have on the history of Africa, does raise the question of the cultural specificity of signs, indeed their non-transparency, perhaps even their purported untranslatability. More accurately perhaps in this context, we should talk about a preferred imperialist reading rather than untranslatability, one that favors the notion of future occupation. In some ways, this question of treaties also raises the question of the attitude toward to documents, the nature of documents and even perhaps the cultural specificity of documents. To some extent the package of land that was given by King Makoko to the French President, along with the signed written treaty were documents meant to seal the friendship between France and Congo 85 . But it could be said that Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza took (in Barthesian terms) a readerly attitude, i.e. he construed the treaty according to his own desire, offering his preferred reading, that is, reading it literally instead of metaphorically, in such a way that it would bring France into the scramble for the Congo. Historian Mubanza Mwa Bawele rightly concludes his article arguing that the interpretation of the famous Makoko treaties as giving away the Congo to France and 85 According to Mubanza Mwa Bawele, King Makoko said the following to Brazza: “We like the whites. Go tell their chief that they should come and settle in our country, wherever they want. As far as I am concerned, I give to the chief of the whites the land that is under my authority. I put it under his command. As a sign of what I give him, take this pack of land in which I have put everything that grows in our fertile land. Take it to the chief of the whites and tell him that Makoko gives him his land. Let him send a chief to exercise authority over it. Give us as you leave a flag so that everybody knows that Nduo is Nduo Falla.” (110). 112 other such treaties on the Congo Basin were in fact part of the larger European strategy of conquest of the African continent. It should be added that often when Europeans would seek to go beyond d the agreements signed in treaties there would be retaliation on the part of Africans. It is reported that Watanga in Central Africa was the site of an economic blockade of a European trading post because Europeans traders resented the control exercised by Chief Ikanga over the exchange of goods in his country. When Ikanga stopped any supplying of the trading post, an open armed conflicted broke out, which led to the death of Chief Ikanga on December 20, 1883, a little less than a year before the Berlin conference. E. “Scientific” Racism So-called scientific racism was equally important in laying the intellectual foundations for the Berlin Conference. Without going into details about their features which have been widely analyzed, it is possible to summarize them as an articulation between discourses of evolutionism, polygenesis, phrenology, physical anthropology, the doctrine of might is right, positivism, and race discourses. Suffice it to give a number of titles, which posit racial hierarchies inevitably favoring Europe and downgrading Africa: Robert Knox’s The Races of Men: A Fragment (1850), John Campbell’s Negro-mania: Being an Examination of the Falsely Assumed Equality of the Various Races of Men (1851), Josiah C. Nott and G. R. Gliddon’s Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological 113 Researches Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and upon their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History (1854), Josiah C. Nott’s Indigenous races of the earth (1857), Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (1853-1855), Julien Virey’s Histoire naturelle du genre humain, ou Recherches sur ses principaux fondements physiques et moraux; précédées d'un Discours sur la nature des êtres organiques et sur l'ensemble de leur physiologie (1800) translated in the US as Natural History of the Negro Race (1837), etc. The above sets of discursive practices constitute the layers that created the conditions of possibility of the Berlin Conference. We shall now look at the conference proper and examine the ways in which these various discourses are articulated and their implication for the understanding of the theorization of documentary and non-fiction film practice in and on Africa. The Berlin Conference A. General Presentation Presided over by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the Berlin Conference took place over three months, from November 15, 1884 to February 26, 1885. The Conference was attended by representatives of 14 states: Germany, France, Britain, Portugal, 114 Belgium, Austro-Hungary, Denmark, Spain, United States, Italy, The Netherlands, Russia, “neutral” Sweden, and Turkey. 86 According to Jean-Claude Allain, the Conference took place in the Radziwill palace, which was the personal residence of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. We learn that the Chancellor for health reasons and due to the call of duty was only able to effectively preside over the opening and the closing sessions 87 (Allain, 22). French was reportedly the working language of the Conference although the US delegate read a declaration in English. A total of 10 half-hour plenary sessions took place in three months, from 2:30 to 3 p.m., and from 5 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. 88 There were reportedly four items on the Agenda on Day 1 of the conference: 1. Opening of the Congo region to commerce (sic); 2. Suppression of the slave trade (sic); 3. Freedom of navigation on all African rivers, but more specifically on the Congo and Niger rivers (sic); 4. Procedures to follow for future occupations in Africa (sic) (Allain 23). 86 See Decraene, Philippe. “Avant-propos: Présentation du colloque.” Centre des Hautes Etudes sur l’Afrique et l’Asie Modernes. L'Afrique noire depuis la conférence de Berlin / colloque international, Berlin, 13-16 mars 1985, organisé par le Centre des Hautes Etudes sur l’Afrique et l’Asie Modernes. Paris: CHEAM, 1985, pp. 9-15. This book is the result of an international colloquium organized in Berlin to celebrate the centenary of the Conference. Noteworthy for its attention to detail (we get an account of the main sessions), some of the articles in it are also striking for their painstaking attempts to demonstrate through the rhetorical mode of the understatement that, after all, the Berlin Conference was not the watershed event it has been remembered as. 87 It can be safely assumed that he exercised tremendous power and influence on all sessions. 88 Lest these sessions seem to too short to the reader, s/he can be reassured that the longest sessions were those that took place behind closed doors, in camerae obscurae to use of photographic metaphor. It is interesting that Jean-Claude Allain does not mention these discussions in his exposé. 115 On November 19, the conference discussed three items: 1. Forms and modalities of opening the rivers to commerce; 2. The question of the sovereignty of Africans and how to “open” the Congo region and “keep it free” of restriction, also known as “neutralization” or “making neutral”; 3. Debates on taxation. A very brief overview of the text of the “General Act of the Berlin Conference” allows us to make the following remarks. The Act itself consists in a preamble outlining the “reasons” for the holding of the Conference, including the names of the representatives of the 14 states, which attended the conference, two declarations, four Acts, eight chapters and 36 articles. The preamble gives us the list of topics discussed and which were subject to decisions: 1. A declaration relative to the freedom of commerce In the Congo basin, its embouchures and circumjacent Countries with other provisions connected therewith. 2. A declaration relative to the slave trade and the operations by sea or land which furnish slaves to that trade. 3. A Declaration relative to the neutrality of the territories comprised in the conventional basin of the Congo. 4. An Act of Navigation for the Congo, which, while having regard to local circumstances, extends to this river, its tributaries, and the waters in its system (eaux qui leur sont assimilées), the general principles enunciated in Articles 58 and 66 of the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna, and intended to regulate, as between the Signatory Powers of that Act, the free navigation of the waterways separating or traversing several States - these said principles having since then been applied by agreement to certain rivers of Europe and America, but especially to the Danube, with the modifications stipulated by the Treaties of Paris (1856), of Berlin (1878), and of London (1871 and 1883). 116 5. An Act of Navigation for the Niger, which, while likewise having regard to local circumstances, extends to this river and its tributaries the same principles as set forth in Articles 58 and 66 of the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna. 6. A Declaration introducing into international relations certain uniform rules with reference to future occupations on the coast of the African Continent. Other issues discussed during the conference include the question of the sale of liquor to Africans (very much influenced by “insight” from previous colonial experiences in the Americas), the role of missionaries, the status of Madagascar, the status of other rivers in Africa such as the Nile and the Zambezi, the status of the island of Zanzibar and the question of the founding of the Congo Free State. The conference ended on February 23, 1885 with the signing and adoption of the General Act of the Conference in the presence of Chancellor Bismarck (Allain 23-25). What immediately strikes the reader upon examining the entire text of the General Act of the Berlin conference is that one its most important decisions, the creation of the Congo Free State as the personal property of Belgian King Leopold II appears nowhere in writing. For a public ignorant of the specifics of the conference, who would only read the General Act, they would not understand the appearance ex nihilo of the Congo Free State on the map of Africa following the conference. It was in Berlin, that Leopold II was able to convince his peers to let him own a country the side of the entire Western Europe. This “forgetting,” this absence presence, this structuring absence is all the more significant as many historians argue that it was really at Leopold II’s request that the conference was convened by German Chancellor Bismarck. 117 We shall now discuss in detail some of the debates and decisions of the conference as they had life-changing effects on hundreds of millions of Africans for centuries to come. B. Economic Dispositions of the Conference Numerically speaking, the number of articles and dispositions of the General Act regarding the economic surpass all others. One might wonder why navigation and rivers were so important as to deserve 33 articles. 1. On the Acts of Navigation From the age of discoveries until our brave twenty-first century, the privileged route for intercontinental transportation of goods and merchandise has been water. In the era around the Berlin conference, the most powerful European country was the one with the strongest navy, and this happened to be Britain. Rivers were indispensable for commerce and of utmost importance were rivers that ended in the sea, and for the purpose of the conference, the Atlantic was the privileged ocean. It had already served very well for the transportation of cargoes of slaves. It could be repurposed to transport goods to and from Africa. Turkey, an occupying force in Egypt and a participant at the conference, had managed to keep the Nile, the world’s longest river, out of reach in discussions of the conference. Thus, the Congo and the Niger were the two rivers, which were the subject of the most intense deliberations at the Berlin Conference. These two rivers were and still 118 are major rivers for Africa and the world, being the continent’s two most important rivers, after the Nile. The Congo River was and is still regarded as the continent’s most powerful river. The following description gives us a perspective of what was at stake in the deliberations regarding this river: The Congo River (…) is Africa's most powerful river and the second most voluminous river in the world with a discharge of 1,500,000 cubic feet of water per second. It is the fifth longest river in the world, draining a basin of nearly 1.5 million square miles. (“The Congo”) The Niger River also was and still is a major water source. Today, it is 4,180 kilometers long (2600 miles) with a drainage basin of 2,117,700 square kilometers (817,600 square miles) in area. It is the main river in West Africa and third most important on the continent after the Nile and the Congo. The symbolic dimension of this is lost to none. By deliberating and making decisions about the most powerful rivers of the continent, by in effect taking possession of them at the Berlin conference, they were, through speech act, exercising the ultimate act of power over the African continent. Rivers, let us remember, are often that around which people gather in order to create a polity, a system of trade and exchanges, an agriculture for self sufficiency and ultimately a culture, a way of life. By taking possession of these rivers, they were de facto transforming the lives of Africans forever. With the same gesture, European counties at the Berlin conference were also taking over of the land around the rivers. Regarding the Congo River, it was thus decided in article 2 of the General Act that All [read: European] flags, without distinction of nationality, shall have free access to the whole of the coastline of the territories above enumerated, to the rivers there running into the sea, to all the waters of the Congo and its tributaries, 119 including the lakes, and to all the ports situated on the banks of these waters, as well as to all canals which may in future be constructed with intent to unite the watercourses or lakes within the entire area of the territories described in Article 1. Those trading under such flags may engage in all sorts of transport, and carry on the coasting trade by sea and river, as well as boat traffic, on the same footing as if they were subjects. 89 It should be remembered that the conference was first and foremost designed for conflict resolution and prevention among European nations involved in Africa and that the articles and clauses related either to the Niger or the Congo River sought to above all to put an end to endless bickering between the Portuguese, the Belgians, the French, the British primarily. In other words, European powers agreed to put their differences aside and devise a “gentlemen’s agreement” in order to better exploit the African continent by dividing it among themselves. The partition of Africa was thus premised on a temporary unity of purpose of Europeans. 2. On Roads and Railroads Article 16 90 refers to the future building of roads, railroads or lateral canals, which were to complement the rivers as means of transportation of goods and people. This article makes it clear that the purpose of the colonial conquest was never to build infrastructure for Africans, but instead for the specific benefit of the exploitation and domination of the 89 Helmuth Stoecker gives us the following explanation about this article: “The Congo Basin was attributed to Leopold II and to a lesser extent to France on the condition that traders from all powers be allowed to participate in the pillage of the basin” (Stoecker 154). 90 The first part of the text of Article 16 goes as follows: “The roads, railways or lateral canals which may be constructed with the special object of obviating the innavigability or correcting the imperfection of the river route on certain sections of the course of the Congo, its affluents, and other waterways placed under a similar system, as laid down in Article 15, shall be considered in their quality of means of communication as dependencies of this river, and as equally open to the traffic of all nations” (“General”). 120 African continent. In other words, any benefits Africans may have drawn from these infrastructure were at best derivative. 3. On the Ethics of Capitalism in Times of War Article 25 of the General Act of the Berlin Conference is very instructive in relation to the ethics of capitalism in times of war 91 . It outlines a position that is still prevalent today in relation to Africa’s wars. Indeed, the article stipulates that the provisions of the Act remain active even in times of war. In other words, free circulation, free trade, the pursuit and traffic of merchandise may not be interrupted for such puny happenings as human beings waging wars against each other. This is interesting in relation to the wars that took place in Africa in the late twentieth century. The war in Sierra Leone for example and the infamous issue of blood diamonds is premised on this notion that killing and maiming could happen within the same space as the traffic of diamonds without stopping it. Indeed the diamond traffic has been known to fuel the war, if not to have been one the impetuses behind it. Similarly, it is commonly known that the recent war in the Democratic Republic of Congo was also a war about access to the innumerable mineral resources of this former personal property of Belgian King Leopold II. It may be argued that the pursuit of the 91 The article goes as follows: “The provisions of the present Act of Navigation shall remain in force in time of war. Consequently, all nations, whether neutral or belligerent, shall be always free, for the purposes of trade, to navigate the Congo, its branches, affluents and mouths, as well as the territorial waters fronting the embouchure of the river. Traffic will similarly remain free, despite a state of war, on the roads, railways, lakes and canals mentioned in Articles 15 and 16. There will be no exception to this principle, except in so far as concerns the transport of articles intended for a belligerent, and in virtue of the law of nations regarded as contraband of war...” (“General”). 121 resources of this country has never let since the Berlin conference and thus every episode in the country’s history could find some of its roots in the Berlin conference. Indeed, the massive exploitation of the resources of the Congo by the colonial regime of King Leopold II and then of Belgium led to “the decimation of the peaceful population of the Congo - [reducing it] from about 20-40 million people till about 8 million” (Arendt 120). The tragedy of the independent moment of the Congo could also be traced back to the Berlin conference. Thus, on Independence Day, the showdown between the King Baudouin, grandson of King Leopold II and nationalist Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and its tragic conclusion was symptomatic of the confrontation between two ideas of the Congo. The first, descending directly from the spirit of the Berlin conference sought to keep the country open for foreign depletion of its resources through the perpetuation of a colonial/neo-colonial regime. The second sought to govern the Congo and its resources for the benefit of the Congolese and Africans more generally. Unfortunately, the first version has prevailed historically. It should be added that as in Sierra Leone, in the height of the war in the DRC in the late 1990s and early 2000s some major European businesses would traverse and even set up in war zones in order to have uninterrupted access to their much needed natural resources. Needless to say, they were complicit of the massive killings during the war in the name of the episteme of article 25. 122 4. On Markets and New Economic Geographies At the end of the conference, the representative of Belgium, Baron Lambermont stated: With these general dispositions, a vast market is hereby created in the very heart of Africa. All the nations will be treated in conditions of perfect equality (sic) and commerce will not be subject to any vexing taxations or formalities… (Allain 38) We had discussed in the earlier section of this chapter that, long before the Berlin conference, Africans were “ready for business” and had even adopted very liberal and free trade approaches in their dealings with Europe. They had invited European capital to finance the building of infrastructure. They had even been open to welcoming Europeans as residents of the continent in a joint venture aimed at using the resources of Africa for mutual benefit. This comment sanctions the fact that the General Act put an end to a horizontal free trade avant-la-lettre approach. It clearly and openly acknowledges that the General Act hereby appropriates and takes over African economies and designs them for the sole benefit of Europe. It is through these decisions and in their military and political implementations that Europe would ensure that Africa become in the long run “underdeveloped” and later part of the “Third World,” then “less developed,” “least advanced” and ultimately the “poorest” continent of the world. As a primary act of refusal of free trade on conditions set by Africans, the European countries at Berlin decided that free trade should only be the preserve of Europeans with Africans as spectators and providers of labor and resources. It may be interesting for one to compare the way in which the Berlin Conference positioned itself in relation to African 123 economies and politics with the current relationship between the African continent and international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF. It is arguably the subjection of African economies to European desires that created the conditions of possibility of World Bank and IMF discourses of structural adjustment programs and thus the remote controlling of the economics and therefore of the politics of African culture. The state of financial dependency of the cinema in Africa today can find some of its origins there. Although the cinema took another decade after the conference to come into being, finance has often been seen as the second leg of the cinema. As André Bazin put it, cinema is both art and finance. For most Africans, the finance component of the cinematic dyad was already entangled in the chanceries of Europe and now America. African economies have literally stopped existing for themselves since the Berlin conference. As a result, everything related to the economic can arguably be said to have been distorted, from political self-determination to the funding of culture, in so far as the economic limits the scope of the possible through financial constraints. Needless to add that the dreams of the majority of Africans are limited today because of financial constraints. Indeed, thousands of Africans are taking to the seas today in search of a better future because they cannot have it in their countries, on their own continent. This is partly attributable to the fact that the leadership at the helm of the continent has neither done enough nor been successful in shaking the foundations of the economic stronghold that has been placed around the continent since the fateful Berlin conference. 124 The statement cited above also speaks to the fact that it was in the name of the market that the African continent was colonized. In other words, it was a clearly capitalist-driven project. Opening Africa to the European market economy, a slogan that is still valid in the twenty first century and that could be seen as late as the year 2002-3 on posters hanging on the walls of the World Bank in Washington DC. In this moment of total dominance of capital around the world today, a sort of capitalist totalitarianism is arguably at work everywhere in what we know as the age of globalization. The ideology of market expansion, whose seeds were planted since the days of Berlin, now deploys itself in full and broad daylight, unashamedly, confident that over the years it has conquered most resistance in the course of centuries. But these are not the only consequences on the economic front. Within the larger framework of the world economy, the conference sanctioned and contributed in the perpetuation of the positioning of the African continent on the periphery of the world economy. The conference ascribed and enshrined the role of provider of natural resources and raw materials to African economies, a role they have not been able to come out of ever since. This positioning has had consequences on all aspects of life in Africa, from agriculture and commerce, to even cultural production. This was no doubt one of the bad surprises of the era of political independence in Africa. Indeed, when the various countries of the continent obtained their independence, they were in many ways, far from realizing the extent of the economic of dependency of the continent vis-à-vis the former 125 colonizers. In some ways, this could be considered the joke of independence, for Europe never relinquished the economic upper hand over the continent. These “hidden structures,” to quote Marx, would find their iteration in unending economic manipulations through such devices as the development paradigm, the globalization paradigm, the structural adjustment paradigm, which, over the course of several decades, could be considered accountable for a large part of the plight of the African continent today. Indeed the economic has been the most important Trojan horse for European countries, the most prized cards used to continually gnaw at the sovereignties of African countries. This question is arguably one of the major challenges that the African continent faces today and has also been one of the major obsessions of African cinema, documentary or fiction. Indeed, the question of the instrumentalization of the political by economic and its effect on the African continent as outlined earlier by Hannah Arendt could be considered the most important challenge that the continent and indeed the world faces today. The Berlin Conference, according to Elikia M’Bokolo, has also changed the patterns of commercial relationships on the continent. If, prior to Berlin, Africa also had strong commercial relationships with Asia, after the conference, Europe would become the primary economic partner of Africa much to the detriment of the Asian route. Within the continent itself, old modes of economic integration were totally transformed. Thus the regions of the Sahel in West Africa, which had historically been linked economically to 126 North Africa via the trans-Saharan trade, were attached, in the wake of the Berlin conference, to Southern coastal countries. M’Bokolo adds that the fact that Europe entered Africa via the coasts could account for the fact that coastal areas of the continent were “privileged” in relation to their interior counterparts. This would lead to a cleavage between coastal regions and those of the interior, the latter being often reduced to the status of provider of manual labor for the former, as was the case of Burkina in relation to Cote d’Ivoire 92 . Some of the now canonic films of Jean Rouch such as Les Maîtres fous (1955), Moi un noir (1958) and Jaguar (1967) all find the source of their themes here. We may perhaps have a better understanding of the aesthetics of the cinema of Jean Rouch, by looking the dialectic between the coastal and the interior established in the wake of the Berlin conference. Dixit M’Bokolo: Berlin was not only the site of the formation of a new political geography, but also that of a new economic geography. All previous mechanisms of regional economic integration - routes, currencies, commercial habits were destroyed… For many old merchant cities like Timbuktu, Jenne and Gao, it was the beginning of a long process of decline, which is still happening to day. Likewise, new ensembles were formed haphazardly. Thus, the independent state The Congo [contemporary Democratic Republic of the Congo] includes regions that previously belonged to the economic spaces of Zanzibar, Egypt and Sudan and the Atlantic. (“Absence” 147). C. The Partition of the Continent and Its Political Control The Berlin conference was also a political conference, that is, it was statesmen who gathered to discuss economic and political issues with their respective national interests in mind. We have previously argued the articulation of the economic with the political by 92 It could be argued that the recent civil turmoil in Côte d’Ivoire around the notion of ivoirité, in spite of political instrumentalization, finds some of its sources there. 127 emphasizing the economic. It is in some sense impossible to distinguish the political from the economic because at the Berlin conference, the economic was political and the political was economic, standing as they were in a deep embrace. But we shall attempt to look at the political in its positivity, even as we underline its economic consequences. One of the most important political consequences of the Berlin conference was the partition of the African continent between various European countries. Before the conference, as we have shown earlier, the political map of the continent was being reconfigured at the initiative of Africans themselves. With the Berlin Conference, European countries arrogated themselves the right to intervene in African affairs. The text of the General Act is the legal instrument they used to justify to themselves and to each other the “validity” and the “rightfulness” of their drive to intervene in African. This would lead not only, as previously argued, to the realignment of all the African economies to European capitalist economy, but also to the management and both the remote and close control of the political destiny of Africa. Thus the lives of all Africans, with the possible exception of Ethiopians, would be decided in Berlin, Paris, London, Lisbon, Madrid, or Brussels. Foreign, diplomacy, military, economic, cultural and political affairs, entire ways of lives of a whole continent would be decided by a few countries in Europe for a century officially, and longer unofficially. Berlin was the substitution of a primarily horizontal relationship between Africa and Europe by a vertical dispensation with Europe at the top of the vertical and Africa at its bottom. In 128 spite of the political independence of the 1950s and 60s, this model of relationship is still very much in order today. From then on, military occupations, edicts about education, missionary schools that would be built, roads and railroads constructed in the colonial era would owe part of the reason for their existence to the debates and the implementation of the decisions of the Berlin Conference. In some ways, every genocide, every interstate war, every civil war on the African continent can find some of its origins in the Berlin conference. Even the crises of the late Organization of African Unity or its failures can, to some extent, be traced to the manipulation by European powers of African affairs initiated by the Berlin conference. By diving Africa into spheres of influence for French, German, British, Spanish, Portuguese, and Belgian interests, the participants at the conference separated families, ethnic and linguistic groups, “Balkanized” the African continent to use a more current expression. To this day, African countries to a large extent define themselves and are defined in relation to the language of the country, which attended the Berlin conference and conquered their lands. Hence, Mozambicans, Angolans, Cape Verdians and Guinea Bissau citizens see themselves and are seen as Lusophones, Ghanaians, Nigerians, Tanzanians, Kenyans, and Zimbabweans, as Anglophones. The Burkinabe, the Senegalese, the Beninese, the Gabonese and the Central Africans are known as Francophones. The case of Cameroon is the more ubuesque as it was under the rule of 129 three different colonizing powers, France, Germany and Britain. Today, Cameroon has English and French as its official languages, but German is still a presence. The Democratic Republic of Congo was in fact the only state that was officially created at the conference under the name of Congo Free State and, a unique case in political history, as a country belonging to one person, not to their country but to themselves. It was only years later that Belgium would take “ownership” of the Congo. Rwanda and Burundi were also colonized by Belgium. Rwanda, as is well known, would experience twentieth century’s closing genocide and Belgium played no small part in the colonial era in pitting Hutu against Tutsi. When in the wake of independence in the late 1950s and 60s, some leaders in Africa sought to unite the continent, it was the legacy of the Berlin conference that stood in their way. Many of the leaders had de facto accepted the ways in which their countries and continent had been constructed by the Berlin Conference and later by the colonial apparatus and thus stood against the move toward African unity. A notable example is that of Cote d’Ivoire, whose late President Houphouët-Boigny argued that his country would not be the milking cow of so-called “poorer” African neighbors, forgetting that the combined strength of each country contributes to the strength of all. Even today, in the logic of capitalism itself, we see that the tendency is toward unity. The United States, as its name indicates, would not be what it is without the unity and complementarity of huge states like California and smaller ones like Delaware. 130 When after several failed attempts at unifying the continent in the wake of political independence, African countries decided to give themselves an instrument of mutual cooperation, they created the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. By recognizing on that occasion, the “intangibility of frontiers inherited from the colonial era” the founders of African independence were unwittingly paying the best tribute to the Berlin conference, for they decided to continue the heritage of colonialism by maintaining the divisions of Africa as established by the colonial project. This attitude has largely prevailed since then. To end this examination of the political consequences of the Berlin conference, let us now look at its infamous chapter VI, which spelled out the future conquest of Africa. Entitled “Declaration relative to the essential conditions to observe in order that future occupations on the coasts of the African continent may be held,” its two articles go as follow: Any Power which henceforth takes possession of a tract of land on the coasts of the African continent outside of its present possessions, or which, being hitherto without such possessions, shall acquire them, as well as the Power which assumes a Protectorate there, shall accompany the respective act with a notification thereof, addressed to the other Signatory Powers of the present Act, in order to enable them, if need be, to make good any claims of their own. The following article concludes: The Signatory Powers of the present Act recognize the obligation to insure the establishment of authority in the regions occupied by them on the coasts of the African continent sufficient to protect existing rights, and, as the case may be, freedom of trade and of transit under the conditions agreed upon. 131 It was this chapter that launched the inexorable “scramble for Africa.” Witnessing with their own wide eyes the example of the allocation of a country the size of Western Europe to Leopold II of Belgium, the participants at the conference instantly saw the image of what was possible. The case of the Congo Free State was the signifier of the right to megalomania, the right to claim as much land, as much natural and mineral resources as possible. From this moment, there would be no limit to European greed in Africa. Stopping at nothing, their rush toward the continent would involve mass killing, maiming, raping, burning, executing, ransacking, etc. The emotional and psychological consequences of this onslaught on Africans have yet to be fully and systematically explored. D. The Language and Rhetoric of the Berlin Conference The Berlin Conference did not simply involve politico-economic decisions that would have tremendous consequences for the African continent. It did so through a specific deployment of language and rhetoric that requires that we spend a moment analyzing it. We have already explored the ways in which explorers, missionaries and “scientific racism” constructed the African continent on the eve of the Berlin conference. The participants at the conference itself had their share of linguistic “fabrication” of Africa. In that sense, the conference could be considered the site of the inter-textual, of the recycling of pre-existing texts of voyages, missionaries and their articulation with a legalist language to produce the text of the General Act. The novelty act here lies in the 132 legal processing of these multi-dimensional, multi-layered discourses that we have so far laid out, making the conference indeed a case study in textual practice. The major axis of this textual activity is that of construction. Seen from the perspective of the Braudelian “longue durée,” it is as if the texts of the missionaries and explorers were part of the building of the legal case of the Berlin conference against Africa in the tribunal of history. In other words, they all combined to construct an Africa that could be dominated legally and legitimately. They speak to a desire and need to construct the case for the legitimate and legal right to dominate and conquer Africa for as this chapter as shown throughout, there was no relationship of necessity between the changing state of Africa and the will to conquer it. The case had to be constructed meticulously, step by step, incrementally and accumulatively. This construction required a double movement between the positions of lack and those of fulfillment. Factually speaking, Europe was the space of lack in so far as it needed the resources natural, mineral and later human resources of Africa and Africa thus was seen as the space for that fulfillment. We already see the logic of narrative at play here. Yet, through the process of inversion, Europe succeeded in positioning Africa as the space of lack, with such features as ignorance, heathenism, savagery, the state of nature, stasis, lack of exploitation of resources (the subtext of explorer discourse), etc. For itself, it would keep the role and space of fulfillment, in relation to the notion of bringing “civilization,” commerce, schools, infrastructure, motion, that is, history. This dialectic of 133 need and fulfillment, the core of narrative, doubled by another dimension of narrative, the dialectic of stasis and motion, was the engine of the script of the conquest of Africa that the Berlin conference enshrined. The Berlin conference was thus a conference on narrative, on narrativization. Paradoxically, the conference relied on “documents” produced by explorers, missionaries and traders. In other words, this narrativization was founded on a “documentary” impulse. We may even see in the narratives of explorers current features of the documentary film form and theorization. These would include the question of the relation between the observer and the observed (Bill Nichols even created the category of “observational documentary”), part of which involves the anthropological/ethnographic notion of living among the subjects one films (such was the case for explorers some of whom even spoke the languages of those subjects). In other words, analyzing the language of the Berlin conference is also an inquiry into the archeology of the documentary episteme. The narratives of explorers, missionaries and traders were considered “visible evidence” of what the African continent “was.” They claimed to portray the continent as it “was,” “life as it was” in Africa, a major theme in documentary theory and episteme. The debate on the status and interpretation of treaties is emblematic of this approach, because they served, were constructed at the conference as “visible evidence” of the entitlement of the European countries assembled in Berlin to various parts, regions, areas of the African continent. Finally, once this series of “documents” were put together literally and figuratively at the Berlin Conference, they could, as 134 argued above, be considered part of a process of “collecting visible evidence” (Renov) for the case in favor of the subjugation of Africa. The importance of the above for the theorization of documentary is that the latter is arguably caught in a dual movement. The first movement has to do with the question of the “documentary” value of narrative(s) (such as those of explorers and missionaries). The second movement involves the notion of narrative as an a priori of documentary, i.e. that from which it emerges in a sense. From this dual movement, we may deduce that in some sense, documentary may be considered the daughter of narrative, that is, that in some ways, narrative may be regarded the condition of possibility of documentary, that which gives birth to it. This is no doubt a major paradox… We shall look at declarations and statements pronounced at the Conference to illustrate the above findings. 1. On the “Rationale” of the Conference and the Absence of Africans The construction of an Africa that could and needed to be colonized was a process that took place throughout the Berlin conference. On the opening day of the Conference, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck claimed as the goal of the conference: "To associate the natives of Africa to civilization through commerce, education and liberty and to contribute to the moral and material well-being of the populations" (Allain 30). 135 Clearly here, the notion of lack is spelled out in relation to the term “civilization” as well as the wherewithal to bring it about in Africa (via commerce, education, and liberty). Bismarck takes as a given that Africans are unable (lacking the ability) to guarantee the “moral and material well-being of the populations.” It should be stated in passing that “naturally,” no African was consulted, invited or present at a conference that claimed to seek to “associate” them to the benefits of civilization. In retrospect one wonders what any African would be doing at a conference that aimed at sausageing their continent. Still, the statement is no less oxymoronic as it claimed that “liberty” was one of the values it sought to share. We now know that the Berlin conference was undoubtedly one of the single most important events that put an end to the liberty of Africans and contributed significantly to the decline of their “moral and material well-being” for centuries to come. In effect, the conference argued for the need to put Africa under tutelage. It assumed that the presence of Africans was not necessary and that, following the famous quote by Karl Marx, Africans “cannot represent themselves. They must be represented”: Regarding native populations, most of whom should probably not be considered as not partaking in the rights of men, but “who in the current circumstances are in no way able to defend their own interests, the conference had to assume the role of unofficial tutor.” (Allain 30) 93 93 Here it is should be highlighted that the liberty, intelligence, genius of Africans as described in the first part of this chapter, was by the stroke of pen, without pulling any trigger, without a single bullet being fired, textually, and thus actually removed by fiat. This was a necessary construction of Africa, since the end of the quote explains to us how much of a “burden” it was for the different countries attending the conference to play the role of “tutors” of an entire continent. It is an ultimate act of power, of possession, of occupation of mind, body, and space. 136 Still on the question of representation, “bemoaning” the absence of Africans at the conference, Sir Baldwin Malet, the Ambassador of Great Britain, the largest colonial empire of modern times, issued, in a classic “liberal” posture, the following statement at the end of the conference: "May I remind you that the natives are not represented in our midst and yet, the decisions of the conference will Have extremely serious consequences for them (Allain 30). Desperately pursuing the task of constructing the meaning of the conference (and seeking to forestall any future readerly approach to its decisions), Belgian representative (Belgium, shall we remember got the lion share of the conference), Baron Lambermont was quick to state following: But economic interests were not your sole motives. You have at the same time served the cause of humanity, of civilization, of science. Such is the actual value and the noblest way of understanding the significance of the decisions of the conference. (Allain 30) Finally, having constructed Africa as needing and requiring colonization, the conference even created, or at least considered and discussed the category of the consenting victim at the proposal of the U.S. representative: Would it not be appropriate, regarding future European occupation, to turn into principle, the fact that their recognition depend on the willing consent of the natives whose countries would be turned into possessions, in the event that they did not initiate the aggressive act? (Allain 31) This pseudo liberal attitude clearly considers or claims to consider “treaties” as “documents” symbolizing the “consent’ of Africans to be colonized. It foregrounds the 137 notion that Africans, through the treaties they signed, were “willing victims” who “called for,” even “invited” the colonial onslaught. Moreover, it undermines itself by positing that in case there is no treaty, in a situation of self-defense on the part of Africans who would be first in “initiat[ing] the aggressive act,” ruthless violence would be called for. In other words, even in hypothetical terms there was no way out for Africans. Having signed the treaties, they had “invited” the colonial onslaught. Refusing to sign or defending their lands was construed as an “aggressive act,” the response to which was well known. 2. On the Violence and Reach of Language The Berlin conference was also a mise-en-scène of the violence of language, of the potential of language for violence. The General Act of the conference, its indoor and outdoor discussions testify to the fact that it was language that first occupied the African continent. Or rather that it was first through language, through the instrumentalization of language that Africa was occupied in a palace in Berlin, miles away from its shores. This is a dimension of the conference that does not seem to have been sufficiently isolated in analyses about it. Indeed, long before bullets were fired, people were executed, arms were chopped off, forced labor was imposed, language had created the conditions of possibility of the domination of the African continent. Language had seized the African space, appropriated it, dispossessed Africans of their lands, their rivers, the political, economic and cultural systems, their ability to have relevant influence on their own destinies. 138 Thus, even after the independence of African countries, with the more or less complete removal of European troops and presence in Africa, the language and words that made this presence possible is still widely operative in the iconic, audiovisual, scriptural representation of the continent. In other words the language of the nineteenth century has not only colonized the African continent before the soldiers and the administrators, but it has also colonized the regions of the mind and the imaginary, the unconscious and the affect, spaces that are more difficult to transform in a sense. There needs to be a second anti-colonial battle articulated around the fight against the language of colonialism, addressing all the areas colonized by this nineteenth century language. This phase of the battle involves ideas, images, books, films, audio recordings, economic and financial decisions and institutions, international institutions, all heirs of the colonial moment, all heirs in one form or another of the Berlin conference. E. Cinematic Allegories of the Berlin Conference It is clear that this language affects the imaginaries of African artists and filmmakers as well, as this is the current condition of their countries and continent. Most filmmakers on the African continent come from a country that was shaped by the letter or spirit of the Berlin conference. In other words, many of the issues they grapple with, the themes they address in their films, the affects they deal with are informed by and have direct or oblique resonance with the Berlin conference. In that sense, many of the films made by African filmmakers could be seen as allegorical commentary on the Berlin conference. 139 Indeed, it may be argued that a lot of films of the 1980s (the decade of the centenary of the Berlin conference), could be seen as allegories of this moment of African history. Thus one may think of the more openly political Med Hondo film Sarraounia (winner of the 1987 Yennenga stallion at the Pan-African Film Festival of Ouagadougou [FESPACO]), which stages the military encounter of Africans with European troops in the Niger River valley a decade after the Berlin conference and emphasizes African resistance to European conquest as one such allegory. Still in the 1980s, many of the films dismissed by many critics as a-historical, set in an anthropological timeless Africa, such as Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen (1987), Gaston Kaboré’s Wend Kuuni (1982) or Idrissa Ouedraogo’s Yaaba (1989), may be recuperated as oblique references the Berlin conference in seeking to recover, whether successfully or maladroitly an ante-colonial moment in Africa. They could be seen elegies (albeit at times hopelessly romantic, nostalgic, and even perhaps “guilty” of offering a bucolic continent at times devoid of conflicts) to a lost African agency following the Berlin conference. It may thus be no accident that the 1980s saw the profusion and international success of such fiction films. It was documentary film that dared address the question of the Berlin conference more frontally. A pioneer in the domain was Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck (who grew up in the Congo, Leopold II’s former personal property) with his documentary entitled Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (1992), which posits the Berlin conference as a prelude to 140 the Lumumba tragedy. On his part, Cameroonian 94 director Jean-Marie Téno’s historical aesthetics makes him often return to the primal scene of the imperialist crime. Thirteen years after examining some of the consequences of colonialism on his country and on Africa more generally in Afrique, je te plumerai (1992), Téno would revisit the scene of the Berlin conference and some of its consequences in 2005 in a film entitled The Colonial Misunderstanding. In the film, Téno casts missionaries as protagonists in an attempt to explore the archive of the Berlin conference. Globally speaking however, it could be argued that the Berlin Conference as a theme for the cinema still remains largely under-explored by filmmakers on the African continent. It took no less than 110 years for African cinema to revisit this event though the work of Téno. F. The Colonial Misunderstanding or Documentary as Historical Poetics Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Téno is one of the only filmmakers from the African continent to have frontally explored the history of Africa in the nineteenth century, particularly as it relates to the episteme of the Berlin conference. In The Colonial Misunderstanding, he revisits the history of missionary involvement in Africa and brings out its articulations with the imperial and colonial project. Taking the case study of the 94 Cameroon was part of the larger Congo basin that was discussed at the Berlin conference along with contemporary Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, the Central African Republic, Congo Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). A brief look at these countries shows the consequence of the Berlin conference in terms of which European power attending the conference ended up colonizing them. Thus the DRC was, as discussed, colonized by Belgium, Equatorial Guinea by Spain, Gabon, Congo Republic and the Central African Republic were French colonies. 141 German Rheinish mission (after all, the conference took place in Berlin, Germany’s capital), he patiently works out various threads in the narrative of these young European men, with an agrarian background, who saw in their mission to Africa, a ladder for social mobility during the first half of the nineteenth century. If one were to pitch this film as a one-liner title, it would go as follows: “From Evangelization to Extermination: Figures of the Missionary in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” For this was the gigantic task Téno had set for himself in this film. The film traces the history of the German Rheinish mission from its founding in 1799 in the Wuppertal Valley by 12 missionaries (reminiscent of the Christ’s 12 disciples) who initiated a revival process and sought to spread the Gospel to the four corners of the world, convinced that the second coming was imminent and that it was their mission to convert as many people as possible. Connected with the London Missionary Society, they would set up in South Africa in 1829 and found in 1830 a town known as Wuppertal in memory of their hometown. But the film shows us that Africa was always already constructed for and by the missionaries even before they left Europe. Thus we learn from historian Kathrin Roller that the missionaries reinterpreted a biblical verse from the Gospel according to Saint-Matthew (28:19) in which Christ tells his disciples to “Go therefore and teach the nations…” This injunction in the hands of the Rheinish mission became “Go therefore and teach the 142 heathens, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.” Clearly constructing African religions as outside the domain of God, they could now confidently set off to bring light and push back the boundaries of darkness. The film shows that throughout the mission’s stay in Africa over the course of more than a century, a number of figures of the missionary could be observed which we shall now examine. The first figure is that which existed prior to their departure from Germany, that of the missionary as farmer. Indeed, we learn that most of these young men were essentially farm boys for whom becoming missionaries and going to Africa was a mode of access to social mobility. Téno rightly wonders in retrospect in the film why they did not seek to transform their own living conditions in Germany (especially as they came from the city of none other than Friedrich Engels himself). Another major missionary figure is that of the missionary as colonial ideologue. The film offers the case of Friedrich Fabri, who was director of the Rheinish mission and who wrote the key textbook that reportedly set in motion the debate in Germany about colonies. In a book entitled Bedarf Deutschland der Kolonien? [Does Germany Need Colonies?], this missionary mounted economic, cultural and political arguments in favor of colonization, devising a triangle (mission, colonialism, economic interest) which posited all three as inseparable. 143 Another figure of the missionary that is deployed after their arrival in Africa is that of the missionary as land speculator. We learn in the film that having been given land to build their mission station and a school by Herero leader, Samuel Maherero, the missionaries did not hesitate to sell this land to the first German colonists who offered them a lot of cash for it, without asking permission of their host. This decision marked the beginning of conflicts between Hereros and missionaries, as it raised the question of land and the semiotics of what it means to be symbolically “sold” or “given” a piece of land. These opposing interpretations of the status and value of land were what an African historian referred to as the “colonial misunderstanding” (the notion the film takes its title from). Knowing what we now know of the history of colonialism, one wonders the extent to which this was a misunderstanding per se, as opposed to what we referred to earlier as the semiotics of conquest that drove these missionaries. Let us remember that they were already on the battlefield for souls of the “heathens” of Africa, whom they did not necessarily consider as “brethren.” This conflict will also bring about other figures of the missionary. One of them is the missionary as spy. When German colonial troops sought to occupy the entire Southwest African region, they declared war on the Herero and their neighbors. In the film we learn of a missionary named Kuhlmann who, sent to deliver a letter by Samuel Maherero to German Commander Leutwein, decided, following pressure (fearing being tried as war criminals), to give away the positions of the Herero, their war plans and tactics. It is interesting thus to know that to save their own individual lives (the notion of giving one’s 144 life for one’s congregation being one of the lasting messages of Christ) they chose to betray thousands of lives. The consequence of this would be the complete annihilation of the Herero army. Worst still, another missionary, Heinrich Vedder, probably the most notorious character the film presents us, would take the missionary logic to its extreme consequences by incarnating several figures, all of which would be profoundly detrimental to history itself, from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. Starting in the obvious figure of the missionary as proselytizer (the film shows a photograph in which he occupies the center of the frame and is surrounded by his African converts), he was known as being in favor of the oxymoron known as “humane” colonialism. Heinrich Vedder was present during Germany’s colonial war in Southwest Africa. As the Herero armies were defeated, a German General, Lothar von Trotta would initiate what historian Joachim Zeller refers to as the “genocidal phase” of the war, demanding that neither children, nor women, neither young, nor old be spared. Von Trotta would issue an extermination order, which took effect in late 1904. As a result, the entire Herero nation was driven to the desert so they would starve and die. This would cause the death of thousands, becoming the first genocide of the twentieth century. When the order to stop the extermination process arrived from Berlin three months later, a new phase in the career of Heinrich Vedder would be inaugurated. With the building by 145 the German army of the first concentration camps in modern history in such town as Swakopmund and Lüderitz, Heinrich Vedder, Kuhlmann and other missionaries who were still trusted by parts of the Herero population, would drive their converts straight to the concentration camps. Together they would produce yet another figure of the missionary, that of accessory to genocide and extermination. But this would not mark the end of the career of Heinrich Vedder. With Hitler’s access to power in 1933, Vedder would go on to become a staunch supporter of Nazism, comparing Adolf Hitler to Martin Luther and declaring that the Nazi “revolution” was the consummation of Luther’s revolution and providing us with yet another figure, that of the missionary as Nazi apologist. Like other supporters of Nazism, Heinrich Vedder would undergo de-nazification following the end of WWII. Yet, clearly believing that de-nazification only stopped at the borders of Europe, Heinrich Vedder would go on to repurpose his racist ideas in Apartheid South Africa when he was appointed by Prime Minister Malan as Senator in charge of Native Affairs in Southwest Africa (current Namibia was under South African mandate). True to his creed, he would turn into law his belief in the separation of the races (with regard to miscegenation) and their proximity for the sake of exploitation of one by other. In doing so, he attested to the notion that Apartheid South Africa was a spiritual heir to Nazi Germany as Ivorian reggae musician Alpha Blondy reminded us in 1985 in a song entitled “Apartheid is Nazism.” 146 With Heinrich Vedder, the missionary project comes full circle, foregrounding the notion that the road to extermination started with the fanatic belief in the hierarchy of races in the realm of religion. It is thus no surprise that the film mentions a major paradox, which occurred during preparations for the commemoration in Germany of the centenary of the Herero genocide in 2004. Curators seeking to mount an exhibition on the missionary work of Vedder were rather embarrassed to learn that he was also a Nazi. The paradox here lies in the fact Germany as a country had undergone a process of collective “de- nazification” in the wake of WWII, yet no mental, cultural, and psychological decolonization has taken place yet. It is almost as if there had been an atonement for the latest crime (WWII and the Holocaust), but not the primal crime of colonialism, a situation which leaves the country in a kind of historical qua temporal schizophrenia. In that sense, we could see the work of missionaries at various points in the nineteenth and twentieth century, as symbolic of the Hannah Arendt’s trilogy on the origins of totalitarianism which include a book on imperialism, another on anti-Semitism, and the last on totalitarianism. The various missionary characters, the Fabris, the Kuhlmanns and the Vedders together embody all three dimensions. They bring together the theses of Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism and Hannah Arendt in her trilogy, who both posit, in spite of the respective singularity of colonialism and the Holocaust, the fact that the two can be put on the same plane of progression. It may thus not be far-fetched to affirm that colonialism was one of the sources of the Holocaust (if only for the transfer of 147 concentration camp 95 “technology” from Southwest Africa to Europe in the space of two decades (1904-07 genocide of the Herero, 1930s-1940s, the Jewish Holocaust). We shall now turn our attention to the aesthetics of the film as well, looking at Jean- Marie Téno’s documentary gesture. Throughout the film, Téno is highly self-reflexive, guiding us from the birth of the idea of the film to the process of its making. He does this chiefly through the soundtrack whereby he peppers the film with audio commentary on the image. The commentary is not always illustrative. In fact, it is both “announciative” and “critical” of the image. On the birth of the film project, his voice informs us that it came out of the screening of one of his previous films entitled Vacances au pays [A Trip to the Country] (2000) in a building located on 9 Missionstrasse (Mission Street), with an audience of missionaries and returned volunteers from Africa. In this mise en abîme, he gives us the model of a cinema that comes out of itself. But this is also a cinema that deploys several positionings within itself. The first is that of mapping. The introductory shots of the film look at the Wuppertal valley from above and from the streets, do their own work of geography, mapping it, situating it, pinning it down, as if Téno was recasting himself in the role of explorer of 95 Here, it is also possible to note differences. Unlike WWII, where concentration camps largely preceded extermination process, in Namibia, they came after with the survivors of extermination. According to historian Zeller who is interviewed in the film, the question of the link between prison and labor, the infamous “arbeit macht frei” of Nazis was arguably initiated there. In some ways, this film could be considered further historical contextualization of the Holocaust, i.e. that a general history of the Holocaust may have to pass through Namibia as one of the routes on the itinerary. 148 the twenty-first century, this time coming from Africa, to understand and dissect the habits of the “tribe” known as missionaries. Indeed the whole film could be considered a work of reverse ethnography, as if Africa was coming to Europe to try to understand (epistephilia) the strange beliefs of missionaries who in their infinite zeal to proselytize, left behind them colonialism, genocide and Apartheid. It is as if faced with such a legacy, Téno the filmmaker sought to find explanations as to the reasons behind so much fanaticism and destruction. Who were these tribes of missionaries? What were their rites and rituals? What motivated them? In order to fulfill this goal, Téno structures his film as an essay that mounts arguments, uses citations (the interviews) that cut across time and space. This film-essay motions back and forth between the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, between Africa and Europe, between Germany and Namibia, Togo, and Cameroon (all former German colonies), cities (Berlin, Wuppertal, Cologne and Lomé, Douala, Windhoek, etc). At the heart of this mobility across space and time, is the act of editing, of the dialectic of sound and image, which bring together these disparate elements. There are instances of mnemonic graphic montage (showing Wuppertal in South Africa as commentary and image of Wuppertal in Germany as the early missionaries would have envisioned it), argumentative montage (image-arguments deployed in different locations in Africa and Europe buttressing each other in the space of the film), etc. 149 In the process, Téno creates different roles for the documentary. There is the role of documentary filmmaking as art criticism. The director takes us to the Rauthenstrauch Joest Museum and reveals yet another dimension of missionaries, the figure of the missionary as art collector, for missionaries also returned to Europe with African art objects. Téno’s camera critiques the museum’s display style (objects placed haphazardly, reminiscent of the newly created French Musée du Quai Branly), the lack of categorization and the ethical question of voyeurism with regard to the status of certain art objects. In the process, he raises the question of the relationship between the cinema and religious art by interrogating the status of African religious art in European museums, as if one art form was coming to the rescue of another art form in order to produce a discourse of resistance. Téno also envisions for documentary a prized place in the field of historiography and constructs this position in different ways. In his archeology of the missionary episteme, he comes across an instance of racialization of the historiography of Christianity in his own country (Cameroon), and sees it as the task of documentary to “set the [historical] record straight” by showing the ways in which Joseph Merrick, a Jamaican adept of liberation theology first brought Christianity to Cameroon. He does this as a way to counteract what history books have retained, that is, that it was Alfred Saker, an English missionary and deputy to Joseph Merrick, who was the first missionary in Cameroon. In so doing, Téno gives documentary the role of “corrector,” counter-history to official historiography. 150 Going even further, Téno does nothing short of dealing with the grand historical narratives of the last two centuries, colonialism, totalitarianism and apartheid, with genocide and the missionary project as common threads between them. Moving incessantly between past and present (the people he interviews in 2004 are holding a retrospective discourse on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), putting them in a dialectic relationship, interrogating the past in light of present concerns (the film is also an archeology of the humanitarian idea, which the director critiques in his conclusion to the film), the film performs a work of historical poetics. Exploring the how of history through the cinema, using the camera, editing, the voice-over, to unearth the mechanisms of history, how history works. In addition to laying bare the workings of history, Téno also asks questions of history, to history. By filming Werner Andreas Wienecke, one of the last missionaries of the Rheinish mission in Swakopmund, the site of one of the first concentration camps in history, he prods us to wonder what it may feel to live in a space so saturated with a history of death and destruction. It is thus no accident that he chooses to conclude the film in Swakopmund. Indeed, the act of filming children at play in this town invites the following historico-philosophico-poetic questions: Do the children of Swakopmund have anything to say to the survivors of Auschwitz? Do Auschwitz survivors have anything to ask the children of Swakopmund? 151 CHAPTER 3. Documentary in the Age of Colonial Occupation - The Case of Britain The next two chapters will concern themselves with the aftermath of the colonial conquest in Africa. They will look at the ways in which imperialism and colonialism in their British and French forms shaped, influenced, affected and transformed the documentary tradition as they came in continent with the African continent. By 1900, the majority of the African continent was under domination. Having thus conquered the African continent, it was now necessary for colonizing countries to administer it, to set up a colonial order of things. This chapter will posit the principle of radical irreducibility for the cinema and thus for documentary, one of its features. It takes as a point of departure that the cinema or its account cannot be exhausted by any single national, regional, generic, functional paradigm. For the purposes of this chapter, documentary will be considered in its own positivity as well as in its relation with history and politics, the two defining axes of the colonial moment. This account will not let either history or politics phagocyte the documentary, make it its province, even if such was and has always been their intention. Instead, it will put them in relation, on equal terms, and reveal the mutual pushes and pulls, the impasses and the aporia inherent in such a relationship. Having these two poles as the compass of 152 our chapter will allow us to bring out the specificities of each, but most importantly, what the relation between the two has yielded and also what it was not able to do This chapter shall deal primarily with the twentieth century even as it sometimes makes forays back to the nineteenth for contextualization. It will address the historical moment during which countries of the African continent were under a new political dispensation, that of their management, administration and thus domination by the colonial apparatus. We shall examine what happens to documentary when it goes under the rollercoaster of the colonial apparatus. Is there anything left afterwards? Is there any residue? Do the politics and history of colonialism exhaust the documentary? It is important to remember that prior to the advent of the cinema, the colonial idea was about the image. In the previous chapter we saw how the image of Africa, as conveyed through words on paper were sufficient to wet the appetite of the major European powers to get involved in the carving up of the African continent. The images were produced by promoters of scientific racism, physical anthropologists and other missionaries who saw even before they left the shores of Europe, heathens and godless people. In other words, there was already a body of non or proto-cinematic images floating around in Europe throughout the nineteenth century through different media and forms such as books, drawings, illustrations, photography, newspapers, travel literature, etc. In that sense, the cinema was only a late or rather a newcomer in a historical moment that had already involved other media and forms of expression. How then to address the question of 153 medium specificity, of the positivity of the cinema in such a context? Is it a case of articulation or subordination? How to make a case for articulation as opposed to subordination? The specificity of the cinema has to do among other things with its ability to reach a mass audience at one time, to convey the illusion or impression of reality through movement, but also to comprise many elements from other media, that is all the elements often used to differentiate it from other media such as narrative, movement, gesture, figures, mimesis, sound, speech, the feeling of being there, etc. In this approach then, we shall explore a politics, an aesthetics and a poetics of repression in documentary, for the overarching regime of colonialism is a regime of repression. Here repression is understood in the dual sense, as oppression as well as foreclosing the emergence of expression of liberational and aspirational impulses. Naturally, a pro- colonialist scholar may see a liberational ethics and aesthetics as emblematized by the white man’s burden to liberate benighted race. Such is not our intent and we will thus not explore this dimension of the debate. Some may even wish to see a dual balanced aesthetics/dialectics of oppression/liberation. Again, such will not be our intent. We shall explore the effects of a particular deployment of the documentary form on the recipients and even on the makers. This has to do with making moving images available in large quantities and trying to influence spectators, in a sympathetic magic fashion (watch this film and become pro-colonialist), and involves the aesthetics of distancing, not distanciation, indeed even an aesthetics of opposition. 154 These chapters will thus seek to answer a number of fundamental questions for documentary film which, incidentally, came into being and even of age in the age of colonialism. In some ways nonfiction/documentary film and colonialism, in the African context at least, had parallel itineraries that often joined. It was difficult for them not to meet and not to influence each other. But the chapter will be organized around a number of fundamental interrogations: To what extent did the colonial moment affect the documentary? We shall explore the status of documentary in three moments of the colonial administration era. The first being the moment from the beginning the cinema in the 1890s till the end of WWI, which represents the moment of cinema coming into its own as a full-fledged medium which will have a tremendous influence on the rest of the twentieth century. The second period, arguably, that of the heydays of documentary, is also that of the height of the colonial moment, that between the two wars. The last moment of colonial documentary is arguably after WWII, when empire is inexorably coming to an end, certainly in Africa. Through these three periods, we will explore the fate of documentary in its relationship to the colonial era, the ways in which it shaped and was shaped by colonialism, and what this means for the study and understanding of the documentary as an art form. We will first explore these moments for British colonialism (chapter 3) and later for French colonialism (chapter 4). 155 To some extent, these three moments also represent specific articulations of figures and institutions involved in the cinema during the colonial era. The first period, from the beginning of cinema until WWI, was to a large extent at the initiative of individuals (amateurs, travelers, etc.). WWI sees the entrance of the army in the filmmaking process for the sake of propaganda. But in the wake of WWI, more initiatives that would start with initial individual impetus would very quickly articulate themselves with the larger forces of the imperial state either on the ground, in Africa, at the level of colonial administration, or in the metropolis through policies and experiments engineered to “suit the intellectual level of natives.” Each of these experiments would see the coming together of institutions in the metropolis, on the ground institutions and prominent figures, the confluence of church and state, academe (anthropology, language studies) and cinematic institutions (the British Film Institute) in the domination project. It is these articulations that we shall now explore with a number of filmic case studies. The study of filmic cases will be placed in dialectic relation with these institutional, historical and policy analyses. Early Documentary and British Colonialism We have already begun to address the question of early documentary and colonialism through the work of the Lumière brothers in Africa. We discussed some of the genres 156 they created including the menimal genre, the travelogue, and the official cinema. In the British colonial context, some of the same categories apply. We learn from Andrew D. Roberts that it was pioneer inventor and filmmaker Robert W. Paul who first sent a cameraman to “record ‘actualities’ in Portugal, Spain and Egypt” and who, much like Alexandre Promio for the Lumière, brought back “scenes of the pyramids, Cairo and camels” 96 (191). It should be mentioned that Robert W. Paul was an electrical engineer who, much like the Lumière brothers, reacted to the pioneering work of Thomas Edison. Thus, Paul reportedly chanced upon film when he was asked by two Greek businessmen to produce a likeness of the kinetoscope, which had not yet been patented in Europe (McKernan, “Paul, R. W.”). With his colleague Birt Acres, they made their first film in February 1895, which featured their “mutual acquaintance Henry Short outside Acres' home in Barnet” making this “the first film to be shot and exhibited (through the peepshow Kinetoscope) in Britain” (McKernan, “Paul, R. W.”). Two years later in 1897, the Warwick Trading Company, thus renamed by US-born Charles Urban who had taken over its management (he relocated the previously named Continental Commerce on Warwick Court in downtown London), sent Edgar Hyman to South Africa who made a “dozen films in and around the principal towns including one of President Kruger leaving his home for the Volkesraad in Pretoria” (Roberts 191). 96 I was able to watch a number of films at the BFI with a similar picturesque impulse. The titles are self- explanatory: Egyptian Bullock-Pump Drawing Water (1897), Egyptian Street Scene (1897?), Women Fetching Water from the Nile (1897?). They were partof a VHS tape entiteld “Pre-1900 Compilation” donated to the BFI by the National Archives of Canada. 157 The last year of the nineteenth century witnessed the beginning of one of the bloodiest colonial wars on the African continent, known as the Anglo-Boer war where descendents of Dutch settlers who had already founded a number of republics such as the Transkei Republic, the Orange Free State, etc, faced off with British troops for the control of South African land, and mineral resources. As a reminder, the race for South Africa had begun centuries earlier with first the arrival of Dutch settlers as early as the seventeenth century. The Southern tip of the African continent was for centuries a stopover point on the way for Portuguese and Dutch vessels on route to India and Asia. Dutch vessels on their way to India would leave some of their passengers in Africa to produce goods. These would be the first European settlers in South Africa. With the success of their experience, more people would come over and form a distinct community of farmers or “Boers,” later joined by German settlers and French Huguenots. Great Britain later took interest in South Africa and first established the Cape Colony. But very quickly disagreements between Boers and British colonial authorities would occur, which after, several attempts at unifying the “white race” would result in the all-out Anglo-Boer War which broke out in 1899. This war was arguably the very first filmed war in history 97 , involved Britain, the most powerful colonial empire of the day, and lasted from 1899 to 1902. Once again, the Warwick Trading Co. was at the forefront of covering the war as Edgar Hyman and Joseph Rosenthal were specifically dispatched to South Africa for the occasion. They 97 Recent information from Guido Convents seems to indicate that the British war for the conquest of Sudan in 1897 was also filmed two years before the Anglo-Boer War. This may suggest that Sudan might be the location for the first filmed war in history. 158 reportedly “filmed movements such as crossings of the Modder river (December 1899), and Vaal river (May 1900), the Boer surrender of Kroonstad, and the raising of British flags at Johannesburg and Pretoria (May - June 1900)” (Roberts 191). Not to be left aside, R. W. Paul also wanted to be part of the pioneering of the war film as he in effect gave cameras to two British soldiers. Other notable figures involved in this groundbreaking moment were former Thomas Edison collaborator W. K. L. Dickson on behalf of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company who had a 70mm camera (Roberts 191). In effect, the British Film Institute has listed eight British cameramen who filmed the war. In addition to Hyman, Rosenthal and Dickson, 98 there were Colonel Walter Calverly Beever and presumably Sylver Melson (the two soldiers above mentioned), John Benette Stanford, who also filmed for Warwick Trading Co., Sydney Goldman and C. Rider Noble. Interestingly enough, one of the most striking aspects of these films is the structuring absence of Africans. The war is taking place on their land, yet they are filmically and politically constructed out of this war, which was for a long time remembered as a “white-on-white” war. Recent historiography however has shown that over 17,000 soldiers (African and Caribbean troops of the British Empire as well as black South Africans enlisted by the Boer) perished during the war. None of the titles seems to refer to this at all. Thus, as early as the dawn of the twentieth century, the cinema 98 Dickson even reportedly wrote a book on his African trip entitled The Biograph in Battle: Its Story in the South African War Related with Personal Experiences (1901). 159 participated in the work of erasure of memory, confining itself to the role of paean to the glory of Empire outside its borders. 99 Among the early nonfiction films that can be found at the British Film Institute which actually feature Africans is Savage South Africa: Attack and Repulse (1899) also shot by the Warwick Trading Company. Filmed in London, this 1 minute 14 second film is already a re-enactment of a battle in the mode of the menimal genre. We had mentioned in the previous chapter, that very often after African armies were physically defeated, traveling shows would be put up to reenact European victory over them. In this film, the camera faces white troops standing in a row, holding their guns in shooting position. It appears that they are expecting something off-screen. All of a sudden, they aim and shoot off screen and set out to fight. We see South African blacks, presumably Zulus enter the frame from all sides. They are holding spears while the whites have guns. They do not last ten seconds and are automatically repulsed by white troops mounted on horses. We then see infantrymen waving to signify victory. The cavalry saved them from the “natives.” 99 At the BFI, it is possible to see, as part of a Red Cross compilation, a film entitled Boer Attack on a Red Cross Outpost made by Mitchell and Kenyon. Clearly anti-Boer, the title itself is a call to wonder what kind of people would attack a humanitarian institution like the Red Cross on the battlefield. It must be added that the BFI Screenonline Web site lists the film under a new title, Shelling the Red Cross, and describes it as a fake war film shot in the Blackburn area, UK. A notable dimension of this film is the use of the off-screen space to convey the sense of danger (a bomb/grenade thrown from off-screen space, unexpectedly appears in the frame and leaves the Red Cross helpless). It is a space clearly posited as a space of mise-en-scène, which by virtue of our inability in these days of early cinema to obtain either a reverse or a panning shot, conceals indispensable narrative information and leaves the viewer in the hands of the film director. 160 This reenactment is quite significant at several levels. It shows how easily and quickly victory can presumably be obtained over Africans. The limits of the film medium play a major ideological role here, because the duration of the film is constructed in such a way as to elicit the idea of the brevity of the attack and swift responses from the boys. It also foregrounds nature (the savagery of spears) versus culture (the sophistication of guns). The organization of the frame also plays no small role in the narrative. The fact that the camera is pointed at British soldiers looking off-screen clearly highlights the notion that they are the ones on the side of legitimacy. While such features of filmmaking as the pan had not been invented by then (1896), nothing prevented the cameraman from framing the two camps in the same shot even if they were to face each other. This directorial choice to emphasize the posture and demeanor of British troops subliminally makes them appear legitimate, especially as they are European. Framing here is part of ideology. The summum of this happens when Africans literally intrude in this lily-white frame from both sides, clearly as unwanted, clearly not desired. This, even without the intervention of the cavalry, was enough to create narrative sympathy for British troops who find themselves assaulted on both sides. It is now Africans who are intruding on European diegetic/colonial space. They must be repulsed, hence the intervention of the cavalry coming to the rescue. It is clear that Britons were the target audience for this film, which foregrounds repression both thematically and formally. Thematically, we are dealing with the repulsion, the “resistance” of British troops against Africans defending their territory. A 161 first level of repression is simply that of context. It seems as if Africans just sprang out of nowhere to take it out on British troops. There is no exploration of why the British were in Africa in the first place (even if the baby-steps of the medium could hardly account for this). Here the limitations of the medium conspire to uphold the imperial idea via shorthand. Because the film strip is only a minute long, the filmmaker is entitled to take shortcuts to get to the heart of his story, and thus represses the African side of the story. Additionally, the effective use of off-screen space should also be mentioned. Here the filmmaker manages to create a feeling of insecurity, of danger by not offering (or not being able to offer- let us remember that the pan or reverse shot were not yet possible), a reverse shot showing the assaulting Africans. This clearly intensifies suspense, and thus interpellates the spectators in an identificatory posture with the British soldiers who are even trapped by the framing itself. The costume design for the African armies put the finishing touch in exacerbating the opposition between the two camps, the latter being unfamiliar, thus driving the viewer toward siding with the chromatically and vestimentary similar. In addition to these reenacted documentaries, actual battles were filmed between Africans and British troops in South Africa in the days of the early documentary. Thus, H. D. Roberts reportedly filmed the suppression of a Zulu rebellion in 1906 for none other than the Warwick Trading Co. (Roberts 192). It may be argued that the Warwick Trading Co. was one of the leading institutions of early colonial documentary 100 as they had 100 According to Guido Convents, Warwick Trading Co. counted among the top three British film companies alongside the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company and R. W. Paul, all previously mentioned (69). 162 cameramen in British-dominated Africa from the end of the nineteenth century to WWI. In addition to their South African films, they were also involved in making films in the rest of the continent. They filmed the Sultan of Morocco as early as 1901. Having developed the habit of giving cameras to soldiers, they entrusted Captain Ralph Cobbold to film the Somalia military expedition against anti-colonialist and nationalist leader Sayyid Mohammed Abdille Hasan. Filming wildlife was also the stuff of Warwick Trading Co. In East Africa, they (Cherry Kearton) even filmed the famous Theodore Roosevelt expedition to Kenya in 1909. A. Lobbying and Early Documentary Cinema One of the significant features of the early documentary is its association with lobbying interests, especially within the framework of the colonial project. It seems that earlier than most, colonial lobbies instantly discovered the potential of the reality claim of documentary in furthering their desire and ambition to put the resources of the African continent at their disposal. Just as imperialism was symptomatic of the rise of the bourgeoisie, the administrative phase of the colonial moment was also central to the entire dispositif, for once the military and political questions were largely under control, it was now possible to implement the initial and structuring agenda, that of economic exploitation. This process of taking civilian ownership of African lands, of exploiting them, of pillaging mineral resources required the presence of Europeans to in effect be party to the “black man’s burden,” i.e. make him work for the enrichment of Europe. 163 According to Guido Convents, institutions like the Royal Geographic societies started showing films about Africa as early as 1906. He adds that the years 1906-1907 constitute the era where lobbies began to actively use the cinema to promote their colonial interests (80). It was The African World weekly, which first directly interpellated a film company and requested that they be involved in the colonial adventure. Indeed, on February 17, 1906, the magazine published a memorandum to draw the attention of the Charles Urban Co, on the completion of the railroad, which crossed Uganda. This memorandum sought to convince the Charles Urban Company that a film about this region of Africa, which had recently accessed civilization thanks to the railroad, would in all likelihood be successful and enjoyed by European spectators. (Convents 81) The magazine would announce a few months later the launching of a film expedition that would seek to document, from the Cape to Cairo 101 , industrial achievements along with African flora and fauna. We see that, as with the Lumière, the anthropo-zoological impetus was almost always already present in the European deployment of the cinema in Africa. Indeed, the London Zoological Society reportedly asked the members of the expedition, not only to film animals, but also to actually bring back rare living animals back to London in addition to recording on the phonograph the languages of Africans. In the colonial imaginary, the African wilderness was constructed in such a way as to encompass both men and animals. 101 Several films were made on the Cape to Cairo paradigm, which metaphorically represents the extent of the ambition of British imperialism in Africa. We were able to see the 1930 version of the eponymous film, which we will discuss in the next part of this chapter devoted to the documentary in the interwar years. 164 Significantly, this filmic expedition (the term itself evokes the colonial impulse) received support from none other than the British South Africa Company (BSAC, named after the British East India Company) by the man who incarnated British imperialism in its full glory in Africa, Cecil John Rhodes. 102 As is well known, Cecil John Rhodes ultimately founded the now world famous De Beers Company, used the semiotics of conquest to acquire and give his own name to lands that were for a long time referred to as the Rhodesias (contemporary Zambia and Zimbabwe). With the BSAC (The African World Magazine was one of their primary outlets and sought to persuade the British public and authorities of the necessary exploitation of the continent), documentary becomes a wing of imperial propaganda. Eight months later, on February 12, 1907, BSAC put together a major private screening event at the famed London Palace Theater. Possibly shot by Lionel Cooke and Brian Bellasis 103 for the Urban Bioscope Company, the films screened were made along the lines of those made by Alexandre Promio for the Lumière in the northern part of the continent, naturally emphasizing the specificities of the Southern, Eastern and Central parts of the continent. 104 Thus, moving images of the Port of the Cape, a train trip to river 102 Megalomaniac to the extreme, Cecil Rhodes was quoted by Hannah Arendt as saying: “ I would annex the planets if I could…” (17). It seems that Rhodes’ ultimate dream was not only to link the Cape to Cairo, but also to create a secret society that would push the boundaries of the British Empire to the furthest corners of the earth. He reportedly wanted to recover the United Sates for the benefit of the British Empire, thus truly ready to turn back the clock of history. 103 Guido Convents argues that they may have made the films (81-82). 104 It is not clear that Cooke and Bellasis saw the Lumière films on this topic. In the vent they did not, it could be argued that the choice of themes thus has less to do with cinematic specificity than with a more general colonial structure of feeling that ran across Britain, France, Germany, Portugal and others colonizing countries involved on the African continent. 165 Kafue in then Rhodesia, panoramas of Victoria Falls, the building of one of the most state-of-the art bridges of the time on river Kafue were screened to the great delight of the audience. The African World magazine reportedly published positive critiques of the event. Ultimately, under the stewardship of its owner, Leo Weinthal, the magazine would regularly organize film evenings. A gifted photographer himself, the newspaper magnate sought to oversee, with his own presence, “progress” made in Africa and document it filmically. He thus set out in May 1912 for a trip to Africa. Details of his trip were often reported in the magazine back in London and had reached as far as possible as he reactivated the explorer project to “publicize the enormous potential and wealth of the African continent” (Convents 100) and thus garnered support from what we might refer to, following Dwight Eisenhower, as the “government-industrial complex.” A decade later, he organized one of the galas he had the secret of, and invited the who-is- who of London to show the filmic results of his thorough exploration of the continent. The 3000 strong audience, which attended the event at the world- famous London Opera House naturally, included shareholders of the most important mining interests in such mine-rich countries as South Africa, the Rhodesias and Belgian Congo (Katanga). Introduced by the Public Relations representative of BSAC, the four-part screening featured the filmed chronicle of Weinthal’s trip from Southampton to the Cape (Convents 101). According to Convents, the first part of the screening dealt with life in Cape Town 166 and ended with the Zambezi Express Train de Luxe departing for the Rhodesias. The second part chronicled life in Kimberley and devoted a segment to the De Beers diamond mines, life in Bulawayo and, like its predecessors from the Charles Urban Company, shots of the majestic Victoria Falls. The third part reportedly focused on the actual exploitation of gold, diamond, coal and copper mines in the region, while the film ended with paeans to the major cities of Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Durban and the departure of the boat from Natal back to London, properly tying up the different threads the imperial narrative of the highest order (101). Yet, The African World would not stop there. It would also send its own team of filmmakers to West Africa as well, all the way to Kano in Northern Nigeria. The general press reception of the entire lobby-engineered filmic production on Africa was rather positive and it is important to note that they served several functions. In addition to advocating the interests of mining companies, the films also sought to mobilize British citizens to come over and make a fortune in Africa, following a well-established British colonial tradition that had been initiated by the advocates of promotional literature for the United States a few centuries earlier. Thus, following the screening of a film program entitled Rhodesia Today in 1913 in Glasgow, The Scottish Critic periodical wrote that if the BSAC was keen on encouraging emigration in Southern Rhodesia (which it owned in effect), it had better show its “educational” films in “popular centers in Great Britain” (Convents 105). 167 Following a screening jointly organized by BSAC and The African World of the same program at the New Alhambra in Leicester Square on 20 May 1913, the press reportedly concluded that BSAC “had offered a living proof of the art of governing this part of British Africa” (Convents 102). The following day, another newspaper The Daily Telegraph felt that “in general, no medium elicits the public’s interest for British overseas possessions better than the cinematograph” (Convents 102). Thus, BSAC was able to reach several objectives. Not only publicizing itself, recruiting laborers and future citizens, but also showing the British government how to govern and be better understood by the public, all this presumably, with the help of the cinema. B. Other Key Figures and Institutions in British Early Documentary in the Colonial Era We shall now briefly explore some other key figures of the British early colonial documentary. These figures illustrated themselves most in the already defined menimal genre, which made both anthropologists and zoologists happy. We shall not dwell on this, as it is only the British version of a more generalized structure of feeling. Suffice it to cite the names of figures like Cherry Kearton, known as the master of wildlife filmmaking who made among others a film entitled A Primitive Man’s Career to Civilization shot in 1909 in black and white and on 35mm and which was used as visible evidence for the study and spread of evolutionism. Kearton is known to have met former US President Theodore Roosevelt on August 23, 1909 near Mount Kenya. Befriending Roosevelt, he 168 would make a film entitled Roosevelt in Africa, the copyrights of which he registered at the Library of Congress on April 18, 1919 (Convents 89). Another key figure to mention is Algerian-born Félix Mesguich, who was also one of the first three Lumière operators who ended up working for Charles Urban, in London. In addition to filming in different countries and regions around the world as he did for Lumière such as Spain, Turkey, the Caucasus, and the Olympic Games, he would also go and film in Africa once he left the Lumière. He would thus visit Upper Egypt, and film, again like Alexandre Promio, the Nile, camels, the road to Gizeh, the Sphinx. Unlike Promio however, he would also visit Khartoum and Fachoda in Sudan. We will take a closer look at Félix Mesguich in our discussion of the French colonial documentary. Globally speaking then, non-fiction films in so-called British Africa in the pre-WWI era was largely a private individual, or lobbying exercise, i.e. a globally private affair. It was only after WWI 105 that there would be discussions of regulations, committees and other laws and decrees pertaining to the cinema in its relationship to colonial Africa. Colonial Documentary in the Interwar Years There seems to be almost a consensus around the notion that the years of WWI were watershed for the realization of the importance of the filmic medium for propaganda. While Andrew D. Roberts argues that “[the First World War] also enhanced the status of 105 We will address the cinematic treatment of the two world wars in relation to Africa in chapter 5. 169 film as a medium for reporting and propaganda” (195), for John M. Mackenzie, “[Film] had emerged from the First World War clearly recognized a significant medium, and discussion continued on its educational role and its capacity to create a national ideology” (Propaganda 76). This realization did not however immediately lead to film policies in colonial Africa under British rule. Indeed, for at least a decade after WWI, relatively non-institutional films were made in Africa by various British companies and individuals. There were in effect a significant number of amateurs who made films during the colonial era, and who would deserve a separate study. The rhetorical posture of amateurs, in the early part of the colonial era, gives them at least two options. Because they owe allegiance to no official power either governmental, industrial or even filmic, they may simply film what they wish, and if they have a grain of leftism in them, they may film and show the problems and abuses of colonialism, denounce it in effect. The second option is the easiest one and the most frequent one in that, they could willingly put themselves at the disposal of colonial ideology and do its bidding, by turning themselves into unofficial subcontractors of colonial ideology, indeed as consenting actors and agents in the spreading of the principles, ideas and practices of colonialism. The aspect of the amateur that we will encounter in this study will follow the second model. Outside of the amateur tradition, it is possible to draw a map, a cartography of documentary in the Interwar Years, with a range of actors, specific practices, specific 170 modes of address and specific audiences. One of the most significant actors was of this period was no doubt the production company known as British Instructional Films, Ltd. A. The Colonial Cinema of British Instructional Films Ltd. According to Sarah Easen, the company was founded in 1919 by Harry Bruce Woolfe in the aftermath of WWI and was notable for an impure deployment of the cinema by simultaneously using maps, models, animation, reenactment, actuality, footage, etc. Reportedly started in a “makeshift army hut,” British Instructional specialized in nonfiction films with an emphasis on the “educational” (McCallum, “British”). They were reportedly renowned for their nature documentaries. Their work was referred to by Paul Rotha as the “sheet anchor of the British film industry” (McCallum, “British”). This comment by Rotha is perhaps no accident since British Instructional is known to have trained a great number of technicians for the British film industry in the interwar years. Indeed, Rotha himself had his debut film produced by Bruce Woolfe, as did Stuart Legg, another member of the British documentary movement, and naturally, primus inter pares, the father of the movement himself, John Grierson. The latter’s film Drifters was co- produced by New Era, British Instructional’s distributor. British Instructional thus finds itself at the nexus of empire and metropolis. With regard to the colonies, it made a fiction film entitled Palaver (1926), shot by Geoffrey Barkas and set in Northern Nigeria. Featuring a love triangle between the District Officer (on the 171 ground representative of the British Empire), a prospector and their object of desire, a nurse, the film has been seen as an equivalent to a Western. Naturally, Africa was nothing but a backdrop. It was however, in the domain of documentary that British Instructional would most illustrate itself, by producing a significant body of films, some of which we shall analyze in the following lines. Blazing the Trail (1926) is one of the best-known British Instructional Films (BIF). A seven minute film, it is part of the practice of BIF of releasing ‘single reel educational films’. It stands out in terms of the developmental discourse inherent in the white man’s burden idea. The film here lauds the advent of European construction technology in Africa. Set in the Gold Coast (contemporary Ghana), it begins with a text that explains the importance of transportation for every country as the reason why “At Takoradi, a new deep water harbor is in the course of construction.” 106 This is followed by a shot from a hill of a railroad under construction by the sea. In the frame, we have the ocean to the right side. In the middle left of the frame, we see a serpentine railroad and on the rails a train puffing up smoke. This shot is replete with historical overdetermination. First, its unspoken premise is that Africans have been living with all this wealth and have not done much to ‘valorize it’ (the real meaning of ‘development’). It is also a shot that sends us back to the Berlin conference in the sense that England, like many European powers, first had a presence on the coast and only later went inland. The railroad here is the link between the coast and 106 Takoradi remains a major port for Ghana and the entire West African region. 172 the African hinterland in some sense. Intertitle 1 further drives the point of the technological might of Britain. It states that “the plan of the harbor allows for the future building of wharves for ocean-going steamers. One of the largest steam shovels in the world in operation.” This is followed by a shot of a steam shovel dumping sand in a train wagon. Intertitle 2 tells us that the machine is “loading automatically into trucks of 3 ½ tons of earth at a time’ and is followed by a back shot of the steam shovel. Intertitle 3 gives a wider context for the construction of the harbor, i.e. “near the site of the harbor, a wonderful new road, over 199 feet in width is being constructed.” We then get an elevated shot from a hill. The camera thus captures the expanse of the scenery, thereby evoking the grandeur of the project. In the lower part of the frame, we see Africans carrying loads of sand and buckets over their heads. The middle ground shows us the road being constructed which goes up to the mountain, as if the mountain itself was giving birth to the road. We get a sense of a mise-en-scène of the shot in the sense that the boys, girls and men carrying loads over their heads, respond to off-screen coaching as to where to be in the visual field of the camera. The camera tilts up and we see more expanse of land being cleared up for the building of the road. We learn more on the speed of the construction process from Intertitle 4 107 and on the progress of the extension of the railroad in Intertitle 5 108 and the difficulties encountered in the process of building the road (Intertitle 6) 109 , and the rate of building of the road 107 Intertitle 4 “Carrying the earth in small baskets appears a slow method of making a road, but a large army of workers complete their work in a surprisingly short space of time.” 108 Intertitle 5 “To satisfy the immediate needs of a country, the extension of the railways into the outlying district is proceeding apace.” 109 Intertitle 7 “When we look at the nature of the country, it is easy to appreciate the enormous difficulties that have to be surmounted.” 173 (one mile a day, we learn in Intertitle 8). These intertitles all convey the ideology of the victory of man and machine over nature, the facing of adversity but the certainty over triumphing over it, etc. But the shots interestingly show something else, which seem to escape the tight narrative of the intertitles. Indeed, whereas the intertitles celebrates the white man’s burden, the film largely shows what has been referred to as the “black man’s burden” that is that the fact that young and old, men and women are carrying loads over their heads or shoulders can be seen as an unconscious figuration of the notion that it is Africans who are carrying the burden of colonialism over their very heads and bodies. These shots allow us to see the real nature of colonialism, which is erased by the intertitle. That it is in the business of putting black bodies to work, to hard labor in order to extract wealth from African land even to the point making them do what a machines could have done in effect. The role of the hard physical labor is downplayed, whereas the easy work of the machine is lauded, in a move to conceal the inequalities of the colonial relations of production. Africans digging holes for the railroad, sweating, carrying rails over their heads and shoulders, or laying it on the ground are the signifiers of exploitation. While the intertitles mention the difficulties of building roads and railroads, there is no image showing a single European carrying loads, digging holes, etc. This is clearly not an equal joint venture. It is one in which the European gives the orders for Africans to execute, where the European works at the level of planning (it is an engineering feat) and Africans are in charge of implementation, providing the body, the sweat and the pain. It does thus also participate in a de facto colonial division of labor, where the European contribution is seen in terms of mind, intellect and innovation, 174 whereas the colonized (in this case the African’s) contribution more in the realm of the bodily. Indeed, in the shot following Intertitle 12, which says, “the cement is carried in bowls” we see a shot of boys carrying cement in bowls. As the camera tilts up, it shows Africans working hard at construction. Further proceeding in its reveling process, the camera keeps tilting up to the top of the structure being built. This is when we see whites giving orders, with their hands in their pockets, ‘supervising’ the entire process. This makes sense even graphically since the camera shows us that at the bottom of the frame, of the hill and of the division of labor, there are Africans. But it takes the camera tilting up, to the heights to reveal where power in the colonial era lies. As if to hammer in the point, those at the summit are the ones who also give orders, and are standing with their hands in their pockets. Mise-en-scène in a fiction film could probably not do better. It is the case that the colonial situation is well suited for a cinematic articulation of power and domination, of hierarchy, of those who are up and those who are down, for it does so both literally and figuratively. British Instructional was quite prolific with regard to Africa and one finds at least 30 titles at the British Film Institute, with a wide variety of themes related to Africa. The production is heavy on agriculture with such titles as Black Cotton (1927) on the cultivation of cotton in Nigeria, The First Year (1948) on groundnut cultivation, The Oil Palm of Nigeria (1930) on the eponymous plantations, Products of Kenya - Sugar and Coffee (1930) and Tobacco Growing (1949) on the growing of tobacco in Northern Rhodesia. It also features infrastructure building as in The Benguela Railway A Milestone 175 in African Civilization (1928), the previously discussed Blazing the Trail (1927), Opening of Takoradi Harbor (1928), Takoradi Harbor and Railway Terminus (1929), the encouragement of emigration in both Up Country with the Settler (1930) and Southern Rhodesia - Is This Your Country? (1948). As we see, the activities of the company lasted at least three decades even if Bruce Woolfe had to create another company with the name Gaumont-British Instructional after the original company was on the brink of bankruptcy following investment in feature films. It is thus clear that British Instructional occupied a prominent place in the production of colonial documentaries in Britain from the end of WWI and that this presence would continue throughout the twenties and even into the thirties and up to the forties as some of the titles above suggest. B. Film Acts, Committees, Policies and Production from the late 1920s to WWII Around the middle to end of the 1920s, Britain witnessed a renewed interest in the cinema that would mark the official entry of the government in the process of regulating the film industry and getting involved in various schemes that aimed at both making and showing documentary films in the colonies. This is the moment when clearly articulated policies came into being that would involve figures and institutions of the film world, the political world (political parties, secretaries of state), the establishment of government bodies which included cinema as part of their work of making colonialism and 176 exploitation look like a blessing (the Empire Marketing Board), would give birth to a school of filmmaking (the British documentary film movement), experiment into a cinema for the “mentally and culturally retarded” (the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment and to some extent the Colonial Film Unit). The next period that we will study will thus see the advent of numerous characters, numerous figures, all interested in putting themselves between Africans and the cinema in some mediational manner. It is also undoubtedly the most interesting part of this chapter for its complete overdetermination as it saw the encounter of all the different elements and parts involved in film policy making, film producing, distribution and exhibition. It was a kind of comprehensive look at the medium and what it really meant for British society and empire. What should the place of cinema be in the British Empire? The following examples will explore some of the steps toward the formulation of specific policies with regard to film in the British Empire. Indeed these debates had to do with several axes: the screening of British films in the Empire as a way of resisting the Hollywood hegemon, the restriction of access to some films by Africans (censorship) and the creation of an entire production, distribution and exhibition apparatus devoted to the specious idea of “making films for Africans.” 1. The Cinematograph Act of 1927 Although this was by no means the first time legislation was passed in Britain regarding the cinema (the first can be arguably traced back to the 1909 Cinematograph Act which 177 was passed in order to guarantee the safety of film projection especially with regard to the inflammability of nitrate), it would be a precedent in terms of kicking off wide ranging debates involving an eclectic body of individuals and institutions in thinking and producing discourse about the importance of the cinema for Britain and its empire and on the role of the state. It ushered a moment where different stakeholders sought to have their say in the conduct of cinema in Britain and its empire. According to Sarah Street, the Cinematograph Act of 1927 marked the first time the British government intervened in filmic matters in order to protect the British film industry (17). Indeed the Act “imposed statutory obligations on renters and exhibitors to acquire and show a minimum ‘quota’ of British films out of the total number they handled, British and foreign” (Street 17). The reason for this state interventionism in the business of the cinema was the perception and realization of a steady decline of the share of British films on British screens 110 . It is well known that the end of WWI coincided with the rise and dominance of Hollywood on the international film market, a position it has never really relinquished since. This anxiety regarding the supremacy of Hollywood cinema was part of larger anxiety over Britain’s increasing loss of super power status in favor of the United States. Indeed the cinema was not the only area that felt this increasing shift in international dominance. 110 Sarah Street gives more precise figures regarding this steep decline in the following quote, pushing the decline of British cinema even further back in time: “Up to 1927, the majority of films exhibited in Britain had been American. In 1914, 25% of films shown were British, but by 1923 they had dropped to 10% and by 1925, it was only 5%. In 1924, the total number of British films trade shown (films shown to exhibitors before hiring) was 56. In 1925, only 25 were shown. And in 1926, the figure had slumped to 37” (17). 178 The entire British economy, which had relied on the notion of free trade, was increasingly found to be unproductive with demands for replacing it with more protectionism that would illustrate itself most with regard to the British Empire more generally. Indeed, in order to compete with the United States, it was felt that Britain ought to enact policies that would encourage commerce within the British Empire, thereby creating a market large enough to withstand the US assault. This general feeling of anxiety had multiple points of anchorage historically and economically. The Imperial Conferences, which had been initiated as far back as 1887 (they were called Colonial Conferences till 1907 with Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa as participants) by the Imperial Federation League, sought from the beginning to promote some form empire unity and even to some extent federation. But from the start, it was clear that the dominions, which were largely settlement colonies, were not interested in federating with the motherland. Rather they were self-governing, sought autonomy and wished only to share some aspects of the partial sovereignty with Britain. The debates on trade within the Empire date back to these conferences and started since the very first Colonial Conference of 1887 111 . This globally economic structure of feeling of the moment will have tremendous consequences on the status of the cinema in the colonies, which were supposed to be part 111 Indeed, according to William G. Ratliff, debates on federation and trade ebbed and flowed. While there was agreement on the idea of common defense (which would be positively tested during the Anglo-Boer War, which saw reinforcement come from Canada, Australia and New Zealand), federalism and trade were more contentious. On the question of trade, there was resistance to ideas of free trade at the 1901 conference, where issues of imperial free trade versus imperial preference were raised and discussed, anticipating the debates in the post WWI era. 179 of this renewed and remapped economic policy. Not only was it felt that the cinema ought to benefit from this new dispensation, but it was also felt that the cinema should be an instrument in selling this very idea of a regained confidence in the economics of empire. The cinema was thus seen as both agent and beneficiary of this “New Imperial Economic Deal” to use a neologism. 2. The Indian Cinematograph Committee According to Priya Jaikumar: This committee was established by the British Indian government to assess film censorship, audience demographics, and the possibility of creating regulatory preferences for "Empire films" in India similar to Britain's Quota Act. Exhaustive investigations undertaken by the Indian Cinematograph Committee(ICC) in 1927- 28 produced four fascinating volumes of written and oral interviews (termed “evidence” by the ICC), from 353 “witnesses”: film producers, exhibitors, distributors, actors, film censors, newspaper editors, and educationists working in India (84). It seems that the British Indian Government already sought to implement some of the resolutions of the Cinematograph Act adopted the same year particularly as it pertained to quotas for British films within the Empire. Although the report was ultimately not implemented by the British government with regard to India, aspects of the report would feature in debates regarding the status of the cinema in the British colonies of Africa. Indeed, the 1929 Colonial Governors Conference featured excerpts of the Indian Cinematograph Committee Report as they 180 sought to articulate a position regarding previous efforts at thinking the cinema within the framework of the Empire. This clearly would highlight aspects of the specificities of British colonialism, and the ways in which the question of the cinema in Africa was supposed to mean something different from that in India or in the dominions. Indeed whereas the dominions and India were “declared free and autonomous to formulate their own policies” (Uchegbu 84), it was felt that the question of the cinema in Africa was a case apart, a state of exception. Indeed, it was deemed that: “As for the colonies (that is Negro areas of the Empire), they ‘are under varying forms of control; and their Governments cannot be expected to take constructive action without a clear and firm hand from the Home Government’” (Uchegbu 84). This process of differentiation did not prevent the British government from using the Indian Cinematograph Committee report as a precedent to be looked at as discussions related to Africa were took place. More generally, in the debates regarding the status of the cinema in the Empire (and no doubt with other issues regarding the administration of colonies), various kinds of comparisons were made between the Indian and African contexts. One example is that of Sir Hesketh Bell, who was well known for a famous quote in which he sought to use the Indian context as that which should be avoided in Africa: The success of our government of subject races depends almost entirely on the degree of respect which we can inspire. Incalculable is the damage that has already been done to the prestige of Europeans in India and the Far-East through the wide-spread exhibition of the ultra-sensational and disreputable pictures, and it behooves us therefore, while there is yet time, to see that the same harm shall not be repeated in our tropical African Empire. (qtd. in Notcutt and Latham 246) 181 England had been too lenient regarding the question and status of the cinema in India. He thus felt that the Indian precedent should serve as a warning as to what not to do in Africa. Unfortunately for him, the wheels of history could not be turned back. Indeed, for most of Africa, and more specifically for the British colonies of Africa, the independence of India would be looked upon as an example, as evidence of the impending and ineluctability of their right to self-determination. It is ironic that even more than half a century later the Indian model of the cinema is to some extent emulated in the film practice of such former British colonies as Nigeria through their emerging film industries in Nollywood and Kaniwood. 3. The Colonial Office Conference and the Colonial Films Committee Just as the British India Office was dealing with questions regarding the status of the cinema in India, setting up an Indian Cinematograph Committee to explore the issue, the Colonial Office 112 called in the very first Colonial Office Conference that same year (1927), to explore analogous questions in Africa. Following this, a Colonial Films Committee was appointed by the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Leo S. Amery to 112 A brief history of this institution is perhaps necessary. The Colonial Office was a very old office in British administration. Indeed, a position of Secretary of State for the Colonies was set up as early as 1768 in response to United States demands for independence. The official date for the creation of the “modern” Colonial Office is 1901. According to Arnold P. Kaminsky, “only the Indian subcontinent and its related territories (...) remained outside the purview of the Colonial Office” (317-318). With many world- renowned figures at its head over the years, including Joseph Chamberlain and Winston Churchill, the Colonial Office presided over the transformation of the British empire over the course of more than a century, including the question of self-government, first for the white settlement colonies, then for India, the questions of independence, the Empire Marketing Board, etc. 182 study three questions, i.e. the use of the Cinematograph as an instrument of education, the supply and exhibition of British films in the Empire and the question of censorship (Uchegbu 84). These three areas of investigation clearly brought together some of the earlier debates and concerns of the Gorell Committee, the Cinematograph Act of 1927 and the Indian Cinematograph Committee. A conference of Colonial Governors was held in 1930, on which occasion the Colonial Films Committee presented its report, which was followed by the following resolution of the Conference of Colonial Governors: The Conference is convinced that the cinematograph has very great possibilities for educational purposes in the widest sense not only of children but also for adults, especially with illiterate peoples. The Conference also considers it is desirable to foster in every way the market for good British films. It regards the question of censorship as of first importance, as the display of unsuitable films is a very real danger, and, in the case of primitive communities in Africa at any rate, there is still time to mitigate this danger. (Smyth, “The Development” 437) The Conference in other words accepted all three premises of the research, i.e. the centrality of pedagogic cinema, the resistance to Hollywood, which took the form of empire-wide distribution of so-called good British films and the issue of anxiety, which combined ideas of moral and political panic so to speak with regard to the tightness of British hegemony in the Empire. The latter anxiety was to be addressed by censorship. We shall revisit these questions later in the chapter. We shall now explore a film text that was not commissioned or perhaps even seen by the Colonial Governors Conference, but that perhaps, because of the time of its making, 183 emblematizes this desire for a stranglehold over the empire. In the face of increasing encroachment from the United States and independence demands from dominions like South Africa, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia, films like Crossing the Great Sahara (1924) and Cape to Cairo (1930) could remind the British of what they were involved in the business of imperialism for, almost in a proto-heritage cinema mode. It is important to remember that the Cape to Cairo idea emblematizes the British colonial idea of Africa as expressed by one its greatest advocates of imperialism, Cecil John Rhodes. This is the reason why, in the cinema, several film teams went to Africa in search of this Holy Grail of the Empire. Within a decade of the invention of the Lumière cinematograph, a project was already at work seeking to cross the African continent vertically. In doing so, various groups of filmmakers thus engaged in the triple operation of possessing the continent through travel, enshrining the vertical relationship between Britain and Africa through the very verticality of their trip from South to North Africa or vice versa, and narrativizing it cinematically. We were only able to see the 1930 version of Cape to Cairo at the British Film Institute 113 . The film could be seen as a case study of what one might refer to as the epic documentary by excellence through its structure, its subject matter, and even its style. It is the space where the history of a man (Cecil Rhodes) and the history of a nation (British Empire) merge, where the one can stand for the other. Indeed the Cape to Cairo narrative 113 It might be of interest to compare the various interpretation of the motif since the beginning of cinema, in both fiction and non-fiction. 184 is the founding narrative of British imperialism in Africa. As such, it is painted with hyperbole and lyricism. It is at once the song of a man and the song of an empire (to paraphrase Walt Whitman). As in most epics, the film’s mode of address is amplification, as deployed through the intertitles, shooting and editing styles as well as the narrative itself. For it is a narrative of conquest. It also has within it such aspects of the epic as the notion of surmounting major odds, which is part of the colonial narrative of Africa. Let us now look at aspects of the film that would bear out these remarks. Listing neither director nor Production Company, the 57 minutes and 35mm film was released in 1930. This cinematic mise-en-scène of the Rhodes dream interpellates the viewer at the level of the intertitle, the image, editing, etc. The intertitle is that which seems to authorize the images in that it interprets them for us beforehand, seeking willingly or inadvertently to foreclose other kinds of readings. The intertitle has several modes of address. We have the description of the scale of the trip: “A 6,000-mile trip by rail, car and river,” the immensity of the African vertical, “the vast African continent occupies one fifth of the world’s land area. The direct distance between Cape Town and Cairo is nearly 5,000 miles.” Right from the start, we are taken in several features of the narrative: the notion of surmounting obstacles of distance (mileage), vastness, what it takes to do so (trains, cars, rivers). The intertitle thus puts us clearly within the framework of an adventure documentary. There is a promise of fulfillment along the way, through the distance, for distance is the metaphor for narrative. What happens between the two points of the distance is in effect, narrative, adventure. 185 To echo this, shots of a black map of Africa on a white background make sure the message is hammered in our minds. Always already in the explanatory mode, a straight animated line is drawn between the cities of Cairo and Cape Town. The film goes on to provide an “establishing moment” (intertitle and shot) the function of which is to let us know, to make us aware of the condition of possibility of the franchise. First presenting us with a comment and a panning shot of the bay of the Cape which offers an immense vista of the city of Cape Town, the travel begins at Groot Schur, the former residence of Cecil Rhodes himself, occupied at the time of filming by the then Prime Minister of South Africa. In the process, we are shown panning, close and long shots of the Rhodes residence followed by shots from his bedroom, of a calm, restful and endless forest. Further introducing us to the owner of the house, the intertitle tells us that “it was there that Rhodes’ great idea to construct a railway from Cape to Cairo had its birth.” In the process, the film engages in an archeology of colonial megalomania. To finish establishing the narrative of conquest, we get a pan on a structure overlooked by mountains with statues of lions in front of it, and the statue of a man and horse standing over a platform. This is followed by a cut to a closer shot of Rhodes in a pensive position with the following text inscribed at the bottom of the statue: “the immense and brooding spirit shall quicken and control. Living, he was the land and dead his soul shall be her soul.” 114 114 The New York Times of April 9, 1902, reproduces the text in its full version and we learn in the process that it was in fact excerpted from a poem by like-minded poet of imperialism, Rudyard Kipling, famous for coining the proverbial “white man’s burden” metaphor. 186 Part of the cinematic appeal of the Cape to Cairo idea (which is almost already the stuff of fantasy), is to promise and deliver spectacle. This is an essential dimension of the narrative pleasure of the Cape to Cairo franchise (to use today’s Hollywood parlance). The first dimension of this spectacle is of course nature. The film seeks to really defamiliarize its viewers by taking them to vistas they are not used to. Thus the cut to the statue of Rhodes pointing the way with his left arm stretched out onto the distance accompanied with the intertitles “Northward!” and “Your hinterland is here” is clearly reminiscent of the final chapter of the resolutions of the Berlin Conference regarding the hinterland, an injunction to Europeans to go beyond the coastal areas of the continent and occupy the interior for the benefit of their respective countries. It also in effect assimilates the so-called hinterland with nature, a state of nature that calls upon the Europeans to come and make it valuable. In other words, setting up a scenario whereby Africa is simply a land waiting to be tilled by crafty Europeans, to be in effect occupied. The battle of culture over nature, and the triumph of man at the end of the journey is also one of the promises of the film. Indeed the next shot is that of the Union Express train leaving Cape Town toward the African interior. It feels like we are explorers, entering ‘uncharted territories” potentially full of all types of dangers. Significantly, enough the shot of the train is a mise en abîme of the Lumière shot of Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat (1895). Off goes the train, then as it supposedly “brings news of progress to the far recesses of the continent.” We learn that the railroad proceeded with mineral discoveries. In other words, the railroad served to 187 link different mineral resources found across Africa. Its purpose was never to offer ways for Africans to link up with one another, but instead to channel the output of minerals from the so-called hinterland toward the ocean for its export to Europe and elsewhere. On the way from Cape to Cairo, the railroad goes through the famous diamond mines of Kimberly (it arrived there in 1885-the year the Berlin conference ended) and we see Africans at work extracting mines, followed by a shot of hands selecting diamonds at a table. We also learn that up to 1903 the mines had produced up to “30 tons of stone” worth £300,000,000. Next, the train reaches another set of mines, this time the gold mines of Johannesburg, and the city that sprang as a result. Again, the figures are staggering as the all-knowing and number churning intertitle informs us “This vast gold field … the greatest in the world ... has produced over £1 billion…” Clearly, going from Cape to Cairo meant for Europeans engaging in effect in a frantic “mineral rush.” To give us an idea of the importance of the railroad in these days of history, one of the best references is perhaps V. I. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: The building of railways seems to be a simple, natural, democratic, cultural and civilising enterprise; that is what it is in the opinion of the bourgeois professors who are paid to depict capitalist slavery in bright colours, and in the opinion of petty-bourgeois philistines. But as a matter of fact the capitalist threads, which in thousands of different intercrossings bind these enterprises with private property in the means of production in general, have converted this railway construction into an instrument for oppressing a thousand million people (in the colonies and semicolonies), that is, more than half the population of the globe that inhabits the dependent countries, as well as the wage-slaves of capital in the “civilised” countries. 188 True to form, the film then cuts to Africans dancing and singing, supposedly happy and unaware of the massive wealth being drained out of their continent. Moreover, the film does not go and show the difficult working conditions of these miners who are more in conditions of hard labor than anything. In Marxism, we could look at this as a case of concealing the relations of production and underplaying the fact that recreation here is simply a way that is allowed the African working class to replenish its forces for more work and more exploitation for the following weeks to come. To add to the suspense, the film makes us privy to the struggles of Rhodes’s assistant, Robert Williams both in raising capital for the further building of the railroad and with securing permission and collaboration from other European colonial powers along the Cape to Cairo axis, i.e. Portugal and Belgium, foregrounding in effect the “inter- imperial” collaboration in securing the domination and exploitation of the African continent which started in Berlin. Spectacle being at the center of the project, we are along the way offered breathtaking long and close shots of the immense waterfalls. As a paean to the film medium, we also get a proto-Resnais tracking shot as the train goes under a four-span bridge over the Quanza River. After going through Angola, Congo, Sudan, the film “expedition” finally reaches Egypt. On the way, we are treated to views of ports, rivers, cities, the statue of the infamous Lord Kitchener, conqueror of Sudan, 115 among others. 115 Lord Kitchener at the moment of the reconquest of Khartoum in 1899 is known to have given the following orders to Major Wingate who would later replace him as Governor of Sudan: “loot like blazes. I want any quantity of marble stairs, marble pavings, iron railings, looking glasses and fittings, and doors, windows, furniture of all sorts” (qtd. in Daly 26). 189 Once in Cairo, and upon surveying the city with shots of traffic, shots from above, this cinematic monument to imperialism concluded with the following intertitle: Cecil Rhodes dreamed in continents and dreamed in time. He planted the seeds of the great project which is gaining in strength every day, thanks to the care of his friend Robert Williams. Much work lies ahead, but no matter what the future may bring, there remains a silent and unchanging witness that Pioneers gave their best to the civilization of Africa. Without the slightest sense of irony, the film ends with the closing shot of the Sphinx. The filmmakers interpret the shot of the Sphinx as his approval of the “great European work of civilization.” For Africans however, the Sphinx in his infinite wisdom amassed through the sheets of time is quietly looking in his sovereign majesty, as a testimony to African ingenuity and inventiveness, looking at these filmmakers who have traveled the entire vertical of the continent, only to end at his feet. Having tried to conquer Africa cinematically and geographically, to demonstrate that it was impervious to culture, the filmmakers end up at the feet of the sphinx, literally in a subaltern position to this very symbol of African culture, thereby, unraveling their own narrative. An unusual mise en abîme of a cinematic/colonial narrative project, Cape to Cairo concludes with its own invalidity. “Civilization, you said…” 4. The Empire Marketing Board and the British Documentary Movement (1927-1933) The debates around the existence of the Empire Marketing Board and the role of its film unit also had a significant albeit indirect effect on the existence of the documentary 190 tradition on the African continent. For one, John Grierson, the leader of the Documentary Film Movement, which would come into existence thanks to the sponsorship of the Empire Marketing Board, would play a major role later in framing policies regarding the role and place of the cinema on the African continent. Indeed Grierson was not only an adviser on the famed Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment, but he also presented a paper and contributed in discussions during a conference on the role of the cinema in the colonies. He was also very instrumental in the stetting up of the Colonial Film Unit. In other words, the figure of John Grierson cannot be escaped in a history of documentary in Africa. Apart from Grierson himself, some of his colleague members of the film movement would also make films about Africa. Additionally, the EMB film unit would also be a sort of clearinghouse/think tank for empire filmic strategies with regard to Africa. But how did this all come about? In standard histories of documentary, the Empire Marketing Board is presented matter-of- factly, as simply being an institution that created the conditions of possibility for the existence of one of the most important film movements in the history of this mode of filmmaking. The Griersonians are mentioned as intent on intervening on the side of the state in order to affect social change. Often the most radical critique levied against them is the problem of the ethics of sponsorship, that is, what it means to raise social problems and present the government as a solution whereas the filmmaker is himself funded by the government. In other words, this approach fails to put Grierson and his colleagues in the largest context of colonialism and imperialism. It must be said that a number of studies 191 have engaged with this question of the colonial link of the Griersonians (Winston 1998; J. MacKenzie 1984), yet this does not seem to have become standard enough in many studies on the Griersonians. For example, Ian Aitken’s entry on Grierson in the Encyclopedia of Documentary Film barely mentions this. It will be our task here to bring out the role of the EMB and its film unit in the domination and colonization of the African continent. The context of the emergence of the EMB in relation to the way Britain saw itself in the aftermath of WWI deserves that we spend a few moments on it. We know already that in the aftermath of WWI, Britain, which had so far been the world’s largest imperial power, saw its primacy challenged if not undermined by the rise of the United States. This loss of supremacy on the world stage was accompanied by demands for more increased autonomy by the dominions (or white settler colonies), which offered yet more challenge within its own Empire. So there was a dual challenge both from within and without, by what we might term the Frankenstein syndrome, that is, the challengers from within and without were both at least initially and to a large extent of the making of Britain itself. One of the places where this loss of supremacy was felt was at the level of the economic. The country that had theorized and championed free trade (after all Britain gave birth to Adam Smith, the most renowned theoretician of capitalism), found itself increasingly faced with the difficulty of pursuing free trade policies with the arrival of newcomers on the capitalist scene. Thus, it seems, free trade functioned perfectly for Britain as long as competition from the US and others were not significant. When the latter started claiming 192 more of the world’s economic pie, Britain sought to question the idea of free trade and proposed to replace it with the notion of preferential tariffs within its own borders (i.e. within the Empire). It is important to also place this economic situation within the larger global context of the world, which had also seen in 1917, the arrival of the Bolsheviks in power in Russia. The Bolshevik regime as is well known was first and foremost premised on a radical critique of capitalism and looked at the working class as the agent of historical transformation. The weakening of Britain’s economic upper hand in the world meant that unemployment was rampant in the country and that quick solutions had to found. This also coincided with the rise of the Conservative Party, which was all in favor of imperialism. Some of the lead characters who would play a major role in the economic, political and cinematic destiny of the African continent belonged to this Party, although, as Stephen Constantine reminds us, “all political parties shared the imperial idea” (193). These figures include Leo S. Amery, Williams Ormsby Gore and Sir Philip Cunliffe- Lister. Leo S. Amery became both Secretary of State for the Colonies and for the Dominions between 1924 and 1929, Sir Philip Cunliffe Lister occupied the same position in the early thirties (1931-1935), and William Ormsby Gore, the third musketeer, took the job from 1936 to 1938 after a long stint as under-secretary for the colonies for seven 193 years. All three were affiliated with the pro-imperial lobbies. Thus Cunliffe-Lister was President of the Board of Trade and member of the British Commonwealth Union, whereas Leo Amery helped create both the Empire Industries Association as well as the Empire Economic Union (Constantine 196), and presided over the creation of the Empire Marketing Board. For them and their party, the importance of the Empire lied in “providing work for our unemployed” (Constantine 196). Doing this was of the highest necessity, as the question of unemployment was understood in clearly ideological terms. Indeed, for the Conservative Party, “the real choice facing British society was between moribund liberalism and either of its two vigorous challenges, the ideology of socialism on the one hand and imperialism on the other” (Constantine 196). In other words, red scare and anti- Bolshevism contributed to the call for more imperialism in a way. The solution against British economic woes was thus a vast program aimed among other things at encouraging emigration to the colonies and encouraging trade within the empire. The first impulse will give us such films as Up Country with the Settler (1930) and Southern Rhodesia - Is This Your Country? (1948), whereas the second will not only lead to the creation of the Empire Marketing Board and the British Documentary Movement, but also give us such films as West Africa Calling (1928) and those in the Britain under National Government Series (1934). 194 Up Country with the Settler was made by the ubiquitous British Instructional Films. In this straightforward “instructional” film that leaves no room for misunderstanding, we are offered a glimpse into a promotional documentary, in effect a cine-manual on “how to” emigrate to Kenya. Made in 1930, it does not seem to have yet registered or afforded the passage to sound cinema, As a result, intertitles lord over the film, structure it inside out. They first situate the question in terms of “difficulty” or the hardship of the land with such introductory phrases is “settlers in Kenya colony have many difficulties to overcome before they are established in their own homes.” Indeed the film is organized along a narrative line that would take the settler from difficulties to the prospect of happiness in Kenya, indeed preparing a happy ending from the opening of the film. In the mode of the fairy-tale (for what else is colonialism, but a fairy-tale of opportunity for the colonizer?), the film shows the settler arriving in Mombassa and the street life there. But this is not his final destination. He has not come to Kenya to live in the cities. No, he shall go and live in the countryside and make a life of his own. But how to get to the countryside? First, he needs to take “lorries in which he will travel with baggage upcountry.” The journey is a long string of obstacles. We see the lorry trying to cross a bridge. But this is impossible. It must be put on a raft. But crossing the river on a raft is not so boring after all. There is a beautiful vista to admire, a vista he would soon call his. But of course “further progress is impossible until a bridge has been constructed.” Colonialism has its work all cut out for it. Then the lorry (truck) is shown traveling up narrow paths and breaking down. 195 After a while, the settler finally reaches his destination. He takes a panoramic view in. He is home. His baggage is carried by Kenyan porters while other Kenyans are shown at work, digging, breaking stones. Clearly, “the natives are good workers and soon the house is finished.” We are then shown Kenyans putting thatch on the rooftop. Now that the settler owns land that miraculously awaited his arrival to be ‘developed’ and a house to live in, he can begin farming. Indeed, shots of cattle herds show us that “it is not long before the settler has established his own herd of cattle.” A woman is shown dragging a horse from a stable in the background. This is not her story, but the settler’s. Shots of sheep show us that his “[green] pastures are filled with sheep,” but Kenyans are the ones tending them. But this is not the end. The settler has brought with him new agricultural technology, a farm machine also manned by Africans. At the end of the day, Africans are shown gathering herds back into the stable, and then “the natives, their long day over, go to their huts.” And the fairy-tale can end without showing the settler once doing actual work. It would no doubt be difficult for Bolshevik leaflets, flyers and meetings to outdo the paradigm of the colonial sublime put on scene in this film. Yet less than two decades after the making of this film, Kenyans for whom this fantasy film was in effect a horror film about their being dispossessed of their lands and working in untenable conditions under a brutal colonial regime would launch a rebellion with the Mau Mau that would ultimately lead to their independence. 196 The creation of the EMB saw the apotheosis of the power of lobbies in British politics, which would have a significant impact. Indeed the EMB had among its membership such organizations as the British Empire Producers Organization (founded in 1916), the British Commonwealth Union (founded in 1916), the Empire Resources Development Committee (1916), the Empire Development Parliamentary Committee (1920), the Empire Development Union (1922), the Empire Industries Association (1924), the Empire Economic Union (1929) (Constantine 194-195). The EMB was created in 1926 as an executive commission that would advise the Secretary of State for the Colonies. It had four major areas of intervention: research, market intelligence, economic investigation, publicity. It was in the latter department that the film unit belonged, along with “newspaper advertisement, shop window display material, the organization of ‘Empire Shopping Weeks’[…], leaflets, radio broadcasts, exhibitions, distribution of materials to schools in Britain and to overseas empire, newspapers, lecture programs, and tours posters on specifically constructed hoardings” (Havinden and Meredith 151). We see here a move by the EMB to phagocyte all existing media and instrumentalize them, put them at the service of the imperial idea. The Film Unit was thus supposed to encourage empire commerce as well as emigration, which could solve the problems of unemployment at home. In many ways, the film unit’s relationship to Africa via empire was not surprising. Indeed, even on its own home turf, the Griersonians had aligned themselves with the British state for the control of the 197 working class. The line between controlling working classes at home and masses of colonized Africans and others was easy to jump. It was not even an extension, it was the two sides of the coin, the domestic and the international. It was indeed clearly understood that Unlike the dominions and to a lesser extent India, the tropical colonies were not expected to develop industries, which competed with British imports, and so by the 1920s, these colonies fulfilled the rate of complementary economies to a great extent. (Havinden and Meredith 151) In other words, the EMB and its film unit were involved in the “planned underdevelopment of Africa” to paraphrase Walter Rodney. But this was not all. Without going too much into the details of the functioning of the film Unit, suffice it for us to retain a number of approaches and practices of the Griersonians that would later be applied in the cinematic realm in Africa. It is first important to remember that behind the EMB film Unit, long before the involvement of John Grierson, was none other than a now well-known character who helped shape the relationship between Britain and Africa, i.e. Rudyard Kipling himself. The inventor of ‘the white man’s burden’ phrase was the eulogizer of one of Britain’s most vociferous imperialist whose impact on Africa is still being felt, Cecil John Rhodes. His involvement in suggesting the creation of a film Unit at the EMB is enough to suggest the parameters of functioning of the Griersonians. Grierson himself, looking back at the achievements of the EMB Film Unit, stated: Its principal effect in six years (1928-1933) was to change the connotation of the word ‘Empire’. Our original command of peoples was becoming slowly a co- operative effort in tilling of soil, reaping of harvests, and the organization of a 198 world economy. For the old flags it substituted the new flags of common labor; for the old frontiers of conquest it substituted the new frontiers of research and worldwide organization. Whatever one’s politics, and however cynical one might be about the factors destructive of a world economy, this change of emphasis had an ultimate historical importance. History is determined by just such building of new sentiments. It was clear that we had to learn to make our building deliberate. (Hardy 165-166) We see here a number of images conjured by the task of the Griersonians. Unapologetic about their mission, the head of the Griersonians acknowledges that they were in effect, in charge of cinematically performing the dirty work of making exploitation, mass killing, land and sovereignty extortion, pillage of resources, maiming and murder look like or pass for collaboration. The incredible violence involved in doing so is nothing short of arresting. The Griersonians thus gleefully performed the ultimate act of cinematic violence on the colonized. That the foremost documentary film movement was premised on eliding and masking the toils and suffering of colonized people in Africa and elsewhere is worth stopping a minute for. We can also see in the Griersonians some of the pioneering articulations of the ideologico-cinematic morphing. It may be argued that the Griersonians engaged in the special effect technique of morphing. They deliberately morphed the violence of colonial destruction into a fantasy of collaboration, perhaps returning to one of the originary moments of the cinema, that is, its magical status, its link to magic (let us remember that both the Lumière and Méliès were involved in magic). Colonial cine-propaganda is a work of magic making in that sense. This is reflected even in the terms of reference of the Film Unit itself. Grierson himself put it best: 199 In cinema, we got the very brief commission ‘to bring the Empire alive’. We were instructed, in effect, to use the cinema, or alternatively to learn to use it to bring alive the industries, the harvests, the researches, the productions, the forward- looking activities of the British Commonwealth and Empire at work into the common imagination. (Hardy 166) It is almost as if they were performing a sorcerer’s work on a dead body, or being vampires bringing the ‘dead’ back to life at the midnight hour, as if they were involved in a process of zombification. In that sense, the Griersonians could be looked at as participating in the register of the horrific. But looked at with the long view of history and even of this chapter, they were in direct filiation with the work done by the British South Africa Company in the earlier part of the century, which also sought to bring the empire alive. If the empire appeared dead in the eyes of British citizens of the metropolis such was not the case for those living in it, much less those who were in effect carrying what we might call ‘the colonized man’s burden’. Similarly, the Griersonians would pass on some practices to later approaches to cinema in the colonies, and most certainly to Africa. Indeed one of the conditions for their employment was “that we should have the good sense to explore a few preliminary avenues, work for a period experimentally…” (Hardy 166). Arguably, this experimental impulse was passed on to the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment only two years after the disbanding of the EMB. Likewise, it is possible to see Grierson’s obsession with the educational dimension of the cinema as a major component in the BEKE project on which Grierson was an adviser. 200 Two films we were able to see at the BFI speak to the concerns of the EMB and its film unit. Empire Trade (1934), made by the Conservative and Unionist Films Association as part of its Britain Under National Government Series takes a global look at trade within the whole British Empire. The film opens with a map of the world and immediately, the voice-over, which would qualify by today’s standards as camp (perhaps we need create the category of colonial camp), interpellates us as pupils: “Let’s take a look at this vast empire of ours on which the sun never sets 116 : Canada, South Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, the colonies and the mother country herself, the nerve center of this Union of Nations.” We are then treated to shots of factories, burning steel. But the voice of God is candid enough to acknowledge that “…we are not a self-supporting country. We depend for our existence on the exchange of our manufactured commodities. For the food and raw materials that we cannot produce ourselves, we must rely largely on our empire and our merchant navy.” This was precisely the project of the EMB and its film unit: to turn the de facto dependency an island nation into cinematic statements of power and even ‘inter- dependency’. Then the film highlights the specificity of each member of the Empire. While the camera zooms in on a map of Africa, highlighting South Africa, the voice-over informs us that 116 The famous phrase “The sun never sets on the British Empire,” which was reportedly first applied to the Spanish Empire a few centuries earlier, received the following rebuttal from Sri Lankan politician Colvin R. Da Silva: “It is because even God does not trust the British in the dark.” There seems to have been other rebuttals on the basis of a play on words. Another one goes as follows: “They say the sun never sets on the British Empire. I hope it burns.” 201 “her annual purchase gives work to at least 90,000 British workers’ and that the immense gold and diamond mines are ‘developed’ by the British. Moving on to India, and showing parades, we learn that “India takes more of our manufactured goods than any area of the world and gives employment to at least 130,000 British workers. Singapore (shots of people working wood and producing rubber) and Malaysia (shots of coconut and date growing) are also shown. Of the dominions, we learn that business deals with Australia account for 77,000 jobs in Britain, whereas New Zealand helps employ 44, 000 Britons. The film ends on the other African colonies but provides no data. Wrapping up the tour of the never-sleeping, insomniac Empire, the film makes sure we understand that “the aim of the national government is to open up for British goods, the vast markets of the Empire, because expansion of empire trade means more employment in our factories at home.” It is imperative to “go forward with this empire policy, remembering that we are a great family linked together in a blood brotherhood of loyalty and service.” The truly “blood-y” price paid for this “blood brotherhood” by the colonies is of course never mentioned… More specifically focused on Africa is British Instructional’s West Africa Calling (1928) which also seeks to fulfill the same mission as the previous film to “bring West Africa alive” to British audiences. As is well suited for any such project, the establishing shot and text have to do with the before. Shots of forests, trees, swamps and forests are accompanied by such intertitles as “Years ago, West Africa was an unexplored forest,” comments on the living conditions of Africans “the natives lived in primitive huts” (with 202 shots of two Africans sitting by their house cooking). In other words, the opening of the film follows the stranger comes to town narrative arch. Indeed “British enterprise changed all this.’’ We see a shot of an engineer working in the forest with a black boy (this is recycled footage in the film Here’s the Gold Coast). Without further ado, the intertitle ‘cuts to the chase’, that is, highlights the importance of Africa for Britain. We see shots of Africans working on placing railroads (also previously seen footage - colonial cinema becomes self-referential…), accompanied by the intertitle “employment has come to the workers in our factories at home through the building of harbors, roads and railways. It would not look fair to only refer to what is taken out Africa. Thus, shots of schools, hospitals are shown to demonstrate that “the British Government has set up native schools,” that “hospitals have been erected.” The shot of men pushing carts is accompanied by “improved conditions have enabled the native farmer to produce on a large scale” (but we are not told for whom). Still on the balance sheet of colonialism, the introduction of new crops (coconut growing), industry (rubber making), mine work, etc. Again candidly, we learn that “West Africa has become one of the chief sources of our food stuffs and raw materials.” This latter phrase was also used in the previous film and part of the texts and debates of the EMB, as if it were an indispensable one-liner to put in these films. 203 Naturally, ‘developing’ (read pillaging) the colonies is not a humanitarian gesture. We learn that British machinery, cement (‘thousands of tons’ we are told) are all used in the process. The perversity of the system is boundless. Not only are resources taken out of Africa, but Africans must pay for British machinery to assist in pillaging their continent. One could arguably trace here the model for the post-independence development project. Shots of bridge building, trains at work, mining activities. What do all these mean for Britain? “This means increased employment in our iron, steel and engineering industries.” Showing plants in Britain, the film crosscuts with shots of cars driving on the streets of Africa for “roads create a demand for British motors to run along them” and of course “the demand for British motorcars means employment in our motor industry.” Naturally, Africa was a prime market for British goods and thus “our exports to our West African colonies in1927 amounted to 20 million pounds sterling.” This in turn translates directly into “employment for 77,000 men at three pounds a week.” We are then shown British workers, not at work, but instead puffing cigarettes with their hands in their pockets. The last intertitle hammers the point in: “This example from West Africa shows how our workers at home benefit by the policy of developing the Empire.” The film concludes with images of the beach, of waves coming and going with an African boy studying in 204 front of it. This postcard image of dreamy landscapes of the colonial sublime shows the African continent as always already available for …tourism as well. After all, it is still Britain. Examining these two films shows a number of things. First the simple didactic mode of address as well as the stress on employment suggest that the prime audience for this was the British working class, which had to wooed in order not to fall prey to bolshevism. Thus, Africa and the other colonies and dominions had to be shown as the horizon, as an additional mental and economic space for the British who did not have to feel confined to their little island. They can claim the world, so why settle for Lenin and Vertov? We can also say that the films deploy the mode of “hear a dog, see a dog” editing style. Most often, the editing is entirely subject to the intertitle or the voice-over. There is no attempt to establish a gap between the two. No chance can be taken on the potential loss in the cinematic translation of empire. Moreover, little to no room is left for suggestion. The cinema is entirely instrumentalized to fulfill one function at a time: “to persuade” (Renov). C. Revisiting the Bantu (Mis?)Educational Kinema Experiment (1935-1937) The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment (BEKE), although a very short-lived one, encapsulates many of the ideas and premises of British approaches to the cinema in 205 Africa during the colonial era. It is located at the juncture of past and present endeavors, both synthesizing previous cinematic efforts, and giving way to the more sustained and longer experience of the Colonial Film Unit. It occupies a liminal space within British colonial cinema historiography. While more has been written on the CFU, there is arguably a lot to glean from the BEKE as a crystallizing space for multiple discourses on cinema and Africa. This warrants that we spend some time on this widely referenced, but little analyzed and largely documentary film project in Africa during the era of British colonialism in the interwar years. It may be appropriate to attempt a dual approach in this analysis. The first would consist in summoning the a prioris of the project, indeed even its unconscious, in exploring some antecedent events, figures and documents which authorize, make possible the discourse of the BEKE. The second would involve an analysis of the BEKE’s own assessment of their work in Africa over the course of two years, and an attempt to tease out more generally some of the consequences of this experiment for the thinking of documentary in Africa in the colonial era. 1. The Historical A Priori of the BEKE Any analysis of the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment must begin with the premises of the project, (that which they reacted to). Before or rather instead of looking at the project as simply a paternalistic endeavor as it has often been seen, it is important to 206 replace it within the politico-filmic context of its time. Indeed the project cannot be separated from the ways in which Britain saw itself with regard to its loss of political, economic and even cultural hegemony. This context helps us understand why it was education that was privileged over all other forms or approaches to the cinema. It also allows us to see clearly why the managers of the project were the ones involved in it as opposed to say more recognized figures in the British film world. The Paradigm of Educational Cinema Although, as its name indicates, the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment saw itself as a pedagogical project, it is important to remember that the question of the relationship between the cinema and education in Africa was not a new issue in the late twenties, and certainly not in the thirties, when the BEKE came into being. As a reminder, the pedagogic/educational was always a major dimension of knowledge production in Britain with regard to cinema, the question, it seems, having already been discussed as far back as the 1910s. In addition to the multiplicity of debates 117 over the years, some actual experimentation took place on the ground by British colonial officials, bureaucrats, researchers or amateur 117 One such example that would have an impact on the BEKE is the 1930 Imperial Conference where the following resolution was passed: “The Conference, being impressed with the potentialities of the cinema as a means of disseminating the results of scientific research, for example among agricultural producers, recommends that steps should be taken to stimulate the production of instructional films having a common interest to more than one part of the Empire and to secure a closer co-operation and exchange of information between the authorities producing such films , and this proposal should be referred for the consideration of the Empire Marketing Board”(Notcutt and Latham, 245). 207 filmmakers 118 . Indeed, one must see Africa as ultimate space for various kinds of experimentations, as if the colonial project made available human subjects or literal Guinea pigs 119 to be used to test out often ill-conceived hypotheses. Of all these, only the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment would have significant official colonial backing both in London 120 and on the ground in various African colonies. Appendix G of Notcutt and Latham’s The African and the Cinema further underscores this educational paradigm in relation to its antecedents. Indeed, following a trip to East Africa “on behalf of the Colonial Advisory Committee on Native Education to test African reactions to instructional films” (Smyth “The Development” 440), Julian Huxley 121 wrote a “Report on the Uses of Film for Educational Purposes in Africa,” making him clearly a figure whose work could authorize the BEKE. Relating his experience in East Africa, he noted the following: I was only able to show the films on two occasions to native audiences… However, the results were in my opinion unequivocal, demonstrating that the use of educational films can be extremely stimulating to African boys and girls. It is clear I think that the films made a definite impression on their minds. (Notcutt and Latham 243). 118 A number of examples come to mind such as William Sellers’ experiments in Nigeria, which would inspire BEKE. William Sellers himself would end up heading the successor to the BEKE, the Colonial Film Unit. 119 We see here the expression itself carrying the association of a country/region of Africa as a locus classicus, indeed an object of scientific experimentation. 120 It must however be noted that this backing was not necessarily unanimous. Indeed, according to Rosaleen Smyth, R. V. Vernon, a representative of the Colonial Office at the Colonial Films Committee perhaps unwittingly (but certainly appropriately) considered the BEKE project as a “monstrum informe ingens horrendum,” i.e. an immense, formless and frightful monster (Smyth “The Development” 442). Once again, the previously mentioned regime of the horrific seems to apply here as well. 121 Julian Huxley was an evolutionist scientist as well as a proponent of eugenics among other things. He would go on to become the First Secretary General of UNESCO after WWII and would bring John Grierson along and put him in charge of communication. 208 It is interesting to note here not only the fact that Huxley seems to be drawing inferences on the basis of only two screenings, but also that the films that he showed to the Kenyans had been provided by the Empire Marketing Board, i.e. the John Grierson-led film unit. We further learn from Rosaleen Smyth, of the production of educational films (as part of an anti-hookworm campaign) by Dr. A. Paterson, of the Kenya Department of Medical and Sanitary Services, several years before the BEKE and even Huxley (“The Development 440). Even more significant is the pioneering of an approach that would become the hallmark of the BEKE, that is, the high tolerance for “technical imperfection,” i.e. for cinematic amateurishness, when the films were destined for Africans. In his report, Huxley also suggests the metaphor of the cinema as a weapon for “school and adult education and propaganda,” underscoring not only that war was the condition of possibility of colonialism in Africa, but also that the cinema might constitute another battlefield, for the conquest on the minds of Africans, thereby extending physical and geographic conquest to the areas of the affect, the imaginary, the mental. Put in the larger context of Britain’s increasing weakness in the face of the American hegemon, it could be argued that while it might be more difficult to compete with Hollywood on the grounds of a cinema of the spectacle both in the metropolis and in the colonies, resorting to the educational paradigm might help create an alternative, if not a “niche market” in which some amount of cinematic control could be exercised by Britain 209 in a space that is geopolitically hers. In other words, it would help them control the kind of cinema that could be authorized and circulated in their Empire. 2. Major L. A. Notcutt One of the first striking facts about the BEKE is that outside the project, not much is actually known about the people who decided to take part in it. We learn that Major Notcutt, the technical director of the project, indeed the filmmaker of the project, had purchased a camera and a projector to show films to his farm employees in Africa, in order to provide for their recreation. It could be argued that for Notcutt, the enterprise of cinematic experimentation was a capitalist enterprise in that it sought to renew the forces of production by controlling even the hobbies and free time of his laborers. Notcutt was not content to exploit his African farmers. He also sought to keep them in check by showing them films he had chosen himself. He could thus to some extent decide how they spent their days and parts of their evenings. For him, thus the cinema fell squarely within the cycle of production of his farm. During the day, he worked them hard, in the evening he showed them films, thus having a de facto monopoly on their entire way of life to some extent. 122 122 The report is candid about this: “Major Notcutt had been experimenting in a small way with films for Africans. In 1926, he was managing a group of sisal plantations in East Africa and, like many other planters, thought that an estate cinema might be an effective method to help maintain a contented labor force” (Davis “Foreward” 24). 210 One has come across little information as to how he arrived in Africa. But it is clear that he was an engineer by training and resided in East Africa prior to heading the BEKE. Perhaps one of the reasons why he was chosen for the project had to do with the fact that he was a man on the ground, to paraphrase Lord Lugard. Little is also known about the depth of his knowledge of cinema. According to the BEKE report, he was able to project films and he underwent training in filmmaking in London in preparation for the experiment. But it is not clear what films he made prior to the experiment or whether his “student” films (either in London or back in East Africa) were worth anything. Only GC Latham (the Education Director of this experiment) asserts that they were good. What is certain is that he seems to have some technical know how as he chose the equipment for the experiment and even manufactured some equipment. What we have in Major Notcutt is an amateur filmmaker, a non-professional who possibly also had a love for the cinema. It is almost frightening to think that the cinematic destiny of the entire East Coast and Central region of Africa was largely framed by such a figure. 3. The Missionary and Anthropological Background Another significant background for the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment was that it was a missionary initiated and sponsored project. This is very significant in light of our previous chapter in which we demonstrated the inextricability of the missionary project from the colonial project in Africa. In effect, the colonial and the missionary project were often in a very tight embrace, indeed even in “the missionary position” in relation to 211 Africa. Missionaries, whether British, French or German, had, even prior to leaving the coasts of Europe, constructed Africans through a regime of lack. They thought of Africans as lacking of God because they were seen as not Christian even though Africa was one of major locations for the birth of Christianity. The motif of lack is thus a primary mode of apprehension that missionaries would have all along with regard to Africa, even after the phase of conquest. In the phase of administration, a different or rather a supplementary kind of lack would emerge, the lack of education, the lack of mental abilities to comprehend moving images. J. Merle Davis, Director of the Department of Social and Industrial Research of the International Missionary Council, headed a 1932 Commission of Enquiry in Northern Rhodesia and Belgian Congo, “to study the effects of the heavy industries of the Copper Belt upon native African life” (9). He said the following: Among the findings of the commission was the undermining of the social fabric of the African tribe occasioned by the pace at which contact with Western industrial life is moving, one feature of this process is the ever widening gap between the outlook and ways of life of the industrialized Native living in towns and mine locations and those of his in the village. Another finding was the extreme bareness of the recreational life of the African who had so many of his traditional ways of entertainment taken a way from him. (9) Here two additional modalities of lack surface: the recreational and the relationship between “old” and “new.” The recreational paradigm has already been partially traced to Major Notcutt. An additional element is the question of pace that will be the cornerstone of the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment’s theory of spectatorship. Industrialization is too fast and Africans too slow, Davis contends. They need help to adjust. 212 The desire to remedy this slowness is compounded by an anxiety over a so-called “gap” between the living styles of industrialized Africans and those living in villages. There seems to be at least a dual move here. The main driving axis is the complete belief in one’s right to intervene in the managing of the lives of Africans. That is, that the missionaries felt and were convinced they were entitled to have an influence, to affect the ways in which Africans related to each other, especially those of the city and those of the village. Indeed, they sought in effect to time and pace the ways in which different sections of the African population related to each other. This is the first imposture of the process. In that regard, the missionary could be seen as a perfect adjunct of colonial administration, which sought to regulate the entire way of life of Africans, or at least to plot out its main outlines, lay out its main directions. Here it seems that missionaries sought to regulate the cultural field, whereas the administration and the army sought to regulate the legal, political, economic and military fields. It is as if there was a clear or unofficial division of labor, what we might refer to as the CDL or the Colonial Division of Labor, or even division of colonial labor. Religion could invest the space of the soul and of culture whereas the administration would deal with how to successfully extract minerals and wealth, put bodies to work, punish those that do not. The missionaries were in charge of administering the souls, while the army, the police and the administration managed the bodies. The BEKE idea thus arguably was an operation of administration by the missionaries. Having already defined themselves as the mediators between God and Africans, they extended their terms of reference to mediating the relationship between Africans and the cinema. 213 The aim of the project becomes even more explicit in another document, “The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment.” Indeed, there is no doubt that “the experiment is essentially a missionary undertaking” (9). More categorically or candidly, the document states: It aims to be an auxiliary of the Church in its task of building a Christian society for the African. It proposes to place a new instrument of education in the hands of the missionary, to adapt it to native mentality and needs and to put it within the reach of the missionary educator. It aims to promote a permanent supply of useful films for the mission programme. Finally, its purpose is to enrich the entertainment and recreational life of the New Christian native community. (2) This passage is extremely interesting in that it allows us to see the larger context of the BEKE. It places the experiment within the proselytizing impulse. It is not really a cinema for Africans, as it claims, but a cinema for the missionary, indeed a missionary cinema, a cinema on a Christian mission. It seeks to auxiliarize the cinema and make it an instrument of the propagation of the Christian faith within the overdetermined context of colonialism. Only in the last instance does it preoccupy itself with the recreation and entertainment of Africans. Being then a weapon of proselytism, one could surmise that it is not a cinema that would emphasize such things as the representation of violence and sexuality, which are the staples of the dominant Hollywood cinema at the time. It is going to be a sober cinema. In some ways, the failure of the experiment can be anticipated by its mode of spectatorial address as enunciated in its objectives. The morphing in the project becomes clear. From Major Notcutt’s desire to control the recreational activities of his laborers, to a missionary hijacking of a project, it is possible to see the ways in which Africa was the site of battle for different types of colonial 214 experimental appetites through the cinema. The document “The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment” reveals yet another dimension to the project: The experiment is essentially an undertaking in the field of Anthropology. Anthropologists are invited to assist by criticizing scenario synopses submitted to them and by viewing and criticizing the actual films. They will be able to prevent mistakes and help integrate the whole experiment with the latest developments in practical anthropology. Both anthropologists at home and those on the field could give invaluable help in these ways. (5) Thus the missionary impulse is doubled with an anthropological impulse via an appeal to the discipline, to help frame the experiment (and supposedly give it a “scientific cachet”) [not to mention the collapsing the field of film criticism with the discipline of anthropology]. This reminds us if needed, that like the missionaries, the discipline of anthropology was part of administrative apparatus of the colonial project. Indeed, Benoît de l’Estoile reminds us that one of the chief thinkers of British anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski, “in his formulation of a program for the ‘rationalization of anthropology and administration’ (...) pointed out a potential affinity between administrative and scientific forms of rationality, founded on their common ‘interest in rationalization’” (“Rationalizing” 30). More fundamentally, de l’Estoile identifies the multiplicity of places of encounter or even “elective affinity” (his term) between anthropology and colonial administration. 123 He cites two sources, which help place anthropology in the administrative project of colonialism. He starts with Lucien 123 It is important to add that the above cited Malinowski, along with two other colleague anthropologists Seligman and Myers, had been contacted by the Colonial Office for a BEKE-style experiment “to test the possibilities of the cinema as a medium of education for ‘backward races’” (Smyth, “The Development” 441). The project reportedly never materialized for lack of funding. 215 Lévy-Bruhl, a French anthropologist and sociologist, 124 who contends that, in a colonial context “scientists and technicians are needed to provide a methodological inventory of the colony’s wealth in natural resources (mines, forests, crops, etc) and to identify the best means for harnessing them.” Lévy-Bruhl also muses whether “the native population [is] not the first among these natural resources” in which case it would be imperative to engage in the act of “studying the population methodically, in having a precise in depth knowledge of its languages, religions, social forms…” (“Rationalizing” 31). The second quote is attributed to Jules Brevié, Governor General of French West Africa between 1931 and 1937 125 Colonization has entered its scientific phase… Here too, knowledge is necessary for planning and taking action… Black Africa’s agricultural growth depends on detailed agronomic studies, sustained and impartial experiments, but also an equal investment in knowledge of the native environment, including African peasants and their mentality, methods and aptitudes. (De l’Estoile, “Rationalizing” 31) These quotes could have come from the designers of the BEKE itself 126 similar as they are to the approach of the backers of the experiment. 124 Lévy-Bruhl published a book entitled La mentalité primitive in 1922, which was translated in English the following year under the title Primitive Mentality, which clearly resonates with the BEKE project. 125 These years would include the years when the BEKE was in effect in British Africa. Although the above two quotes were articulated in the French context, it is clear as seen previously, that there was tremendous inter-colonial comparison, dating back to at least the Berlin Conference, which established a general inter- colonial structure of feeling. 126 In fact, the BEKE in seeking to appeal to the discipline of anthropology does include in Appendix G to its account, The African and the Cinema, an excerpt of one of the key documents in British film policy in 1932 entitled “The Film in National Life” by the Commission on Educational and Cultural Films. The document has the following to say about Empire and anthropology: “It is equally important and more urgent to obtain deliberate documentary films of the great mass of local traditional practices and conventions which make up the daily lives of primitive, barbaric and orientally civilized peoples within the Empire, and to preserve them for future record, before they are overwhelmed by contact with Western customs. It is still possible to obtain such film by expenditure of labor and time; soon even that will no longer be possible, for the life itself will be gone” (qtd. in Notcutt and Latham 244-245). Here anthropology is called to rescue the vanishing cultures of Africa and Asia. This impulse is very much central to the BEKE project as they wonder “how to preserve the respect of the younger generation for the best traditions of the tribe” (“The Bantu” 1). 216 We thus find ourselves at a very interesting nexus. In the first chapter of this study, we encountered a colonial interpretation of the term bassour (as we discussed the visit of Lumière operator Alexandre Promio in Algeria). The bassour was described as a kind of cage, which carried goods on the back of a camel and was seen by the French observer as a marker of a lack of separation of spheres (food storage, kitchen, bedroom, etc) in the lives of the ‘natives’. It is possible to reverse the analogy here in looking at the mechanisms of colonialism. Colonialism can be considered as a ‘bassourification” of various spheres of knowledge and power (the spiritual and educational for missionaries, the intellectual for anthropologists, the managerial for administrators, the military for the soldiers, etc). Appendix A of the book The African and the Cinema listing the members of the Advisory Council of the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment confirms the above observation. Indeed the membership included Lord Lugard as Chairman (the administrative sphere as well as the educational/intellectual sphere- Lugard also chaired the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures). Other members included two representatives of the British Film Institute 127 (the cinematic sphere) including Dr. T. Drummond Shells (who also chaired the Dominions, India and Colonies Panel of the BFI), three representatives of religious institutions (the spiritual sphere) including in addition to J, Merle Davis, a representative of the London Missionary Society and one from the Cinema Christian Council, two from educational institutions (the educational sphere), one representative of 127 It may be important to remember here that the British Film Institute itself was founded as a result of debates pertaining to the management of the cinema both in the metropolis and the Empire. 217 the Royal Anthropological Institute (the intellectual sphere) and finally a representative of the already discussed Gaumont-British Instructional (another dimension of the cinematic sphere). In this context, the cinema in the age of colonialism, especially in its BEKE form could be seen as a point of crystallization of a bassourification of the spheres of power/knowledge. 4. The Philanthropic Discourse Another important element of the BEKE puzzle is the question of the philanthropic discourse, which is linked although not reducible to the missionary discourse. In relation to the missionary discourse, it has to do with the supposed solicitude of the BEKE vis-à- vis the welfare of Africans. Although nobody invited them to come, it is felt that the BEKE is in effect a philanthropic endeavor as it seeks to have “films of Africans, made in Africa, for Africans.” It takes upon itself the (white-Christian- man’s) burden to bridge the intergenerational gap between African denizens of the city and the rural areas, to “preserve the respect of the younger generation for the best traditions of the tribe,” “to help the adult African to understand and to adapt himself to the new conditions which are invading and threatening to overwhelm him,” “to conserve what is best in African traditions and culture by representing these in their proper setting as stages in racial development and as an inheritance to be cherished with pride,” “to provide recreation and entertainment” (“The Bantu” 1-2). 218 The prevalence of the term help is striking here as it positions Africans as “help-less.” The sliding of the signifier continues, from God-less, to cinema-less, to help-less, it is clear that an active construction of the notion of lack is the condition of possibility of the continuation of their presence in Africa. The BEKE engineers strive thus on the narrative of lack, the construction and maintenance of a narrative of lack, lack itself being a founding pillar of narrative itself. Lack of funding being one of the questions for any such enterprise, the BEKE would obtain funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York as well as such mining interests the Roan Antelope Copper Mines, Ltd., the Rhokana Corporation and the Mufulira Copper Mines, Ltd, none of which were by any means engaged in a philanthropic project. It is well known that Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia) is one of the richest copper countries in the world, and these companies were among the richest in the world. We also remember the Cape to Cairo franchise, which among other things sought to link various mineral mines from South to North of Africa. It is thus interesting that the philanthropic discourse satisfies itself with both notions of backwardness and advancement, but also more squarely with straightforward economic plunder. 5. The Experiment The time has come to look at the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment on its own terms. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of the book The African and the 219 Cinema is the examination of the actual film production and circulation process. It is there that one witnesses the project unraveling over itself, collapsing as it seeks to self- narrativize. 6. The Originary Argument One of the fallacies about the BEKE is their claim that they were introducing the cinema in Africa. Indeed the very opening question of the first chapter of the book, which introduces the BEKE, goes as follows: “‘Why be in a hurry to introduce the African to the cinema’ is a question that may well be raised by the title of this book" (Notcutt and Latham 22). Reading such a statement makes one wonder whether the architects of BEKE were actually fooling themselves, their sponsors or chose to close their eyes vis-à-vis the obvious. Indeed, not only do they assume that there can exist such a category as “THE African,” but they surmise that forty years after the Lumière cinematograph, they could actually be introducing the cinema to Africa. Our research has already shown that the Lumière were in effect in Africa as early as December 1896 with Alexandre Promio in Algeria. We have also already discussed in this very chapter - dealing specifically with British films - many films that predate the arrival of the BEKE on the eve of WWII in Africa. Could it be, one wonders, that the BEKE sought to make their project look exceptional in order to impress their funders or patrons? 220 7. The Film Production Process As a reminder, the project started on June 1, 1935 and folded two years later in 1937. The total output over the two years was 35 films. Voice-over commentary was used in such languages as English, Swahili, Sukuma, Kikuyu, Luo, Ganda, Nyanja, Bemba and Tumbuka. The technical crew involved an electrical and sound engineer (G. C. Gardner who had already worked with Notcutt in East Africa), a cinematographer (Captain C. F. Cooley), a projectionist P. D. Woodall and a director who was also the accountant, Major L. A. Notcutt. The BEKE was premised on a two-fold approach to their entire project. This involved the production phase and the exhibition phase to “selected native audiences over the largest possible area of Eastern and Central Africa” and “studying the responses of the audiences to the pictures displayed. The work is divided in a producing organization and displaying organization” (“The Bantu” 3). The production process was premised on a number of fundamentals, such as the centrality of low-budget, the use of cheaper technology. Indeed they felt that “owing to the improvement in sub-standard projectors, it is now possible to exhibit a 16mm film to a native audience as large as 1,500 persons” (“The Bantu” 3). In that sense the architects of the BEKE were not totally outside of film history, that is, that many of the changes in 221 film history have been linked to the advent of new technology, which made the cinema accessible. The BEKE would however bring about a peculiar kind of change. The BEKE project was headquartered in an old sanatorium at Vugiri, a location offered by the colonial government of Tanganyika. The films were shot in the two British colonies of Kenya and Tanganyika in 21 separate locations. The 35 films made were divided in two large categories/genres (as defined by BEKE), the “entertainment” and the “educational” film. The “entertainment” category included two subcategories, the comedy and the farce. The second major category , the “educational” was divided in two subcategories, the instructional and the cultural, in turn divided respectively into “ Instructional” and “story-instructional” and “cultural interest film,” “the story-cultural” film and the “pure drama. ” For the BEKE, the story instructional is meant to “convey some definite educational idea such as improved care of babies, seed selection, poultry keeping, cattle mastership” whereas a “change of attitude toward witchcraft , the white man’s religion, medicine, hospitals, cattle, schools, education, etc. might be brought about by a story-cultural film.” Finally the “pure drama” “will present stories full of dramatic interest in which the cultural motive may be the implanting of a pride of race and a sense of the value of what is best in African traditions and customs” (“The Bantu” 3). Not having had the opportunity to actually view any of the BEKE films 128 , we will now proceed to examine some films in light of what the architects of the BEKE 128 According to the BFI, there were only three films left of the experiment. I requested to view them as part of the research for the writing of this dissertation. But due to the film delivery process of the institution - they were located offsite - the films never arrived at my desk prior to my departure from London. 222 themselves wrote in their accounts of the experiment. We shall examine three films in the educational genre. One of the first films directed by the BEKE involved a story regarding the virtues of saving one’s money in a bank. Entitled Post Office Savings Bank it contrasts the fate of two farmers who use different saving techniques with their salary. While one goes straight to the bank the other hides his in a hole in his house. A thief sees him and steals it. A chase scene ensues in which the thief, cornered, falls from the tree where he had found refuge and dies. Several critiques are levied against the film from a supposed illiterate audience such as the harshness of the punishment for stealing. They suggest instead that the thief be taken either to court or to the chief. Yet one of the lessons drawn from this experience by the BEKE architects is that “it appears that in making films for Africans care must be taken that wrong-doing is always punished” (Notcutt and Latham 34). To what extent is this Africa specific? Any minimal knowledge of film history would indicate that only a few years prior to the BEKE, the Hays Code was enforced for the very commercial cinema the BEKE sought to define itself against. One of the stipulations of the Code was that "no picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin." 129 129 See the full text of the Hays code online at http://www.classicmovies.org/articles/blhayscode.htm 223 Analyzing the scenario of the story instructional type for poultry keeping, it appears as always already overdetermined. In Poultry Keeping, the story seeks to “show how a native can keep fowls in a village with profit” (6). 130 The story goes by opposing two approaches to poultry keeping. One in which the enclosure is dirty, while the other is clean and well kept. Naturally, the poultry in the well-kept farm is in better shape. Of course, it is well kept because the person doing so has been “imitating the white man” (6), while the others refuse to do so because “the spirits of their fathers don’t like to see their customs change or it will bring evil upon the village” (6). Singularly, the incident that drives the narrative has less to do with improving poultry rearing habits for the sake of the African farmers, but because of taxation. We know that Africans had to pay via taxes for the costs of their own colonization. Their taxes paid for the maintenance and running of the colonial administration as Kwame Nkrumah reminds us below: There is a belief that the British Government contributed to the costs of administration and public services in their colonies. This is a fallacy. Each colony raised its own budget out of taxes and revenue, and the first charge upon it was the salaries of the European officials of the administration. (Africa 22-23) In other words, the improvement of poultry raising and other aspects of the BEKE instructional/educational cinema project was not for the benefit of Africans. It was meant to keep the colony running. 130 “The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment: Origin and History.” London: International Missionary Council, 1930s. Print. 224 The narrative is propelled forward when “a government messenger arrives, saying that the District Officer… is coming to collect taxes” (7). The poor farmers are terrorized, wondering “where the tax money be found.” They resort to contracting debts, and are resigned to improving their poultry raising system. Although in absolute terms it is a good thing to improve one’s poultry raising abilities, it is not clear from this script whether the motivation be for improvement or to avoid the anguish of the arrival of the District Officer. Narrative transformation has to take place within a circumscribed power structure, with the District Officer as the representative of whiteness/power. He walks around the village, collects taxes, gives extensions on payments, compliments the one who is raising his poultry well, for he “is a good taxpayer” and he adds that “it would be a good thing if others followed his example” (7). Another film entitled Tax was made to address the fact that “many Natives are under the impression that their tax goes into the pockets of local administrative officers. The object of the film was to give them an idea of how it was used” 131 (Notcutt and Latham 35). The BEKE team tried to lay out a dialectic opposition between the use of taxation prior to colonialism and during colonialism, (the mode of the before and after). Thus, “in the first reel scenes were shown of the old days, with tribute being paid to the Chief, and a raid on a village which refused to pay. In the second reel, examples were given of various services rendered to Natives in return for the taxes paid-for instance medical attention, education, help in time of famine, maintenance of order and peace),” that is, how colonialism would love to see itself. 131 We know now from the above Nkrumah quote that they were actually right. 225 We are told that the film was not a success “as it needed more time than could be allotted for it.” Notcutt and Latham note the non-cooperation of “the local chief [who] failed to keep his promise to produce large numbers of warriors and other requirements. The film was popular in Tanga, but came in for a certain amount of criticism, and was not often shown” (35). This episode is instructive on many levels. Not only does it expose the total inexperience of the crew with regard to pre-production planning (in this case the film stock to narrative ratio), but it also underscores the non-exploration of the lack of “popular” success of the film and refusal of the chief to cooperate. Not only is the scenario a mise-en-scène of his supposed authoritarianism, but the writers fail consider the fact that Africans, feeling the burden of taxation on their bodies (let us remember that as in the colonial days of the USA, it was a situation of taxation without representation), would not take kindly to this blatant unadorned colonial propaganda. If they were considered illiterates in the English language, they were clearly highly literate in the language and ways of colonialism. It is thus no surprise that the BEKE team chose no to show the film often. The major themes for the instructional themes included,: “Cultivation of soil, use of manure, seed selection, production and care of good crazing land; care of cattle; use of cattle; breeding and care of poultry; home building; care of children; care of water; disposal of refuse, etc. (p 6). Yet as one examines the BEKE’s own account of their filmmaking prowess, the balance sheet is far from glorious. Indeed, of the 35 films 226 made, 132 the account of the shooting or even screening of several reveals the ineptitude of the BEKE crew. Indeed for the film The Chief (a two-reeler), about “the conflict between the old and the new,” Latham acknowledges failures of mise-en-scène and of pre- production planning. Dixit Latham: We attempted to film this story on two reels (sixteen minutes of screen time) and it was apparent that it could not be satisfactorily condensed to that extent. Also, the rushed production caused a tendency to hurry the action too much in certain parts, which were thus not clear; furthermore owing to lack of experience at that time for producing films for the Bantu, the scenes were not as nearly well directed as they could have been later… (Notcutt and Latham 38) The film production report is replete with this kind of explanation. For the one-reeler entitled The Farce (an attempt at slapstick comedy), “on the whole … the film was marred by poor cinematography” (Notcutt and Latham 39). For Co-operatives, the story of a successful co-operative movement “was too ambitious for so short a film.” Film number 9 on Soil erosion is lacking in several ways. Not only was “the photography not good” but “it was difficult in some places to follow the lesson it was supposed to teach.” Here the failure was not simply at the level of photography, but at the level of narrative itself, which was supposedly the strength of the BEKE crew. The entire edifice of BEKE was built around the idea that they would teach Africans about how to watch a film, how to follow the narrative of a film. Indeed, Latham confesses, “even agricultural officers 132 The full list of the BEKE output is as follows: 1. Post Office Savings Bank 2. Tanga Travel 3. Tax 4. Hides 5. Tea 6. The Chief. 7. A Farce 8. Co-operatives 9. Soil Erosion 10. Gumu 11. The Hare and the Leopard 12. Food and Health 13. More Milk 14. Healthy Babies 15. Progress 16. Soil Erosion at Machakos 17. Anaesthesia 18. Peasant Holdings 19. Preserving Eggs 20. Native Veterinary Assistants 21. Infant Malaria 22. Hookworm 23. Improved Agriculture 24. Coffee under Banana Shade 25. High Yields from Selected Plants 26. Coffee Marketing 27. Msukuma Farmer 28. Farm Implements 29. Labor Conditions at Geita Mine 30. Agricultural Education at Bukalasa, Uganda 31. Uganda Boy Scouts 32. Milk from Native Cows 33. Cattle and Disease 34. Artificial Insemination of Cattle 35. Marketing Export Native Maize (Notcutt and Latham 211-212). 227 differed as to what certain scenes were intended to portray.” Films produced in the second stage of the project did not necessarily fare much better. On another film entitled Soil Erosion at Machakos, “unfortunately the photography of much of it was poor.” This technical ineptitude is compounded by the boundless effrontery of the architects of the BEKE at the level of ideology. A cursory examination of their proposed scenario for one project makes this clear. In one film classified under the “Story-Cultural Film” label, which proposes to “modify attitude of Africans in regard to the values of African and European ‘medicine’” (“The Bantu” 7), they seek to adapt a book by Jean K. Mackenzie entitled African Adventurers. Set in French Cameroon, the project self-avowedly has a transitive agenda: to transform attitudes and it believes it can. It seeks to adapt the story of two brothers who go to a neighboring village to teach (European) school at the beginning of the century and are accused of causing the sickness of one of the elders in the village. To prove their innocence, they take the elder to the mission and have him cured by the missionary doctor. They are able to do so by being already Christian, that is, members of “the tribe of God” (sic). When the elder returns home in good health, he is convinced of the power the said “tribe” and asks questions about God (en route for conversion). The person who accused them of causing his father’s sickness is now apologetic and wants to go to school as well and perhaps join the “tribe of God” as well. 228 What is perverse about this is not only the selling of Europe as a package of medicine, education and religion at once, with each element reinforcing the other. It is also enshrining the idea that Africans are godless, and that they must renounce their religion and medical practices. The only way for the Africans’ salvation is to adopt European education, medicine and religion, all at once, for each of these elements is a royal entry road to the others… 8. The Exhibition Process The second leg of the BEKE project, perhaps the most important was the time of testing, that is whether the ambitions, goals, hopes and expectation about this mode of filmmaking would resonate with audiences, which ones and why. They clearly stated that they hoped to discover among other things “the African’s preference in films-which pictures interest him, which stir his emotions,” ”the technique of film production best suited to the mentality of different types of Africans-the educated, the partially detribalized, the primitive villager” as well as “the extent to which a two-and-a-half hour programme of films impresses itself upon the African’s memory; whether he grasps the educational idea behind a story-instructional picture; whether he is sufficiently interested to put such ideas into practice” (“The Bantu” 2). The films were screened in 5 colonies (Tanganyika territory, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Kenya and Uganda), 70 districts, cities and mines and 16 mission stations, 229 (Church of Scotland, Roman Catholic, Seventh Day Adventists, Mil Hill Mission, Methodist Missionary Society), Dutch Reform Church, Church Missionary Society, the London Missionary Society and the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa). Touring began September 4, 1935. The projection crew involved two Europeans, Peter Woodal, the projectionist, and G. C. Latham, the Educational Director of the project, and four Africans: Jackson, the driver-mechanic, two personal servants, Hamedi and Mulishu, and Alphonse “a hefty but brainless youth with an insatiable appetite” (Notcutt and Latham 74). 133 The means of transportation across the Eastern and Central regions of Africa was “a two ton Ford lorry with the cinema unit engine mounted on a trailer bouncing behind” (Notcutt and Latham 75). 134 A typical BEKE screening would include a film demonstrating the “talkie” technique devolved by BEKE, three short instructional films, two to three farce films, and a Western topical film, in other words a program that would mix the educational and “entertainment” elements as well as a film that would involve some estrangement from the audience’s immediate surroundings. It should be added that following the screening of the three instructional films, an audience survey would take place seeking to assess audience preference. 133 It is interesting to note that such a statement closely resembles the types that one finds in the accounts of such explorers as Henry Morton Stanley. Here it seems the figure of the missionary as explorer seems to be resurrected. 134 Here it is important to note that the question of separation of the races takes place even inside the cinema track, with a distribution of seating position reminiscent of the days of Jim Crow in the US. Indeed, when Johnson, the (black) African is driving, they sit all three in front. Yet, when one of the Europeans is driving, the black man seats behind as Rosa Parks would refuse to do in a Montgomery, Alabama bus. 230 According to the BEKE’s own account, their screenings were well attended, involving both exclusive screenings for the authorities and public screenings for crowds of about 3000-5000 people. The screenings involved the creation of a de facto benshi to curtail the problems of the multiplicity of languages. The method of audience study was described as follows: At all displays, I endeavored to arrange for competent European observers to be present and to report to me later on the reactions of the Africans to the films. In this way, a vast amount of useful information was accumulated. Officials, missionaries, anthropologists and educated Africans were the chief contributors. Their reports were based partly on their own impressions and partly on the questioning of natives after the display.” (Davis, 7) As could have been anticipated, the BEKE received varied responses to various films depending on area, specificity, etc. Regarding European settlers met along the way, “we generally found that in towns with a cinema very few Europeans came to see our pictures, whereas elsewhere most of the European population turned out.” It appears clearly here that the BEKE experiment was predicated on the bracketing out of other cinema-going possibility, that faced with a choice, audiences would prefer non-BEKE films. This was evident not only with European audiences. Indeed, the “town Natives of Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaaam found our programme too educational.” This is explained in the following way: The main reason for this, no doubt, was that many of them were regular cinema goers, and were accustomed to a proportion of definitely funny films, which they did not get in our programmes. Also these Natives were accustomed to professional films made primarily to entertain. They found our pictures inferior in quality and less entertaining in subject matter. (Notcutt and Latham 114) 231 Here it is not only clear that the BEKE were not introducing the cinema to this part of the continent, but also that they found a discerning African cinephilic culture which would have little to nothing do with their production. Sometimes the reactions of Africans were downright hostile to the BEKE mobile cinema, with actions including sabotage. Indeed, At Mwanza, we stayed in a spare house at the central African School as the guests of the headmaster, Mr. Cutler and his wife. The following night we showed at the school and the cable connecting the projector-box to the engine was cut- the only time such a thing happened. We never discovered who was responsible. (Notcutt and Latham 89) The BEKE’s predictable explanation for this was that “it may have been cut by a jab with a spear from some native who imagined it was a snake” (Notcutt and Latham 89). In other instances, the BEKE team met with upper class, highly educated Africans. For example, following a screening at the elite Makerere College, they had to conclude that “for sophisticated audiences such as we had that night, films of better quality are really necessary” (Notcutt and Latham 93). Two interesting accounts of the BEKE have to do with their encounters with Africans in position of power. In one instance, they met with Chief Kamlemera in Kinanzi, a man who supposedly made 3,000 pounds a year and drove his car to their screening. Following the screening he told the BEKE crew that “he would like a cinema of his own” to which they replied in half liberal parlance, that “with his income there is no reason 232 why he could not have a 16m cinema” but qualify this with “if suitable films are available.” This underscores not only the fact that the desire and ability to have the cinema in Africa existed and could have been done by Africans themselves without the intervention of BEKE, but also that the notion of censorship is inseparable from any analysis of the experiment. The most interesting account however is a highly significant meeting of the BEKE mobile crew in Uganda. Let us listen: At Iganga, the Saza Chief of Kamuli, named William Wilberforce Kajiumbula Nadiope, who had seen our films the previous night, brought some of his own locally taken films, which we showed with our programme. Parts were quite good and parts were very bad. We had great trouble with the box-body car here… (Notcutt and Latham 94) This is cinema history unfolding in front of our very eyes. The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment actually came face to face with an African filmmaker in 1935 in Uganda and even screened some of his films. This marks the collapse of the entire edifice of the BEKE. This encounter makes it clear if such a thing was needed, that African filmmaking practice, not only spectatorship, actually existed prior to their arrival in that region. The BEKE team should have drawn the implications of this encounter and stopped their experiment on the spot as it symbolized the opposite of everything they stood for instead of lazily referring to it in terms of thumbs up and thumbs down. 233 For us who study African cinema, this encounter has fundamental implications. It means that from now on, the name of William Wilberforce Kajiumbula Nadiope has to be added to the long list of pioneers of African cinema, most especially among those who came on the scene long before figures like Paulin Soumanou Vieyra or even Ousmane Sembène, “the father of African cinema.” Furthermore, it leads us toward other research areas such as whether or not some of these films survived and if anything could be done with them. Even more durably, it creates an area of study that has so far never been explored: the history of amateur cinema in Africa, a history that may help us rewrite the global history of African cinema. 9. Final Remarks about the BEKE It has been demonstrated above that the BEKE project was indeed fraught with many methodological, cinematic, political, ethical, problems. These ranged from the very question of the knowability of an audience (something even Hollywood has not yet figured out), to the test of realism, the question of cinematic competence of the experimenters themselves, the racialization and biologization of class (making illiteracy an immanent category which through a sliding signifier is meant to stand in for the wide diversity of African experiences). It is possible to say that having constructed a less-than-ideal spectator, the BEKE went on to propose a cinema for this new figure in cinematic reception. They proposed an entire 234 cinematic edifice that involved a certain filmic practice (the staunchly unprofessional), certain kinds of narrative (transitivity of the problem-solution model), certain genres (the educational cinema), a mode of exhibition and circulation (the mobile cinema), an economic and technical model (the 16mm film) and of course film policy recommendations which take into account previous experiments and other colonial contexts (India), but also speak to the decision-makers of colonialism. For all its avowed interests and objectives, it is difficult to forgo what may be considered the punctum of the BEKE, that which it does not clearly and programmatically state, but which creeps up repeteadly in its writings and in the documents that serve to authorize it. In their chapter one, they state in unequivocal terms: Yet surely reflection will convince any unprejudiced person (sic) that, with backward peoples unable to distinguish truth and falsehood, it is surely our wisdom, if not our obvious duty, to prevent , so far as it is possible, the dissemination of wrong ideas. Should we stand by and see a distorted presentation of the life of the white races accepted by millions of Africans when we have it in our power to show them the truth. (Notcutt and Latham 22-23) Thus it is clear that the philanthropic, the spiritual rationales put forth by BEKE find their conditions of possibility in an anxiety about one’s own ideas of the power of the cinema, one’s own fears vis-à-vis the power of the cinema to undo the colonial edifice at the level of the minds of the spectator. It is an attitude that would like the cinema to carry the “burden of representation” of the white race as mediated through the colonial context. It is in some ways the translation of a feeling of defeat vis-à-vis the cinematic apparatus. 235 Yet this very fear undermined the avowed objectives of the project. For how could a putative (African) spectator be construed as being on the one hand incapable of reading cinematic images and on the other understand “a distorted presentation of the life of white races…?” Going even further, the BEKE adds: There is much that is silly and sordid in the life of the West, but white people have other interests in life than money-making, gambling, crime and the pursuit of other people’s wives and husbands.; and their life is not entirely lived in palaces, nightclubs, opium dens and police courts. (Notcutt and Latham 23) One cannot help but wonder why Africans had to suffer the consequences through such humiliating experiments at the BEKE for the deeds of commercial film industries in Europe and America. Should not the BEKE and the Colonial Office have taken it up with their own film industries rather project their anxieties on already highly exploited peasants in Africa? Interestingly enough, the reproach made to the commercial industry was made of BEKE as well. Africans lives do not only revolve around learning. They need entertainment. They do not even only have to see films about their own surroundings, they are curious about the world. They are not only interested in fighting against disease, improving production for colonialism, which was the main output of BEKE. To resolve this problem then, the vulnerability of metropolis is morphed into that of the colonies. In that sense, the BEKE was one of the most effective means of cinematic censorship in Africa. It sought to kill a colonial African cinephilia. 236 Colonial Cinema Quarterly and Debates in British Colonial Documentary in Africa We shall conclude our chapter on documentary cinema in Africa in the age of British colonial occupation with an examination of the quarterly magazine of the descendant of the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment, the Colonial Film Unit. This will allow us to learn more specifically about the unit and to examine some of the implications for larger debates in film theory and historiography for this type of filmmaking. The bulletin defines itself in its very first issue dated November 1942 as “a monthly bulletin by the Colonial Film Unit for distribution in the colonies” (1). Becoming a quarterly magazine in March 1945 after three years of publication, it was released until 1955, giving it well over a decade-long run. In its March 1945 editorial, the magazine characterized itself as follows: Its main object has been to keep workers in the field in close touch with the work of the Unit and with the development of the cinema in the Colonies as a whole; but it has sought also to provide a convenient channel for the exchange of views on the production, distribution and exhibition of films suitable for the different kinds of audience in the Colonial Empire; and to be the vehicle for circulating informative articles likely to be useful to those engaged in cinema work. (3) Thus as the organ of the Colonial Film Unit (something the BEKE did not have), it seeks to cover time and distance by linking the field with the London headquarters. It also shows that the censorship impulse is still very present in the work of the CFU. But more than any other organ, it allows us to find out about the history and activities of the CFU in the words of the protagonists themselves. 237 Colonial Cinema magazine consisted in an editorial, which both laid out the line of the magazine as well as summarized the major questions dealt with in the issue, reviews of films as well as books. One of the cornerstones of the magazine was the reports from the field, that is, from various colonies in Africa. The Unit was based in London, in the Ministry of Information and later the Central Office of Information (from 1946), along with contemporaries such as the Crown Film Unit, headed by John Grierson. From London, the Unit sometimes (after the war) sent teams to the colonies to make films and received reports from them. Thus reports were filed from the Gold Coast (now Ghana), Nigeria, Sierra Leone, the Gambia in West Africa. While reports were also filed from locations already encountered with the BEKE, that is Tanganyika, Kenya, Uganda, Northern Rhodesia, and even further from Mauritius, the CFU to some extent marked a shift toward West Africa, with the Gold Coast, being the major center of operations in some ways. They also received reports from other colonial officials or more generally from figures interested in the cinema in the colonies. In that sense, the magazine sought to be a clearinghouse for an exchange of ideas around the notion and practice of colonial cinema. Thus, they offered practical advice or information regarding the handling of film technology, especially as it applies to the Tropics. Indeed several issues carry entries on such questions as nitrate cinema, exposure, etc. Another major element of the magazine was the exchange on theoretical debates either explaining or interrogating the very assumptions and practices of the Colonial Film Unit itself, their usefulness and relevance. 238 The first issue of the magazine situates the CFU in relation to the history of colonial approaches to the cinema. Thus, it acknowledges the filiation with previous efforts, which started almost two decades prior to its coming into being. Indeed, “for more than twenty years before the war, pioneers had done much excellent work in these directions, sometimes without encouragement from any quarter. They generously made their experience available and it has been most valuable” (1). This is of course an acknowledgement of the work of the Head of the Colonial Film Unit itself, i.e. William Sellers, who, as discussed earlier, had initiated experiments in Nigeria in the late twenties. 135 This genealogy has to pass through other already mentioned figures as well, such as Julian Huxley, Major L. A. Notcutt and later the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. In that sense, the CFU is the culmination of at least two decades of discussion and debate on the status of the cinema in the colonies, and more specifically of the place and role of the government in that endeavor. Indeed, these pioneers, although not doing their initial work for the British colonial government, were themselves employees of that government and their works were in direct lineage with the premises of that form of government in Africa. With the advent of WWII, and the lessons already drawn from the importance of the cinema in a war context following WWI, “it was arranged therefore that the Colonial 135 In effect, William Sellers in an address to the British Kinematograph Society in December 1947 told his audience that he had been studying over a period of twelve years before the war “the reactions and visual limitations of Nigerian peasants who were seeing film for the first time” (9). His experimentation process can thus be deemed to have begun about 1927. 239 Film Unit should be set up as a separate Unit under the auspices of the Films Division of the Ministry of Information for the production of special films.” 136 A. History and Activities of the CFU One of the narrative strains that can be extrapolated from the Colonial Cinema magazine is the history of the Colonial Film Unit itself. Indeed, through several articles both the leaders of the CFU and editorial board members revisit the past of the organization, situate it in relation to the present and try to envisage its future. Indeed, the magazine offered periodical retrospectives on the life of the Unit. Thus, the June 1947 issue provides us with a narrative history of the Unit up to that period. We learn that the Unit was created during the war in order to disseminate the “British Way and Purpose.” Rosaleen Smyth completes the picture by adding that “The Colonial Film Unit was established in 1939, as part of the Ministry of Information to tell ‘the story of the War with the right propaganda’ and explain ‘the effect of the war on the life of people in England’. It came into being on the heels of a general sense of dissatisfaction with the output and prospects of the BEKE both at the level of colonial governments in various African colonies and at the Colonial Office in London as well as a refusal to let private companies fill in the void. With the advent of war, the question of using the cinema in the war effort was discussed and thus following consultations, it was decided that a Colonial Film Unit 136 Colonial Film Unit. Colonial Cinema 1.1 (1942): 1. 240 would be established in the Films Division of the Ministry of Information, which had also absorbed the now world famous GPO Unit of the Griersonians. In effect, the initial films of the CFU were made with the help of the Griersonians, the GPO having now been re- baptized the Crown Film Unit. William Sellers was appointed Head/Producer of the Unit whereas renowned film director, George Pearson was named Senior Director of the Unit. As a reminder, Sellers had experimented in the Health Service of the colonial government of Nigeria with making films. He is credited with an anti-plague film in 1929, followed by 1932 of a series of 15 Health films funded by the Colonial Development Fund. He is also credited with introducing the mobile cinema van. We shall discuss George Pearson a little later. It seems that the Colonial Film Unit had at least three lives, one during the first two to three years of the war (1939-41-42), the second from 1941-2 until about 1950 and the wrapping up phase (1950-55). At the beginning of the war, and being under the banner of the Ministry of Information, the CFU had to devote most of its efforts to the war effort, that is, mobilize the colonies for the war, so they would not only provide soldiers, but also subsidize economically Britain’s war in various ways until victory was won. In this phase, all the films were virtually shot and edited in England. “In 1940, seven films were made and another adapted for colonial audiences” whereas production in 1941 was concentrated on a series of films which were intended as preliminary to the issue to newsreels.” 137 137 Colonial Cinema, 5.2 (1947): 27-28. 241 Starting 1942, the CFU saw its mandate extended to making (non war-related) instructional films. This phase also coincided with the departure of the Crown Film Unit to Pinewood Studios. Without the assistance of the Griersonians, the CFU had to recruit its own technical staff and have its own equipment. Not least among the issues of the CFU was also the lack of recent footage from Africa. Throughout its first three years of existence, it had recycled pre-war footage including those of Sellers himself during his Lagos days. The CFU sought to mitigate this lack of recent footage from Africa by setting up the so-called Raw Stock Scheme (1941 to be precise). This was a system whereby colonial information officers in various African colonies would be provided with a 16mm camera and regular supplies of raw film stock to film Africa and send the footage back to England for inclusion in newsreels and other documentaries. It was to a large part in order to facilitate communication between these people on the field and the London Soho headquarters of the CFU that Colonial Cinema magazine was created. This turn or rather return to the instructional, meant that many of the elements of the BEKE episteme could be reactivated to give a longer lease on life to the CFU. In other words, instead of disbanding after the war, the CFU repurposed its terms of reference by emphasizing their ‘missionary’ desire to ‘uplift’ the colonized. As part of this extended mandate, the question of training came to the fore. Indeed, it was necessary for the CFU to train these information officers during their vacation in London who largely had no experience of film so that they could shoot relatively decent footage upon their return in the colonies. 242 After the war, the issue of physically sending film crews in the colonies became central. Indeed, it was felt that “the majority of films for colonial exhibition should be made in the Colonies, the actual proportion desirable being estimated at eighty per cent.” 138 In this postwar context, the CFU sent its first crew to the colonies, to the Gold Coast (contemporary Ghana) colony in West Africa in January 1946. At the end of the year, two other teams were sent to Nigeria and East Africa. The final phase of the CFU can be said to begin with the end of filmic production in 1950. The CFU did maintain the domain of training as a service to be provided. By 1950, it was clear that move toward independence in Africa was no longer reversible. By then specific colonies had created their own units, which they sponsored independently, and which made the London headquarters increasingly irrelevant. The Gold Coast colony for example had its own Unit since 1947 and was already marking its difference from the CFU by turning its back on the London orthodoxies. Regarding the activities of the CFU we have already mentioned several. The Raw Stock Scheme for instance arguably consisted in a pursuance of the tradition of the amateur that was always at the center of British cinematic involvement in Africa. By providing 16mm cameras and film footage to colonial administration officers on the ground, they enshrined the notion that even during the war, the question of cinema in Africa was not treated as a fully professional manner. Those in charge of the Raw Stock Scheme were in a sense no different from such predecessors as Major Notcutt or William Sellers himself. 138 “The Colonial Film Unit.” Colonial Cinema 5.2 (1947): 29. 243 It seems that this was the triumph of the era of the amateur., that the colonies would be the domain of reserve of the amateur, who had defined his audience and subject matter as incapable of properly processing film information, and would thus position himself in the role of the mediator, of the expert who would thus bring cinematic light to the benighted masses of Africa. Another important dimension of the work of the Colonial Film Unit ended up being the training of Africans in the art of filmmaking. This though, was by no means an invention of the CFU. Indeed the BEKE had done some minimal level of training, as they needed helpers in their work. Projectionists, editors, commentators (neo-benshis) were all part of the BEKE apparatus. This practice would be pursued by the CFU although with a bit of nuance. According to Rosaleen Smyth, William Sellers, the chief of the CFU was initially opposed to the training of Africans. When Jack Beddington, then Head of the Films Division of the Ministry of Information suggested in 1943 that two Africans be appointed to the Colonial Film Unit, William Sellers argued that “an African with the necessary qualifications would be too out of touch with conditions among the more illiterate sections of the community for whom the films were principally designed” (qtd. in Smyth, “The British” 293). But training did ultimate take place with the creation of a regional film school in Accra in the Gold Coast Colony in 1948. This school was established with help from the Gold Coast and Nigerian colonial government and thus six students were trained over a period 244 of twelve months, three from each colony including Sam Aryetey who would end up becoming a prominent Ghanaian filmmaker. It would be interesting to actually seek out these initial CFU graduates to have a sense of the work of CFU in Africa. With regard to the training, the CFU, faithful to its creed, adopted the following approach: Beginning with a short course of still photography, it includes the elements of cinematography, film directing, and script writing and it is confidently hoped that the training will eventually equip the students to produce simple topical and Instructional films that would be of utmost value in these territories. 139 Subversive cinema was clearly not expected of these students. Very succinctly, other activities of the CFU involved touring the colonies with mobile vans and screening films, pursuing experiments into the possible use of cartoons to “facilitate” understanding, as well as organizing screenings for soldiers on or back from the war front. B. The Filmography of the CFU Every issue of the magazine included short notes of films recently seen by the Unit such as the documentary classic Nanook of the North by Robert Flaherty, The Life Story of the Tawny Owl by British Instructional, Instruments of the Orchestra, a children’s film made by the Crown Film Unit. Most importantly though, the filmography of the Unit was often listed and included films already existing in the catalogue, new films and even film work 139 “The School of Instruction, Accra, Gold Coast.” Colonial Cinema 6.3 (1948): 78-79. 245 in progress. Issue no. 1 for instance listed 24 films already made by November 1942, with such titles as Mr. English at Home, military-related films such as The British Army, British Soldiers, The Royal Air Force, These Are Paratroops, Our Indian Soldiers, Early Training of African Troops, African Troops on Active Service, This is an Anti-Aircraft Gun. Others more in tune with the civilizing mission (although some of the military ones must have had that element as well, the military as a form of ennobling of Africans), include Progress in the Colonies (dealing with hospitals built by the British), An African in London (including such sites as Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, The Tower of London, etc). The film Mr. English at Home was the very first film of the Colonial Film Unit. As the title indicates, the film was not set in Africa or other British colonies, but in Britain itself, and took as its protagonists a carpenter and his wife and their two children (a girl and a boy), showing a day in their lives. Literally entitled “A Day in the Life of an English Family” the film was shot by Gordon Hales and photographed by Faulder Ganoge. Making for laborious viewing due to its being “excessively obvious” (to paraphrase David Bordwell), the film begins with the boy waking up in the morning, dutifully waking his sister up, skipping shower, changing clothes, wearing his socks, gloves and shoes. The family gets together and has breakfast. Then the father stands up and leaves the house to take his bus to work. Cut back to the dining room, where mother and children are finishing their breakfast. The kids take their schoolbags and rush off to 246 school. We then cut to the schoolyard where children are playing. Childhood and school are perfectly matched together, everybody knowing what they are supposed to do. We then cut back again to the house, with the mother going out with the last child (a baby) in a stroller. She goes grocery shopping and returns home to cook for the family. It is lunchtime and the children come out of school, cross the street and get the mail. As they walk home, we see people at work. They reach home and start playing with baby. Cut to the father who also stops work to take his lunch break. He sits down with colleagues to have lunch while we crosscut with his family, which is also having lunch at home. Part 3, the children return to school while mother stays behind to clean the house and baby is fast asleep. We crosscut with the children (the boy and his sister at school playing in the courtyard). We then see the father finishing his work for the day, walking to buy the daily paper and jumping on a bus, stopping by the children’s school to pick them up and the three of them going home together. At home, the family has dinner, which is followed by everybody getting involved in putting the house back in order. The children do their homework, the daughter learns to sew, while the mother washes the baby and puts it to sleep. She returns to teach her daughter how to sew whereas the father helps his boy with homework. Then, playtime for the son, followed by sleep time for all the children. The mother closes the curtains, turns off the lights and the film ends. 247 It is striking to notice the strict division of labor in the house and respective gender expectation in late 1930s Britain. Sewing versus studying, working outside the house, versus staying at home. Also striking is the lack of display of affection between husband and wife, or even a moment of intimacy, a one-to-one moment. It is strictly the daily routine, organized around ideas of duty, order and orderliness, everybody knowing strictly their place and doing exactly what is expected of them. There is almost no outside this film, life does not creep in to jettison this routine so well orchestrated for the colonized. It may be added that there is no mention of war in the film and we are in 1939- 40, when Britain is in great danger. This paradoxical calm in the face of real existing and impending doom around the world at large, and Britain in particular makes this small film a true ideological film, showing a picture perfect family and by extension a picture perfect Britain in a context where bombs are falling all over Europe. Indeed habits have not changed, there are no shelters, light is running all right, etc., a clear sign that Britain Can Take It or perhaps pretend to ignore it (the war that is). The Colonial Film Unit also released Colonial Cinemagazines. These cinemagazines were one-reelers, which sought to replace the war newsreels and circulate information about the colonies in the metropolis and vice-versa. 140 The CFU shot a total of 58 cinemagazines, 29 in each format (16mm and 35mm). These included such titles as Kenya Building Roads and Animals from Kenya for London Zoo (no. 8, 1947), Gold 140 “After the end of the war in Europe, it was decided to revise the nature of the newsreel by converting its contents from items of purely war interest to those of particular domestic interest to Colonial audiences. It was renamed the Colonial Cinemagazine and provision was made to produce eight issues each year.” (“The Colonial Film Unit” 29) 248 Coast Police Band in London (no. 9, 1947), London: Nigerians Compete with Empire Athletes (no. 20, 1948). A cinemagazine would open with the logo of the Colonial Film Unit consisting of a circle with a crown on top of it (the circle of empire, the commonality of empire premised on the Law laid out by the British Crown, which in effects brings this vast human diversity together). Inside this circle, a second black belt circle with Colonial Film Unit written on it. Then we see a third circle, and the globe with Africa at the center, Europe and Asia, America cannot be seen because Britain no longer had colonies in North America by WWII, although it did in the Americas at large. In the background is the sky, with black and white clouds. We will take a close look at one of them to give the reader a sense of the cinemagazine. In Kenya Building Roads, we first get a shot of the countryside supposedly in the 19 th century. The shot gives a sense of peaceful contrast between land, sky and houses. Then from above, the voice descends over the images and pronounces: “No country can make progress without roads.” We then cut to a shot of a tractor pushing trees down. Nature has to be dominated indeed to be crushed for “civilization” to emerge. Says the voice-over: “At one time work like this had to be done by the hand of man. Now there are machines that can do as much work in a day as a large number of men would have done in a month.” Clearly in a ‘technology for dummies” mode of address, the voice-over belabors the triumph of technology as trees are shown falling. The sound helps it with an upbeat music singing the praise of progress. After a while, it is clear that the mode of voice-over address will be dominant, explanatory to a fault, overtly and painfully didactic. In this 249 cinemagazine, it is clear that in the cinematic battle between words and images, the word comes out on top. The moving image is functionalized, reduced to its explanatory function. No time is left for scanning the image, appreciating it, taking it all in. The forward march of progress cannot wait nor has time for meditation. As the construction of the road is shown to the viewer, the latter is informed that “everything is done to keep the road well graded.” Thus in a simple-minded logic, “an earth road will break up quickly, particularly in accounting with rainfalls,” we are treated to a use of the documentary mode as manual, as textbook for road construction under the tropics. Yet, it must be made clear that progress is not only taking place at the level of infrastructure and machinery. It is most importantly to be tracked at the human level for “these days the machines are driven by Africans. The majority of them were in the army during the war. They are putting to operation the training they received. They are expert drivers.” To be sure, the war was not simply an operation of putting African bodies in harm’s way; it was also an investment into post-war progress. As if the message was not clear enough, the CFU- believing in the pedagogic virtues of multiple repetitions which involve a repetition of what is seen in the image with what is heard in the voice-over (see a dog, hear a dog), as well as a repetition of themes addressed in the voice-over itself, the CFU puts the last nail in the coffin in the following terms: “ With trained men and good machinery, many roads can be built quickly and efficiently” as was the case for this road linking Nairobi and Limuru. 250 But there is an accompanying cinemagazine that is symptomatic of the mindset. It is entitled Animals from Kenya for London Zoo. The parallel could not be more appropriate. “We build roads for you, you give us your animals. We give you civilization, you give us the wilderness we lost.” This squarely puts the CFU filmic practice in the regime of images of the menimal genre, of the human zoo genre premised on the spectatorship of that genre. Indeed, briefly stated we get shots of people walking into the London Zoo. The voice-over contextualizes the situation for us: “At the London Zoo, strange animals from all over the world are kept with greatest care and kindness” (here perhaps meaning that Britain is benevolent and merciful with her colonies). This is followed by a close shot of a lion with the accompanying voice-over “this great lion has come from Africa” doing its job of helping fix for generations associations of Africa with lions, with wilderness. We then get shots of flamingos, leopards, as well as an elephant. These shots are crosscut with spectators looking excitingly at the animals. Unwittingly self-reflexive, the CFU cinemagazine through the smiling faces and shining eyes of the audience metaphorically addresses the British public at large, suggesting that Britain is not in the colonies to exploit, kill, rape and pillage, but instead to guarantee the entertainment of its own citizens by bringing a steady supply of wild animals for their unique pleasure. 251 C. The CFU and Its Implications for Film Theory and Historiography The final aspect of our discussion of the Colonial Film Unit relates to the possibility of linking its actions, writings, and practice to larger issues in film, cultural theory and historiography. The first place to examine this is to look at the exposition and heated debates regarding the very philosophy of the CFU itself. This is notable in the very first issue of the magazine. Indeed the notion of “special films for colonial audiences” is put forth as having been under consideration before the war. It is also argued that not only was the CFU created to make those “special films” but also that people were being recruited and trained in “the new technique developed by the Colonial Film Unit.” 141 But critiques are not far away. Indeed the magazine acknowledges that “this new technique is a very debatable business altogether” and that “some people seeing their first Colonial Film Unit production, dismiss it as a simple straightforward silent film.” Yet, the magazine warns, Many different things must be borne in mind when preparing a film for African and other audiences, and while these can be learned by most people, they cannot be learned by the man or woman who regards the films as a third rate kind of production with a particularly slow tempo. The Colonial Cinema will from time to time seek to explain the basis on which the Unit builds its films. 142 It is clear here that the CFU’s approach to the cinema was under attack from the start. It is a wonder how after the discontinuation of the BEKE, the ideas that underwrote it were accepted at the highest levels of the British government as legitimate filmmaking for the 141 The Colonial Film Unit. Colonial Cinema 1.1 (1942): 1 142 Ibid. 252 colonies. The quote makes it clear that it shall be the job of the magazine to periodically theorize the “special” ‘straightforward silent” and “third rate production with slow tempo” cinema “for” African colonies. Regarding the “silent cinema” character of the production, it appears that the presence of George Pearson can explain this in the sense that for “retarded” colonial audiences, it is more important to tell stories with images than with words (incidentally all contemporary film schools teach their students to “show, don’t tell”). The idea of simple cinema was implemented throughout the production of CFU. Thus regarding the 1942 production, the films “set out to explain in simple visual language the function of such items of war equipment as would be most likely to recur in news reports, such as tanks, aircraft, barrage balloons and the like.” 143 In the same issue, a CFU staff discussing issues related to soundtrack considered that “the films of the CFU… have as an inherent and necessary characteristic, an emphasized simplicity of technique to such an extent that the normal film conventions such as dissolves and wipes are ruled out.” 144 In a different context, George Pearson said the following about aspects of film language that were out of bounds for African audiences: Modern cinema method for literate audiences follows a highly developed formula of brief scenes, carrying the story forward. With all the time and space gaps covered by screen conventions of mixes, wipes, montages, and fades-varying its scenes with “dolly shots,” “panning shots,” queer angles, and on occasion diagrams… All the conventional methods for short-circuiting time and place are utterly confusing to the illiterate… (Pearson 25) 143 “The Colonial Film Unit.” Colonial Cinema 5.2 (1947): 28. 144 “The Use of African Music in Films.” Colonial Cinema 5.2 (1947): 31. 253 As in Mr. English at Home where nothing is left to the imagination, the CFU is engaged in a kind of “total cinema” without an outside, indeed nothing that could suggest an economy in the representation of narrative progression. Carrying forth the work of its predecessor, the BEKE, “the specific task of the Colonial Film Unit is to train colonial people in the technique of viewing and appreciating the moving picture and secondly to produce pictures in that medium and in a suitable technique to further the policies and principles of individual governments which integrate the overall Government plan.” If it is the task of CFU to help raise, develop, civilize illiterate Africans, certainly the Unit ought to be able to assess the response of the so-called illiterates to the cinematic diet specifically concocted for them. Thus, “a questionnaire on audience reactions prepared by the Colonial Film Unit was circulated in the Colonies in 1943 under the auspices of the Colonial Office.” Upon examining the results of this survey, the CFU developed a number of further “hypotheses,” premised on the same ideas of visual impairment of illiterate Africans. It should not be taken for granted that unsophisticated peoples see things as Europeans do. Many primitive people are unable to identify two-dimensional pictures with the originals; and very few tribes have evolved two-dimensional representational art. It seems possible that their vision does not have the same depth and variability of focus as those of Europeans. This, if it is so, affects the patterns of movement and the cutting of films for colonial people. Some tribes appear to be less sensitive to colour; or sensitive to tone rather than colour, a quality sometimes mistaken for colour-blindness. 145 It was felt necessary to reproduce this quote at length to show the totalitarian nature of the CFU project. It deals with the entire cinematic apparatus, from dimension, to depth of 145 “Audience Reaction to Films: Necessity of Planned Research.” Colonial Cinema 5.3 (1947): 60. 254 field, color to tone, narrative to framing (shot scale), editing and mise-en-scène, every thing that would fall within the domain of the auteur in cinema, his expressive arsenal. There had to be a way of measuring the success of this unique theory of spectatorship in cinema, which fueled a unique practice of cinema, namely in the use of narrative. As with the BEKE, the CFU would find no other instrument than audience responses, which had already been shown as flawed during the BEKE experiment. This orthodoxy of visual limitation of illiterate African peasants would first be attacked by one of the members of the CFU itself, Norman Spurr, who had been the film person at the Public Relations Office of the Colonial Government in Nigeria, the very place where Sellers made his experiments prior to the war. Norman Spurr argues that before production began, he felt that the approach to judging audience reactions so far was inadequate. Since the work of the CFU,-in continuation of the BEKE-was to transform the habits of Africans, “...we wanted to know how effective [the films] were in communicating ideas, where our strength lay, and how we might improve - always bearing in mind that we existed only to inform and to educate.” 146 Candid enough about his findings, Spurr declares that “the first thing we found was that our programmes were too long, too diffuse, and too indigestible. It was the Charlie Chaplin comedy, put in at the end of the programme, which stole the show, and not our instructional films. Competition of this kind within a programme simply would not do.” 147 With hindsight and our current knowledge of film history and 146 “The Mobile Cinema Van is A New Weapon in Mass Education.” Colonial Cinema 7.1 (1949): 9. The last part of the quote underscores the fact that the CFU was participating in a documentary impulse, as it fits in one of the four fundamental functions of documentary outlined by Michael Renov. 147 Ibid. 9-10. 255 theory, it is rather ironic that the illiterate peasants of Nigeria, who were often seeing film for the first time, according to CFU, were in aesthetic agreement with André Bazin, one of the best minds the discipline of film studies has ever produced. André Bazin together with Eric Rohmer, a New Wave film director (and both writing for Cahiers du cinéma), devoted a book length study on the complexity and pleasures of the work of Chaplin. Apparently coming to their senses, the CFU came to the realization that It soon became evident that the system of finding out what an audience thought of the films was completely inadequate: there was far too much opinion, too little fact, and sometimes we were deliberately misled. Questionnaires were not possible, because the audiences were illiterate, and the ordinary question by word of mouth was little better, “for,” argued the African, “we like these film shows, and they will continue as long as we say they are good.” 148 We were talking about illiteracy, visual illiteracy. But as with BEKE, the question of the illiterate’s literacy in the ways of the colonizer comes to the front here. Highly pragmatic, and fully apprehending the globality of a situation (the measure of meaning making), the “big picture” was the center of preoccupation of the peasants, the question of finality, of purpose and means to an end seemed to be clear in their minds. For the love of cinema, for the sake of prolonging the pleasure of watching films in absolute terms (which has nothing to do with an actual enjoyment of the films of CFU per se) they fed to the CFU “analysts” the answers they sought to hear. But criticism of the philosophy of the CFU did not only come from the European staff of the CFU. Some of the few Africans, who moved up the “developmental” ladder of the CFU cinema project, did express disagreement as well. One such figure was G. B. 148 Ibid. 10. 256 Odunton, who wrote scripts for the CFU and went to Britain for further training in 1943 at Oxford and was due to undergo training in London at the CFU headquarters, following which he was due to return to Accra, in the Gold Coast colony. In an article in the June 1950 issue of Colonial Cinema magazine, Odunton takes on the doxa (literally) of the Colonial Film Unit in no uncertain terms: What a lot has been written about the illiterate African and films. How little solid sense, how many debatable theories, and how much high-falutin nonsense! (...) Whether or not the illiterate African sees things differently, or has different laws of mental progression, I leave to the experts to say. So far only little research has yet been undertaken into the impact of films on illiterate African audiences. The results are unsatisfactory because they are fragmentary and unscientific, and offer no conclusive evidence. Such data as are available appear to be the personal opinions of self-appointed experts. (29) Odunton goes on to propose a totally new approach, which would involve “the seedy side of life” and avoid a “moral [that was] always painfully obvious.” He proposes that films be cast “in the traditional pattern of storytelling” to avoid “making our films dull,” “to enlist the help of African composers, musicians, sculptors, painters and teachers,” “to appeal to the emotions of our audiences rather than their reason, for what is art if it fails to appeal to the feelings?” (32). This program he plans to implement in the Gold Coast Film Unit, which resulted from the reorganization of he Film Section of the Public Relations Department of the Colonial Government, abandoning the 16mm format and “working on a 35mm professional basis” (32). These critical exchanges unfortunately did not fundamentally shake the foundations of the CFU, which relentlessly pursued its way. George Pearson sought to respond to 257 Odunton but offered no substantial rebuke to the ineffectiveness of the film production of the CFU. On the contrary, the following issue of Colonial Cinema carries a kind of manifesto drafted by George Pearson entitled “A Creed for Colonial Documentary Filmmakers” (who believes that the Film is important in Colonial Development). Very much patterned after John Grierson’s First Principles of Documentary, it lists a number of “We believe” creeds. The manifesto starts with the general, that is, with issues related to medium specificity (the belief in the specific abilities of the motion picture to convey some kinds of information. It also takes issue with importing within the cinema questions that might be better treated in other media). Pearson goes on to list what he considers the secrets of success in film and insists on the importance of “the subject material [as the] true moving picture material,” but most importantly on obeying “the vital principles, so far agreed, that govern narrative through moving scene flow.” These rules thus include, first of all, “a sure knowledge or audience mentality” (the backward, the illiterate) as well as the realization that teaching is meant to arouse interest (which is an implicit admission that CFU films were indeed boring as previously expressed). It is cardinal, in the eyes of Pearson that the rules of simple narration must be applied: “in each film one definite purpose to achieve,” “in each film one lesson for the audience carry away in memory,” provided that “such lesson[be] one that is within the audience capability of applying by their own effort,” “simplicity and clarity in narrative 258 flow” “narrative forward movement that keeps to the rail, is never sidetracked, never jumps the points (one is tempted to say “forward ever, backward never!” and add “no digression allowed!”) for “emphasis [must always be placed] on that which is important.” After producing a litany of dogmatic prescriptions, Pearson tries to save the day by requesting humility , for “we are but explorers working along the fringes of a new medium” and that “there is no place for dogmatism, conceit, pretence, or cheap satisfaction,” in other words, everything that the very notion of the existence of the CFU is premised on. Ultimately, the Colonial Film Unit may be remembered in film history as the only institution to have created the category of the “illiterate African peasant” as an object of cinematic knowledge that could set in motion discourses, positions of power, careers, a cinematic language, a vertically integrated cinema from conception to reception and even post reception. Except that it was premised on flawed hypotheses, which led to flawed practices. Yet, the heritage seems to have survived under other skies, in different forms. Indeed, one of the practices of the CFU was an “interactive” dimension with the audience, that is, that after the filming, they sometimes showed the films to the very audiences they filmed and often sought to ineptly record their reactions. One may wonder the extent to which this practice fundamentally differs from what Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin did with their famous film Chronicle of a Summer (1960) where they had a debriefing session at the 259 Musée de l’Homme with the people they filmed and discussed issues of realism, truthfulness, vérité, etc. Could it be that Rouch, familiar with colonial cinema in Africa, simply applied these ideas to his Parisian subjects? Rouch’s familiarity with the work of the Colonial Film Unit is well known and articulated in his article “The Situation and Tendencies of the Cinema in Africa,” which he wrote in 1961 for UNESCO. Although Rouch rightfully adds his voice to the critique of the quality of these films: “I’ve had the opportunity of seeing some of the films made by these Film Units. Many are quite disappointing, if one considers them from a purely cinematographic point of view” (Rouch 65), he found “their educational value considerable…” He even went as far as hailing the chief architect of the CFU, William Sellers in the following terms: What, then, might be said of these films generally? It is certain that Sellers must in any case be one of the true pioneers of African cinema and if, perhaps, a true African filmmaker springs up in Nigeria, Rhodesia or Kenya, it will certainly be the result of the modest but obstinate effort of this man. (Rouch 65) Such statements after the study we have proposed above are dubious at best, at worst… There are other places where the work of the Colonial Film Unit could be related to debates on film historiography and theory. Indeed the CFU did not simply seek to produce a discourse on and for the “illiterate African peasant.” It also sought to influence the thinking about cinema at the level of academia itself. Thus, the work of the CFU was presented by John Maddison of the Central Office of Information at an international gathering at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1946 as part of debates on what is now known as filmology. According to Robert Stam, the founding document for the filmology 260 movement was a book by Gilbert Cohen-Séat entitled Essai sur les principes d’une philosophie du cinéma [Essay on the Principles of a Philosophy of Cinema] published in 1946. An Institute of Filmology was created to that effect at the Sorbonne and lasted from 1947 to 1959 (Aumont and Marie 83). The project of this phenomenology-inspired group was to propose a general and scientific theory of film involving such disciplines as sociology, psychology, aesthetics, linguistics and psychophysiology (Stam 81-83). Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie add that “filmology sought to be a study of the filmic phenomenon [fait filmique], regardless of particular works or directors...” (83). Opposed to criticism and textual analysis, it developed around three major disciplinary axes: “the psycho-physiology of perception, which sought to study filmic perception as visual perception” 149 (83). The second axis according to Aumont and Marie is that “At the meeting point of sociology and the psychology of education, filmology studied the effect of filmic screening/projection on rigorously selected publics…” (83). Thus in addition to testing children’s level of understanding of image sequences, there was also an interrogation of role of the mental level in filmic understanding. It is here that the CFU presentation fit perfectly as “English anthropologist John Maddison studied the mental information of ‘primitive’ people via the cinema” (Aumont and Marie 83). Finally, filmology sought to create the framework for an aesthetic approach to the filmic phenomenon, defining the “major features of the filmic universe” (Aumont and Marie 149 One hears some of William Sellers’ statements on the visual impairment of illiterate African peasants. 261 83). This universe is reputedly apprehended through a set of phenomenological concepts as screen perception (involving flatness of screen, objective duration, the play of light and darkness, the visible, etc.) and diegetic perception , which is seen as coming under the purview of the imaginary, reprocessed through the spectator’s thought processes, in which film events supposedly unfold and characters move. Colonial Cinema gives the following account of John Maddison’s presentation to the filmologists: Mr. Maddison was invited to speak on the cinema as a mode of information for primitive peoples. He based his talk on the work of the Colonial Film Unit and illustrated it with extracts from Mr. English at Home and Fight Tuberculosis in the Home. 150 Lest we think that this august assembly of “University members, officials and cinema workers from twenty countries” who attended the Conference found the CFU work problematic, we learn that His account of the pioneer work of Mr. Sellers, of the history of the Unit and of its expanding activities, was listened to with great interest by the distinguished international audience present. The Chairman, Professor Mario Rogues, the eminent philologist, spoke with enthusiasm of the value of such practical applications of the social study of films. 151 It is not possible at this point of our research to say any more about filmology as this would require a study of the work of the filmologists, a close reading of their journal entitled Revue Internationale de Filmologie, a study of the minutes of the said conference, access to the text that James Madison presented, etc. If however, as these 150 “C.F.U. Films at the University of Paris.” Colonial Cinema 4.1 (1946): 87. 151 Ibid. 262 quotes seem to show, they did accept the work of the CFU as participating in a science of the cinema, then a re-examination of their work may be called for, at least in so far as it concerned the perception of the so-called “primitive peoples.” Another question left unanswered is the actual role and place of George Pearson in the history of cinema itself. We are introduced to him and his work in an article by the British Journal of Photography reprinted in the September 1946 issue of Colonial Cinema magazine. We learn that Pearson entered the film industry as far back as 1912, having been a teacher and headmaster and being now “the Director in Chief of the Colonial Film Unit, a Government body which exists to make films for the cultural betterment and general welfare of the inhabitants of the Colonial Empire.” 152 He is said to have directed over 300 films in Britain, Paris, New York, Hollywood, Rome and Berlin, lectured at Oxford and Cambridge, and the BFI summer school. What is more intriguing is that “eminent critics have stated that ‘Pearson was ten years ahead of his time’, that he used all the techniques of montage ‘before anyone ever heard of Pudovkin and Eisenstein’ and have compared him in stature with D. W. Griffith, Murnau and Pudovkin. Mr. Pearson is one of the pioneers in the use of non-professional actors in films of a documentary character.” 153 If such is the case, what does it mean for film history as it is currently written without taking into account Pearson’s supposed contribution? If his contribution to the history of cinema is that grandiose, how could one explain all the criticism about the CFU films that he masterminded? How could one even explain the following quote 152 Colonial Cinema, 4.3 (1946): 55. 153 Ibid. 263 from within the Central Office of Information itself about the bicephalous leadership of the CFU: Both Mr. Sellers and Mr. Pearson have had a long experience in filmmaking and instruction in filmmaking. On paper, their qualifications are most impressive. But my opinion is that their output has always been of a low standard and that they are utterly without dynamism. (Smyth, “The Post-War” 175) 264 CHAPTER 4. Documentary under Colonial Occupation: The French Case The time has come, for comparative purposes, to turn our gaze to the French colonial experience in Africa as it relates to the status of documentary on the continent. The colonial regime being a regime of exception and France being only second to Britain, in terms of the size of their colonial Empire, such a comparison must be made to allow us to assess the approaches of the two largest colonial empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. As in the first part, we will explore the moments of the early colonial documentary, the interwar years as well as the post WWII era, which for Africa coincide with the era of decolonization. The singularities of each will clearly appear, as will the points of convergence. It is however important to have a short and general overview of the ways in which, in the wake of the military conquest of parts of the African continent, France sought to administer them, that is, put them under a French order and ordering of things. According to Jacques Thobie, by 1914 and after a frantic process of expansion [in the wake of the Berlin Conference], France became the second colonial empire in the world stretching over 10 million square kilometers and with over fifty million inhabitants (7). The French Empire in Africa at its height consisted of entities with different legal statuses, that is, colonies for West and Central Africa, departments for Algeria, mandates for Cameroon and Togo (both previously German colonies) and protectorates for 265 Morocco and Tunisia. As a result, they also depended on different French ministries. As a department, Algeria was managed by the Ministry of the Interior, whereas Morocco and Tunisia depended on the Ministry of Foreign affairs, and the rest of the continent, the Ministry of the Colonies. It is important to note that behind the different appellations a rather strict colonial system was in place across the board and involved many administrative power struggles, which shaped the destiny of many of these African colonies. Indeed, it was decided that the West and Central African colonies would be gathered into federations, hence the creation of Afrique Occidentale Française [French West Africa] (AOF) and Afrique Equatoriale Française [French Equatorial Africa] (AEF). According to Jean-Meyer et al., after the creation of the colonies of Gorée and Senegal, a “colony of the Southern rivers” was created 1882, which included the littoral from Southern Senegal to Gabon. Eight years later the same space minus the Gabonese side would be named Colony of French Guinea from which other colonies would be created such as the Ivory Coast (1893) and Dahomey (1894) 154 . 1891 also saw the creation of French Sudan. It was only on June 16, 1895 that a Governorate General of French West Africa was created, 155 which sought to centralize administrative processes. There seems to have been some level of trial and error or rather a period of self adjustment during which some colonial governors sought to assert their autonomy from the central government of the Governor General based in Senegal. Hence, a brief autonomization of the Ivory Coast and Guinea 154 Meyer, Tarrade, Rey-Goldzeiguer and Thobie 706. 155 Ibid. 266 colonies would be quashed by a return to centralization. This involved a dismembering of parts of Guinea and Cote d’Ivoire to form the colony of Haut-Senegal Niger. In 1904, AOF comprised the five colonies of Senegal, Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire, Dahomey and Haut- Senegal-Niger. By 1910, the colony of Mauritania was added and Niger was isolated from Haut-Senegal Niger in 1911. Upper Volta (today’s Burkina Faso), created in 1919 would undergo multiple fates, from pure and simple suppression to being split between the colonies of Ivory Coast, Niger and Sudan, only to be re-membered in 1947 in its current form. The AEF was created later, in 1910, in replacement of what was formerly known as the French Congo. Observing these various activities of composition, de-composition and recomposition leads us to think of the little concern the colonial establishment had for Africans living in these places. It is safe to assume that from the moment of the conquest to the moment of independence some groups of Africans may have been split apart between several different entities at least three to four times, as if the continent was a sort of toy box or a game of Lego, parts of which could be reshuffled ad infinitum without any afterthought. This paradigm sets the general tone of the rest of this chapter because the colonial experience will singularly consist in acts and ideas relating to notions of shaping, molding and shuffling. This sense of shaping was at the heart of the approach to the cinema, and thus to the documentary in the French-controlled sphere of Africa 156 . 156 Hubert Deschamps, a former colonial governor and professor at the Institut des Etudes Politiques, said the following to that effect: “As for natives, from the point of view of the technique of colonialism, they may be considered as a solid mass of clay that other actors sculpt. But this matter [mass] imposes the laws of its own consistency. Sometimes it comes alive and becomes an important character. Many a sculptor will be seduced by it. At the end of the work, it will be seen mixing with others and merging with them” (6). 267 Early Documentary and French Administration of Africa We have already seen the Lumière Africa corpus in the first chapter. In some ways, this corpus largely defined the template for the different documentary approaches of the era of the early documentary. For this section, we will focus on two aspects of early documentary in the colonial era. As a transition from the Lumière, we will briefly look at the work of Félix Mesguich, who was one of the first Lumière operators, and the only one born in Africa, in Algeria. Although he took the Cinématographe to the four corners of the world, he only made films in Africa after he left the Lumière brothers. We will then take a look at Pathé whose company outlived the Lumière and went on to become one of the most successful companies in the history cinema in the pre-WWI era. Pathé was heavily involved in Africa. We are focusing on it understanding that practices, approaches and attitudes at Gaumont, Éclair, Eclipse and other companies did not significantly differ as far as Africa was concerned. A. Félix Mesguich, First African Film Director? We learn a lot about Mesguich from his own book entitled Tours de manivelle, souvenirs d'un chasseur d'images in which he consigns his memories as an “image hunter” [chasseur d’images] as he referred to himself. In this rare book (perhaps the only one written by a Lumière operator and prefaced by Louis Lumière himself), we learn not only about his recruitment in the Lumière house, his training as an operator by Alexandre 268 Promio, his first job as an operator in Lyon, his firsthand witnessing of the spectatorial responses to the Cinématographe 157 , his first trip abroad to New York City, etc. In November 1905, he traveled to Algeria at the request of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique for the Warwick Trading Company. We remember that this was one of the first companies to specialize in the business of filming the colonies. Going to Algeria for Mesguich meant going back home, filming one’s place of birth and he becomes lyrical in his description: "Luminous with its amphitheater-shaped terraces, Algiers shines under the midday sun. The Mosque, the Casbah, the lacing of narrow and climbing streets, the small Arabian houses, I film my youth and its decor" (94). Traveling across Algeria by car with an automobile concessionaire, he falls into an ambush and gets shot at by Algerians. He films the city of Oran, which he refers to as a “crossroads of peoples and races, a point of transition between Europe and Africa.” He contends that his directorial desire is to convey this sense of liminality where Catholics, Jews and Muslims shared the same space (Mesguich 95). Interestingly enough, he is very much concerned with and interested in the picturesque, as he mentions filming people and objects, from “streets lined up with laundry,” to fortune tellers, from “Andalusians who threw red wool covers over their shoulders” to “ Negro villages, Black images: Negresses selling fruits, basket weavers at work,” “wandering sorcerers holding dancing 157 He recounts his screenings of the now classic La sortie des usines Lumière, L’arroseur arrosé and L'arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat. He confirms what is now part of the legend of the beginnings of the cinema, the movement backward of spectators as they experienced the impression that the train was coming in their direction. 269 bears on a leash” (96). In Tlemcen, he filmed among other things “hashish smokers savoring the narguile in a rapturous silence” and “young Jewish women wearing damask silk robes and handing poultry to the rabbi who copiously slits their heads off, adding a prayer to this fulfillment of the Hebraic rite” (97). Mesguich refers to non-European Algerians as indigènes ‘natives’ and declares that native life “ignore le movement” ‘knows no movement,’ casting it as the space of stasis which he contrasts with a military camp, full of activity. It is clear that Mesguich posits a distance between himself and the non-Europeans he films. In effect, the colonial system does as well, as the commander of the military camp “organizes an Arab feast for me” (97). In effect, Mesguich’s trip to Algeria ends with the death of two people. Indeed, following the filming of various picturesque scenes during which he films belly dances, Mesguich requests a goum (a contingent of Algerian soldiers mobilized by the colonial army) to mount their horses and organize a race involving shooting guns (this is also referred to as a fantasia). In the process, two horses fall along with their riders. The two men die. Asked by a representative the Governor of Biskra to pay two thousand francs to the wives of the deceased, his comment is “the difficulty is to know how many they are on the spot” (Mesguich 101). His company would end up sending five thousand francs to the widows. In addition to Algeria, Mesguich also visited Tunisia, Egypt (November 1906 - March 1907 - four months) and Morocco (August - September 1907). In Tunisia, he 270 acknowledges that not everybody was impressed by the Cinématographe for a barber took offense of his attempt to film him even after he had tried to give him money (the man laughed at him for trying to pay for his image). The question of the control over one’s own image was already present in the minds of Africans. When somebody else volunteers to perform for him, he refers to the end of the performance in the following term: “A barbaric dance closes the exhibition” (Mesguich 101). In Egypt he revisits aspects Promio’s Orientalist dream of sheets of time, of pyramids, mosques, the Sphinx, Kasr-el-Nil Bridge and goes down the Nile. Like Promio, he is interested in fixing time, in fixing Egypt in the past. Like Promio, he was also very much interested in mise-en-scène, as the above episode of the dead soldiers shows. Unlike Promio, he visits more of the sacred places of Egyptology, Thebes, the city of Temples, Abu Simbel. Unlike Promio, he reaches Sudan in black Africa, flirts with the women, films their nudity as they come out of their bath in the Nile, organizes and films a crocodile hunt (including the dead crocodile in close up). The filming reportedly lasted three months and sixty meters of footage. Mesguich’s Moroccan episode is more problematic. He accompanies the French colonial army headed by Maréchal Lyautey on an expedition to quash an insurrection in the city of Casablanca during which a number of Europeans were killed. He first arrives there on board of the French torpedo boat (he is embedded and works for the newspaper Le Journal) and dreams of filming live combats between the forces of colonialism and those 271 of Moroccan resistance 158 . He clearly films the events on the side of colonialism as he has discussions with French military experts who tell him about battle sites. In fact, he considers himself French as he mentions that when he ran away from an attack by Moroccan insurgents, he headed toward “our French 75 artillery field guns.” Giving a precise description of the “Moors’ boldness against our positions,” he shakingly proceeds to “reposition my apparatus on its tripod and… film the enemy” (Mesguich 147). Mesguich even filmed the interrogation of a Moroccan prisoner of war. It is interesting to note that not once in his narrative does Mesguich express any ambiguity about his position. Although he was born in Africa, he was culturally, mentally and ideologically unable to side with Africans in their resistance against colonialism 159 . B. Pathé in Africa It is common knowledge that in the wake of the Lumière invention of the cinematograph, a number of companies and individuals took interest in it and in the end outdid the Lumière in terms of longevity, prosperity and reach. Such was the case of the company founded by Charles Pathé, to whom Louis Lumière reportedly said that the 158 “I am on alert. Will I be able to film an actual battle?” (Mesguich 145) 159 Abdelghani Megherbi, in his book on Algerians in colonial cinema, contends that “Mesguich does not beat around the bush. He did not seek to film Algerians in order to better understand them but rather to film his juvenile memories and the background which served as its ecological substratum” (54). Having seen Mesguich’s films however, he adds that “In his films, the desire to disfigure the colonized was not present. He filmed reality as it was, with its beauty and its ugliness. In fact, he did not film scenes. He photographed them” (54). This statement clearly opens itself up for criticism in light of documentary studies, which has thoroughly deconstructed the transparency of the mode. Still, seeing the films would no doubt add to our analysis. 272 cinematograph really had no future. Yet Charles Pathé turned his initially fledgling company into one of the giants of the silent cinema era, at least until the rise of Hollywood in the aftermath of WWI. As a major player in cinema on the world stage in that period, Pathé cinema also took part in the colonial adventure and contributed to the general colonial structure of feeling. As early as 1906, Pathé was involved in making films in Africa, with such titles as Panorama en Guinée (pris à l’avant d’un train) (1906) and Vues d’Afrique 160 : Au Congo (1906). Pathé sent operator Alfred Machin on two trips to Africa, the first in December 1907 and the second in 1908-1909. On his first trip, Machin’s attention was attracted by the spectacular in Africa, which led him up from the Blue Nile to Abyssinia (contemporary Ethiopia). The picturesque, the flora and fauna made the bulk of these films, including hunting, one of the key features of the colonial experience, with the taming of wild animals as the metaphorical taming of Africans and of their lands. Hence, such titles as En Afrique Occidentale (1907), Chasse à l’hippopotame sur le Nil Bleu (1908) and Chasse à la panthère (1909) 161 . Convents adds that Machin on his second trip followed the White Nile all the way down to Lake Victoria going through such cities as Cairo, Alexandria and Khartoum. The output of about twenty films was reportedly parceled out into three series, namely, Voyage en Afrique, Les grandes chasses en Afrique, Voyage en Egypte (enshrining the idea that Egypt is not in Africa) along with two others films, one on birds, Les oiseaux d’Afrique et leurs ennemis (1911), and the 160 The term vues d’Afrique ‘views from Africa’ has stayed across the century and been given as a name to a major festival of African films in Montreal, Canada. 161 Convents 127. These titles bear a strange similarity with those of early Jean Rouch. 273 other on cinema entitled Le cinéma en Afrique (1911). Additionally, footage from the expedition was turned into a documentary anthology, screened in the years 1910-1911, as well as into a four-part feature-length film entitled Voyages et grandes chasses en Afrique (Convents 131). Another one of the films that came out of this trip was entitled En Afrique Centrale: Fachoda (1910). In the French diplomatic imaginary, Fachoda is the ultimate site of defeat and humiliation of the French by the British as the former sought to conquer this part of Central Africa. There is indeed a so-called “Fachoda syndrome” in French diplomatic qua military history, which reportedly still animates and motivates the thinking in France today. It has been argued that the Rwandan genocide and the alleged French participation in it was due to the fact that the people who sought to take power from the Hutu majority leadership had come from Uganda, and thus were regarded as Anglophone, whereas France was reportedly in support of the so-called Francophones, in effect using Africans as proxy for recasting of a battle and a defeat caused by the British. The previous year, Pathé shot Promenade au Soudan (1909) filmed very much in the Lumière mode, i.e. static shot, almost frontal/presentational style, characters are facing the camera, aware of its presence and dancing and performing for it and with a strong emphasis on the ethnographic, the picturesque. Consisting of two short films, the first is entitled Chez les griots: danse de sabre et de guerre, which is almost literal replica of a Lumière title featuring the Ashanti in Lyon. One senses here a desire to experience the 274 thrills of filming a scary saber dance that would confirm the radical alterity of performers. As in the Lumière films, the musicians and audiences are shown prodding the dancers. Among the Pathé films of this era, such films as Afrique Occidentale Française: Bas Dahomey et Bas Togo (undated) 162 may be mentioned as it takes place in West Africa and chronicles the method of palm oil processing from picking palm nuts to obtaining the oil. Also looking at the sisal and at the process of decorating calabashes, the film ends on the thrones of the kings of Dahomey. It could of course be argued that these crops were meant for export in Europe, whereas the empty thrones of the Dahomeyan kings were reminiscent of French victory over Africans. One is the condition of possibility of the other, African labor for Europe depends on Europe’s submission of the leadership of Africa. The camera in effect takes stock of this state of facts. It is almost as if following the victory of European generals and captains, they came to see the product of that labor. It was Pathé however who would perhaps articulate the best the beginning of a theory of colonial cinema, or at least officially assign a place for cinema in the colonial project, by calling for a “cinema as an auxiliary to colonization” in a 1916 document penned by Gérard Madieu (Pathé’s official representative in Algeria) and prefaced by none other than the Governor General of Algeria, Charles Lutaud himself. As a reminder, Lutaud was the figure for whom Alexandre Promio (first Lumière operator in Africa) would end 162 This film is available online on the Gaumont-Pathé archive Web site: www.gaumontpathearchives.com 275 up working for as of 1919 as he founded the Service Cinématographique and Photographique (Film and Photo Unit) of the Government General of Algeria. This text deserves that we stop on it, because it appears to be one of the first open theoretical articulations of the status and role of the cinema in the colonial project in the French context. It is also interesting in other ways. It is the private sector that calls for more involvement of the government in the colonial cinema project. The collusion of the public and private sector, already evident in other aspects of colonialism, also appears here in the domain of the cinema. We remember from Hannah Arendt that the bourgeoisie (the private sector) called the state to its rescue and that it was this process of statization of the bourgeoisie that led to what we now refer to as imperialism. Once again, in the case of cinematic imperialism, it is the private sector (Pathé was one of the two majors of the cinema in the world at the time) that calls for government involvement and investment. It is important also that this theory was elaborated on the ground, in Africa, in Algeria itself, by presumably colonist filmmakers, in other words, people for whom colonialism was a daily-lived reality. This is very much reminiscent of the British context where figures like William Sellers, Major L. A. Notcutt, G. C. Latham and others played no small role in formulating an approach to cinema in the colonies, as if it took people living among the colonized to articulate a colonial approach to the cinema. It is also no surprise that this activity of thinking the cinema in the colonies should come out of Algeria. Indeed, Algeria was the Crown jewel of French colonialism, the preferred 276 colony in a way. Its proximity with Europe, its Mediterranean-ness, its weather, the fact that it had been a colony for almost a century, the only French settlement colony in Africa, all these contributed to the fact that in Algeria the colonial idea had brewed for a long time. Indeed if in the rest of the continent, there was an effect of groping in the dark and experimenting with different approaches, this phase had arguably already passed in Algeria. Indeed the almost 100-year presence in Algeria served as a template for how to organize the rest of the colonies in the twentieth century, at least in Africa. Laws, regulations, organizations even film laws were in part inspired by the Algerian model. In that sense, understanding, as they are linked. It is also no surprise that because of this attachment to Algeria, France did not hesitate to go through an eight-year war against Algerian nationalists. It was the longest decolonization war for France and one in which all the knowledge and expertise on how to defer if not erase any desire for self- determination was put in place and activated. Gérard Madieu’s is a 30-page essay that combines a global apprehension of the cinema with the ways in which it could be put at the service of the colonial project. Claiming the fundamental Frenchness of the cinema 163 , he contends, with the hindsight of two decades after the Lumière invention, that the cinema is one of the best applications of photography (2). He remarks that the cinema has become an auxiliary of various scientific, artistic and literary endeavors and that the various layers of the educational system have requested its assistance. Here the notion of the cinema as auxiliary is 163 Indeed, he argues that “the cinema [is] the quintessential French oeuvre” [le cinéma, oeuvre française par excellence] (2). 277 interesting, in that it contends that cinema means in relation to the various uses it is put to. An adaptable apparatus by definition, it arguably only really does the bidding of its user. In that regard, and in light of the current colonial situation, Madieu feels that the cinema has a role to play in the colonialist enterprise. In addition to addressing other issues, such as the necessity for specific legislation for the cinema and its potential applicability to the colonies, Madieu also takes on the moral panic argument against the cinema and argues for more latitude toward this new medium, which still has many years to prove itself. According to him, instructional cinema was born in France, and the Ministry of Instruction had already created a commission of enquiry into the pedagogic role of the cinema, highlighting that the latter would be perfect for such disciplines as physics, chemistry and the natural sciences (Madieu 14). Madieu even offers us a world tour of the various uses of the Cinématographe. In the specific realm of colonialism, Madieu sees the role of the cinema as bidirectional: teach France about the colony and teach the colonies about France. In some ways, Madieu is anticipating debates that would take place in the Interwar years all the way to the moment of decolonization, for this was the central axis and preoccupation of the colonial documentary in particular, in France as well as in Britain. The problem however with this pedagogic project was that it not only posited a “natural” hierarchy between the colonies and the metropolis, but also [consequently] with regard to the educational dimension, it felt that the metropolis had little to nothing to learn from the colonies. 278 Education in the colonial context, as we know, was radically overdetermined, overburdened by the so-called “white man’s burden.” For Madieu, “A few years ago still, some retarded doctrinaires condemned colonization. But it ended up imposing itself as the future form of the evolution of societies, as the natural law of the expansion of the races and the diffusion of the genius proper to each” (23). As such, he contends, the cinema has a major role to play in this endeavor. Indeed, The cinema is bound to play a major role in colonial penetration, in the unending expansion of ideas and facts. It is no longer possible to deny it this quality, to object with any kind of argument. It has proved itself and everyday, what is learned from practice corroborates the proposed theory of the cinema as colonizer. (25) He sees several ways in which cinema could be part of the colonial project. One of them is the kinds of films the colonized are allowed to see, that is, the question of censorship. Indeed, although in his mind, the “Arab-Berber soul” welcomes the cinema, it is important to take its mentality into account and select films accordingly. This statement is strangely reminiscent, or rather anticipatory of the premises of the British Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment as well as the Colonial Film Unit. Here, however, the question is not about making slower films, but instead about showing Walt Whitman- esque “songs of ourselves,” i.e. showing films that glorify and emphasize the greatness of France. He proposes that mobile films units be set up, with the help of the French government that would take this message of grandeur to the furthest reaches of the Sahara and the Sahel. Part of this grandeur lies of course in the so-called achievements of colonialism in Algeria, which the cinema is called on to make a spectacle of (we have already seen examples of this in the Lumière cinema as in the filming of the Kasr-El-Nil 279 bridge in Egypt, etc). Naturally, these achievements should not be reduced to the field of infrastructure building, but should include the arts, the sciences and more generally, the French way of life. Madieu even argues that these films should be targeted at foreign audiences as well so as to prove the world that France is not “incapable of colonizing” [inapte à la colonization] (29). In all circumstances, the idea of the prestige of France should be the foremost preoccupation. Madieu believed that this would help endear the French to Algerians, that is, win the hearts and minds of Algerians in favor of the French presence on their land. Here it is almost as if Madieu was calling on the cinema to wash the dirty laundry of French colonialism clean, by transforming, indeed morphing it into a collaborative enterprise (almost anticipating the Griersonian project at the Empire Marketing Board). But the films would also have to show Algeria and Algerians to the French. This however should be nothing short of a cinematic production of a colonial sublime. Of Algeria and Algerians, Madieu proposes that the cinema show “grandiose ruins of the past,” “prosperous and captivating oases,” “glittering visions of fantasias shot in nature in an ideal setting,” “ caravans, infinite deserts” (29) to awe the French spectator. In addition to these, such scenes as “tribal camps,” “Kabyle villages,” “the harvesting of dates, the cooking of couscous,” “Muslim prayers,” “market scenes” and “men dressed in a picturesque fashion” (Madieu 14-15) shall not be left out. These suggestion-prescriptions in effect contributed to creating the template for what colonial cinema should be, a sort of “how to” or even “what to” film manual of colonial cinema. 280 This vast program for the cinema in the colonies will see many of its features recast in debates, policy arrangements and filmic production in the aftermath of WWI. French Colonial Documentary in the Interwar Years The two decades separating WWI and II were very active years for colonial cinema in the French context. These activities included the exploration or rather the physical mapping of this vast continent with the coming together of the cinema and other modern prosthetic devices of mobility such as the automobile (largely, and especially in the 1920s), the train and the airplane, in a move to effectively take spatial possession of Africa. Also included were the expansion of the colonial city symphony genre (arguably by Promio and his generation of directors), the initiation and implementation of specific regulations regarding the status of the cinema in the colonies, the technological passage from silent to sound cinema, with its obvious repercussions on the colonial dimension of the medium, and of course the larger plan regarding the importance of the cinema for colonialism. A. The Twenties The 1920s were arguably inaugurated both politically and cinematically with the acceptance of some of the theses of Gerard Madieu at the highest levels of government. Indeed, as discussed, above, Madieu, at the height of WWI, and from the vantage point of 281 his Algerian experience, advocated for the turning of cinema into an auxiliary of colonialism. It would take only four years for the French Government to seize on Madieu’s insight and make it state policy. Indeed, in 1920, Albert Sarraut, the Minister of the Colonies himself, had the following to say, words that have now become classic of the formal embrace by the state apparatus of the cinema for the purposes of its colonial ideology: It is absolutely indispensable that a methodical, serious propaganda, constituted by the word, the image, the newspaper, the conference, the film, the exhibition, be able to influence the adult and the child in our country. We must improve and expand, in our elementary and high schools the highly sketchy teaching they receive on our history and the composition of our colonial domain. This teaching must be livelier, more expressive, more practical… [It is important] that the image and the film teach and entertain the French youth who knows nothing about the colonies. 164 An entire project is hereby enunciated. The French state shall thus use every means necessary, and primus inter pares, the image and the film, to make the French familiar with the colonies. Interestingly enough, it chooses to turn the cinema into an ideological state apparatus to conquer another ideological state apparatus, the school system. Highlighting the project of turning young minds into colonialism friendly minds, it is in pursuit of the project of the Parti Colonial, which as in Britain, had always lobbied for more presence in the colonies. It is almost as if, the twenties proved to be a fertile ground for the moving toward the center of the political apparatuses of colonial powers of the various pro-colonial lobbies. There was arguably a logic of institutionalization of a 164 Albert Sarraut in the Senate in Annales du Senat, session of February 27, 1920. 282 colonial structure of feeling that ran across various European capitals. It is now known in effect that French institutions took very much after such British institutions as the Royal Colonial Institute. Indeed, more largely speaking the role of the French state in the actual process of colonial film production starting in the twenties was major. It involved not only giving loans for films being shot in the colonies, but sometimes even sometimes the presence of government ministers and even the President of the French Republic on movie sets 165 . In spite of the criticism however, the intervention and presence of the government in colonial cinema would be actively sought by many of the thinkers and practitioners of colonial cinema. Albert Sarraut, the Minister of the Colonies himself was naturally no small advocate of the colonial project. Kwame Nkrumah, a keen observer of these colonial times, provided the following quote by Sarraut as the latter addressed the Ecole Coloniale in 1923 and which could be referred to as the “candid confessions of a colonialist”: What is the use of painting [over]the truth? At the start, colonization was not an act of civilization, nor was it a desire to civilize. It was an act of force motivated by interests. An episode in the vital competition, which, from man to man, from group to group to group has gone on ever increasing; the people who set out to seize colonies in distant lands were thinking primarily of themselves, and were working for their own profits, and conquering for their own power... (qtd. in Nkrumah, Africa 21) 165 According to Pierre Leprohon, “the government no doubt played a role in the expansion of colonial cinema. It often offered its patronage, its collaboration, even its loans to films shot in the colonies… Hence ministers and at times even the Head of State presided over mediocre productions for which the colonial army was mobilized to play in films of a soap opera variety” (215). 283 Yet, in the same year 1923, Sarraut penned a book entitled Albert Sarraut, ministre des colonies. La mise en valeur des colonies françaises [Albert Sarraut, Minister of the Colonies. The Development of French Colonies – my translation], in which he argued that “colonies were humane creations” [creations d’humanité], “moral conquests,” that “colonial life ought to be incorporated into French life” (qtd. in Deschamps 168). In addition to his ideas of colonial life, he also elaborated a 10-15 year ‘development’ plan, indeed the “first expression of coherent colonial economic policy” (Coquery- Vidrovitch, “Colonisation” 51-52). This policy (which was not implemented but speaks of the Geist of the times) included, according to Coquery-Vidrovitch, a demographic element, aimed at the “conservation of the races” (53), which entailed the “medical missionary impulse” [my term], (fighting disease, etc.) as well as a decidedly pragmatic qua utilitarian educational (burden?) project. 166 It also comprises a justification of colonialism as being not simply in the interest of the colonizing power but also in those of the entire world, a major doctoring of the above-cited confession. Another leg of the plan included the question of infrastructure building such as ports, dams, roads, railways, etc, i.e. one of the most recurrent arguments even in this 21 st century in defense of colonialism. It also included a funding scheme that would for once involve investment in the colonies as opposed to simply taking resources and money away from them. The last leg of his plan reportedly included the notion of training the elites (Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Colonisation” 56). 166 Dixit Sarraut: “To instruct the natives is decidedly our duty… But this fundamental duty coincides with our most obvious economic, administrative, military and political interests. It is important to envisage first and foremost, the economic utility of mass education.” (qtd. in Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Colonisation” 53) 284 A number of films one comes across at the archives seem to put on screen the twin approaches of Gérard Madieu and Albert Sarraut. Indeed, it is surprising to see colonial filmic work in the twenties by or related to a figure we already met two decades earlier as a Lumière operator, that is Alexandre Promio. Two films entitled respectively Dans le Sud-Oranais (1921?) and Constantine (1921) recall Promio as they were made by the Éclair company for the Film and Photo Unit Promio created at the Government General of Algeria in 1919. The first film features a horse race in Mecharia as part of celebrations. One thing that strikes the viewer is a sense that the director may have seen his Griffith or Italian films of the mid teens. The first shot is a 30-second descriptive pan surveying the desert oasis, 167 followed by the entry of numerous horsemen in the visual field from right to left of the frame. They advance toward the camera, which uses a diagonal framing to allow more time for the procession to unfold. All too happy to follow the horsemen, the director in his combined use of static and moving camera work, contrasting still hills and moving horses along with the white dresses of the horsemen, as well as articulating a relationship the close and the distant, contributes to make the film the site of visual pleasure. The film even restages a fantasia a la Mesguich through a majestic shot of galloping horsemen with the desert in the foreground, horsemen in the middle ground and hills in the 167 The effect of this shot is quite breathtaking as it is literally a traveling pan, i.e. the camera pans as it is being moved on a dolly or another vehicle to that effect. The film as a whole does have the feel of Hollywood Westerns with the iconography that includes a wide and infinite desert, people on mounted horses and holding guns. One wonders if the grammar of the Western had already been codified in Hollywood by then. The film is all the more intriguing as it is not credited. It would be quite interesting if this were filmed by Promio, which would mean that he would be embracing the filmic grammar of a place where he introduced the Cinématographe, i.e. the US. 285 background. It is important to add that the camera is supposedly a “fly in the tent” ( as it shoots from a tent), but one clearly observes that when the horsemen ride past the tent, they return back to the camera’s visual field, clearly demonstrating the mise-en-scène involved. If the film were shot by Promio himself, it would be tremendously self- referential as it features another scene with a bassour. The second film, Constantine (involving the Éclair company as the previous one) would be an early 1920s version of the colonial city symphonies initiated by Promio as he worked for the Lumière. After establishing the city as “picturesque” “and “located 700 meters above ground,” where “the winter is cold and it snows everywhere” (a panning shot illustrates this by showing us snow-covered mountains), and driving through the city, and offering us a view from the train station, the director goes on to redeploy what has become a marker of his style, that is, a 31 second long left to right pan which shows an interesting division of the frame with houses above and below the bridge. However, a colonial city symphony including street scenes shot from a moving vehicle, a very fast and fuzzy panning shot of the city’s public garden, mountain roads, in other words, all signs of a colonial transformation of the environment would not be complete without a shot of a monument of the man who partly made this possible, that is, General Christophe Louis Léon Juchaux de Lamoricière, who was part of the battles of the conquest of Algeria. Here, the cinema contributes to making the city the site of monumentalization of the colonial project, and in the process, becomes itself a moving image monument of such a project. 286 Another films entitled Constantine (1922) was shot by René Moreau, and not sponsored by the Government General of Algeria. Moreau’s approach seems a bit different. There are few traveling shots in this film. It seems as if for the filmmaker passing by, the “proper” camera attitude is the static position so as to take deliberate care to record the images one sees in front of one’s eyes. Naturally, these images would have been pre- processed (pre-edited) by the brain of the filmmaker who is first and foremost chasing/pursuing images of difference. Arguably, what may appear to require more camera time and a static position for a new comer is dealt with in shorthand by the filmmaker who lives on the ground in the colonies. The latter thus deploys the traveling shot as shorthand. It must be added here that René Moreau plays with light and dark, with composition as he sets up his various shots in Constantine. There is clearly an expressive desire here, a will-to-(colonial?) aesthetics. Still in the early 1920s, another film set in Morocco this time participates in a similar project, but this time more openly engaged in celebrating France’s work in the colonies. This 13-minute film is entitled L’oeuvre civilisatrice de la France au Maroc (1920?). No director was credited in the version one was able to see. Stylistically, it is clear as in the previous two films that the era of the direct “presentational” style is over. Instead, we are offered faster editing with short shots, irises opening and closing to shorten narrative time, the closeness of the camera to the subjects. Thematically, the film parallels almost two worlds. In the first part, it takes the Moroccan child as the center of its attention, with the intertitle informing us that “in the Muslim world, the child has always been the object 287 of great affection” and that he remains very close to his mother,” hence the shots of children on their mothers’ backs. We are then shown the growth of the child, who goes to Koranic school. We are also shown the Ecole musulmane of Rabat, which is the French instituted school system Here the teaching is in French and a graphic contrast is made between the French and the Muslim teacher. Indeed, while the latter is shown not moving about the classroom (or rather is not shown moving about the classroom), on the contrary, the French teacher is shown as caring more for his students by walking to their tables and watching over their work, making sure that they are doing their work properly. Here we see the cinema itself hierarchizing the two educational systems. As a transition to the next phase, the film states the so-called doctrine of the Protectorate, which is to “scrupulously respect the religion of the administered,” hence “students go the mosque.” Here, the school bell rings and the camera follows students to the mosque, stays outside, and picks them back up when they exit the mosque. Even the camera therefore presents itself as being respectful of Islam, in line with the avowed doctrine of the protectorate. We have here a proposal of what could be called a cinema of indirect rule. Apart from respecting religion, what then would the work of France consist in the protectorate of Morocco? To this question the intertitle answers “Medical assistance: France’s civilizing work in Morocco” and who better to shepherd this work but the First Lady of the colony (sorry the protectorate) itself, Mrs. Lyautey, the spouse of the 288 conqueror of Morocco. Here we have a perfectly set up shot in which the Mrs. Lyautey enters frame left. Right of the frame, we see children run across the visual field right to left and throw themselves in her “colonially maternal” (my term) arms, making her the preceptor of Moroccan children. This work involves as the film shows us, overseeing the building or the running of dispensaries in such cities as Rabat, Meknes, nurseries, maternities, the sterilization and distribution of milk and the curing of ringworms with X- rays and ointments. It may be important here to pause a moment and briefly examine a figure whose name we have encountered and who has had more influence on colonial cinema than acknowledged, that is Maréchal Lyautey. This influence is not to be sought necessarily in the areas of film producing or funding of films but rather in the actual discourses of many films (especially documentaries) which were in effect cinematic adaptations of the Lyauteyan doctrine of colonial administration, as if his doctrine was the script waiting for a filmic mise-en-scène. But what can be briefly said of him and his doctrine? Fellow colonialist Hubert Deschamps best summarizes his itinerary. According to him, Hubert Lyautey must be seen as incarnating one of the two poles of French colonial doctrines, the first one being that of a “patient assimilation leading to a democratic unification under the French banner” (Deschamps 161) 168 and which is incarnated by Lyautey’s master, Joseph Simon Gallieni (whom we shall discuss later in the chapter). 168 This was the model imposed on and enforced in the majority of French-ruled Africa. 289 Indeed, Lyautey reportedly started his colonial career under Gallieni at the age of 40 in Tonkin (Indochina) in 1894. Three years later, in 1897, he joined Gallieni in Madagascar (Miège 1995). In 1902, he was sent to “pacify” (i.e. destroy anti-colonial resistance) the Moroccan- Algerian border. The results of his actions were the considered the stuff of legend for “in 1912 he was entrusted with a medieval Morocco on the brink of collapse. In 1925 he returned to a saved, preserved, stimulated, modernized Morocco, hopeful about its future” (Deschamps 159). But what exactly did this “action animal,” this self-appointed “savior” whose influence was at once “political, economic, esthetic and social” do and believe? According to Jean-Louis Miège, Lyautey believed that, “colonial war is always noble because it has a civilizing and regenerative effect. A sometimes necessary trauma, it makes it possible to impose a new political and economic order that can only be beneficial to populations, as long as their civilization, their habits and traditions are not modified.” Indeed such phrases are often associated with his legend: “associating territorial management with conquest,” “using local elements to ‘administer while preserving the institutions,” “pacific penetration,” “thinking of the native as much in terms of cooperation as of domination” (Miège 21). 290 Very much inspired by the British colonial model (or shall we say Lugardism), he believed that the latter should be the source of all lessons, extolling its supposed sense of continuity, pragmatism, its “adaptation to the country,” the purported “careful handling of customs and traditional chiefs” (Deschamps 159). Thus as the Regent of the Protectorate of Morocco, he saw as his task to “preserve while rebuilding,” to secure an “evolution without a revolutionary rupture,” and to make “the future the blossoming of the past.” Indeed this to him is the very definition of the protectorate, which is “not a transitory regime, but a definitive one, the essential characteristic of which is the association and close cooperation between the native race and the protecting race in a context of mutual respect and the scrupulous safeguarding of traditional institutions” (Deschamps, 159- 160). Deschamps adds that under this “altruistic” (my term) new dispensation, Morocco was to be unified by France’s army and turned over to the Sultan. It would also involve the recruitment of elites among traditional ruling classes and their training in “renovated schools inspired by local traditions.” Naturally, European colonization would be encouraged, but without causing any damage. After all, did Lyautey, the master of euphemism himself not declare that: “While I represent the Government of France, I am greatly honored to be the first servant of Sidna (Our Lord: the Sultan)” (Deschamps 160). The “selfless” action of France in Morocco is no easy task however. For the “pacification of Morocco is long-term affair” and a heavy cross to bear as trials and tribulations exist along the way including “religious fanaticism,” the “attachment to the oldest form of 291 Islam’, and “the ferocious cult of independence.” Thus, “initiatives of economic and civilizing action must be hastened.” They must include “[the building of] ports, roads, railroads and next to them civilizing actions, schools, hospitals, which all have a quick influence on the mentalities of the natives… Anything that participates in developing commerce and [increasing] well-being will be of utmost help to our military endeavors” (Miège 101). In light of the ubiquity of many of these ideas in various combinations in countless documentaries during the colonial era, it may be possible to speak of colonial documentary as Lyauteyan. 1. Some Colonial Documentary Directors In some ways, the Albert Sarraut project also embodies many of the themes and debates surrounding documentary cinema in the colonies in the twenties and thirties. Indeed, many of the classics of documentary in the colonial era were made in these interwar years, and some of the most prominent directors of the period either started making films or gained prominence as directors in that era. Hence a director like René Le Somptier, who began making films in the 1910s, working with such directors as Louis Feuillade, would later become “chargé de missions cinématographiques officielles” [in charge of official cinema missions], hereby pursuing the role that had been pioneered by Alexandre Promio and other Lumière operators who arguably “invented” the “official cinema.” Although his filmography also includes such fiction films as La sultane de l’amour (1918) and Les fils du soleil (1924), Le Somptier’s most famous film was La marche vers 292 le soleil (1928). Other major directors of the period included Jean d’Esme (whom we shall refer to later in this chapter), Alfred Chaumel, a former colonial administrator himself (reminiscent of the British model) 169 , J.-K. Raymond-Millet, who co-directed with Charles Lemaire France - Congo sur un cargo (1930), a travelogue where they land in various colonial ports such as Dakar, Douala, Libreville, Grand-Bassam, etc., making this in effect a mise-en-scène of the infrastructural paradigm. Raymond-Millet’s other travelogues include Voyage en Afrique du Nord in the same year, this time making stops in Oran, Algiers, Tunis, Constantine, Biskra, etc., Promenade en AEF (where he goes to Central Africa) in 1931. The following year, he directed Voyage mauve (1932) leaving Marseilles and stopping in Tunis, Carthage, etc. He made A la rencontre du soleil (1935), where he crossed the Sahara from Algiers to Gao, and Le chemin de Madagascar (1935) with stops in Port-Said, Suez, Djibouti, Tamatave, etc. 2. Léon Poirier, a Colonial(ist) Auteur Between Two Decades? Perhaps the most famous of all these filmmakers was Léon Poirier. Poirier who wrote a book entitled Vingt-quatre images à la seconde [Twenty Four Images per Second] defined his practice of filming in the colonies as follows: "An exotic film is not a scenario that one carries in one’s luggage. It is something that is constructed on the way, 169 Alfred Chaumel’s filmography includes such documentaries as his two films on sleeping sickness, La maladie du sommeil au Cameroun (1930), La maladie du sommeil (1931), as well as L’âme hindoue (1927) and a film on Madagascar entitled Mouramoure (1947). And Le char des dieux (1946) also partially dealing with sleeping sickness. 293 with landscapes one comes across, characters one analyzes, incidents that one notes down" (qtd. in Bataille and Veillot 25). Echoing debates as to whether or not the cinema should belong to the studio or outdoors, it seems as if Poirier’s approach brings out a number of issues such as the acknowledgement of the constructedness of documentary, a suspicion toward the scenario (shared by Vertov) and the idea of the vast landscapes of Africa offering space for colonial cinematic freedom. Poirier who, according to Georges Sadoul, started making commercial films, turned to Orientalism by adapting films based on The One Thousand and One Nights, in the wake of the success of the film La Sultane de l’Amour (1918) by Charles Burguet and René Le Somptier before turning to documentary, which he would shoot primarily in Africa. His first trip to Africa was with the Citroen funded expedition, which provided material for the now classic colonial documentary film La croisière noire (1926). A few years later, on his way to preparing a feature fiction film entitled Caïn, aventure des mers exotiques (1930) 170 , he filmed a quite arresting documentary entitled Instantanés malgaches (1929). His other works include Autopolis (1934), another sponsored documentary which shows the process of manufacturing Citroen automobiles, two fiction colonial epics L’Appel du silence (1936) and Brazza ou l’épopée du Congo (1940), the latter being the subject of intense debates in the colonies because it was not shown. Archives show an exchange of 170 This was reportedly to be his first sound film, which according to Georges Sadoul was a failure (Georges 45). 294 letters between colonial administrators and noted African writer Paul Hazoumé to that effect. The latter (rather unfortunately) lobbied for the film to be shown in the colonies. Léon Poirier’s magnum opus however remains La croisière noire (1926), a true colonial epic. The film is arguably the French equivalent of the British Cape to Cairo cinematic franchise. Opening on a map of Africa, it is considered by its director as a cine(matic) diary of the Citroen expedition [Journal cinématographique de l’expédition Citroen- Centre-Afrique]. The film was scored by the Orchestra of the French Théâtre National de l’Opéra headed by J. E. Szyfer who would go on to score several other Poirier films such as Brazza ou l’épopée du Congo and L’appel du silence. We see here the desire to link colonial cinema with the heritage of classical music, indeed with high culture, perhaps in an attempt to legitimize it with the tastemakers as well. Doing first things first, Poirier introduces to us the members of the expedition who are George Marie Haardt (head of the expedition), Commander Betancourt, his deputy, Louis Baudoin Dubreuil, (second head of expedition), and the two mechanics Mr. Benoit and Mr. Buji. Clearly supported, as argued earlier by the colonial state apparatus, the expedition begins on October 25, 1924 in Colomb-Bechar (in Algeria) where it is saluted by marching and mounted soldiers. In fact, the co-presence of the mission and the soldiers in the frame leaves no doubt as to their complementarity. Indeed, the voice-over adds that the expedition will consecrate the work began by the soldiers. Following 295 military conquest, occupation and mapping, the time has come to engage in the technological equivalent via the half-track caterpillar vehicle [autochenille]. We then see shots of several half-track caterpillar cars taking off en route for the adventure of conquest. The shot of them leaving in the open horizon informs us that the infinite is the promise and limit of colonialism, which, to paraphrase Cecil Rhodes would annex the planets if it could. After briefly stopping in Beni Abbes, the expedition heads for the open and “inexorable” (according to the voice-over) desert. There follows a number of shots of the caterpillar cars entering frame right and crossing the desert, with the latter occupying the foreground and middle ground whereas the sky is the background. We then get a pan left to right where we catch cars emerging slowly from the background into the foreground. This is a cinema of spectacle, with cars as the currency for the spectacle of modernity as if the film intended to tell us that modern cars would be displacing the camels on desert roads. One of the shocking scenes is a series of shots of skeletons lying in the burning sun with the voice-over laconically saying “victims of thirst.” A particularly macabre scene, it cares little for the dead as it films them like carcasses of dead animals, as if the shots had been included to create suspense in the minds of the viewers as to whether or not the expedition would make it through the desert. Making a spectacle of the dead so as to turn one’s own adventure into more spectacle here is testimony to the looping logic of spectacle. 296 The particularity of the desert is its ability to be at once a signifier of space as well as time, of various regimes of time. Filming the dead here speaks to the stoppage of time, human time, but also perhaps of the impending stoppage of colonial time. At the same time, it evokes, at once timelessness as well as its own historicity, (for it was not always) and unstoppability. The soundtrack here both scores and underscores this epic spectacle of time and space. On the road, the mission is flown over by a French army plane from Colomb-Bechard with the sign “Vive la France et en Avant! Lt. Paolacci, Escadrille de France” (Long Live France! Forward! Lt. Paolacci, French Squadron), reminding us not only that the mission is state-sanctioned, but that for that very reason, the colonial army is literally and figuratively looking over the success of the trip. Coming across wild life and humans, the voice-over puts them on the same continuum. Hence, we hear and see “a gazelle,” “ostriches” and “men” taking to the desert the language of the menimal genre, inaugurated cinematically by the Lumière. In many ways, the film is not that original in terms of the themes that run across it. It redeploys for the most part, in a feature film format, many experiments and motifs inaugurated and pursued in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth in the ages of early cinema and part of silent cinema. Indeed, when the mission reaches Niger, the focus turns to dance, enshrining the association of Black Africa with the bodily, with motion and dance. We get shots of women performing a 297 knife/ saber dance. Yet the singularity of the moment lies in the filmmaker’s own reaction to the dancers, as he appears to fall under the charm of one of them. The action of keeping the camera on one of them for a little longer than usual reminds us of the erotic dimension of the colonial encounter. Desire bursts through the frame and recalls its presence, leading us to wonder about the relationship between the able-bodied unaccompanied all-male mission and the colonized women encountered on the way, dancing or bathing. The scene of the parade also inaugurated by the Lumière in Lyon itself in 1896 is also recast in Poirier’s film. Here though, we do not have the Ashanti, but Hausa and Djerma sultans and their armies in the Niger valley, who are compared to Middle-Age European crusaders, employing again the rhetorical trope according to which Africa’s present, is Europe’s past. Leaving the West Coast of the African continent, the mission heads to the centre of the continent, to Chad. After a detour, following a warning by colonial authorities still looking over the mission, they are driven to the Chad River by the cavalry and triumphantly proclaim in the voice-over that, “without ever leaving French territory, the automobile linkage of the Mediterranean with the Great African lake had just taken place on December 14, 1924, thanks to the expedition.” It is now time to head to Fort-Lamy, the major city in the area. 298 Here, Léon Poirier deployed one of the defining features of his cinema, at least, his body of films shot in Africa, through the narrative uses of the slow motion device. As the expedition reaches, the city, a dance to organized in their honor. As women dance, Poirier uses a slow motion, which he accompanies with the voice-over “the slow-motion of this dance referred to as ‘the colonizer’, underscores the harmonious attitude of the women of Kanem.” What the slow motion does here is not simply highlight the gracefulness of the dance, but also pretends that this slow motion is live, indeed, as if the women were dancing slowly in slow motion. Leaving Fort Lamy on December 25 (Christmas Day), 1924, the mission is seen off by the cavalry of Kanem raising their sabers, as if to say that the conquered have in effect accepted “their fate” to the point of “liking us” (the hearts and mind paradigm). The mission then engages in another one of the inevitabilities of the colonial moments, that is, the scene of hunting. We thus get shots of giraffes, antelopes, hippopotamuses being hunted as the mission goes deeper in Central Africa. Confronting natural obstacles and overcoming them is also part of the mission of the expedition. Indeed, like Flaherty and the Revillon Frères, who were interested in publicizing the fur industry, Léon Poirier and the members of the expedition are sponsored by Citroen, and the film is in effect a feature length commercial for the Citroen company. It associates the company’s vehicles, with adventure, discovery, resilience, and 299 naturally progress. Colonial and technological progresses are merged in an endless embrace. The Citroen is thus shown conquering the hardship of African physical and human geographies. A cruise across the African continent would not be complete with the obligatory visit to the pygmies. For the purpose of attraction, the expedition willingly leaves French territory, enters Belgian Congo, and cinematically validates representations of pygmies. “Pygmies live in trees,” we see a pygmy boy who is asked down from the tree so that he could be shown to the members of the mission. We also get shots of an exchange between the pygmy chief and the head of the mission. As these exchanges happen, we get a shot of pygmies coming down from trees, passing in front of the camera and getting back into their houses. It can be surmised that having been attacked several times during the moment of conquest, they may have found trees a convenient hiding place against invaders (a typically standard military camouflage practice). Yet to the followers of Linnaeus, the pygmies (and thus Africans at large) belong to natural history. . One of the intriguing scenes of the film takes place when the team heads toward the Nile (who could claim to have visited Africa without seeing the Nile?). In one of the scenes, Poirier in a graphic montage contrasts the ways in which a woman grinds millet with an ancient Egyptian statue found in the Museum of Florence showing a woman performing the same gesture. He does not stop the analogy there. He also compares the elongated hairstyle of the Mangbetu people with that of ancient Pharaohs adding in the voice-over 300 that “Mangbetu art may have been influenced by Egyptian art.” He concludes his Egyptian analogy with a graphic montage of shots of a woman making dance moves with hand postures in ancient Egypt, the voice-over adding that “the slow-motion of the gestures of this dancer brings forth an analogy with those of paintings found on pyramids.” This is interesting in that it almost applies avant-la-lettre some of Eisenstein’s ideas about montage, by adding the feature of the slow motion for analytical purposes (analytic montage). It also underscores not only a self-reflexive attitude toward film, but also a recognition of the relationality between the cinema and other arts (painting, sculpture) or disciplines (history, archeology). More surprisingly though, it (unwittingly) aligns with some of the later epistemological arguments of historians like Cheikh Anta Diop against the tradition of Egyptology which, faced with the impossibility of effectively removing Egypt from Africa, is not completely ready to endorse the idea that many African cultures (if not all) bear traces of ancient Egypt in them. It is important to discus the exploratory dimension of this Haardt-Audoin-Dubreuil. Indeed, if explorers like Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, Henry Morgan Stanley or David Livingstone significantly contributed to the mapping of the continent, in preparation for the brutal colonial onslaught, the African continent still presented unknown areas to the countries that had conquered it and were now administering it. Thus, an important part of the mission of “la Croisière noire” was also a geographic project seeking various roads 301 of access to the Indian Ocean on the way to Madagascar from the interior of the continent. As a result, the mission was divided in four groups, one taking the direction of the White Nile toward Mombasa, Kenya, another one crossing the Tanganyika, a third one which went all the way down to the Cape, and fourth way going round lake Nyassa toward the Indian Ocean. After an arduous route, which confirmed the solidity of the Citroen caterpillar truck, the four teams met in Madagascar’s capital, Tananarive (the actual Malagasy name is Antananarivo). Naturally, the site of the conclusion of the over 21,000 km cruise across Africa had to end with the affirmation of the supremacy of the French state and colonial project. Thus, the team was welcomed by the Governor General of the island, Marcel Olivier. After showing shots of crowds, the camera stops on the monument of Joseph Simon Gallieni who was not only the conqueror of Madagascar and its first Governor General, but also the conqueror of French Sudan in West Africa who also operated in Indochina. In the figure of Gallieni, we may see the condensation of the extent of the French colonial project in continental and island Africa as well as Asia. Should it be added that Gallieni was considered one of the foremost technicians of French colonialism? Indeed the two major approaches or “methods” of French colonial conquest were the Gallieni method and the (previously discussed) Lyautey method (the latter being a disciple, albeit singular, of the former). According to Hubert Deschamps, whose writings participate in perpetuating the mythologization of Gallieni, the latter was an avid reader 302 of history and philosophy. He contends that for Gallieni, “pacification” of the conquered lands must begin with “political action, the strength of which lies in the knowledge of the country and its inhabitants” (155). He adds that Every move forward must be accompanied by a permanent occupation of the land. One must set up a network of small posts linked to each other by roads. One must reassure the inhabitants, open markets ands schools and strive to bring dissidents to one’s cause. It is an “oil spot” [tache d’huile] like expansion. (156) Gallieni was also largely responsible for the potentate-style power invested in the colonial administrators. Indeed, he felt that “only one person should be solely responsible at each of the echelons, and endowed with a lot of initiative.” He added that administrators should make sure that the administered (the colonized) should only shake for fear that the colonizer would depart.,” hereby psychologically reversing the colonial rapport., turning a relationship of power, inequality and oppression into one of desire and craving for that very oppression. In terms of organizational approach of the colonies, Gallieni is known to have experimented with direct and indirect rule as well as protectorates. A staunch believer in social Darwinism, he argued that “the organization of a conquered land must follow the course of its natural development 171 (Deschamps 157). It was thus to this man, who did not hesitate to abolish the monarchy of Madagascar, because he saw it as an “anti-French symbol,” yet who is remembered in the annals of French history as “The Last King of Madagascar” (one thinks of The Last King of Scotland), and whom Lyautey referred to as “the master of all colonial masters” 172 171 “Naturally” defined by the colonizer. 172 In French: le maître des maîtres coloniaux. 303 (Miège 103) that Léon Poirier would devote some of last final shots of La Croisière noire. We then get an insert of a telegram sent by Haardt, the head of the expedition, back to Paris, which carries the following lines: “Have found here the French flag which was floating upon our departure.” The end was at beginning, in the beginning was colonialism, and in the end is colonialism. The second Léon Poirier film we will look at is Instantanés malgaches. With the subtitle “Noted by Léon Poirier en route for the making of his film Caïn, aventure des mers exotiques (1930),” the film positions itself as a notebook, following Poirier’s own notion that an “exotic” film is made of incidents one notes down along the way. This is interesting because it is not a diaristic film, which has elements of the autobiographical, yet it maintains a form of intimacy absent in such epic films as La croisière noire. How to call a type of documentary that is not an essay, not autobiographical, not epic, yet has the intimacy of the notebook? Perhaps something along the lines of the notebook documentary, expanding scriptural references in defining the domain of documentary. The film is really the story of the arrival by boat of a colonial figure in Madagascar and his impressions of the colony. Indeed, there is an impressionistic feel to the film that is striking. This arrival is used as an excuse to explore the human and cultural geography of the island, in colonial terms that is. We are thus first shown a crosscutting between a shot of the horizon and that of an old black man sitting on a wall and looking at the sea. The man turns around, jumps off the wall and exits the screen. Establishing the mood of 304 expectation Poirier goes on to inform us in the intertitle that “the arrival of the carrier from France is the main events that sets the pace for life on the island.” The shots that follow “underscores” that “dependency” of the island on European propelled time. We thus see crowds all across the shore, walking, busy, etc. It is important here to note that the shots are deliberately long enough to allow the spectator to take in the scene. They are not, to use secretarial jargon, stenographic, as in many other films. Here we are almost in the Bazinian mode of the long take. There follows a succession of closer shots, introducing us to the human diversity of the island. We see shots an Indian man walking followed by one of an Indian woman with her children in a hand-drawn carriage with the subtitle ‘Hindus.” Another series of shots shows Arabs sitting or carrying pieces of metal, which is followed by a series of seven shots of Sakalavas, blacks standing, carrying loads, walking, unloading bananas, etc. Following the scene of the arrival of the liner boat after much expectation (here Poirier deploys a heightened sense of suspense), the film isolates a European man arriving on the island for the first time. We get a shot of a Frenchman dressed in all white with the proverbial colonial helmet, looking through his glasses and walking out of the frame. As he walks away from the quays, his luggage is taken from him by a porter. The camera waits for him in front of a hand drawn cart, as he walks and sits inside it. Again cutting is used minimally, offering a preference for letting the image unfold. Poirier reserves faster cutting to arrival and departure scenes. 305 Self-reflexive about his own practice, Poirier films the colonial official from behind the cart, thereby offering us a frame within a frame set up, with the man looking back through the window at the camera. We then get moving frontal, lateral, and back shots of the hand-drawn carriage as it crosses the city and as the new colonial man takes in his new environment. Here not only does Poirier show us stolen images of two young girls in a small alley way, but he uses what is now a trademark of his colonial cinema, that is the slow motion. Crosscutting between a shot of a woman crossing the street from right to left of the frame and that of a car coming from left to right of the frame, the director chooses to slow down the action of the woman crossing the street to underscore the slowness of time in the colonies. This slow motion, which is preceded by an intertitle informing us of this “strange slowness” [lenteur étrange] is not Vertovian (as in Man with a Movie Camera in the sense of analyzing movement). It is also not a BEKE/CFU style slowness of film language, which referred more to spectators supposed mental abilities. This is a case where the director uses the language of film editing to slow down the unfolding of cinematic time in order to convey a colonial vision of time in the colonies, almost locating the colonies as outside of (industrial?) time in a sense. This technique, which Poirier had already inaugurated in La croisière noire, is deployed several times in Instantanés malgaches. In the next sequence we get a shot of the moving carriage riding through deserted streets, while the intertitle rhetorically wonders “Deserted… could they all be on the quay?” only to answer its own question “No…but it is siesta time” offering us a moving lateral shot 306 from another moving vehicle, of people in different positions having a siesta. We even get a shot from the side of the colonial official’s carriage. He comes out of a house, looks left and right and sees his porter also having a siesta. It is almost as if by fiat, the entire city fell asleep at the same time. One cannot help but think about mise-en-scène here. The official looks up, thoughtful. We may guess that he has obtained on the very day of his arrival in the colonies, the incontrovertible ‘visible evidence’ of the proverbial laziness of the natives. The gaze here at the end of cinematic mediation becomes discourse. At the same time, it speaks of the necessity of European presence in Africa to put the natives to work, to teach them the virtues of work. We then get yet another deployment of the slow motion. This time, the carriage drives through streets lined with palm trees as the intertitle announces that the newcomer has been “contaminated by the calm rhythm of clement skies” [Et gagne déjà par des cieux cléments]. This is followed by a shot from in front of a building showing us stairs. The porter and his two passengers enter frame left in slow motion. During the unfolding of this slow motion scene, we see the porter struggling to slow his vehicle down and stop it. This at the same time evokes some of the early experiments into human motion, which made the cinema possible. The colonial official exits the vehicle, turns around only to find his porter asleep. The film is at normal speed. We then get a shot in slow motion in which the colonial official slowly, nonchalantly takes off his hat. Back to a normal speed shot in which the colonial official cleans off his sweat with a handkerchief, and puts his helmet back on. He looks at his porter. In slow motion, the porter gets up, slowly picks 307 up the man’s suitcase and walks in slow motion across the frame. We see a total decomposition of movement. He exits frame left. We are then treated to a medium shot of the colonial official smiling and wearing a black and white dotted bow tie. He turns around and starts slowly walking up the stairs to his new house. It is the dream come true. This time we have yet another deployment of the slow motion to figure the ascension to paradise as the intertitle informs us “the Westerner thinks he is climbing up Joseph’s ladder reaching into heaven.” The man is shown almost running up the stairs but this time in slow motion. Here thus slowness is meant to convey heavenly bliss, constructing of the colonies as Edenic for the colonizer (what else could they be?) in effect proposing an Edenic cinema. We thus see Poirier in this film deploying various potential registers of the slow motion editing technique. From conveying an idea of outside-ness of (industrial?) time to colonial life, to expressing the notion of far niente and in the end to positing the colonies as Edenic space in addition to simply offering the visual pleasure of decomposition of movement, Poirier bends the aesthetics of cinematic speed and puts it at the service of the colonial idea. In the rest of the film, Poirier resumes his observations on the human diversity of the island’s population, which he announced at the beginning. He predictably falls into stereotypes by telling us via intertitles that “all Hindus are bazaar owners or jewelers,” 308 offering us several shots of jewelers at work. To him “the Chinese are grocers,” hence a shot from a diagonal position of the front entrance of a store with the sign “Chan Kwan Bros: Perfume, Tobacco, Miscellaneous - Champaign.” But Poirier has a specific point to make here. Certain of the unassailable superiority of European arithmetic, he contends that “ A Chinese addition is no small affair’ and then shows a shot from above of a Chinese man doing calculations in Chinese script, implying that it takes longer to make additions with diagrams than with numerals. We even get another shot from above of the same man using an abacus to count. Another sequence of note is that of supposed racial harmony on the pier. We are first offered a series of shots of a European man, his wife and daughters walking on the copier, while people of various races are standing on the side. We are then shown a series of young dark-skinned Malagasies in European dress, walking with an attitude, cigarettes in their mouths; one is wearing a hat, while another carries a cane. To Poirier, these flaneurs are nothing but “pedantic Hovas.” In addition to showing us elegant women and girls strolling with their umbrellas, the camera gives us a shot from the back of two men standing by a wall facing the ocean. On the left, a dark-skinned man is sitting looking toward the camera. To the right the two Hindu men are still looking at the sea, with one of them holding his chin, pensively. The intertitles informs us that these “Hindus [may be] dreaming of their faraway India where their ancestors came from a thousand years ago on audacious boats.” Offering a shot of the sea from the shore and the sight of small 309 boats lost in an infinite ocean, Poirier quickly adds in the intertitle “What is a thousand years to Oriental wisdom? The boats linking Majinga to Bombay are still the same.” Further showing the island’s racial makeup and the economic and cultural division labor under colonial rule, Poirier falls back on the structures of colonial cinema. One such structure is the almost injunction, that while in Africa a film shall always feature songs and dances. As such, the intertitle announces, presenting the Sakalavas to us, that “everything ends with dance.” Indeed , in spite of the European cultural, military and political presence on the island, as evidenced in the fact several Sakalavas occupy clerical position in the colonial administration, such as those of postmen, bank cashiers, policemen , in the evening, the “inevitable atavism” springs back to the surface. We are thus shown two men playing drums and who are introduced to us as the city’s cashier and policeman, while the Secretary of the provincial administration is shown dancing while holding a gun. Indeed, it is added, “under the thin veneer of the Western varnish, the millennial past re-emerges from all sides…” Showing what he considers cultural cross- pollination between the races we are told that Hovas carry Asian influences, whereas Makounas carry souvenirs of their African drums while Comorians reminisce Arabic culture. How then to conclude this beautiful and harmonic notebook documentary about racial fraternity and cross-pollination? While making sure it does not show any influence of all these cultures on Europeans, the film offers final shots of soldiers of all these races 310 parading. These “Malagasies of many races whom France is bringing together around the same ideal” are shown standing in line with a flagstaff in their midst. They present arms. The fanfare starts playing while, while the French flag, moves up the staff. All these races, all this cultural diversity is made subject to the French flag, united under a “French dream.” As the flag reaches the top of the staff, we get a fade out and the film ends on this truly insidious colonial “e pluribus unum.” Thus, even in its notebook form, even in its formal experimentation, the colonial documentary, in its ramblings about across the colonized island of Madagascar, always ends up reasserting the majesty and inevitability of the colonial project. Unable to think itself out of its very condition of possibility, it ends up being simply as a paean to colonialism, so that a film that sets rhetorically sets off as spontaneous (the title means Malagasy Snapshots) ends up totally deliberate, both consciously and at the level of the unconscious (not an oxymoron). B. The Thirties The thirties marked a very important turning point in global politics and economics, and thus had significant effects on the colonial experience. The 1929 Wall Street Crash had a tremendous effect on the colonies as attested many documents in colonial archives. Anxiety was felt both in the metropolises and in the colonies. Yet in the French colonial context, the decade was welcome in the course of two consecutive years by grandiose displays of colonial might or will to power as if to counterbalance the larger social and economic anxiety and self-doubt caused by Wall Street. Indeed, the year 1930 was 311 celebrated in France as the centenary of the conquest of Algeria, whereas 1931 saw the most lavish mise-en-scène of French colonialism in history at the famous Colonial Exhibition. The thirties were also the years of the infamous Laval Decree regulating the production, exhibition and circulation of films in the colonies as well as the decade that saw the release of the film that most forcefully affirmed the supremacy of the French empire, that is, the documentary epic La France est un empire (1939). 1. Celebrating the Centenary of the Conquest of Algeria France opened the third decade of the twentieth century with gigantic celebrations of its odyssey in Algeria, celebrating the epic of its conquest there a century earlier. This yearlong event was also the occasion for an intensive filmic production, using the filmic medium to embalm colonial time and lay claim to the eternal. It was also the occasion on French territory to implement the Sarrautian injunction about making the colonies known to France, particularly to school children. Thus, at least 167 conferences were offered to students. The centenary celebrations were also the occasion to stage in Algiers (where the initial call for a cinema as colonizer had been issued by Pathé employee Gérard Madieu), between April 13 and 27, 1930, a congress on educational cinema (Vignaux 8). A number of proposals emerged from this, including one two years later by Adrien Bruneau, Director of the Cinémathèque of the city of Paris, which sought to “organize in the country, with the assistance of Educational Cinema Services [Offices du cinéma educatif], film screenings… for school children and their families” (Vignaux 9). 312 Some of the films made as part of this centenary celebrations included Les Fêtes du Centenaire de la Conquête de l’Algérie: Voyage de Monsieur Doumergue, a 10-minute film on the presidential voyage for the occasion, Alger la blanche, Alger son port et son commerce. Both Pathé and Gaumont thoroughly covered the event. One of the titles from Pathé newsreel shows the arrival of the French president in Algiers, his ride across the city of Algiers preceded by an impressive cavalry, his meeting with Algerian chiefs, and even a horse race. The newsreel deliberately seeks crowd scenes that would consecrate the acceptance by Algerians of their century-old defeat. This obscene mise-en-scène of French might would continue the following year, on a much larger scale, this time featuring not only all of France’s colonies but also all the colonies “belonging” other European and North American colonial powers. It must be added that Jean Renoir was put in charge and indeed directed a feature film as part of this centenary celebration. Entitled Le Bled (1929), it featured fictional re-enactments of the landing of French troops in Sidi Ferrouch in 1830 (Leprohon 233). 2. The 1931 Colonial Exhibition and Documentary Although we have already discussed colonial exhibitions in general in the previous chapter, the specific status of this exhibition and the question of the place of the cinema in it deserves that we spend a moment on it. Indeed, we will look at another dimension of this cultural, economic, and spectatorial institution. If in 1896, the cinema was exhibited alongside human beings within a general context of European physical conquest of the 313 African continent, in 1931 it is fully established as a legitimate artistic and even propagandistic medium, and is called on to exhibit and celebrate the well-established idea and fact of Empire. Yet strangely enough within same context, it seems to go back to its “origins” in a sense because it not only is produced and exhibited within a truly attraction context (we may here talk about a colonial cinema of attractions perhaps) because the cinema is not isolated but screened as part of the larger discourse of colonialism that involves exhibitions, parades, constructions, etc. Within the framework of exhibition, it, alongside human exhibitions, shows the remote, the distant. It re-screens visually what the organizers of the colonial exhibition were not able to put on display. In the French imaginary, the 1931 Colonial Exhibition is the official moment when French citizens became aware of the colonial situation 173 . It is the considered the most heightened moment in French imperialism on domestic soil, the occasion in which the republic-empire sought to display itself in its full glory. Curated by Maréchal Lyautey, the exhibition space spread over “110 hectares around Lac Daumesnil in the Bois de Vincennes. (...) [It featured] pavilions representing all the overseas territories of France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Portugal, Italy and the United States” (Lebovics 57). The staggering figures of the Exposition give us a sense of the gigantic nature of the event and the kind of impact the organizers sought. Indeed, there were reportedly 33.5 million tickets sold, one million foreign visitors, 33 million francs in profits, at 11,500 173 I had an exchange with noted French historian Michel Winock on that issue at the French National Library in October 2007. During his presentation on the colonial idea in France, Winock argued that prior to 1931 the French public was largely unaware of colonialism per se and that it was the exhibition that made this recognition possible. I retorted that exhibitions like these, albeit minor in scale, but omnipresent in space had existed in French history as far back as the 1880s (cf. chapter one). 314 inventoried articles, 3,000 reports published after the Exhibition, 1,500 so-called natives featured, 200 congresses on the Exhibition, 174 discs recorded. 174 With regard to the cinema, Peter Bloom adds that “according to the multivolume Rapport general documenting the exhibition at least three hundred films or ‘a million meters of film’ were shown in the fifteen-hundred seat theater at the Cité des Informations” (130). Indeed, Léon Poirier whom we encountered previously was reportedly the artistic director of the film program (Bloom 130). These 190 days (i.e. six months and ten days) long mise-en-scène of colonialism have some resonance with one of the functions of the cinema, that is, its will to spectacle. It was thus natural for it to be part of the event as they shared almost structural commonalities in their quest to deploy spectacle in order to acquaint French citizens with “their” Empire, to bind it inextricably to the metropolis, making it the source of both the national sovereignty of France and of its purported might (then and even later after the defeat by Germany during WWII). The colonies were indeed constructed as part of the so-called Greater France [la plus grande France] through the mode of spectacle, bringing together ideas of grandeur, power and alterity. 174 These figures are extracted from a document entitled “1931-2006. 75 ans après, regards sur l’Exposition coloniale de 1931” prepared for the 75 th anniversary of the exhibition in 2006. The event was sponsored by the Mairie of the 12 th arrondissement of Paris, in large part because the vestiges of the exhibition can be found there, making it a very present historical event, one with an import in our contemporary lives. Indeed such Parisian landmarks as the Zoo of Vincennes, Daumesnil Avenue (which was enlarged for the event), Metro line number 8 (also extended for the circumstance), the Museum of Colonies (now converted into the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration) were all created for the purpose of the exhibition. Some streets were even named after such African colonies, e.g. Congo, Madagascar, Niger, or regions, e.g. Sahel (35). 315 There were at least two kinds of film featured at the Exhibition, those specifically commissioned for it and those made outside of it but with some relevance to the event, to the general idea of French colonialism, its benefit to the colonized, and what it should mean to French citizens. Some of the films featured at this 1931 Exhibition included the already discussed La croisière noire by Poirier, René Le Somptier’s La Marche vers le soleil, Alfred Chaumel’s Au Cameroun, Charles Barrois’s Visions de la Grande Ile, and J. K. Raymond-Millet’s Promenade en AEF (Bloom 239) 175 . 3. Documentary and Censorship: The Laval Decree Three years after the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, the French Government adopted the so- called Laval Decree, so named after the then Minister of the Colonies, Pierre Laval, who would later be infamous for his participation in the Vichy Government following the French defeat by Germany in 1940. It was the first time a decree was passed regarding the production and exhibition of films in the French colonies of West and Central Africa. It is important to remember that prior to the Laval Decree of 1934, one of the first legal measures regarding the cinema in the colonies was one regarding safety issues related to flammable films. Shepherded by the French Ministry of the Interior, a series of circulars dating as far back as December 7, 1928 sought to stop the use of flammable films 176 in 175 During my final days in Paris, I tried to trace the extended list of films screened on this occasion, but without success. 176 Letter dated February 24, 1930 of the French Minister of the Interior addressed to various prefects in France and Algeria. 316 public screenings. The same measure was introduced a few years later in the French West African colonies via a circular dated September 28, 1935 of the Minister of the Colonies to the Governor General of AOF (French West Africa). These would however contain derogations for a number of screening apparatuses such as Pathé Rural (by Pathé), Cinelux, RC16 (by Compagnie Radio Cinéma) and Kodascope (by Kodak Pathé). The Laval Decree itself is very interesting regarding the references it uses to authorize itself. It must first be said that it is a decree that was signed by the French President himself. British colonial Governor Lord Lugard’s analysis of the French system gives us some insight into the “preamble” of French decrees: In French colonies laws on all important subjects (which form the basis of policy), are drafted by the Minister for the Colonies, countersigned by the Finance Minister and others, and presented for signature and approval to the President of the Republic, preceded by a reference to all other legislation on the subject and by a brief statement of the reason for the law. (252) The preceding legislation the Laval Decree refers to include: a) Article 18 of the Senatus Consulte of May 3, 1854 177 ; b) The law of July 29, 1881 on the freedom of the press; c) The October 18, 1904 decree which organized the Government General of French West Africa (AOF); d) The August 4, 1921 decree on the press regime in French West Africa; e) The July 22, 1933 decree on the control of phonographic discs and sound recordings. 177 According to Georges Mazenot, the Senatus Consulte of May 3, 1854 intervened under the reign of Napoleon III. Article 18 stipulates that colonies other than Martinique, Guadeloupe and Reunion will be regulated by decree of the Emperor until a Senatus Consulte decides otherwise. ” In other words, all legislation regarding African colonies will be taken by a simple decree signed by the Emperor and later by the President when the Republic would be restored. In other words, the French Parliament was not involved in legislation regarding the colonies until 1945. Colonialism was thus truly a regime of exception in that sense. Interestingly enough, even the intervention of Parliament in the management of colonial affairs will not prevent massacres in the colonies in the late forties and early fifties. The colonies were indeed the locus classicus of exception with regard to legality. (Mazenot 474) 317 Hence, legislation on cinema in Africa has a filiation as old as the French Second Empire, 178 foregrounding the continuity between the notion of empire and that of Republic, in effect, merging the two concepts, and having France stand, in the eyes of the colonies as a Republic-Empire, or an Empire-Republic or perhaps even a Republican Empire. This fundamental contradiction is at the heart of the colonial problem where abuse, murder and pillage (which are often the domain of empire) will be meted to the colonies in the name of liberties (republican ideas). Indeed, in a clear chronological logic, the governmental understanding of the place of the cinema in the colonies is inseparable from the ways in which they were framed by the colonial apparatus as federation. But the cinema was also put on the same continuum as the press and sound recording. Since this is perhaps the first time the Laval Decree is closely looked at in English language writing (perhaps even in French language writing), we propose to have a minute textual presentation of this exceptional decree or rather this decree of exception as it de facto defined film making and screening practice in French Africa (Algeria excepted) for almost three decades. 178 Jean Suret-Canale adds that “it is the Second Empire –with Faidherbe which gave French Black Africa the principles of its administration. The Senatus Consulte of May 3, 1854, lays out for almost 100 years (until the new Constitution of 1946 is established) the legislative regime of new colonies … abandoned to the arbitrariness of the Head of State” (393). 318 Consisting in three Titles regarding the screening of films in the colonies, the shooting of films and general administrative dispositions, 179 Title 1 comprises 6 articles (1 to 6) whereas title 2 comprises three (7, 8, 9) and three is made of 5 articles (10, 11, 12, 13, 14,). Before going into the details of the decree, it may be worth mentioning the context of its passing. 180 Indeed, the March 11, 1934 issue of the Journal Officiel contains the report that led to the adoption of the decree. The report was written by two ministers, Henri Cheron, Minister of Justice and Pierre Laval, Minister of the Colonies. In it, the two ministers argue that there is no legal text regarding the control of the projection and shooting of films in West African colonies. The move was in effect initiated by the Governor General of the colony who suggested that the decree take inspiration from a similar decree adopted for the metropolis on March 18, 1928. The two ministers suggested merging cinema and sound recordings in the same decree. This could be understood as sound cinema had recently come into being. It is also interesting to note that the decree was taken with the general aim of control, that is, of mastering the cinema, preventing it from escaping the gaze of the colonial scrutiny. The background thus for this measure, is arguably one of anxiety vis-à-vis the subversive potential of the cinema, which means that controlling the colonies was tantamount to controlling the cinema they were allowed to see as well the cinema could be shot there. It was an attempt at a colonial control of the entire cinematic chain in a sense. 179 Title 1 goes exactly as follows: “Contrôle des films cinématographiques et des disques phonographiques” [Control of films and discs] whereas Title 2 is about “Contrôle des prises de vues cinématographiques et des enregistrements sonores” [Control of shooting of films and of recording of sounds]; Title 3 is about “Dispositions communes” [Common Dispositions]. 180 This decree, as most presidential decrees, was published in the French Journal officiel de la République française. 319 Under Title 1, Article One stipulates: “No film shall be screened publicly in French West Africa until the said film, its title and subtitles have received a visa from the Lieutenant Governor of the colony where the screening is supposed to take place.” This is interesting in the sense that for a giant colony like Mali, for a screening to take place in the North of the country, one needs to receive authorization in the South. The interesting loophole in the article is of course that private screenings can be held without the Governor’s permission. There is in effect room for subversion. Article 2 stipulates that the visa can only obtained from a commission designated by the same decree. To make sure nothing escapes their hyper vigilant eyes, the article adds that “the visa must be displayed on all posters and programs whether or not they are illustrated.” To make triply sure, “two copies of each shall be deposited at the head of the administrative district where the film is to shown.” Article 3 addresses the question of the censorship commission. Indeed it stipulates that “It shall be set up in the capital of each colony and in Dakar, a commission whose members are designated by the Lieutenant Governor and in Dakar by the administration of the district, in order to examine booklets or scenarios, posters and programs, and if necessary, the films themselves in order to grant or reject a visa as stipulated by the present decree.” 320 Article 4 legislates on the modalities of this censorship work. Indeed, “After examining the films, the commission shall draw a list of films suitable for a visa.” The criteria for granting a visa are thus defined: “In that regard, it shall take into consideration all the national and local interests involved, and especially the interest in preserving national and local mores and traditions.” It is clear here that films that stand against colonialism would be considered “against national mores.” The notion of respect of local traditions is even more specious as colonialism is in effect the very act of pushing aside those so-called traditions, or at least putting them at the service of the colonial project. The decree is condemning cinema for actions it has itself been engaged in by its very presence in Africa. This clause could arguably have been inspired by anthropologists and missionaries, historically so keen in keeping Africans in their place” in the name of a so- called respect for traditions. Lyauteyism is also not far away. The article goes on to legislate on the temporality of the decisions of the commission and the ways in which the ‘cinema entrepreneur’ as he is referred to should be notified. Indeed, “the commission shall opine either immediately upon examining the booklet, the scenario, the posters and the programs or within three days if it screens the film. In the event the commission decides that a film can only be seen following cuts, the said cuts shall be summarily mentioned in minutes addressed to the Lieutenant Governor of the colony.” It may be interesting to research the films that colonized Africans were allowed to see only after such amputations. 321 Title I ends with article 6, which is specifically devoted to sound recordings. To show that the two media are considered in the same spirit, the article stipulates that “the importation, circulation, reproduction and cession of phonographic discs shall not be authorized prior to the opinion of the commission designated by the preceding articles.” Yet the most interesting aspect of the article follows: “However the commission is not required to hear every disc submitted to its control. It may delegate this task to one or several of its members who would bring suspect discs to its attention.” It is this clause that was levied against famous Guinean musician and later Minister of Culture Kéita Fodéba whom Frantz Fanon mentioned in The Wretched of the Earth. His recordings entitled Aube africaine [African Dawn] to which Fanon devotes no less than five pages, were deemed subversive and thus were seized by the colonial authorities. We should also remember in passing that The Wretched of the Earth was itself seized immediately in France after its publication for “jeopardizing state security.” Title II, as discussed above deals with filmmaking itself, the act of shooting films. Just as screening films cannot take place without permission, Article 7 stipulates that “Any person desiring to shoot films or make sound recordings, shall address a written request to the Lieutenant-Governors of the colony or colonies in French West Africa where the shoot is supposed to take place. To this request, which must include relevant information on the person’s birth details, and if needed, the professional references of the entrepreneur, the latter shall include the scenario of the film he intends to shoot or for phonographic discs, the sung or spoken musical texts he intends to record.” 322 It follows in article 8 that “the commission of control instituted by article 3 and other of the present decree, shall opine on the appropriateness of granting or denying the requested authorization.” The colonial authority hereby delegates its power to say yes or no to any film shoot, hence its right to squash any potential career from an African filmmaker who might want to make a films on lines it does not accept. If any African were to be allowed to make film under this regime, it would have to be a submissive African. Naturally the commission” shall indicate whether some passages need to be cut from the projected film or disc.” But since it needs to give some authorization anyway, if only to French citizens, “If authorization is granted, the entrepreneur shall, in agreement with the head of the district concerned, indicate the date, location and the hour when the shooting or recording shall take place so that the said civil servant or his deputy could be physically present in order to verify that the operation is in conformity with what has been authorized” (Article 9). This clause is quite interesting because it clearly considers that not many film crews can be operating at the same time in the same area, or else the colonial administration would have to have a large film staff. It also underestimates the power of editing. Finally, it begs the question of how film directors like René Vautier or Rondeau from PROCINEX were able to film subversive events. We shall return to these two later in the next chapter. Finally, Title III, which deals with the final dispositions of the decree. All this of course involves fees and thus “ All fees related to the examination of scenarios, booklets, miscellaneous texts, films and discs, including fees for translation verification of titles, 323 subtitles and texts and delivery of the visa shall be at the expense of the persons concerned” (Article 10). The article that follows leaves some powers to the local police outside the commission as it stipulates that “the prescriptions of the present decree do not hinder measures of local control which might be taken by the heads of the districts concerned.” 181 As with all such decrees, punishment must follow any infringement and thus “Any infringement to the prescriptions of the present decree shall be punished with a 100 to a 5000 Francs fine and the confiscation of the incriminated film or disc” (Article 12) But punishment does not stop there. They also apply to public venues, which screen “illegal” films for “if either a censored film or one without a visa, or the censored part of a film, or a censored disc or one without a visa, are represented or reproduced in any establishment open to the public,, the local administration may proceed to the immediate closure of the establishment” (Article 12). Article 13 simply abrogates the separate decree, which previously addressed sound recordings, whereas the final article, while Article 14, puts the Ministers of Justice and of the Colonies in charge of implementing the decree. The decree was signed President Albert Lebrun on March 8, 1934, along with the two ministers. Even a cursory examination of the decree shows the vast field opened for arbitrariness and indiscriminate abuse of power. For notions such as “national interest” in Article 3 can be the ultimate cover to quash any form of cinematic dissent whatsoever. 181 This latter clause was levied against René Vautier whose film was confiscated by the police authorities in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. 324 The same can be said of the clause regarding local authorities for whom no criteria are established regarding the situations in which they could ban or seize a film. To date there is little knowledge as to how many films, film directors or public venues the Laval Decree was levied against. Archival research is thus necessary in the archives of African countries, which used to be governed by France, that is, at least 12 countries. We know that it was levied against Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, the first African graduate of the French Institut de Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques. René Vautier was another graduate of the Institut against whom the decree was levied. The PROCINEX company was also targeted by the same decree, a case we shall revisit in our next chapter. 4. La France est un empire (1939) The time may have come now to look at one of the films that most encapsulated the spirit of French colonialism. In his book French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism, Peter Bloom mentions a Colonial Films Committee, which was in existence in France in the 1920s and 30s, and which sought to make films in the colonies in anticipation and in pursuit of the Colonial Exhibition’s goal to acquaint the French with their colonies and vice-versa. Part of the committee’s project was to make “popular feature documentaries to highlight the history of colonization, public works undertaken, natural resources available, geographic markers, living standards, anthropological referents and a vision for the development of the respective colonies” (128). 325 One such film and a truly epic one was La France est un empire [France is an Empire]. In some way, this film best emblematizes the apotheosis structure of feeling which arguably had its highest point in 1931, but which filmically lingered until the beginning of WWII. Reminiscent (in terms of scope) of the epic Western How the West Was Won (1962) which was also an omnibus film, this five-part documentary involved directors Gaston Chelle who filmed North Africa (traveling 13,000 km in the process), Hervé Missir who filmed Asia (he traveled over 35,000 km over East Asia) 182 , Georges Barrois, who went to Madagascar and Somalia, Raymond Méjat who was put in charge of the Guyana and Caribbean section of the film, and finally, André Persin, who filmed the so- called Black Africa. There is an irony in this, because the film is self-titled France is an Empire, yet metropolitan France is nowhere to be found in the film. It is instead the structuring absence, that which allows the rest to be. Perhaps a film that would present metropolitan France would have to be titled La France est une république. Yet this film was made during the third republic, during as we put it before, the Republican Empire. The film is in effect a compendium of all the ideas and feelings that colonialism deployed to justify its presence and permanence in the occupied lands 183 . It is important to note that the gigantic and will to power of the makers and the distributors of the film can be seen in the very trailer for the film, which was shown in movie theaters. The trailer itself lasts no less than four minutes and eighteen seconds, making it in effect a short film, indeed even 182 According to Pierre Leprohon, these figures were provided by George Fronval. Additional figures relate to the fact that in the course of 90 days, no less than 30,000 meters of film footage were exposed (Leprohon 229). 183 In that sense, it could have been titled How the Empire Was Won and Kept. 326 a compilation film. It is this trailer that we shall now proceed to look at. Although we acknowledge that it is in itself a different filmic object, with its own singular mode of address, its own editing style, it is the one that best summarizes the film, and allows us to see the global idea and the ways in which it was to be proudly presented to the public. It also allows us to avoid a lengthy textual analysis of a film that is an hour and half long. Right from the start, we learn that six film crews cruised the world for the making of this film. It may be appropriate to note in passing that the film also marks the global ambition of France as an empire, not only physically but also filmically. We remember that the Lumière were the first to initiate the globalization of the cinema, later to be followed by Pathé. By the late thirties, France mattered less in terms of the global reach of its cinema, but its empire could come to the rescue, and give it the impression of being able to extend its reach the four corners of the world, a sort of compensatory empire as was the case of Britain during the same era. The tone and speed at which the voice-over addresses us is also worth noting. There is a kind of smooth merger of image, voice, tone, and speed that combine to make the succession of images seem natural and inevitable. At the same time, the music is the soaring kind one would hear for such films as Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments. All these in turn combine to give us the feeling that this film is indeed an epic documentary, not simply in terms of length, but tone, it is a documentary about the epic of France. 327 The first images of the trailer are those of the classroom. We see a quick montage of classroom images featuring teachers at the blackboard, students writing, therefore putting colonialism first and foremost under the sign of the pedagogic, and thus the colonized as pupils. Colonialism projects itself as a teaching and learning project with Europe teaching and Africa learning. It establishes a master-student relationship. We thus see a series of images from the different parts of the empire, (here a redeployment of the ‘E Pluribus Unum’ trope), with Arabs, Indochinese and Blacks united under French banner. Since white French students are not featured, it makes it clear to us that this professed ‘unity’ is conditioned by the absence/presence of the French, which does not need to speak itself. It is the norm, the self-evident, the one that can afford to be absent, precisely because it is the one that is structuring all this, bringing all this together. The emphatic voice-over puts things in perspective for us: “In our colonies, spread out across al climates, children on school benches learn to know France. They know that they are the inhabitants of an empire which is the second largest in the world.” This is followed by a shot of a boy standing in front of a map of the world and tracing the expanse of the French empire. He then turns his head left and smiles at the camera. One wonders what difference this really made to the colonized, cognizant that this vast empire is premised on the destruction of their own. We cut to an animation with a dark background. From the map of France a number of rays of light beam in all directions and show the extent of the French empire. The voice- 328 over contextualizes it all and tells us that “six teams of cineastes taking the fastest means of transportation went across the world. We see shots of film crews boarding an airplane, a boat, a train, This colonial mapping the world is done cinematically, the cinema itself contributes to that mapping, uses the technological means of transportation, becomes itself a prosthesis of colonialism, a moving mobile visual prosthesis of colonialism. Explorers of the age of colonial administration, these filmmakers “went everywhere 100 million human beings live and work under the protection of the French flag.” We cut to a crowd shot of Africans walking forward with the sign “France is our country.” Then we see and hear “coming soon to a theater near you,” with documentary using the advertising technique of studio feature film. It is clear here that there is a will to narrative in this trailer and in the documentary more generally. This is clearly not a documentary that seeks to show things as they supposedly are. This is the full deployment of the persuading/persuasive function of documentary that seeks to touch hearts and minds, the ultimate project of propaganda. “A Great National Film” is another way the film is pitched to appeal to French nationalism, equating French nationalism with colonialism, French sovereignty with empire. At the same time, it makes one wonder what a non-national film would look like. This is subtle sliding because it seeks to construct French nationhood solely within the framework of Empire, as if this was the only way the notion of nationality in France could be mobilized. In that sense, it is totally correct. 329 Taking the prosthetic idea even further, the trailer voice-over repeats “France is an Empire” adding that “without leaving your seat, you will visit Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, the Antilles, Black Africa and all our overseas territories” following the listing of each country with a supposedly representative shot. Black Africa is cinematically figured with waterfalls in the background, a man and woman in the background, idyllically exchanging whereas Madagascar is symbolized by flowers, etc. The will-to-narrative mentioned earlier is furthered by the voice-over announcing that “You will see in this film what these countries were before colonization” We know now that there will be a before and an after, colonialism marking the radical caesura between the two for there are shots taken at the moment of filming showing consecutively a fire eater in Africa and other Africans in a procession in the sand with some men flagging others and a close shot of an Arab men holding a gun. “Letting the images speak,” they tell us that Africans and Arabs were in a state of barbarism and magic and acted cruelly toward one another. The following shots further narrativize the past, filming images in the present as stand-ins for the past, as if these very film directors had been present during the conquest. Indeed, we get a shot of people running toward the camera with fire blazing behind them. This is followed by a graphic cut of French soldiers running during their training. This fake continuity, in a move to suggest the moment of conquest, gives the impression that the soldiers are running after the Africans in the previous shot. 330 “You will understand the scope of the work accomplished by our soldiers, our explorers, our settlers.” This is accompanied by a low angle shot of the soldiers.” You will understand the wonderful apostolate of our missionaries who sometimes preceded administrators and soldiers going sometimes where none had been before and made France known and respected.” This is followed by a shot of missionaries sitting center frame fully surrounded by Indochinese children. The next shot shows missionaries distributing food, then another nuns distributing food in Arab lands, and finally a nun holding an always already colonized baby (for the time being of course). The slippage is also loud here. Missionaries are not there to make God and Jesus known but France, operating a nationalization of Christianity. As demonstrated in chapter II, the national impulse was central to the actions of the missionaries. Candidly recognizing this is quite refreshing as it reminds Africans of the sequence of events. First missionaries/explorers (this is how they are portrayed in the voice-over), then the soldiers and later the administrators although many soldiers turned administrators (Faidherbe, Gallieni, Lyautey, etc). It is thus also an unwitting narrative of the sequence of events as lived by Africans and Asians. But the “good work” of colonialism does not stop with feeding hungry bellies and souls; it also heals and cures bodies. And thus we have shots in which soldiers and doctors examine children, another where a soldier is cleaning the chest of a wounded person with cotton wool, and yet another in which a sitting white doctor wearing a colonial helmet and looking at the wounded hand of a boy. Other illustrative shots ensue with a doctor 331 listening to the heartbeat of a black child, another with a close shot of a doctor washing an African baby and another washing an Indochinese baby Moving forward in a promissory mode of address, the voice-over tells the audience that they “will realize the immense struggle our doctors and scientists are involved in, in order to fight all the physical ills in view of creating healthy and strong races.” One sees eugenic ideas (themselves synchronous with evolutionism) lurking in the background, along with the confidence in the demiurgic powers that medicine offers France in its colonized land. It gives France nothing short of Adamic powers to create and mold ‘strong’ races. We then see shots of various races, peoples and ethnic groups under French dominion. First Touaregs, then Black Africans with naked torsos, then Indochinese sitting, then a four-man shot of Malagasies. Making us aware of the fundamentally gendered nature and expressions of colonialism, the film offers another six consecutive shots of a bare- breasted Malagasy woman, a close up of an old black woman, shots of women of different races, in shorts, a kaleidoscopic montage of shots of women of the empire. Articulating a fundamental aspect of accepted colonial doctrine, the voice-over goes on to add above these images that “On all the territories of the countries it/she protects and administers, France has respected all the races, all the customs, all the traditions, all the religions.” The simple act of saying this shows us that it has not, for as argued above the colonial situation is ipso facto a negation of all the above. 332 This is followed by shots of colonized leadership and royalty such as the Moro Naba of the Mossi in Burkina Faso, the Tunisian Bey, etc, with the voice-over adding “France has even respected the great native chiefs, the kings, the emperors, chosen by each people, each tribe, each caste,” willfully forgetting to add that in the period of conquest all the leadership and royalty that stood in the way of colonialism were shot, hanged, publicly executed or exiled. Respect indeed…We have here a clear cinematic adaptation of Lyauteyism. Thus “although France has also respected all vestiges of the past and all the exotic picturesque, “it has brought all the benefits of civilization” further enshrining the divide: to the colonized, the old, the vestige, the exotic and the picturesque, but certainly not civilization. We are thus treated to shots of cities with European-style buildings, tramways, Golden Gate-style bridges since thanks to France “modern cities have sprung from the earth, roads, bridges, dams, railways, have crisscrossed the land.” Following suit in due process with the litany of the benefits of colonialism, “[France] has developed and exploited all the wealth of this empire and constituted an immense reserve of men,” who in the context of the impending war make prophetic the words pronounced by Jules Ferry at the Chamber in 1883 during a memorable session: “Tomorrow, if France succeeds in winning hearts, those who love her will come and defend her.” This is followed with another recasting of the Lumière original shot of a train arriving at the station signifying the arrival of colonial troops. Then black tirailleurs walk across the city holding guns in their hands. Naturally, ahead of them, leading them are white soldiers. 333 Then we return to and end with the trailer mode of address: “Soon on this screen” “A sensational film,” “France is an Empire.” The announcement of a blockbuster film, it would be interesting to know how many spectators went to see this film. It is important to remember that this film no doubt fulfills another function, that of reassuring the people of France of the ability of their government to protect them, for if a government can reach and administer countries in the four corners of the world, surely it can protect its own population in its European hexagon. The defeat against Hitler’s Germany would crush that mythology of might. It can be surmised that both French citizens and the colonized must have been surprised at the discrepancy between the discourses of power and might in these films and other forms of media, and the total wiping out of the country by Germany in literally a few weeks. But luckily, as France was indeed an empire, it was in the empire that the leadership of Free France found refuge. It was Africa that welcomed that leadership and sent her children to fight with them against Hitlerian hordes. It was thanks to those troops that De Gaulle was able to lay claim on a seat at the able of negotiations with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt at the end of the war. Surely enough, there was no France without the empire. Surely enough, France owes its claim to post-war sovereignty to the Empire. It may thus be perhaps appropriate to reverse the phrase ‘France is an Empire’ into “The Empire made France.’ 184 Interestingly enough, eight years before the war, during the 1931 colonial exhibition, Maurice Reclus, in an article in Le Temps, dated May 31, 1931 184 This reversal clearly calls for a (Guy) Debordian style détournement, which would use even the same images in order to mount an anti-colonial argument. 334 prophetically (albeit perhaps not in the sense we mean it) wrote: “If France was not in Algiers, in Dakar, in Hanoi, it is a question whether it would be in Paris…” 185 French Colonial Documentary after WWII It is interesting to know that the immediate aftermath of WWII did not imply a radical shift in approaches to the cinema in the colonial era. Actually in some cases, there was more rigidity in applying laws and decrees related to the cinema. We have already discussed questions of early attempts at theorization of the colonial in cinema by various stakeholders in the colonial enterprise. In the fifteen years that separated the end of the war from the advent of independence in the majority of African countries, a lot of knowledge production on the subject would take place articulated around colonial film committees, colonial film festivals, letters and official exchanges between colonial bureaucrats, regulatory procedures around the organization and management on the cinema in the space of the colony. The period also involved an intense activity of film production itself. A number of schemes were proposed to renew among other practices the colonial documentary itself. We will focus on the debates, which took place at the Commission des Films d’Outre-Mer of the Ministry of the Colonies (now renamed Ministry of Overseas France). This period was also that of the two decolonization wars 185 Other films in the same mode include the 1939 film entitled La plus grande France [Greater France] and directed by Lea William de Lane. However, the other classic film in that vein, albeit shorter, is Philippe Este’s Français, voici votre empire [French People, Here’s Your Empire]. Shot at the height of WWII, when France had chosen to collaborate with Nazism, the film is structured in three parts: The first part distills the “inescapable” benefits of French colonialism for Africa, while the second (the longest) deals with everything France gets from her colonies, as if colonialism was a give and take affair. The film concludes with WWII, insisting on the necessity for the colonies to band with France for the re-conquest of her lost grandeur. 335 that France got involved in against both Algeria and Indochina/Vietnam. The cinema was also mobilized by the French state in an attempt to quash the independence drive of Algerians, an aspect of which we will discuss in the next chapter. A. Historical Context of the Establishment of the Commission des Films d’Outre-Mer (Commission on Overseas Films) One of the most important institutions through which it is possible to have an idea of some of the major debates regarding thinking the colonial as it pertains to Africa in the post WWII era is the French Commission des Films d’Outre-Mer 186 (Overseas Film Commission). The first documents one comes across which mention this Commission date back to the year 1949, four years after the end of the war. Indeed, politically speaking there has been, in the aftermath of WWII, a change in the general organization of French colonies. A new dispensation referred to as Union Française (French Union) came into being in 1946, which among other things involved a little more participation of Africans in the management of their own affairs. Because of this policy change, a number of African delegates became members of the French Parliament. Among the most famous were all the leaders of the Negritude movement (Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, Aimé Césaire of Martinique and Léon-Gontran 186 All the documents consulted regarding this commission were found at the Centre des Archives d’Outre- Mer in Aix-en-Provence. I have not yet encountered any other mention of it in other books, articles or research. 336 Damas of French Guyana), and other figures such as Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast. We shall revisit their respective roles in that period. This was also the beginning of the end of the colonial era. One may wonder if attitudes toward the cinema in the colonies reflected these changing times. The study of this institution is all the more important as it positioned itself as an institution that not only produced but also coordinated discourse about the cinema in France’s colonies possessions in Africa. B. The Commission des Films d’Outre-Mer Set up on May 19, 1949 by the newly renamed French Ministry of Overseas France, the Commission met regularly at the Ministry to discuss issues pertaining to the cinema in French colonies. It counted, along with representatives of the Ministry, an eclectic range of members from such institutions as the Office of Public Works, the Commission on Educational Cinema of the Ministry of Education, the Colonial Administration Service, the Office of Telecommunications, the Office of Economic Affairs and Planning, the Inspector General of Education and Youth, the Bureau of Military Affairs, the Office of Agriculture, Husbandry and Forests, the Director of the Agence des colonies, and two members of the CNC (Centre National de la Cinématographie), the Departments of Political Affairs (of the Ministry) and of Health. 337 A cursory look at this membership shows us what was at stake in the cinema of the colonies. Not only were some of the main themes of colonial cinema represented (education, economics, agriculture and health, etc.) but the additional presence of the army and the ministry’s political division foregrounded the fact that the cinema was also a military-political affair 187 . Although the documents consulted did not clearly outline the attributions of the Commission, it is possible to deduce them from the agenda of the various discussions that took place. Indeed, the meeting dates of the Commission can be found in the correspondence addressed to high ranking members of the commission or divisions of the Ministry that were also members of the commission, such as the Political Affairs Division. One such example is a letter dated April 27, 1949 from Mr. Gaston, Inspector General of Education and Chair of the Commission to Mr. Hanin, Director of the Political Affairs Division of the Ministry of Overseas France, laying out the agenda of a meeting due to take place on May 11, 1950 at 10am on 27 Rue Oudinot, the headquarters of the Ministry of the Colonies. The agenda for that meeting included an examination of a circular sent to Colonial Governors and High Commissioners of France by Dr. Aujoulat, Under Secretary of the Ministry, regarding the organization of non-commercial cinema in the colonies, the examination of proposals pertaining to the development of documentary in the colonies, and the necessity to encourage the circulation of educational 187 In effect, a large number of cinema-related documents at the CAOM are to be found under the heading “Direction des Affaires Politiques” (Division of Political Affairs). For the Ministry of Overseas France and other colonial authorities, the cinema in Africa at the time was not considered as mere entertainment or commerce, but as a highly political matter. The reports on the deliberations of the Commission were sent to the Political Affairs Division of the Ministry of Overseas France. 338 documentaries in the Union Française. There still remains work to be done regarding the longevity of the commission, the actual effects of its deliberations on the status of the cinema in Africa in the last fifteen years of French colonialism. At this stage however, it is possible to examine these deliberations along three main axes, the role of the cinema in the colonies, especially as it relates to the notion of education, proposals from various private or scholarly institutions and stakeholders as to how to manage the cinema in the colonies, projects related to actual film production, exhibition and circulation. The deliberations of the Permanent Committee on September 28, 1949 188 , involved among other issues discussed, a plan to make documentary films for FIDES 189 , the creation of a public-private film production company to make films in the colonies as well as actual film projects on the ground in the colonies. For the first item, it was thought that the FIDES funded-project should seek to filmically document the results of the economic and social development plan. In other words, FIDES was funding for the amount of 14 million francs, five documentary films to sing the deeds of the colonial administration. These involved a 25-minute film, which would offer an overview of the “evolution” that took place in Africa as a result of introduction of machinery and modern technology, seen as solutions to the problems of Africa. The other four films, supposed to last 12 minutes each, would feature the exploitation of palm oil, the peanut industry, the Dakar harbor and the wood industry, that is both the wealth being taken away, and the 188 Details of the meeting are found in a non-dated 8 page report on the October 13, 1949 session of the Commission. 189 Created in 1947, FIDES was the acronym for Fonds d’Investisssement pour le Développement Economique et Social des Territoires d’Outre Mer (an investment fund for the economic and social development of France’s Overseas Territories). Research has shown that investment in the colonies was extremely low especially compared to the amount of wealth drained daily from the African continent. 339 infrastructure being built. This project falls squarely within the larger discursive position of the colonial apparatus by articulating the twin notions: the exploitation of resources that were laid to waste by a people that did not know its value, and the massive infrastructural argument, which is often presented as a justification of colonialism. “We took the wealth, we killed, we maimed (which is seldom admitted), but (mind you), we built bridges, harbors, schools, hospitals…” The second aspect of September 28, 1949 deliberations involved an examination of some actual film projects taking place or envisioned in the colonies. We learn among other things that the High Commissioner of France in Madagascar sent a note regarding the availability of equipment on the island, which included seven 16mm film projectors, seven record players linked to projectors, four power generations of 5 kilowatt each. The colony sought to build a cinémathèque with financial assistance from its provinces. From Guinea, we learn about an association of students and friends of public schools which sought to encourage educational cinema. In addition to seeking acquisition of more projectors, they too sought to create a cinémathèque. The deliberations also involved discussions on French film companies seeking to make films in Africa. Thus, the SIFRA company sought to make a film on Djibouti, whereas Claude Vermorel requested a 200,000 Francs financial assistance from the Commission to make two feature films and four documentaries in French East Africa. The titles of the films were Escales maritimes d’Afrique, Bois africain, Escales aériennes d’Afrique and 340 Cinq Mois en Brousse, titles which evoke an African alterity along with the plunder of its wood resources. The colony of Madagascar also planned to make a color film regarding tourism and economic ‘development.’ The last major subject of debate involved the creation of a public-private production company to make actuality and documentary films with the aim of “providing a faithful and objective image of the Union Française.” It is interesting to note that not only is the documentary associated with the objective (one or myths) but that precisely the brains behind the project did not see their own positionality as participating in the subjective. Colonialism for them occupies the space of objectivity, hence the important Fanonian reminder that “objectivity is always against the native.” Another major part of the deliberations of the Commission of Overseas films involved examining proposals from various private or academic stakeholders in the colonial enterprise. These proposals entailed an attempt to manage the field of cinema in the colonies for the benefit of colonialism. One such project was introduced by Dr. Aujoulat, who was none other than the Under Secretary of the Ministry of the Colonies, in a note to the Governors Generals of all the French colonies in Saigon, Pondichery, French East and West Africa, Madagascar, Djibouti, Papeete, etc. According to Aujoulat, this circular comes out of the deliberations of the commission, which showed the necessity to set up regulations regarding the production, distribution and exhibition of films. Focusing on “non-commercial cinema,” it posits that the organization of the latter is less complex than 341 the commercial cinema. We learn in the process that two studies are underway, one by the CNC and the other by the Commission on Overseas Films in that regard. At the center of the dispositif of a non-commercial cinema in the colonies is the pedagogic impulse. This cinema shall be educational. Aujoulat thus invites colonies with sufficient financial means to “initiate a policy of educational film production.” These films, he contends, will be of tremendous assistance to the colonies in such areas as public health, education and information. Aujoulat sees the possibility for these films to be used by other colonies and even perhaps by the metropolis. The production costs for such films could be part of the colony’s budget. He even envisions the possibility for some colonies to get involved in larger production schemes, which could involve funding from the FIDES. We see here a clear encouragement of the production of colonial documentaries, with what could be termed an open line of credit through the FIDES. From a practical standpoint, Aujoulat sees the necessity for the various colonial governments to work with the CNC or with a private company in the metropolis. He adds that the Film Unit of the Agence des Colonies could serve as intermediary between colonial governments and the CNC or private companies 190 . Aujoulat concludes this part of his circular by exhorting colonies to produce “educational films for the natives” by conjuring plans in stages customized to suit the available budget.” 190 This arrangement is rather striking in light of contemporary practice. Indeed, as part of cooperation agreements between France and several former colonies, the CNC is often an indispensable go-through as are some other intermediaries such as the Festival des Trois Continents. It is almost as if structures initially established in the colonial era were simply dusted off to suit the new era of “cooperation.” 342 The second major part of the circular addresses the question of the circulation in the colonies of educational films made in the metropolis. He contends that colonies must use filmic production from both the metropolis and other French colonies. He adds that a catalogue of films will be made available to the colonies by the Film Service of the Agence des Colonies for purchase. Buying films implies storing them somewhere and thus Aujoulat instructs all colonies to have a cinémathèque, the operational funding of which shall come out of the colony’s budget. It is important to remind the reader that the said budget was in effect funded by Africans. In other words a major part of this scheme was paid for perhaps unknowingly by Africans, that is, Africans were made to pay for films that would tell them about the greatness of their subjugation. A policy of educational cinema also involves the act of exhibiting the said films. Aujoulat proposes a two-pronged approach. The first, “fixed screenings” with schools and associations as screening locations with the funding for projection equipment to be included in the colonies’ budget. The second dimension of the exhibition plan is mobile cinema. For Aujoulat, traveling cinema teams should be set up and composed of a teacher, a master worker, a farmer and a nurse with a vehicle and teaching equipment. Another scenario would be in his mind to send a projectionist and a commentator. Aujoulat adds that there is abundant documentation at the Film Service of the Agence des Colonies pertaining to data regarding commenting silent films in African languages. 343 France is even manufacturing special trucks for that purpose. What is clearly apparent is an embrace of the screening practices sanctioned decades earlier by the BEKE and later the CFU. This directive by Aujoulat was in effect adopted by the Commission on Overseas Films, which expressed satisfaction at the notion that there was interest in colonial educational cinema at the ministerial level. Another major series of discussion of the Commission had to do with proposals regarding the status of documentary in Africa. The three major ones came from the Société d’Application Cinématographique, the Académie des Sciences Coloniales (now known as the Académie des Sciences d’Outre-Mer) and the Conseil Economique. We shall examine the first two in light of the documentation available. C. The Société d’Application Cinématographique (SDAC) 191 We get access to the contribution of this private company to the debates on colonial cinema in two letters. One of them is dated January 30, 1952, written by the company’s director Andre Lemaire to the Film Division of the Ministry of Overseas France. The Ministry had already contracted the company to make five films about the achievements of France in the colonies. The object of this series of films was in line of both Albert Sarraut and Gérard Madieu, previously studied, to teach France about what happens in 191 We are at present not able to offer more information about this company. Further research will be needed to that effect. In actuality, a systematic research (probably as a follow up of this work) will have to be made on all the institutions (both private and governmental) involved in the business of making films in the colonies. The name of the company suggests that it is a company that pursues the notion of “applied cinema,” i.e. has a desire to find various pragmatic uses of the film medium. In our context, the colonial readily offers itself as one such potential area of use. 344 the colonies. The audience was thus the French public. Among other things, Lemaire sought to lobby the Ministry so that actuality films about the colonies become a larger part of the filmic diet of French audiences. Three years earlier, in a letter dated December 10, 1949, Lemaire outlined a number of proposals pertaining to similar questions. He sought to encourage the government to intervene in regulating what was shown in the cinemas in France itself. This entailed a among other things, an interventionist attitude of the government that would force commercial movie theaters to play ‘informational’ films in their daily programming, adapting metropolitan film regulations to the colonies, along with issues of funding colonial films. On the latter, he believes that there is a lot of interest on the part of European and African parliamentarians, businessmen, administrators and others, which would require coordination. The project for the Société d’Application Cinématographique then is one that would entail a number of steps such as the study of the colonial cinema models of Belgium, Great Britain and the US. Thinking along the lines of the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment, he seeks to find out how Africans react to film, thereby reactivating the entomological mode of observation of filmic spectatorship, a distinct feature of colonial cinema. This proposal naturally involved issues of funding (funding to come from FIDES). 345 A major dimension of the proposal was the idea of the creation of a public-private film company. For Lemaire, the funding of the company should be dual, private funding originating from companies operating in Africa, and public funds from FIDES. Insisting on the notion of film as business, he seeks a profitable venture that would effectively balance startup, operational and other costs. Being a public-private entity the company should be affiliated with the Cinema Commission of the Ministry of Overseas France, the Cinémathèque of the Agence des Colonies, the Cinema Commission of the Assembly of the Union Française 192 along with the Governments of the different territories. What then should this company do? According to Lemaire, the company ought to be engaged in both fiction and documentary filmmaking. Acknowledging that fictional filmmaking, or rather the making of “long films” (grands films), i.e. features, would be very costly, he cautions that this should not constitute the mainstay in the company’s production, as it may require co-production or even loans from Credit National. Instead, he advocates that the company be mainly involved in the production of various types of documentaries. He outlines three “categories”: 1) “public documentaries for use in the metropole”; 2) “films of a technical character for use in the metropole”; 3) “films for Africans.” Thus in the minds of Lemaire, the audience of colonial cinema must be segregated. 192 As mentioned above, at least 12 Africans were members of this National Assembly starting 1946. It would be interesting to study the deliberations of this commission. It would also be enlightening to find out which Africans were members of this commission and their contributions to the discussions on the status of cinema in the colonies. One may wonder if the involvement of René Vautier with some of the parliamentarians in the filming of Afrique 50 does not stem from their membership of this commission. 346 For the first category, ‘public documentaries for the metropolis’, the constraint of profitability still remains as it speaks in his mind to the difficulty of getting Africa-related subjects on the screen. To circumvent this obstacle, he proposes that emphasis be put, in terms of subject matter, of ‘general information films with economic, social and human problems.’ 193 Still these would involve a search for external funding which might come from various government bodies such as the Planning Office [Service du Plan] or from colonial governments themselves. Lemaire’s second category of “films of technical character for the metropolis” is a category of films made specifically for sponsoring institutions such as engineering societies, higher learning institutions, and other constituencies. The company would also thus offer its services for hire. Finally the category of “film for Africans,” the films Africans deserve to see. He lists as themes to explore in this category, health propaganda films, agriculture, arts and crafts, social organization among others. These ‘educational’ films were to be made available to pedagogical institutions. Regarding actual production, it could be initiated either by the company or in agreement with the territories as part of their propaganda plans. Finally, these films would circulate in the various territories. Another aspect of the proposal of the Société d’Application Cinématographique involves the actual exhibition of the work produced. According to Lemaire, the public-private venture should provide projection equipment to the territories. This would include 193 Letter to the Economic and Film Division of the Ministry of Overseas France (December 10, 1949). 347 projection trucks, power generators, projectors, sound equipment, etc. As in the previous plan both “fixed” and mobile projection are envisaged in remote areas. The Lemaire plan is even precise to the point of outlining a typical screening sessions. In his mind this should include a ‘recreational film’ (without further precision as to what this means), a documentary film about the metropolis, a health film [film de propagande prophylactique], and a film on arts and crafts. A few words may be added about the filmic production of this company, which made a number of films in the last two decades of colonialism in Africa. Further research might allow us perhaps to put it on par with such companies as British Instructional, at least as far as colonial cinema is concerned. Indeed, it directed at least 10 films and seems to have had staple directors such as Jacques Dupont, who is credited for more than half the films or even Edmond Séchan. Indeed Dupont filmed an eclectic array of subjects such as agriculture in such BEKE-style films as Palmes (1949) which sought to convince Africans to improve palm oil production, “not for the benefit of colonialism” but “for their own.” Other Dupont films include La Grande case (1949) on Bamun secret societies, Okoume (1951) a five-minute film chanting the virtues of the arrival of European machine technology in order to develop Gabonese wood. The film is a paean to the machine, which it contrasts with life in pre-colonial Africa. Not only does the film not discuss the real beneficiaries of this ‘hi-tech’ transaction, but viewed from today, it could be regarded as having contributed to the deforestation of the second lung of the world (Africa’s equatorial forest) and thus helped usher in the era of global warning… 348 But we must stop and take a closer look at one film by prolific Jacques Dupont which stands out, that is the film entitled Voila nous! (1951). Made in the context of decolonization the film reveals the extent to which the imminence of African liberation was confusing to colonial cinematic discourse. It registers the sense of fumbling to articulate a discourse in tune with the times without committing “colonial perjury” (my term). Self- titled “a film on social evolution in Cameroon” the film uses a creative credit sequence that sets the tone for the rest of the film. Indeed, it writes the names of various crew members on an elementary school slate, which it films in succession. Among the production crew, we recognize the name of Andre Lemaire, SDAC‘s director who presented his company’s project to the Committee on Overseas Films. Also recognizable is the name of the director of photography Edmond Séchan who also occasionally directed films for SDAC. The film opens with the voice-over of an African over the shot of a classroom, with a teacher standing by the blackboard and his elementary students looking at him. The post- synched voice-over, pretending to stand in for the teacher, first locates the country geographically for the children, between West and Central Africa Immediately however it declares that under the French mandate, social evolution has taken place in Cameroon. It is no accident that this film is set in Cameroon, as it also seeks to prove to the rest of the world that France literally takes good care of lands put in its custody (in this case by the ancestor of the United Nations, the League of Nations). 349 The Cameroonian voice-over is immediately replaced by a French voice-over which, after all is our guide, as it confirms: “Yes, Africa is changing, and Africa has surprises in store for us.” There is a potential double entendre not only about change as a result of colonial presence but also due to the impending independence. This places the film squarely on the way of the winds of history and makes us wonder whether it will survive the push. But the camera immediately orchestrates a series of medium long shots, tilt ups and panning shots of groups of people posing for two machines that historically succeeded each other-the movie camera and the photographic camera-while the voice-over informs us that this is the new class that has been produced as a result of contact with the colonizers and that it has taken on the habits of the former. Wondering whether this is a good thing, the voice-over adds that “it is not easy to make up for twenty centuries in twenty years.” The next line of the voice-over may at first surprise one as it says” “these are not naïve people as you might think.” It makes one wonder whether colonialism has at long last come to its senses. But lo, the next intertitles crush this hope, for Africans “know how many miles they have had to walk to get here from their primitive lives filled with cruel gods.” A percussion session ensues with several low angle shots showing both percussionists and dancer and masks (the same masks one sees in the films of Jean-Marie Téno, of course, deployed differently). Shots of bare breasted women precede shots of 350 what is supposedly a warrior dance which the voice-over turns into a metaphysical “African condition” that is that prior to the arrival of European the continent was in a state of anarchy (reminiscent of the Hobbes/Lockean paradigm of the state of nature), and thus in a state of perpetual war (also a Hobbesian /Lockean paradigm). 194 Precisely, the next scene is in the realm of pure fiction. It proposes to adapt a supposed African legend. According to this “legend,” God had three children, a White man, a Black man and a gorilla. The Black man and the gorilla reportedly disobeyed God one day and were severely punished and God left with his preferred son, who happens to be the White man. The Black man and the gorilla (we are still in the menimal regime) find themselves alone and in tears. While the gorilla goes into the forest, the Black man goes looking for his brother. We see images of Africans walking in group holding spears. Here a supposedly “documentary” scene in turned into a fictional visualization of a supposed legend. The levels of mediation are increasing as here the film switches from present to past, turning the diegetic present into a fictional illustration of the past. How does this search end? One day, the “legend” goes the Black man finds his brother. Seeing him in a boat coming to the shores (the film crosscuts between a low angle shot of the Black man with his face beaming with joy against a shot of the arriving vessel), he has confirmation that the White man is indeed God’s preferred son. He has the power and 194 One may wonder which came first. Did these philosophers of the Enlightenment conjure up their fiction of the state of nature as a result of the voyages of discoveries of their times, or did the voyagers apply Hobbesian / Lockean notions onto the populations they came across in the New World? It seems that after the formula worked in the New World, it simply needed to be transposed to the African continent, as a new colonial phase was coming into being. If that were to be the case, what does it say about the fictitious nature of colonialism at the epistemological level? What about the so-called “documentary” ontology of the ‘non-fiction” films dealing with this fictional episteme? 351 has brought in his boat all the presents from heaven. We see then road-building caterpillar machines enter the frame with triumphant horn music played in the soundtrack. We even learn of another “legend” in which whites are supposedly represented as the preferred sons of the devil. But although the voice-over contends that Europeans have brought both the good and the bad in Africa, the filmmaker spends no time illustrating the least flattering “legend.” The film goes on to show various aspects Africa benefited from with the advent of colonialism. In agriculture, coffee, bananas, cocoa and co-operatives which bring about prosperity. It must be noted that the soundtrack and voice-over make little case of geographic specificity. While the opening voice-over is reportedly one with a Cameroonian accent, in the rest of the film the supposed Cameroonian voice-overs have a Senegalese accent, whereas in the market scenes, the “wahla” sounds (filler non-descript sounds in crowd scenes) are in Bambara which is spoken more to the West side of the continent (Mali, Burkina, Cote d’Ivoire, etc). After all the film is primarily about language, the power of language as a weapon of social Darwinism, of evolutionism, “civilizationism” even. We thus cut to the scene of education with a series of shots showing children in a classroom, in the schoolyard, drilling sessions. But being in Africa, education must be in synch with the environment, hence an insistence of manual labor as well, which incidentally is taught by a white teacher whose job it is to instill the “love for a job well-done.” 352 Language having magical powers, “the day the African speaks our language, his mind is transformed.” We learn from the voice-over that French is superimposed over African dialects (they do not qualify for the title of language). What it does not add is that when Africans refused to speak the French language, or chose to speak their own, badges of shame were put around their neck, like scarlet letters in the days of Nathaniel Hawthorne in colonial, puritan America. Thus, the act of shaming was consubstantial with the supposed “transformational” “magic” power of the French language. It was thus the “transformational” power of shaming and the “magic” of the stick combined with the ‘witchcraft” of economic and political subjugation that made the French language “so enchanting.” After language, the power of religion is not far away. Shots of people kneeling in front of a church are evidence that “their fervor is that of the original Christians.” We are shown a white priest handing out the Eucharist communion.” Indeed, although Africans have abandoned their “fetishism for Christ,” we are told that “Christianity confirms” the old [pagan, fetishist] “legend” according to which all men are brothers. Hence the images of blacks and whites working together, sitting in classrooms together and listening to the same lessons. Interestingly enough, this proposal of non-racial fraternal bonds and cooperation, made possible by colonialism, mediated by Christianity comes at the end of a teleological narrative thrust premised on evolutionism. Indeed as we see the low angle shot of a black and white priest walking together out of a Parisian church, we are reminded that “just as we will never forget what we owe to the Latins, Africa will never 353 forget that France was her godmother.” Once again, the end was at the beginning. But the film is not yet over. Relocating for a moment in Paris, it shows African parliamentarians and students, adding in a less self-assured tone, “The Black world has taken us as an example. It sends us its best sons. What side of ourselves are we going to show them?” Very few colonial films have posited such a self-conscious, self-aware, self-interrogative posture with regard to Africa for the voice of the colonial documentary is not a philosophical voice of doubt, self-questioning and excruciating self-criticism. Rather it is the voice of certainty, of affirmation, of self-affirmation, a voice sure of its own legitimacy. Here however, the film seems to begin to doubt this very legitimacy. It is in that sense that it is interesting because it shows that the cinema can within its own diegesis, register the trembling of history, by trembling itself. Yet after a moment of self-doubt, the colonial documentary voice-over bounces back. In effect it relocates once again in Africa, in ‘familiar territory,” films the dances it knows “are” the alpha and omega of Africans and even scolds its countrymen for thinking that: “ because he loves to laugh and play, people say that the Black man is a child… There is nothing wrong with that.” Trying its lyrical best it concludes “Is childhood not the spring of man?” 354 D. The Crisis of the Colonial Documentary as Told to the Committee of Overseas Films by the Académie des Sciences Coloniales The Committee on Overseas Films also examined a proposal initiated by the Académie des Sciences Coloniales (renamed Académie des Sciences d’Outre-Mer at the dawn of African independence on June 7, 1957). Before looking closely at the proposal by the Académie des Sciences Coloniales for colonial cinema in the colonies, it may appropriate to say a few words about the institution itself. One must confess that it is puzzling to know that such an institution is still in existence, five decades of the independence of African countries. The website of the institution presents it as having been created at the behest of a journalist named Paul Bourdarie to deal with overseas questions. Created on July 8, 1922 at the headquarters of Alliance Française at 101 boulevard Raspail in Paris, its founding members included Maurice Delafosse (an Africanist scholar of world repute), Alfred Martineau, professor at the College de France, Albert Lebrun (former Minister of the Colonies who would later become the institution’s first president, and later the French President who signed the Laval Decree). Other members of the original board included Paul Doumer of the French Assembly (who would also become President of France), Louis Archinard of the colonial army (also known as the ‘conqueror’ and ‘pacifier’ of French Sudan), Ernest Roume (known as the architect of French West Africa, and former Governor of French West Africa and Indochina). The official opening of the Académie took place on May 18, 1923 355 at the Sorbonne under the aegis of Albert Sarraut, Minister of the Colonies. The list of high profile figures of the French Republic who were members of the Académie 195 is very long but includes at least three former Heads of States, many ‘conquerors’ ‘pacifiers’, colonial governors (Lyautey of Morocco), It also included (includes?) former and sometimes current Presidents of such African countries as Senegal, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, etc. Shall we add to end the presentation of this institution, which is still located in the posh 16 th arrondissement of Paris, that its activities include holding conferences, publishing a journal entitled “La Revue Monde et Cultures,” as well as giving awards for publications in the fields defined in the statuses. The awards are named after major figures of French colonialism as in the Maréchal Lyautey Award for Best Publication on North Africa. The pinnacle of impenitence regarding French colonial involvement goes to the Luc Durand-Reville Award, which rewards the best publication regarding the ‘positive aspects of colonialism’ [les aspects positifs de la colonisation]. So much for the ‘impartial’ and ‘objective’ goals outlined in the statuses. The proposal itself was made by Jean d’Esme, 196 a member of the Académie, but also very well known by the French public as a journalist, a novelist and filmmaker. Born in Shanghai, China, he was a product of the Ecole Coloniale of Indochina. His tireless 195 The Web site of the Académie des Sciences d’Outre-Mer defines the purpose of the institution in the following terms: “According to Article 1 of its statuses, the Académie des Sciences d’Outre-Mer is a public institution whose aim is to study under their various aspects, namely scientific, political, economic, technical, historical, social and cultural, questions relating to overseas countries and to associate to that effect competent French and foreign personalities, in a spirit of complete objectivity and impartiality” (cf. http://www.academiedoutremer.fr/activites.php). These statuses, which clearly need updating, do not consider the fact that African countries are no longer (at least legally, technically) overseas areas of France. 196 As mentioned previously, Jean d’Esme was one of the auteurs of French colonial documentary alongside Léon Poirier, J. K. Raymond-Millet, Philippe Este, George R. Manue, Willy Rozier, Roger Le Somptier and others. 356 travels across the colonies made a prolific writer of him (about forty books). He also has an important documentary filmography, which includes such titles as La grande caravane (1936), Dans l’ombre des ailes (1938), Les sentinelles de l’empire (1938), La grande inconnue (1939), all shot in Africa. It is important to remember that the proposal was initially addressed to fellow members of the Académie des Sciences Coloniales during the January 20, 1950 session and that following this meeting, it was recommended that Jean d’Esme along with Mr. Vatin- Pérignon and Saurin draft a request to the Ministry of Overseas France regarding this proposal, amended naturally on the basis of the discussions at the Académie. Having had access to the minutes of the original meeting at the Académie, we shall thereby present and analyze them. Jean d’Esme’s presentation begins with two realizations: the first is one about a deficit of knowledge of the colonies on the part of the French public. The second is a candid acknowledgement by d’Esme that “…our country amputated of its overseas territories and reduced to its European borders would be nothing but a nation of the second order” (Académie des Sciences Coloniales 55). With these two propositions laid out, he goes on to bemoan the wide circulation of misinformation about the colonies. This, according to d’Esme, is due to the absence of deliberate propaganda in favor of overseas France. Hence the importance of the cinema. 357 For d’Esme (as it would be later for revolutionary filmmakers, but for different reasons), “the cinema is a weapon” to be put at the service of the colonial project (hereby recasting an argument by Gerard Madieu over thirty years earlier). Cinema thus should be at that nexus of power/knowledge that the colonial experience consists in. Bemoaning the “fact” that out of 6,000 films shot in France between 1930 and 1948, only five were related to the colonies, 197 he zeroes in on the documentary, which he considers an “exceptional and… powerful instrument of propaganda” (Académie des Sciences Coloniales 56-57). Giving us a sense of the colonial documentary prior to WWII, he argues that those were successful years as the genre of documentary was sought after by distributors 198 . There was even to a public enthusiasm for the documentary, perhaps even a cinephilia (my term). In other words, prior to WWII, it was possible to watch a colonial documentary in a regular movie theater without any hindrance. The colonial documentary was part and parcel of viewing practices of the life of a regular French spectator. In the aftermath of the war though, this situation changed. Jean d’Esme blames the situation on the lack of support from public officials. Claiming that private individuals have tried to take up the torch of colonial cinema, he reckons that legal and financial constraints have in effect ‘assassinated’ the form. These various constraints, he contends, have led to the loss of profitability for the colonial documentary. In the process, we get an insight into at the political economy of the colonial documentary, involving the costs of 197 This is clearly inaccurate. Only a cursory search on the Web site of the CNC / Archives Françaises du Film proves this figure wrong. (cf. www. cnc-aff.fr) 198 One wonders how such could be the case, if as he affirmed earlier, only five films about the colonies had been shot in France over the course of eighteen years. 358 the production process (at least two to three months trips to Africa, a film crew or team of filmmakers, union rates, etc) which make it impossible for the maker of colonial documentaries to break even. Another culprit appears to be the 1940 law stipulating that 3% of the net receipts of a showing involving a documentary and a fiction film would return to the maker of the documentary. A 52% tax goes to the government whereas 30% of the intake goes to the distributor. This economic model, d’Esme argues, gives the documentary filmmaker or producer half of what he spent on his film. This unsustainability is at the heart of what Jean d’Esme refers to as the “crisis of colonial documentary.” But the woes of the colonial documentary also have to do with the politics of the free market. Without government intervention, d’Esme argues, distributors prefer to have already amortized Hollywood chase-scene films, which they would show during the first part of their program, prior to the feature. Indeed, in the eyes of d’Esme, two of the mortal enemies of the colonial documentary are none other than Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. To solve the crisis of the colonial documentary then, Jean d’Esme proposes a number of measures for the French government to implement at the request of the Ministry of the Overseas France. These would include mandatory screenings of documentaries as part of a show, a minimum quota time reserved for documentary in the program, a remuneration of the documentary on a percentage basis rather than a lump sum basis. 359 Regarding the colonial documentary proper (indeed the crisis is first one of the documentary and secondarily that of the colonial documentary), he advocates the creation of a Cinema Department at the Ministry of Overseas France (which in effect exists already, that is the Commission of Overseas Films), the setting up of a schedule and modus operandi for the documentary, the possibility for High Commissioners to financially and logistically assist documentary filmmakers. He also argues for colonial government to make available (presumably African) extras for the film crews, the creation of a cinémathèque (already addressed by Dr. Aujoulat), and naturally the creation the Grand Prix” of the Overseas (that is, colonial) Documentary, in other words, an award for the best colonial documentary. 199 It is important to note by way of ending that Jean d’Esme’s proposals were subject to discussions by members of the Académie. Attending this session were Luc Durand de Reville (whose name ‘graces’ the award for best work on the “positive” aspects of colonialism), Michel Cote (President of the Académie) and Emile Vatin-Pérignon (author of a book on Lyautey), Edmond Giscard d’Estaing (father of former French President Valéry). A range of ideas were proposed such as the potential creation of a film studio in Black Africa, as in the Moroccan protectorate which had created and funded a 70-milion franc professionally-run studio (with Hollywood-style sets) to shoot short 20-25 minute 199 It must be added in passing that a colonial documentary entitled Les grands cultivateurs du massif Kabre (1948) directed by colonial administrator Raymond Vaudiau was screened at the 1949 edition of the Cannes Film Festival. 360 films, how to shoot a “good” propaganda film, the desire to wean African audiences of “bad filmic objects” (Académie des Sciences Coloniales 64, 72). One also learns that Michel Cote, the then President of the Académie must be counted among the first people to have used a Lumière Cinématographe without being a Lumière operator. Dixit Michel Cote: Regarding the suggestions of Mr. Jean d’Esme, I agree with him as far as the films are concerned. I think I was the first one to make some since it was my friends, the Lumière Who entrusted me with making a film [m’avaient confié une première prise de vue] in late December 1896. And I filmed - I don’t know what became of it - Easter celebration dances in Addis-Ababa, in the month of March 1898. (Académie des Sciences Coloniales 64) This statement slightly modifies our findings in chapter one. Indeed, it indicates that although Alexandre Promio or other Lumière operators may not have traveled south of the Sahara in these early days of the cinema, a friend of the Lumière went all the way to Ethiopia. It is not clear what Michel Cote filmed in 1896, but by 1898, he had made it to Ethiopia in order to film Easter celebrations. One may wonder where this footage is and what else he did with the Cinématographe in Africa or in France about Africa. E. Other Debates on the Status of the Cinema in the Colonies in the Late Colonial Era Outside the deliberations of the Committee of Overseas Films, other observers of colonial cinema proposed ideas as to its future. One such figure was Pierre Leprohon, who 361 analyzed colonial cinema in his book L'exotisme et le cinéma: les chasseurs d'images à la conquête du monde, which was referenced in this chapter. At the end of the book, which he published in 1945, Leprohon presents an assessment of French colonial cinema. Bemoaning the fate of colonial cinema as Jean d’Esme would do five years later (one wonders if his reflection did not influence Jean d’Esme or if they did not mutually influence each other as he confesses having interviewed the director), he argues that the two pillars of colonial cinema are production and well as distribution, and that not much had been done in France in that realm. In some ways, many of the debates around the status of cinema in the colonies as found in the documents in the archives are sketched out in this final chapter of Leprohon’s book. Indeed several debates of the Commission of Overseas Films address the question of the necessity of the cinémathèque, the intervention of the state in the process of creating a type of political economy of the colonial documentary film. The notion of centralization was also picked up by the commission as previously discussed. Leprohon’s book also features an interview with colonial novelist and museum curator Ary Leblond, whose ideas of colonial cinema went even further. Taking colonial literature as an example, he argues that the majority of people who filmed the colonies did so with preconceived ideas and that they only sought confirmation of what they already knew. Instead, he proposes that “to appropriately film the colonies, one must come without any set plan, but rather approach them with good faith, open oneself to being moved and surprised… That is why we will no doubt have surprises when the Empire has its own 362 filmmakers as its own writers.” What is meant is not necessarily a call for the rise of African filmmakers, but instead for Europeans who have settled in the colonies and would have presumably ‘known” them enough, “from within” in order to produce supposedly decent work. Until then Leblond argues, the metropolis would have to be in charge of producing images for the colonies. He goes on to equate the act and experience of filming the colonies with an apostolate. Here we are reconnecting with the missionary regime of filmmaking, already encountered in the British context. Leblond even proposes special training for these colonial filmmakers. Indeed, he contends, “there must be an institute, a school which guarantees- not useless degrees- but at least titles, one that guarantees a minimum of taste” (Leprohon 238). 200 This is not the end of Ary Leblond’s ‘how tos’ of colonial cinema. Indeed, another significant dimension of the edifice is the question of censorship, for not any film must be shot in the colonies. Indeed, Leblond proposes preventive censorship, by advocating the creation of a censorship commission that would examine scenarios prior to authorizing film shoots in the colonies, clearly displaying his lack of awareness the Laval decree, already in effect since 1934. But why is this preventive censorship deemed necessary? As in Britain, anxiety over the image of Europe and whiteness are at the core of concern. Dixit Leblond: We have too many examples of colonial films betraying the work accomplished by France and presenting the colonies as a refuge for violence, baseness, vileness, as an asylum offered to the detritus of the metropolis… It is high time we understand that in doing so we are responsible for destroying the work 200 It is interesting to compare this with the CFU/BEKE approach, which was in some ways premised on tastelessness. But then again, the audience is different. 363 accomplished by some at the cost of so much sacrifice. It is time to understand that we are being judged abroad by these testimonies, which are our own (qtd. in Leprohon 238). We see here outlined a dual function for the colonial film/documentary. It must at once carry the burden of representation as well serve in the realm of public diplomacy. This dual function will be very much enacted during the Algerian war of liberation, which we will revisit in the next chapter. Leprohon’s book also features another advocate of colonial cinema, Jean d’Esme who would present a paper five years later at the Academy of Colonial Sciences about the crisis of the colonial documentary. Arguing that the [French] public is open to “noble works,” he affirms his incontrovertible faith in the future of colonial cinema. Calling for a very “masculine, muscular, virile” cinema that would offer portraits of such “great” colonial men as Gallieni, Lyautey, Lavigerie, he considers colonial cinema a “cinema of the testosterone” or rather “testosterone cinema” (my terms). In this configuration, the position reserved for Africa is plain to see. For this project, once again, d’Esme calls on the French state to the rescue to subsidize national theaters, national schools so as to encourage the blossoming of colonial vocations (Leprohon 240). Indeed, the French youth “must know the Empire in order to learn to love it.” For this, weekly screenings of colonial films could be envisaged in theaters in Paris and elsewhere in the country, involving schoolchildren 201 . This “cinema of the colonies” as he calls it may even lead to an alternative circulation circuit, which would also involve open universities, and would 201 It is important to note here the obsession of the thinkers of colonialism with preparing young generations for a passing on of the colonial torch, a ‘get them while they are still young’ approach. 364 screen special programs of amateur colonial films as part of galas, commemorations, with the entry fees used for the building of a cinémathèque… F. Jean Rouch - A Cursory Look It may seem strange that an account of the French documentary in Africa in the colonial age would not include an extended exploration of the work of Jean Rouch who made his first trip to Africa in 1941 and almost never left until his death. Jean Rouch is, to say the least, an ambiguous figure in the discussion about colonial documentary, or more generally about documentary in Africa. He is one of the filmmakers who have filmed Africa the most. After all, he made over 100 films there and his films encompass the colonial and post-colonial periods. He is also one of the pillars of the documentary tradition, known as the father of cinema vérité and a major influence on the French New Wave. He is also known as having helped a number of filmmakers such as Safi Faye, Oumarou Ganda, and others start a film career. Rouch also died in Africa in 2004, in Niger, the country where he spent most of his filmmaking life. There exists extensive literature on the work of Rouch, which displays almost a consensus in terms of his contribution to Africa, to cinema in Africa that puts the researcher ill at ease. What exactly was his contribution to the cinema in Africa is really the question that is left to be answered. Time constraints and insufficient first-hand knowledge of the question makes any pronouncement at best hazardous. 365 If some directors like Safi Faye and others appear to some extent beholden to him for having been trained and been brought into the cinema, such is not the case for the majority of African filmmakers who had little to do with Jean Rouch. Indeed few people outside the small circle of directors he brought to the cinema may feel any filiations or even cinematic/ideological kinship with Rouch. In a recent conversation (June 2008), I had with Burkinabe filmmaker Gaston Kaboré, I informed him that I was interested in finding out about the purported importance of Rouch in African cinema, since I was literally not there when events unfolded. The director expressed his annoyance at this omnipresence of Rouch in discussions about African cinema. He also called for a real reassessment of the so-called Rouchian contribution to Africa in general and its cinema in particular. Veteran film director Med Hondo is extremely critical of Rouch and his work on/in Africa. Sharing co-authorship with Sembène of the term “you are looking at us like insects,” he sometimes recounts that a French television station, asked him to go and interview Rouch in his office. Med Hondo reportedly asked Rouch about the film Petit à petit (1971) in which Rouch claims to practice reverse ethnography by giving illiterate Africans a camera to film Paris. Rouch reportedly demanded that the cameras be stopped and the interview be ended when questioned where the vérité in cinéma vérité was, when he had edited out hundreds of feet of footage from the film made by the two Africans. What did he decide to leave out? Why? More recently, a former friend of Rouch, Jean Sauvy, published a book entitled Jean Rouch tel que je l’ai connu: 67 ans d’amitié, 1937-2004 [Jean Rouch as I Knew Him: 67 366 Years of Friendship, 1937- 2004]. In it, the author gives us biographical accounts of Rouch’s first trips to Africa and shares letters from Rouch to him in which the latter gives accounts of his impressions of Africa. These accounts are by no means in the “I love Africa” mode. Instead, one of the first things Rouch did when he arrived in Africa was to go and sign up with the French colonial propaganda machine and propose his services. It is the contention of this writer that not enough is known yet on Rouch’s work in Africa and that his filmography alone may not suffice to produce a clear picture in that regard. But given Rouch’s importance in documentary, it may be appropriate to consider the “Rouch in Africa” part of this project as a work in progress until such time as more information is gathered, via oral interviews in various countries in Africa, an examination of Rouch’s own personal archives (reportedly at the Library of the Cinémathèque Française - the Bibliothèque du Film) and of course pouring on the literature on Rouch as well as interviews he gave combined with a close textual analysis of his films. This may be a book project in and of itself, but one that would certainly expand the knowledge on the subject. G. A Very Brief Overview of the Filmography of the Late Colonial Era In a filmography proposed by film historian Michelle Lagny and her team of student- researchers at the University of Paris III, it is estimated that at least 421 non-fiction films were made in Africa between 1946 and 1955. 202 Looking closely at this filmography, 202 These documents were communicated to me by Michele Lagny. 367 specific themes are revealed. Indeed there appears to be a plethora of films devoted to the explorational/expeditory mode including Charles Fasquelle’s Congo-Méditerranée (1949), Croisière noire de la santé (1951), directed by René Gosset - a health-related film, which takes after Léon Poirier and chronicles a 10,000 km odyssey across the continent to cure leprosy -, and colonial administrator Alfred Chaumel’s 1952 film Continent noir, which crosses the Sahara into the equatorial forest by Lake Chad. This genre is highly self-referential as it creates homages as mentioned above. Another such homage which merges the emulation of the British Cape to Cairo franchise with the impulse behind Poirier’s La croisière noire is Serge de Poligny’s Alger le Cap (1953). The latter film uses an automobile rally as an excuse for a pursuit of the expeditionary impulse. The rally itself seeks-almost twenty years after the Citroen trip- to promote other French automobile brands, including Renault and Lancia. The film crew reportedly “leaves Algiers under the snow, finds spring in the Sahara and summer in Niger.” 203 Truly epic in scale, the film crosses diverse and breathtaking landscapes, including the staples of the genre (wildlife in Kenya, the Victoria Falls of the Zambeze, the gold and diamond mines of South Africa). The film, which reportedly sought to encourage tourism in Africa, is told in four parts, each with a different voice-over, one of which is Jean Rouch’s. Through its display of the breadth and wealth of the continent, it engages in the regime of attraction, in effect, proposing an “epic cinema of attraction” (my term) merging the ambiguities of wonderment and alterity, the two pillars of tourism. 203 Film note by the CNC / Archives Françaises du Film. 368 Other themes are also explored in the period. The scene of hunting, which dates back to the very first British and French early documentary era, is by no means relinquished. Thus, only a few years before African independence, such films as hunting-obsessed Albert Mahuzier’s 1947 Grande chasse d’Afrique, Chasses en A.E.F. and his 1951 Tchad, paradis des animaux were common. The novelty lies in the fact that the director now uses newer technology (the plane) for his hunting sessions contrary to such predecessors as Mesguich and Machin. On the theme of Africa as a colonial medical frontier, we get such titles as Alfred Chaumel’s Le char des dieux (1946), which in a typical “bassour cinema” mode manages in a single film to mix together such varied discourses as the purported cultural retardation of Africans (pygmies), dances, wild animals, and European medical victory over trypanosomiases (sleeping sickness). Marie- Anne Colson-Malleville’s 1948 La caravane de la lumière literally “brings light” as it documents the fight against blindness. While Edmond Séchan pays tribute to the work of world famous Dr. Albert Schweitzer in Les feux ne s’éteignent pas (1949), Jacques Schiltz offers a more comprehensive historical view of French medical intervention in Africa in L’oeuvre médicale française en A.E.F. et au Cameroun (1949). These modes of filmmaking would continue until late in the fifties and sometimes even beyond. Still, given that no good colonial filmography on Africa can be complete without a reference to the mysterious, ethnographers make sure we never forget this. Hence from master Marcel Griaule’s Sous les masques noirs (1938) and Au pays des Dogons (1941) and from his illustrious student Jean Rouch we get such classics Au pays des mages noirs 369 (1949) and Magiciens noirs (1949) even offering as a bonus in the first film a bonus a hippopotamus hunt. In closing this chapter on the status of documentary under French-administered Africa, it may also be of interest to briefly note the relationship between film schools and colonial cinema. Indeed, in the French context for example, IDHEC was one of the very first film schools created in the aftermath of WWII. Interestingly it produced at least two kinds of graduates on the colonial ideological compass. Some went on and openly offered their services to the colonial filmic apparatus. Indeed, there were several recommendations about encouraging IDHEC graduates to go and film the colonies. Others chose to follow a different path. Either following their conscience or having a keener sense of the direction of history, they chose to take side with Africans in their struggle against colonialism. These included René Vautier, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. Naturally, the school also produced some of the first African graduates, the most prominent of whom was director/critic/historian Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. The next chapter will among other things discuss their work as well as some of the historical, political and cultural conditions that made them possible. 370 CHAPTER 5. Documentary and the Tradition of Dissent in Africa The time has come to turn our attention to the encounter between documentary and the tradition of dissent on the African continent. Although this tradition predates documentary and will no doubt outlive it, it is possible to examine some of the modalities of this encounter throughout the Age of colonialism. This long lasting tradition is not a theoretical concept even if its manifestations can be stuff of theory. It has nothing to do with the substantializing “tradition” of anthropologists and ethnographers. It simply has to do with the refusal of subjection, a tradition of rejection of foreign domination. The founding feature of this tradition, and thus the driving axis of this chapter, is a profound, inextirpable, vibrant and perpetually self-renewing commitment to and longing for liberty. It is the truism that the African continent belongs to its inhabitants and children who should and must dispose of it according to their own volition, without imposition from the outside. It is also an attitude, often contrarian, which manifests itself in cultural productions, institutions and, sometimes, ways of life. It is a range of dispositions, which provided the ground around which an opposition to the colonial onslaught could be organized. This exploration of the connections between documentary and the tradition of dissent in Africa will concern itself with the ways in which Africans affirmed this longing in the face of a system that came to be based on the premise of the end of their liberty. It will 371 examine the variegated forms this yearning has taken politically, culturally, socially. It will look at the ways in which Africans opposed a regime of weapons, of bureaucratic administration, of ideas, of exploitation during the days of colonialism. Organized around a series of major events, and actions, this chapter will analyze the questions of freedom Africans asked and raised of colonialism and assess what these questions and answers offer us as a potential approach for an epistemology of the documentary in Africa. In other words, what we are concerned with here is an exploration of the relationship between regimes of oppression, and affirmation of liberty, between history and the cinema in the context of colonialism. In that sense, this final chapter of the dissertation will look at the reverse angle of the colonial problem. Indeed, the previous chapters primarily examined the question of documentary in the era of colonialism with colonialism in the driver’s seat, as the central producer of the narrative. In this closing chapter however, we shall examine the ways in which Africans worried, derailed and countered the narrative of conquest, domination, and exploitation. The Tradition of Dissent from the Moment of Conquest until WWI As a reminder, in the aftermath of the Berlin Conference, various Western European countries launched a concerted and systematic attack on the African continent, across the four cardinal directions (Eastward, Westward, Northward and Southward). Indeed, in the 372 words of historians M’baye Gueye and Albert Adu Boahen: “Never [before in history] had the continent witnessed so many military interventions, so many invasions and campaigns organized against African states and societies” (138). The gargantuan scale of the assault was nothing short of bewildering and underlined the scope of the project, which was the complete and total subjection of millions of bodies, square kilometers, and resources, making this indeed a deliberate attack on liberty itself. In the face of the collective European assault, Africans who were not prepared for it 204 and had not anticipated its magnitude 205 , chose to defend their countries, themselves, their liberty, and in the process affirm liberty. In doing so, they deployed an incredibly wide range of varied and resourceful approaches, strategies and tactics, which involved such postures as direct confrontation, temporary submission, diplomacy, negotiation, rebellion, insurrection, conjuring up historical, literary and artistic, political, economic, cultural, philosophical and theological arguments and means. We shall look at a few examples in the period dating from the moment of conquest to the eve of WWI. It was at the moment of conquest that the tradition of dissent began manifesting itself in the time period that is of interest to us, when it became clear to Africans that the Europeans had elected to replace the language of sharing and mutual interest, with that of guns and ammunitions for domination, in the aftermath of the Berlin Conference. From 204 Up to then, according to historians, Africans had for the most part and for the longest time dealt with Europeans on the basis of radical equality and were either not fully aware of or had not drawn all the consequences of Europe’s sudden industrial development and ogre-like need to expand beyond her borders, assisted with new and lethal weapon technology. 205 To use a consecrated term in documentary, Africans were literally “caught unawares.” 373 that moment, historians contend, direct confrontation, alliances and in some cases temporary acceptance were all part of the arsenal of postures adopted by Africans to face colonial conquest, although resistance was the predominant choice over alliance or submission. A. Direct Confrontation 1. Military Resistance Thus, Africans decided to take up arms and defend their lives and their lands. In cases where direct confrontation was chosen as a modus operandi, tactics such as open warfare, sieges, guerilla operations, scorched earth were implemented (Gueye and Boahen 138). In West Africa, sites of fierce battles involved the French in Western Sudan, Cote d’Ivoire and Dahomey (Benin) and the British in the Niger Delta and Northern Nigeria between 1895 and 1903. The battles were the site of tremendous massacres of African populations but also of bravery of the fighters often confronted with weapons of unequal lethal capabilities. Numerous figures of African resistance also illustrated themselves through their strategic and military abilities. In the Western Sudan and parts of Cote d’Ivoire, for example, one of the most famous figures of resistance was the Almamy Samory Touré, who chose direct confrontation with French troops. 374 As a reminder, the colonial onslaught did not happen in a vacuum in Africa. As argued in chapter two, it occurred at a time when Africa itself was undergoing tremendous changes at the political, economic, military levels, in what historians referred to as the Age of Revolution. New state formations and reconfigurations were the order of the day. Thus, the colonial conquest unfolded even as Africans themselves had their own designs regarding the reshaping of their continent. In the case of Samory Touré, he had started building an empire, which stretched from Northern Sierra Leone to the Sassandra River in Côte d’Ivoire (Gueye and Boahen 147) and was on his way to further expanding it when the French colonial invasion began. Samory Touré is renowned for having had a redoubtable army, with an infantry of 30- 35,000 men and a cavalry of 3,000 men. Importing guns from Sierra Leone, he reportedly had his blacksmiths fabricate imitations of European guns, trained his troops European style, emphasized the high mobility of his army and faced the French head-on. With this, he was able to beat the French at Dibadugu in 1891 although they would defeat him the following year. But this defeat was by no means the end of Samory Touré. Following French encroachment on his territory, he sought to create another empire inside Cote d’Ivoire, which extended all the way to Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso. Upon his return toward Liberia from one of his campaigns however, he was captured by the French in 1898 and deported to Gabon where he died in 1900. 375 This larger than life figure in the history of Africa inspired many nationalists in Africa from the moments of conquest until even in the last days of colonialism in the 1950s. In the cinema in particular, the Elder of Elders of African cinema, Ousmane Sembène sought to make him the subject of his magnum opus. Having spent several decades researching and living with film, Sembène sought to make a truly epic film about Samory, supposed to last no less than… six hours 206 and feature thousands of extras. He was unfortunately never able to gather enough funds to bring his dream to fruition 207 . Even so, after a cursory look at the Sembène’s filmic work, it is safe to say that he sought to translate cinematically the features he admired most in Samory, that is, the dream of freedom, independence and unity for the African continent. Beyond Sembène, it is important to note with regret that no major documentary film project has been devoted to Samory Touré and other figures of African resistance in those crucial days of conquest. Moving to East Africa, for example, the region that headquartered the adventures of the so-called Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment, it is significant to note the palette of approaches that Africans in that region deployed as forms of dissent. We learn from Henry A. Mwanzi that active resistance, active non-cooperation and diplomacy were used and that these strategies depended both on the type of African state formation at hand and the nature of the European approach (172). In Uganda for example, King Kabarenga of 206 Dixit Sembène: “The cinema version will last six hours, three two-hour episodes. For television , our ambition is to make a series of twenty episodes…” (Busch and Annas 122-123). 207 In an interview with the monthly magazine Jeune Afrique, asked if he thought the Samory project would ever materialize, Sembène had the following to say: “If I were to die without having made it, you are allowed to write that Sembène died dissatisfied. If I made a film on Samory, afterwards I would leave cinema straight away […] I’d leave cinema because Samory would be the great oeuvre of my life. I like and admire the man and everything he did. No Head of State measures up to Samory and I doubt any ever will.” (Busch and Annas 59-60) 376 Bunyoro first had a direct military confrontation with the forces of Lord Lugard, and chose the road of diplomacy only after he was militarily defeated. In other instances as with the case of Mumia, King of the Wanga, the key question was how to instrumentalize the British, to use them as mercenaries against his adversaries in the neighboring regions 208 . For his part, Mwanga, the Kabaka of Buganda, used guerilla tactics and really opposed a fierce resistance to British troops (Mwanzi 179). Indeed British Major Thurston is reported to have said the following: Kabarega used his old tricks, causing all kinds of trouble, but never accepting open warfare, preferring instead to use his favorite method, that is, assassination. He had poison delivered to one of our allies who died from it. I had the messenger executed. (Mwanzi 182) In other cases, it was the building of railroads that was opposed. Such was the case in Kenya, where the railroad was the signifier not of “development” but of the imminent arrival of European settlers bent on taking away their land. Thus on the coastal regions of Kenya, the Girima not only refused to give up their lands to settlers on the eve of WWI., but they also opposed the forced recruitment of their youth in order to work in white plantations and rejected the imposition of a pro-colonial leader. All these culminated in an uprising, which ended with the British reacting by burning people’s houses, and confiscating their property. As a result, the Girima turned to guerilla tactics and opposed fierce resistance to the British until their ultimate defeat (Mwanzi 188). In Central Africa, also part of the region covered by the BEKE, historians have observed similar patterns of resistance to colonial conquest (Isaacman and Vansina 191-216). 208 Mwanzi adds however that the British also saw him as a docile agent. 377 Indeed, the Gaza are known to have tried to play the British against the Portuguese. Faced with Europe’s military predominance, Africans also sought to find ways of procuring the latest weapons through international commerce with Arabs for example. These would help sustain large-scale insurrections in situations of temporary defeat. Although, it was mentioned at the beginning that Africans were initially not aware of the sheer massive scale of the colonial onslaught , once this became the case, in many quarters strategies of alliances were developed in order to bring together forces of resistance beyond territorial, ethnic and even religious lines. 2. Theologies of Liberation In addition to military resistance, Africans also deployed religious arguments against European attempts at putting them in bondage and taking away their lands. A number of examples will be looked at in what might be termed a theology or spirituality of liberation. In Kenya, members of the Mumbo cult used religion as a tool for liberation. Thus their leader, after condemning Christianity as a rotten religion, invited his followers to “let their hair grow,” adding that “all Europeans are our enemies and the time will soon come where they will disappear from our country” (Mwanzi 187). In other cases, Christianity itself was mobilized for the purpose of liberation. Hence Henrik Witboi, leader of the Nama who elaborated a theory of self-determination on based on Protestant principles, 378 whereas Chief Maherero of the Herero, whose people would witness the first genocide of the twentieth century invited his neighbor Witboi (whose children had been educated by German protestant Missionaries) to join in the fight against Germany. Dixit Chief Maherero: “My wish is that we, weak nations, rise against the Germans. That the whole of Africa fights the Germans and I prefer that we die together than as a result of various physical abuse, imprisonment or in any other way” (Ranger 72). Still in other cases, it was African religions that served as inspiration for the defense of the freedom of Africans. Thus, the Maji Maji revolted against the German administration, which imposed forced labor, harassment, and poor working conditions in Tanganyika. Kinjikitil Ngwale, the leader of the movement mobilized his followers appealing to African religion and fabricating magic potions supposed to make his fighters resist European bullets. Although the Maji Maji were ultimately defeated, they held on for no less than two full years (from July 1905 to August 1907) and spread over 26,000 kilometers (Mwanzi 189). This movement is known to have been the first large scale anti-colonial movement in East Africa, and was regarded as a peasant mass movement oriented against colonialism. Still on the question of liberation theology, Islam was also a major source of inspiration for the defense of liberty, in several regions of the continent. Part of the tremendous geopolitical transformation that was occurring in Africa prior to the European onslaught was made under the aegis of Islam. Thus, the already mentioned example of Samory, but 379 also the expansion of the Fulani theocracies which offered a very strict interpretation of the Koran including the cardinal principle that in Islam, man submits only to God and not to other men. This foregrounded for many, the de facto theological impossibility at the level of Islamic dogma itself of the acceptance of the idea of European/Christian conquest, as the latter were considered infidels. All over North Africa, such was also the case 209 where the fight for the defense of the right to self-determination was waged until the 1920s. In Egypt for instance (already at the vanguard of several self-initiated liberal forms of experimentation as discussed in chapter 2), Colonel Ahmad Urabi found his inspiration in the revolutionary ideas of Muslim reformers Jamal al Din al Afghani and Muhammad Abdu and sought to topple the British approved Khedive and establish a Republic. As a reminder, Egypt was then part of the Ottoman Empire and Britain was on the side waiting for the right occasion to occupy the country, so that the fight for liberation was directed against both the abuses of the Turkish occupier and the would-be British colonizer. The Urabists attempt to depose the Khedive led to British involvement in the Battle of Alexandria where no less than 2,000 Egyptians were killed. Following this, Colonel Urabi launched a Jihad against the British. After extended battles with strong resistance on the part of the population, Britain would occupy the Suez Canal. But the symbiosis between the population and the nationalist army allowed for the continuation of the resistance movement, as the people offered financial help and mobilized thousands of volunteers against Britain (Ibrahim 90). 209 Indeed, Hassan Ahmed Ibrahim argues that “nowhere else in Africa did initiative and resistance against the division and occupation of Africa by Europeans were as determined and fierce as in the modern states of Egypt, Sudan and Somalia in North East Africa” (Ibrahim 87). 380 The Egyptian model was emulated by the Sudanese, headed by Muhammad Ahmad al Mahdi who founded the Mahdiyya, a Jihadist movement, premised as in West Africa, on a return to the originary Islamic faith with an active proselytizing impulse (Ibrahim 99). This movement with strictly patterned itself after the originary moments of Islam (among other things, the leader became Mahdi at age 40, like the Muslim prophet Muhammad and named his followers Ansar, etc). The Mahdi confronted the British for no less than four years (1881-5), defeated them on several occasions, including at the Battle of Shaykkhan (Ibrahim 100). In these heydays of colonial conquest, the Mahdi succeeded in controlling large territories of Sudan (currently the largest country in Africa), transforming a rebellion movement into a powerful state, which managed Sudan for 14 solid years. Even after WWI, resistance did not let. It is now well known that in Libya for instance, Umar al-Muktar led the movement from 1923 to his execution in 1931 by Italians. Using such tactics as raids, ambushes, surprise attacks incursions, Libyans offered Italians a very difficult moment. The Italian response included erecting a 300 kilometer barbed wire border between Tripoli and Egypt to avoid the delivery of weapons from sympathetic Egyptians to the Libyans, using poison gas and aerial bombings against them, deporting entire rural populations and locking them up in concentration camps. It was the same desire by Africans to defend liberty that prompted Germans to react by erecting the first concentration camps of the twentieth century as well to perpetrate the 381 century’s first genocide in Southwest Africa against the Herero and the Nama as documented by Jean-Marie Téno in his film The Colonial Misunderstanding (2005). B. Other Forms of Resistance One of the impetuses behind the colonial conquest was the desire by Europeans to also to put an end to the economic liberty of Africa, a feat they have been tremendously successful at, as the economic has since been the Trojan horse through which hard won liberties were subverted and almost completely obliterated since the days of independence. Thus along with military assault, Europeans put an end to the equal partnership with the African bourgeoisie and established their own monopoly on the entirety of the continent’s economy (Ranger 82). This led to rebellions on the part of African merchants such as Chief Nana Olumu of Itsekeria in the Niger Delta (today’s Nigeria), Rumazila who fought both the Germans and the Belgians (Ranger 82). Although Europe secured victory over African armies, the continent’s population did not simply accept the new (dis)order of things. They did on a day-to-day basis seek to snatch out spaces of freedom from the all-consuming colonial monster, using ingenuity against a hydra that accepted no dissent. Thus trying to stop the functioning of the colonial machine, they became adept at tax evasion, cognizant of the fact that the taxes would not be deployed in their interests. One remembers the desperate efforts of architects of the BEKE to offer a colonial reading of similar situation via documentary. It is no surprise 382 that their effort was met by resistance from African audiences who had experienced the administration’s handling of their tax monies firsthand. Thus, to avoid paying taxes, entire villages would find refuge in hard to access areas of the country (including marshes) until the departure of colonial tax collectors. In other cases, tax evasion occurred through border crossing. As is well known, colonialism drew arbitrary wedges between various states, and thus ethnic groups and entire families found themselves living on both sides of borders claimed by different colonizing countries. Thus, border populations in Central Africa managed to avoid paying taxes to either of the colonizing forces by moving to the other side of the border during periods of tax collection (Isaacman and Vansina 203-204). In the same region, populations often took to arms to repel recruiters from their territories. In other instances in a situation of colonial labor, they feigned sudden pains, slowed down the pace of labor, escaped from their workplace, which, to the dogmatic mind of the colonizer could only confirm the proverbial laziness of Africans. In Northern Rhodesia, for instance, the lack of cooperation of Africans and their chronic absenteeism confirmed just that. Still in Central Africa, African workers often sabotaged the farming equipment, burnt warehouses, looted stores belonging to European companies and local merchants benefiting from trade with Europeans (Isaacman and Vansina 204-205). They even often sabotaged lines of communication and destroyed means of transportation. 383 In light of the general climate described above, it is a wonder how the architects of the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment could have claimed to transform the habits of Africans and produce a theory of African spectatorship, seeing the extremely and widely different protocols of reading a situation they had. Where the BEKE saw an illiterate population unable to decipher filmic language (confusing illiteracy with unintelligence), these same populations were in the position of (literally) resistant spectatorship. The BEKE were unable to produce a hermeneutic of resistance in East and Central Africa, choosing instead to see backward savages. The incident of the breaking of the cable of the electric generator for the BEKE projector takes a different meaning here. While for the BEKE it was most likely the case of an African who mistook the cable for a snake, it could instead be interpreted as an active attempt by the perpetrator to put an end to a cinematic apparatus and project aimed at the promotion and perpetuation of the subjection of Africans, making his throwing of the spear a supreme act of resistance. The spear in effect attacked a cinema of oppression. Still, other forms were conjured for the defense of freedom. Some populations, although defeated militarily, refused to live in the space defined by colonial domination. Thus, several communities were formed in inaccessible areas or heights where they established an autarchic- like independence, reminiscent of the maroon communities in slave owning states in the Americas. From their position in isolation, they often attacked all symbols of colonial oppression. Some of them came to be known as social bandits. Mapondera was one of the most famous of these in Southern Rhodesia. He is reputed to have fought, for 384 over a decade (1892 to 1903), against the Portuguese and the British, with the willing help and unconditional support of the populations of the area who fed him and his troops, helped them hide and provided them ammunitions and strategic intelligence” 210 (Isaacman and Vansina 207). As we come to the end of our examination of these myriad acts of resistance, what immediately jolts the researcher, and presumably, the reader as well, is precisely the extent of what is missing from the colonial documentary. The various case studies analyzed above can be rightfully considered the off-screen space of the colonial documentary, that which is absent. Yet, these events by their very screenic absence are massively present, as they are the stuff that structures the lives of the people living in Africa at the time. These events participate therefore in a dialectic of presence absence in documentary in Africa in the age of colonialism. They are indeed the very structuring absence of the colonial documentary that is still and paradoxically yet to take documentary form. Yet even in the colonial era, where the cinematic means of representation were quasi- exclusively in the hands of colonizers, some African born filmmakers were able to film the continent in the early decades of the cinema, almost at the same time as the Lumière operators themselves. One such notable figure was Tunisian Albert Samama Chikly. 210 One cannot help but think of Ernesto Che Guevara and his guerilla fighters in Bolivia, six decades later. 385 C. Pioneers of Documentary in Africa: Albert Samama Chikly Albert Samama Chikly was a contemporary of the Lumière brothers, although not one of their operators as was Algerian-born Félix Mesguich. Chikly is thus credited by Férid Boughedir, for organizing the film screening in Tunis in 1897 211 (5). Being truly multi- talented artist open to the larger world, Chikly was also a painter, and is known to have introduced photography, the cordless telegraph, the radio, the X-ray and even the bicycle in Tunisia (Boughedir 6). A lover of the good life, he reportedly referred to himself as “the Prince of Chikly.” Born in 1872 in a Tunisian Jewish family who left Andalusia for Tunisia after the Reconquista, he was also world-traveled, having sailed to the Caribbean, Germany and Australia at the early age of 16. Very much a technophile, he both purchased and experimented with the latest technological devices. His interest for the X-ray led him to offer free consultations at the Tunis hospital. His love for voice transmission also prodded him to teach his daughter the Morse alphabet. As a photographer, he was on equal footing with the Lumière brothers and exchanged correspondences with them. With both the cinematic and photographic apparatus, he would be one of the first to take submarine views as early as 1903, also filming aerial views of Tunis, Paris and Brussels from a hot-air balloon. The Tunis experiment ended with an abrupt landing of the balloon and the destruction of his camera (Mansour 31-32). Never a man to be stopped in his desire for experimentation, he 211 It may be interesting to find out who between Chikly and Alexandre Promio did organize the first screening in Tunisia, as Promio also traveled to Tunisia in early 1897 after visiting Algeria. 386 deployed the cinematic apparatus in a scientific context by filming the behavior spiders and scorpions in his lab. He even deployed the cinema celestially through his interest in astronomy, which led him to film a lunar eclipse and photograph the Haley comet on October 19, 1914 at 4 p.m. Finally, he is known to have even experimented with microphotography, stereoscopy and three-dimensional cinema (Mansour 39-40). Albert Samama Chikly was also a professional journalist who, in addition to filming actualities for Pathé and Gaumont, was also a reporter for both Tunisian newspapers (La Dépêche Tunisienne) and French ones (Le Monde Illustré, Le Soir, L’Excelsior, Le Matin). In that dual capacity, he also filmically and photographically documented Tunisian life, especially as it revolved around the Bey. In that sense, he was, like the Lumière operators, a pioneer of official cinema, which took royalty and dignitaries as their protagonists (in this case filming palace receptions, spectacles, diplomatic meetings, etc.). Indeed according to Guillemette Mansour, all the photographs of the Bey from 1890 to 1930 (forty years of photography) are to be attributed to Chikly. His liminal position is interesting for our study. Being both Tunisian and French (his father reportedly received French citizenship after offering purebred Arabian horses to Napoleon), he was commissioned by the colonial government to make films on new agricultural techniques, which brings to mind both the BEKE and CFU projects. He filmed cities 212 and regions of Tunisia, ways of life, arts and craft, agriculture, irrigation processes, oil production processes, the fishing of tuna in Sidi Daoud by Sicilian 212 One of the surviving films is entitled Tunis and is dated 1907. 387 fishermen who harpooned their fishes (which evoke both Grierson’s Drifters and Rosselini’s Stromboli), the making of traditional costumes in Tunisia, and Algerian oases. In other words, Chikly addressed themes that were very much part of the episteme of the colonial documentary. It would be interesting to study the inflection the Tunisian-born filmmaker gave to such projects, which appear very similar to those of Alexandre Promio or Félix Mesguich, the two Lumière operators, both of whom also filmed Africa during the same period. Another dimension of Chikly’s career was his work as war correspondent, He was reportedly dispatched from Paris to Tripoli to film Italy’s attempt to occupy Libya in 1911 and is said to have filmed the Libyan resistance. In other words, Chikly found himself in a somewhat analogous situation to that of Mesguich as discussed in the previous chapter. Mesguich was an embedded documentary filmmaker who took sides with the French against Africans on the Algeria-Morocco border. Here, Chikly was commissioned by the French to film a competing imperial power with designs on an African country. In examining this part of Chikly’s career, a number of questions arise. Indeed, one may wonder how he filmed the Libyan resistance. Was he sympathetic? Was he conflicted about it? Or did he like Mesguich film the resistance by siding with invader? Were Libyans “natives” to him, or rather fellow Africans under attack? Or both? 388 In 1917 at the height of WWI, Chikly joined the French Service Cinématographique et Photographique des Armées 213 [Army Film and Photo Unit], founded by none other than Maréchal Lyautey, and was part of team including Louis Feuillade, Abel Gance and Léon Poirier. As a WWI army cameraman, he was dispatched to Algeria (where he filmed military action in the mountains) and Tunisia (where his filmed prisoner camps and military vessels in Bizerte). He was also assigned to Verdun, the site of the famous battle, which cost no less than 200,000 lives including thousands from Tunisia and from the rest of the African continent. Although he received the War Cross at the end of hostilities, his footage, like that of John Huston for San Pietro (1945) three decades later, was not always welcome, as it was considered, not propagandistic enough. After the war, Chikly went on to make what is known as the first fiction film by an African, entitled Zohra in 1922 (a short film) and Ain-el-Ghazal [The Girl from Carthage] in 1924 (a medium length film). Chikly’s work clearly invites a serious investigation as it may have several implications. The first is that, in the large desert of the colonial documentary, characterized by the absence of Africans, he systematically made non-fiction films for at least two decades engaging in the most eclectic subjects and forms of experimentation. It is not clear whether much of his work is still available, but they invite multiple questions for our study. The questions include the issue of his potential contribution to filmic language 213 His ID, dated August 1, 1917 reportedly carried the following inscription: “Soldier Samama Chikly, operator for the Photo and Film Unit is in charge of recording documentation necessary to the War Archives in the French army zones. Access to the font lines shall be granted to him. All competent authorities shall facilitate his mission.” (Mansour 220) 389 (experimentation with above the ground and underwater filming), filmic technology (stereoscopy, three D cinema) and the relationship between science and cinema, his status as a pioneer of the documentary form, indeed as an auteur of documentary, his contribution to creating the grammar of filming war, etc. Documentary, the Interwar Years and the Tradition of Dissent A. Pan-Africanism as a Tradition of Dissent To colonialism, Africans did not only offer military, strategic, tactical and theological resistance. They also opposed to it political, intellectual, epistemological, artistic and cultural arguments as well. Thus, one of the longest lasting expressions of the tradition of dissent in Africa has been Pan-Africanism, a notion and movement, which affirms the principles of liberty, equality, solidarity and thus unity for Africans as responses to the tremendous challenges faced by the continent in recent times. To some extent, Pan- Africanism could be considered as having given “logos” to sporadic, often spontaneous and diffuse efforts of resistance. We shall attempt to briefly present this complex ideology as an articulation of three defining axes: the territorial/spatial, the specific and the relational. With regards to the territorial, it may be argued that for Pan-Africanism, the central referent is Africa, whether geographic or mnemonic, real or imaginary, past, in process or yet to be. It first 390 accounts for the idea of the dispersal of Africans to the four corners of the world, with an emphasis on those subject to this dispersal as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and later of colonialism and now or post-colonial migrations. It is also attached to the idea of the independence of the African continent (the principle of liberty). Thus, when the majority of the continent was under colonial domination in the first half of the twentieth century, specific states crystallized Pan African affect and idea: Ethiopia as the longest living independent African state dating back over a thousand years, Haiti the first independent Black Republic in the Northern hemisphere and Liberia founded by freed slaves returned from the United States. At the same time and precisely due to the colonial situation, one of the central projects of Pan Africanism, was the total and complete liberation of the African continent, from North to South, East to West, which implied an open hostility to the colonial system, and experimenting with a range of approaches to bring about its demise. In this effort, both Africans on the continent and Africans abroad sometimes worked in tandem (the principle of solidarity). The notion of the specific as a central axis of Pan Africanism relates to acknowledgement of the diversity and irreducibility of experiences across the vast expanse of the reach of Africa and Africans beyond the continent’s borders. So that the experiences in the Caribbean may be seen as not reducible to a mere continuity of Africa, as may those of North and South Americans, Afro-Europeans, etc. But we may also include in the domain of the specific, the attempt to define or resist cultural features specific to Africans and their descendents. Here the cultural specific would tend to elide spatio-temporal 391 specificity, hence the aporia of the Negritude movement (in its Senghorian version) which sought to attribute transcendental cultural features to Africans regardless of their geographic and historical circumstances. Finally, the relational axis, which foregrounds the link, the relationship, the active solidarity between Africans in the various corners of the continent (as a way of transcending specificity) and between them and the descendents of Africans spread around the world. At once real and imaginary, affective and political, intellectual and cultural, this relationality is what makes Pan-Africanism a truly compelling reservoir of dreams, aspirations, inspirations, concrete projects and sometimes utopias. The relational axis also involves the ideological, so that in much of the first half of the twentieth century, there was a feeling of affinity between several figures of Pan-Africanism and another major ideology of the time, Marxism. Many joined the Communist Party (e.g., George Padmore, C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire), and some even served as prominent members of the Komintern and the Profintern (George Padmore) even if they would ultimately divorce the Party. Others, without ever joining a party, embraced the Marxist analysis of society, regarding it as a crucial heuristic device deconstructing the mechanisms of capitalism, i.e. the condition of possibility of the version of colonialism that held Africans under its boots. Another dimension of the relational axis relates to the sense of the place and role of Africa in the destiny of the world. This would take several forms including the historical 392 (the notion of Africa as the cradle of civilization, the role of Egypt in the relation to African and European cultures-(the problem of the Greco-Roman paradigm) and more generally the role of Africa in world history through an exploration of both the past - with such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois 214 (known as the “Father of Pan-Africanism) and Cheikh Anta Diop 215 - and the present, again with Du Bois 216 or Padmore 217 and even the cultural (Negritude’s idea of the continent’s contribution to universal civilization). In some ways, this relational axis has an image dimension, which naturally evokes the cinema and thus documentary. An undergirding premise of this approach is the struggle over images, that is, images as a battlefield of liberation. Here an implicit relationship is made between liberty, subjection and the image. In other words, an unflattering of Africa needed to constructed by colonialism in order to justify the ‘need’ for her to lose its liberty in favor of Europe. To this semiotics of oppression thus, Pan-Africanism sought to offer instead a semiotics of liberation, working to produce an image of Africa co- terminous with freedom, ingenuity, inventiveness and prosperity. Hence the recourse to historical documentation, to produce “visible evidence’ of such a not readily acknowledged truism. In that sense, it could be argued that there is a documentary project within the Pan-African project itself in effect, a new way of “representing reality.” The relational axis is not only concerned with putting an end to the colonial domination of the African continent. It also makes this independence relational, so that when Ghana 214 Du Bois, W. E. B. The Negro. 1915. Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization Ltd., 1975. Print. 215 Diop, Cheikh Anta. The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. New York: L. Hill, 1974. Print. 216 Du Bois, W. E. B. “The African Roots of War.” The Atlantic Monthly 115.5 (1915): 707-714. Print. 217 Padmore, George. Africa and World Peace. 2 nd ed. London: F. Cass, 1972. Print. 393 became the first country south of the Sahara to extricate itself from the grips of colonialism in 1957, Kwame Nkrumah in his declaration of independence proclaimed that “the independence of Ghana is meaningless until it is linked to the total liberation of the African continent.” Still the relationality is not considered complete until it also expresses solidarity outside of Africa with other peoples also living under colonial domination. Hence the expression of solidarity with the Indian, Vietnamese, and other Asian nationalist movements, the participation in the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference in 1955, etc. Still, liberation is not the final horizon of Pan-Africanism. This horizon also involves the unity of the continent, i.e. the creation of the United States of Africa, to precisely defend that freedom and guarantee the safety and prosperity of all Africans. In the colonial age then this Pan-Africanist doctrine manifested itself first through writings, initially from diasporic Africans. Thus to the colonial contention that Africa had no history, no past, no cultures, such figures as Edward Wilmot Blyden (who coined the phrase “Africa for Africans”) and Alexander Crummel provided key rebuttals. To the idea of the supposed inferiority of Africa as ‘proved” by scientists of colonizing countries, Pan-Africanism retorted through a majestic piece by Haitian-born Anténor Firmin, who responded to the Count Arthur de Gobineau (the so-called father of scientific racism and author of The Inequality of the Races), with his own The Equality of the Human Races. Debunking all the notions that made the heydays of anthropology at the time, i.e. polygenesis, anthropometry, craniology, etc, Firmin published his book in 394 1885, 218 the very year of the infamous Berlin Conference, where the ideas of de Gobineau served as theoretical legitimation of the scramble for Africa. In this groundbreaking book, Firmin declared that “all men are endowed with the same qualities and the same faults, without distinction of color or anatomical form. All races are equal” (xii). A significant dimension of Pan-Africanist strategy in the face of colonialism was, as argued in the introduction to the book Le mouvement panafricaniste au vingtième siècle: the idea […] that different Pan-Africanist groups should act in their respective fields as long as they could meet regularly to make a strong political statement, proclaim demands, and formulate proposals. The choice of location had to be subject to specific tactics and strategies: to take the Pan African message to the very heart of the imperial system itself. (Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie 29). What is interesting here is the military-like, or rather guerilla-like approach of Pan- Africanism, whereby the intellectual “troops” would live in their respective countries, among their respective people, and gather immediately upon hearing a clarion call in order to drive discursive stakes in the heart of Empire. Thus, a series of Pan-African conferences and congresses took place between 1900 and 1945, and which articulated the grievances of Africans living under colonial duress, moving from moderate demands of improvement of the colonial system to radical calls for the immediate ending of the colonial regime. Initiated by Henry Sylvester Williams, a Trinidadian lawyer living in London and who pleaded the case of colonized South 218 Entitled in French De l’égalité des races humaines, the book was published in English in 2000, i.e. 115 years after its original publication. 395 Africans and inhabitants of the Gold Coast, the first Pan-African Conference was held in London in 1900, with 32 official participants: 4 from Africa, 11 from the US, 10 from the Caribbean, 1 from Canada and 1 from an unspecified region (Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie 30). Although, the conference did not demand an immediate end of colonialism, it was the occasion for W. E. B. Du Bois to articulate his prophetic statement that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, the question of how far differences of races - which show themselves chiefly in the color of the skin and the texture of the hair - will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization. 219 (qtd. in Pobi-Asamani 84) W. E. B. Du Bois went on to take the mantle of Pan Africanism after the London conference by organizing in the aftermath of WWI, five consecutive conferences in Paris (1919), London-Brussels-Paris (1921), London-Lisbon (1923), New York (1927) and Manchester (1945) of which we will present a very brief overview. The 1919 Congress sought to be an intervention during the signing of the Versailles Treaty, on the question of the former German colonies in the aftermath of WWI (after being defeated in WWI, Germany ipso facto lost her African colonies, which were taken over by France, Britain and South Africa) 220 . Two year later, the 1921 Congress held consecutively in three colonial capitals - London, Paris and Brussels - adopted resolutions 219 Although written over a century ago, the words are yet to be made completely obsolete in our own twenty-first century. 220 This Congress remained rather moderate in tone, due to the attendance of colonizing powers themselves, as noted in the book Le mouvement panafricaniste au vingtième siècle. 396 on racial segregation, discrimination, imperialism, land seizure, and suggested direct action (Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie 33). The 1923 Congress, held this time in London and Lisbon, demanded “the development of Africa for Africans and not simply for European powers” and adopted resolutions on the necessity of independence of Blacks states that is, Liberia, Ethiopia and Haiti, the restoration of the independence of Egypt, responsible government in British West Africa, the enlarging of French citizenship status in French colonies, the condemnation of exploitation in Belgian Congo. The Congress also denounced forced recruitment in Portuguese colonies, opposed lynchings in the United States and condemned land expropriation and the supremacy of racial minorities in the South Africa, Rhodesia and Kenya, etc. (Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie 34). In New York, the 1929 Congress examined the possibility of a relationship with the Komintern following Lenin’s call for an alliance between communists and national liberation movements in the colonies (Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie 34). It was however the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945, known as the most radical Congress, which would accelerate the decolonization process with the involvement of more radical figures from the African continent itself, primus inter pares, Kwame Nkrumah. We will discuss this Congress later in the chapter. While the Pan-African Congresses of the interwar years mainly involved intellectuals, there was a need for an embodiment of these ideas on a large scale, indeed into a mass 397 movement and none was more successful at it than Marcus Mosiah Garvey was in the 1920s and 1930s. Born in Jamaica, Garvey came to prominence when he moved to Harlem, NY, at the time of the great Northward migration of African Americans and immigration from the Caribbean. Founding the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and through it popularizing already existing slogans like “Africa for Africans,” he mobilized and spoke in front of millions, in gigantic and well- choreographed public meetings and through Negro World, his journal, which had supplements in Spanish and French, symptomatic of his global vision.. In his defense of Africans on the continent and the diaspora, Garvey wrote and proclaimed a “Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World” (1920) in which he argued, among other things that "We believe in the freedom of Africa for the Negro people of the world, and by the principle of Europe for the Europeans, and Asia for the Asiatics, we also demand Africa for Africans at home and abroad" (A. J. Garvey 138). Known as a vibrant orator with a heightened sense of mass psychology, Garvey was successful in rekindling the desire for Africa among diasporic Africans with his “back to Africa movement” and his championing of the liberation of the continent. With this, his following extended well beyond the confines of the United States and the Caribbean. Indeed, he also inspired Africans on the continent and in Europe as well. In Africa itself, and one encounters in the French colonial archives numerous exchanges pertaining to the presence in French colonies of Garveyites who needed to be monitored. Indeed several Sierra Leonean Garveyites were deported from these colonies in 1922, and accused of 398 “Garveyist propaganda.” It is clear, as Tony Martin argues, that Garvey sought to establish UNIA branches all across the continent, as his message of self-determination posed a threat to all the colonizing powers in Africa (Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal). Indeed, followers and sympathizers of Garvey lived even in the capitals of these empires themselves. In Paris, for example, Garvey’s UNIA inspired the creation of the Ligue Universelle de Defense de la Race Nègre in 1924, by Beninese Kojo Tovalou Hoauanou, also known as The Prince of Dahomey, who would travel to New York, meet Garvey and address UNIA’s audiences in a highly publicized trip. In his heydays, Garvey sought to build a ship liner named the Black Star Line, which would take African Americans back to Africa. Falling victim to mismanagement as well as maneuvers by the US Government, Garvey would be ultimately deported and with this, his dream of a return to Africa would be deferred. But his actions influenced many Africans, not least of which Ghanaian Kwame Nkrumah who adopted the black star as the symbol of independent Ghana. In the Interwar years, we remember the holding of pornographic displays of colonial power during famed colonial exhibitions. The 1931 exhibition in Paris was, as argued, one of the most publicized in history. Yet, the holding of this exhibition was met with furious resistance from Africans living in Paris at the time. One of the means through which they made their voices heard was through an independent monthly called La race 399 Nègre (clearly inspired by Garvey’s Negro World). In their April 1931 issue, they exposed the mise-en-scène at play in the exhibition in the following unequivocal terms: At the precise moment when French imperialism is feverishly preparing the colonial exhibition about which right- and left-wing newspapers provide an overly extravagant amount of details, we must denounce this odious comedy, which will be played out… It is important that people from the colonies, and our Negro comrades in particular, refuse to join these ignominious events. They must in all circumstances resist performing in indecently produced scenes. Instead, the editors of the monthly demand a different mise-en-scène, which would involve the exhibition of “the genius of our race, the display of our values, of our traditions, the lived film our existence, the beauty of our sites and the fertility of soils.” Going even further, the monthly demanded also that colonial exploitation be put on display: They should also display the physical misery of Negroes, the forced labor they are subjected to, the ignoble tax collection procedures, the archaic hygienic conditions created by civilization. They should also display how their lands were taken away, how their property were stolen; the cruel bodily punishment meted out to them; the repression and the crimes perpetrated against them when they dare protest. So, let us refrain from any commandeered optimism 221 . Documentary, WWI and II and the Tradition of Dissent We shall devote the following section to a brief study of the two world wars in relation to the tradition of dissent as a first step toward articulating a discourse on documentary in Africa regarding these two foundational events of the twentieth century. Indeed, so far the question of the relationship between the cinema and the world wars in Africa has yet to be systematically examined. Although historians have started the work, the cinema has 221 La Race Nègre, Organe Mensuel de Défense de la Race Nègre, 4 ème année, numéro 1, Avril 1931. 400 largely been left behind. This is both paradoxical and understandable. The paradox lies in the fact that WWI played a major role in the legitimation of the cinema in the eyes of the various armies and governments (colonial ones included) around the world, as discussed in the previous chapters. This lack is also partly explained by the epistemological configuration of the study of the cinema in Africa, that has for the most part treated the colonial moment (which was also the moment when the two world wars took place) as a kind of parenthesis or even footnote to the discussion of the history of cinema in Africa, with a preference toward emphasizing the post-independence moment when Africans had taken over the cinematic means of representation. So that today, there is not yet a vocabulary that could assist with looking at these two events in a comprehensive perspective with Africa as a point of departure. This section is but a first step in that direction. We shall look at the African participation in the wars, the cinematic documentation of this participation, as well as arguments relating to the role of Africa as causative agent in these two wars, and what this means for our study of documentary in Africa. A. Documentary, WWI and the Tradition of Dissent 1. The Argument Regarding the Role of Africa in the Advent of WWI In his insightful and even prescient article entitled “The African Roots of War,” the “father of Pan-Africanism,” W. E. B. Du Bois takes a Braudelian longue durée approach 401 to the history of Africa, arguing against “those who write world history and leave out this most marvelous of continents. Particularly to-day, most men assume that Africa lies far afield from the center of our burning central problems and especially from our present problem of World War” (707). Written in the heat of the war (1915), the article takes a global look at Africa as an explanatory factor in the coming of different wars. One of the key moments in this trajectory is naturally the Berlin Conference, which inaugurated an uneasy alliance between European countries in order to collectively assault the continent, which would result in colonial wars of conquest between various European countries on African soil. This also arguably marked the beginning of a positioning of Africa by Europe as the site for the reparation of wounded European egos on European battlefields. Indeed, it has been argued that French involvement in colonialism was partly due to an attempt by the French to revenge the defeat against Prussia in 1870. To this may be added the argument of the “need” for colonies in order to guarantee one’s own place in the concert of supposedly “great nations,” a consequence of which being the use of Africa as a proxy for the resolution of conflicts between Europeans. This inside/outside interface is one of the major arguments brought forth in favor of the centrality of Africa in the beginning of WWI. Indeed, according to Du Bois, this two-way interface was fueled by the economic imperative, according to which Europe “needed” to go abroad and acquire lands and wealth in order to quash increasing dissent at home vis- 402 à-vis the obvious conditions of exploitation of capitalism. In other words, turning the exploited classes of Europe away from the seductions of Socialist ideas entailed having them benefit even minimally from the spoils of imperial conquest. This Du Boisian argument is interesting as it anticipates later similar positions by Antonio Gramsci on the question of hegemony and even of the theoreticians of colonialism in the 1920s and 1930. Regarding the latter, we shall remember that, particularly in the British context, colonial expansion, and its consequences such as immigration and colonial service, were seen as ways to take the steam off social pressure at home and away from the rise of Bolshevism across the European continent. This, Du Bois refers to as ‘the association between labor and capital.” In some ways this ‘association’ did manage to make the revolution impossible in Western European countries involved in the colonial enterprise and delay the possibility of organic linkages between exploited classes in Europe and exploited Africans and Asians against the colonial system more globally. Du Bois adds, contrary to what is generally believed and repeated by historians, i.e. that We speak of the Balkans as the storm center of Europe and the cause of war, but this is mere habit. The Balkans are convenient for occasions, but the ownership of materials and men in the darker world is the real prize that is setting the nations of Europe at each other’s throats today […] The present world war is, then the result of jealousy engendered by the recent rise of armed national association of labor and capital, whose aim is the exploitation of the wealth of the world mainly outside the European circle of nations. (“The African” 711) It appears clearly therefore that according to Du Bois, WWI may be considered the equivalent of an Act II of the colonial conquest of the African continent. This would make WWI a de facto colonial war, a war for the colonies. 403 2. African Participation in the War Effort One of the major understatements in the history of the twentieth century is the decisive contribution of Africans in the winning of the world wars through a multifaceted participation in combats started by Europeans. This participation, it must be added, was not always enthusiastic. Indeed, what reasons did Africans have in fighting for countries, which only a few years earlier had massacred them and confiscated their liberty? As studied in previous paragraphs, the so-called “pacification,” that is the destruction of African resistance took place even after WWI itself well into the late 1920s and thirties. Thus, the recruitment efforts of the European colonizing powers were often met with severe resistance by Africans. Indeed, as Peter B. Clarke put, in British West Africa, for example, “many felt that joining the army meant tacitly agreeing with the colonial system of indirect rule, which they rejected” (15). As a result, both French and British troops often resorted to forced conscription, even if the French referred to their conscripts as “engagés volontaires” (willing conscripts). Different forms of coercion were deployed, including literal manhunts, kidnappings, blackmailing, all reminiscent of the dark days of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Throughout the wars, Allies found themselves in constant needs of troops, and populations often rebelled against this politics of forced enlistment. In both British and French contexts, several parts of the empire are known to have rebelled against this phenomenon. In the French empire, there were uprisings in the colonies of Niger. Dahomey (Benin), Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), and Côte d’Ivoire. 404 Further North, the Tuareg are also known to have rebelled which led to a several-month siege of Agadir. In East Africa, John Chilembwe, one of the most prominent nationalists of Malawi, is known to have led a rebellion opposed British forced conscription arguing that “poor Africans who have nothing to own in this present world, who, in death leave only a long line of widows and orphans in utter want and dire, are invited to die for a cause which is not theirs” (Clarke 15). Africans deployed other ways to resist recruitment. In French West African colonies, for example, people of fled in mass to neighboring British colonies. Thus, no les than 15,000 people left Benin for Nigeria, 20,000 moved from Côte d’Ivoire to Ghana, and many still from Senegal and Mali to the Gambia (Duval 150). It must be added that Africans were not alone in opposing enlisting for the war. Indeed several countries party to the war equally did not favor their joining the war effort on the European front in particular. The British Colonial Office, for one, argued that Africans would not do well in the cold climate of Europe. Less we think that this was truly out of concern for the welfare of Africans, there was in effect a fundamental racial anxiety about it. Indeed, according to the Colonial Office, “blacks and whites fighting together will undermine white supremacy” (Clarke 7). On this question, there was almost a consensus between the Allies and their enemies. Thus Belgium, Germany, South Africa and the United States shared the same angst that “the African would lose his ‘respect’ for the white man and consider himself as equal partner to the latter” (Clarke 7). The US 405 feared that “integrating the army would have “the most sinister implications for the future when Black soldiers returned to the United States” (Clarke 7). Yet the most “eloquent” condemnation of African deployment on European theaters was to come from the German Governor General of Tanganyika for whom, the French approach has set an example of evil and sinister significance., as consequence of which the entire attitude of the native races towards the whites has began to change for the worse, their old respect and deference for Europeans has been diminished or altogether dispelled, and the native everywhere has been taught to regard himself as equal, if not superior, of those he had been taught to look up as his masters, since he finds that they cannot win their wars without his help. (Clarke 8) It is striking to note the parallel between the anxiety about the direct access that Africans may have of European realities in their own settings in the course of war and the arguments invoked by Sir Hesketh Bell in relation to the negative influence of Hollywood films on the image of Europe. In some ways, we may speak of a global theory of the image in the age of colonialism, which is premised on blocking or preventing that the colonized gain access to the reality of the colonizer, whether actual or represented. In that sense the colonial is by definition a project of representation, one that creates a specific regime of representation, which cannot in effect sustain the position of “to-be- looked-ness” in a sense. It can look but appears too frail to be looked at. Still in spite of all opposition, Africans would find themselves in great numbers on the battlefields of Western Europe, Africa and even in the Balkans, with something equivalent to the following lines of Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay in mind: If we must die, let it be not like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot Why round us bark the mad and hungry dogs 406 Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die So that our precious blood may not be Shed in vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead… (53) 222 According to Peter Clarke, whose study only focuses on West Africans, no less than 235,000 soldiers took part in WWI, with at least 94 battalions on the European front and at least 135,000 employed in French factories in the course of the war. As seen above in the opposition of the British Colonial Office, Africans reportedly took no part in the fight on the European front. Stemming from the Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Nigeria, they seem to have operated mainly on the African continent, in the former German colonies of Togo, Cameroon and Tanganyika, with at least 1000 conscripted sent to Mesopotamia. Ironically though, “it has been claimed that the first ‘British shot’ in World War I was fired by a Ghanaian Sergeant, Alhaji Grunshi in Togo” (Clarke 10). It is well known that the death toll was extremely high. Thus, in the East Africa campaign, which lasted until 1918, no less than 10,000 soldiers and 100,000 carriers perished, not to mention the maimed and wounded. One must note the dreadful conditions under which these soldiers were fighting. In the British context, their food rations of were little and of very bad quality, their clothing was sparse, had no boots and lacked blankets. 222 It is no surprise that Claude McKay would prove a major influence of the founders of Negritude, namely Leopold Senghor, who would devote a poem to African soldiers who died in the two world wars. The title of the poem is “Hosties Noires.” 407 In the French context, we know that African soldiers reached Europe as early as August 1914, i.e. at the very beginning of the war and were immediately deployed in combat. They took part decisive parts in the Battle of the Marne, of Ypres (1914), in the Battle of Verdun (August 1916), in the capture the village and fort of Douaumont. The same year, they took part in the Battle of Assevilliers (1916). In 1917, they fought in the first phase of the Battle of Aisne, secured victory at Malmaison and took part in another battle at Verdun. The last year of the war, African soldiers fought the Battle of Picardie, attacked the Hindenburg line. In the Balkans, Africans soldiers were reportedly celebrated as the “the heroes of Dobropolije” in Slovenia and in Krusevo, Macedonia (Duval 174). Indeed, they were reportedly feted in Belgrade as well (Kamian 78). 3. Cinematic Representation of the Great War This participation was in part recorded by the cinema, although the extent of the representation is not clear. Specific research needs to be done in the audiovisual archives of the French and British armies (indeed in the archives of all former colonizing countries) to assess the scope and range of the representation of Africans in WWI and II. We could begin the process though by remembering the work of Tunisian Albert Samama Chikly who was part of the French Army Film and Photo Unit and documented several battle scenes in Africa featuring Africans or non-Africans. One of these was a black and white film shot on March 11, 1917 featuring Spanish priests visiting the battlefield of Verdun, shots of infantrymen returning from battle and soldiers resting. 408 Other images do exist about African participation in WWI. Interestingly enough, co- participation in war, and thus co-implication (Renov) in the war effort, did not apparently fundamentally affect the representational principles of non-fiction cinema, in these days of colonialism. Indeed the description of the content of the scenes suggests that the regime of images of the army in WWI was to some extent a direct descendent of the work pioneered by colonial filmmakers. Indeed, film after film seems to show African soldiers not simply in military posturing, but also to insist on a will-to-producing difference, premised on the soldiers performing their difference, perhaps in a proto-performative documentary style. Thus in the film entitled Les tirailleurs sénégalais en Alsace [Senegalese Tirailleurs in Alsace] dated May 8, 1918, African soldiers are shown digging trenches and returning to their camps. Once there, they rush to their lunches (a wink at the Lumière footage on the Ashanti children eating in Lyon?). Then they make a circle, play the flute, clap their hands and dance. There is even a scene in which one of them enters in a trance. In the film entitled Un campement de tirailleurs tunisiens près du front [A Tunisian Tirailleurs Camp close to the Battlefield] and shot in 1918, the film presents soldiers wearing the chechia. The soldiers are shown doing drills with Hotchkiss machine guns, then go through an alarm drill where they put on gas masks. Faithful to the prescription of colonial sublime made a year earlier by Gérard Madieu, the operator films tea making and drinking sessions along with the inescapable dances. 409 B. Documentary, WWII and the Tradition of Dissent in Africa As in WWI, the Second World War saw a very significant participation of Africans in the war effort. We shall as in the previous section, look at the significance of Africa as a causative element in the advent of the war, explore African participation on the ground as well as take a brief look at a few existing documentary representations of the war in Africa. Regarding the first part of this section, we shall explore through George Padmore the significance of Africa in the advent of the WWII. In some ways, the economic argument, deployed by Du Bois in his search for the African origins of WWI, is taken up by George Padmore in his own examination of the relationship between Africa and the imminent WWII. For Padmore the question of WWII in Africa starts with the rise of fascism and the intervention of Mussolini in Ethiopia in 1935, which for African historians, constitutes the real beginning of WWII. 223 It seems indeed reading both Du Bois and Padmore that one could speak of structures of feeling with regard to the causation of the two world wars in relation to the African continent. Those involve as discussed earlier, a sense a dissatisfaction of certain colonial 223 Indeed it is significant that the college of historians involved in the writing of the general history of Africa took 1935 as opposed to 1939 or 1945 as a dividing line in the history of the African continent (cf. Comité scientifique international pour la rédaction d'une histoire générale de l'Afrique. Histoire générale de l'Afrique. 8 vols. Paris: UNESCO; Jeune Afrique; NEA, 1980-1998. Print.). This is arguably an implicit way of positioning themselves outside dominant historiography and striking a dating system specific to the historiographic needs of the African continent. 410 powers with the distribution of the territorial spoils of the colonial project, a feeling of wounded pride and a desire for revenge on the part of some of these nations. Central to this is clearly the economic question as structuring the nature of these societies and their relationship to the rest of the world, and thus to Africa. Thus, in explaining the rise of fascism in Italy, George Padmore argues that Just as German Nazism has grown out of defeat and economic misery, intensified by political oppression under the Versailles Treaty, Italian Fascism has likewise sprung from fundamentally the same causes, the breakdown of capitalist economy and wounded national pride (Africa). This, according to Padmore was not new, in the sense, that Italy had for some time been a “dissatisfied colonial power.” It is quite accurate to acknowledge that although Italy took part in the Berlin Conference, it had a significantly lesser presence in Africa than others did, and that it was the first of the European powers to have its army destroyed by the forces of Ethiopian Emperor Menelik in the famous 1896 Battle of Adwa. Thus, while Italy entered WWI as part of the Triple Alliance, it ended the war on the side of the Allied, reportedly hoping to benefit from the post-war redesigning of the world. It was her being sidelined by both England and France, compounded by economic misery in the aftermath of the war and the pauperization of the bourgeoisie that created the conditions of possibility of the rise of Mussolini to power, a part of his project being the affirmation of Italy’s ‘right’ to be a power on the African continent (Padmore, Africa 102-103). In analyzing the role of the African continent in the outbreak of WWII, one country appears central. Indeed, this country, the ultimate object of desire for Mussolini was 411 Ethiopia, the only country that until the interwar years had never fallen in the hands of European colonizers. Being the “last country standing,” it was coveted by other European powers as well. It is possible to divide the question of the fate of Ethiopia in two major parts: its status during the era of conquest and its place in the Interwar years. In both contexts, the situation of Ethiopia, her freedom and importance in the world, as with the rest of the African continent, was determined by the expediencies of inter-European diplomacy. 1. The Centrality of Ethiopia In the age of conquest, Ethiopia was already coveted by Italy, which affirmed its presence as early as 1885, the very year of the Berlin Conference where it annexed Masawa, and then two years later occupied the littoral of Eritrea. In addition to military expansion, Italy managed to exact territorial concessions from Menelik (including Eritrean land), and to pose as the indispensable go-between, between Menelik and the other European powers lurking around, i.e. France, England, Germany and Russia. Even in those days, alliances were struck between Britain and Italy for the destabilization of Ethiopia and sordid agreements passed which would guarantee Britain free passage through Ethiopia (Abyssinia) of the infamous Cecil Rhodes Cape to Cairo dream in exchange for British non-intervention in Italy’s eventual attempt to annex Ethiopia (Padmore, Africa 102-103). Reflecting on the role of Britain in sabotaging Ethiopian independence, A. B. Wylde, then British Consul General for the Red Sea had the following candid confession to 412 make: "Look at our behavior to King Johannes from any point of view and it will not show one ray of honesty and to my mind it is one of our worst bits of business out of the many we have been guilty of in Africa." Offering more details on his country’s tartuffery vis-à-vis Ethiopia, the diplomat added: England made use of King Johannes, as long as he was of any service and then threw him over to the tender mercies of Italy, which went to Masawa, under our auspices, with the intention of taking territory that belonged to our ally and to allow them to destroy and break all the promises England solemnly made King Johannes after he had faithfully carried his part of the agreement. The fact is not known to the British public and I wish it were not true for our credit; but unfortunately it is, and it reads like the vilest bits of treachery perpetrated on Africa. But Britain was not alone in the diplomatic game around Ethiopia. The French were also involved in jockeying with Ethiopia, against England and Italy, by providing weapons, training Ethiopian soldiers in exchange for contracts for the construction of the Djibouti- Addis-Ababa railroad. 224 Ultimately, Italy would attack Ethiopia in 1896 and would lose during the battle of Adwa where no less than six thousand Italian soldiers were killed, two thousands made prisoners. This stinging defeat forced Italy to recognize the independence of Ethiopia and to pay indemnities worth two million dollars to Emperor Menelik (Padmore, Africa 105 - 106). But this was not all. According to Padmore, secret German documents reveal that in the event of an Italian victory, Russia had threatened to intervene with the support of 224 It seems that this “contract diplomacy” has remained a feature of French foreign policy as witnessed in the actions of current French President Nicolas Sarkozy who often returns to France from a foreign visit with contracts for French enterprises. 413 France and to establish a base on the Red Sea, which would have curtailed British control over the route to India and the Far East. Had this scenario been implemented, Padmore argues, WWI would have taken place two decades earlier, and thus, it appears that Ethiopian resistance against Italian imperialism had the net result of influencing the destiny of the entire world for no less than twenty years. The second moment during which the fate of Ethiopia was decided by international diplomatic jockeying was that of the interwar years. As is well known, WWI ended with the signature of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and led to the creation of the League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations. Ethiopia joined the League in 1923. Although the organization was premised on the non-aggression of member states, Ethiopia would be invaded. In some ways a paradox lies there, for while Ethiopia belonged to no international organization it managed to resist attack, yet as a member of an international organization, a supposed college of peers, it was in effect defeated in 1935. The interwar years were also the years of the rise of fascism and in some ways, many of the criticisms levied against European democracies in terms of their responsibility in the advent of WWII could be symptomatically read in the Ethiopian situation. Indeed, history books remember that it was in a large part because these so-called democracies, England and France mostly, placated the voracious needs of the fascists that the latter were able to slowly take over various countries and later have the ambition to dominate the world. To 414 some extent, Europe had already experimented with this expansionist gluttony during and in the aftermath of the Berlin Conference as demonstrated above. The interwar years proved not fundamentally different. The protagonists were literally the same, the antagonists too, at least as far Africa is concerned, and more especially Ethiopia, the last country standing, which undoubtedly must have been a tremendous sore in the eyes of Empire. Thus, as early as 1925, that is, three years after Mussolini’s rise to power secret agreements were signed between Italy and Great Britain regarding the fate of Ethiopia. Dixit Mussolini: "In 1925, with the British Ambassador in Rome, Sir Ronald Graham, I signed an Act which divided-you understand me-which cut up Abyssinia between Italy and Britain" (qtd. in Padmore, Africa 145). What comes out of the information of available is typical diplomatic fair, i.e. proclaiming on the face of the Earth one’s support for the independence of Ethiopia, and in dark antechambers, signing deals diving up the country among interested parties. In this case, not only did Britain not oppose Italy’s designs of Ethiopia, but when Mussolini decided to invade the lone African country, the planes carrying and dropping poison gas on Ethiopians obtained their fuel from British controlled oil companies. Italian troops entered Ethiopia on October 2, 1935. Hoping that the League of Nations, initially set up to settle disputes among member states would be able to rein in Italy, Ethiopia’s Emperor, Haile Selassie lodged official complaints several times, but to no avail. One 415 wonders how it could have been otherwise, given that the two most important members of the League, France and Britain had sided with Italy. Thus, seven months after the initial attack, Emperor Haile Selassie had to leave his country for exile in (irony of ironies) Great Britain. What is striking here is that we have with the Ethiopian situation, the first phase of a long-lasting relationship between the democracies and fascism. This lays bare one of the threads that often get left out of the WWII narratives with the good democracies on one side and the bad fascists on the other. What we see here clearly is that within the colonial context, democracy and fascism were virtually interchangeable, that no moral questions were asked when it came partitioning the last independent African country. With this in mind, it is not surprising to read the following quote from Mussolini, which could have been pronounced by any of the so-called technicians of colonialism we have encountered over the course of this research. I consider it monstrous that that the process, by which we assured in Abyssinia, the necessary expansion of our people should be criticized. How about the others? What have they been doing for centuries? There has never been but one method in the world of imposing one’s will on backward peoples. That is by force. It was by no other means that one other secured the greatest Empire on the planet. (qtd. in Padmore, Africa 123). Yet, in sacrificing Ethiopia to the altar of fascism, Europe failed to see that it was in the same move sacrificing its own security. What is even more interesting is that in these days of inter-European greed and power mongering, the ethical voice, the voice of morality, of transcendence, of conscience, came not from democracies, not from fascism, 416 not even from communism, but from the African continent. Indeed, seven decades after the events, it is rather sobering for us in retrospect to meditate these words by the Ethiopian Emperor under attack: Do the peoples of the world not yet realize that by fighting on until the bitter end, I am not only performing my duty to my people, but standing guard in the citadel of collective security? Are they too blind to see that I have my responsibilities to the whole of humanity to face? (Padmore, Africa 156). Then, Haile Selassie I, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, also known as the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, added with blood-chilling lucidity: "I must hold on until my tardy allies appear. And if they never come, then I say prophetically, and without bitterness: ‘The West will perish!’" And perish the West did in all the battlefields of WWII and in Auschwitz, Birkenau, Dachau, Thiaroye and even on the day of the armistice on May 8, 1945, in Setif, Guelma, etc. 2. Africans in WWII in the British Context Peter B. Clarke reminds us that there are several ways in which African contribution to WWII could be looked at. Indeed, in addition to providing soldiers who were no less 240,000 (that is, discounting those in the French and Portuguese colonized areas of West Africa), he argues that “West Africa played an important strategic role in WWII by providing bases for British, American and other Allies soldiers and their supplies and 417 equipment en route to the Middle and far East” (Clarke 19). Often left out of talked historical accounts, is the contribution in raw materials already part of the colonial division of labor. Thus, while Sierra Leone helped with iron and industrial diamonds, the Gambia produced palm oil and groundnuts, Nigeria, wood, palm oil, groundnuts, tin among others, and Ghana contributed cocoa, industrial diamonds and manganese for weapons manufacture (Clarke 21). Finally, individuals, communities and leadership contributed to the funding of the war. In Nigeria alone, several acts of genuine generosity were witnessed in all quarters. The Nigerian staff of the colonial administration reportedly set up a “Win the War Fund,” contributing 30 shillings a month from their salaries, while leadership also pitched in. Thus, the Oba of Benin contributed 10 pounds a month while the leadership from Ibadan gave 28 pounds a month out of their salaries. To the children of London who lost their homes in German bombings, the inhabitants of Ondo, in Western Nigeria sent money to ease their suffering. Nigerian schoolchildren contributed too, in what would be referred in today’s context as child labor, by collecting palm kernels and having them sold on the market as a token of their participation (Clarke 21-22). 3. Two British Films about World War II WWII took place within the framework of Empire, and thus African soldiers fought on the side of the countries that colonized them and on battlefields in which the latter were involved. In that context, films were made on all sides to mobilize troops, reassure the 418 home front, lift the spirits of the soldiers, seek for more allies, and involve the colonies in the effort. We will briefly pay attention to two films: War Came to Kenya (1941) and West Africa Was There (1945). 225 In the first film, it is Africa itself that is the site of battle with really high stakes including, in effect, the salvaging of Ethiopia. We shall look at this film on its own terms keeping in mind what was previously learned about British involvement in Ethiopia. It is first important to establish that for British colonial powers however, engagement in Ethiopia was part of an attempt to prevent Kenya, then a part of the British Empire, from falling into fascist hands. Directed, photographed with commentary by Guy Johnson, the film was commissioned by the Kenya Information Office and organized in three parts: the first, a narrative of arrival in Kenya, the second, the looming war and the third the actual attack on Italians who have occupied Ethiopia. Briefly, we see in part one, various establishing shots of the Kenya colonies, from mountaintops, to city traffic, and others evoking the pastoral (cows) and nature (waterfalls). The ever pro-colonial voice-over of binarism, taking stock of a “land of contrast, a land of cool islands, tropical coasts and great plains teaming with game” and accompanied by shots of zebras, giraffes, etc, draws a sharp contrast pertaining to the order of things. “It is a land where the savage” (headshot of a Kenyan woman) “and the 225 Both films can be seen at the Imperial War Museum in London. 419 civilized” (close up headshot of a white girl eating, graphically establishing the binary), “live in harmony.” In this self-delusional colonial utopia, “20,000 Europeans and 45,000 Indians lived in the midst of 3.5 million Africans” (shot of African schoolchildren exercising). This arrival narrative is one of willful erasure of conflict, as shots of a white mother and daughter in their house evoke not only the fact that “many years ago, white men, pioneers and adventurers found the country beautiful , the climate kind and the soil fertile” 226 but also the fact that “they stayed and built a small colony where children are born and taught and grow strong and healthy” thereby turning Kenya into a colonial Eden, indeed “a peaceful land at peace not only with its neighbors but with itself.” The narrative of colonial settlement and supposed peaceful coexistence at the domestic and neighborly levels is meant to prepare us for the impending doom. Indeed, the cut away to the map of East Africa situates this ‘peaceful” colony in the colonial geopolitics of the 1930s in Africa. A peril has come to Africa to undo the great achievement of British colonialism, or rather its benevolence and generosity. It is Italian fascism. And thus, British colonialism sees it as its duty to take a stance against it. For ‘after the slave trade [but discounting the aftermath of the post Berlin Conference invasion of Africa by Britain and France primarily], the voice-over adds with or without irony that “a new aggressor arrived to police the homes of proud Ethiopians,” and takes on Italian fascism which “this time … came with tanks and aeroplanes, with poison gas. Acts of aggression had started. War crowds gather’” A montage of newspaper articles announce the coming 226 Although it is rather glossed over here, the land question was precisely at the heart of colonial exploitation in Kenya, and its reclaiming the source of Kenyan nationalism. 420 of WWII 227 . The entire following section is devoted to white colonists joining the troops for what was at stake for them, was the safeguarding of their home (Kenya) and their way of life (shots of African labor as Kenyan women are shown tilling the land). Henry Moore, the chief colonist and Governor of Kenya is shown signing the order for Kenya to prepare joining the hostilities following Italy’s official entry in the war on June 10, 1941. But a question arises: could 20,000 Europeans defend this British colony? No, war requires reinforcement and thus African troops are brought in from Nigeria, the Gold Coast (Ghana), Belgian Congo, Equatorial Africa, South Africa and Nyassaland forming an unlikely band of brothers. In the framework of war, another narrative of colonialism is deployed, that of an identity of vision, indeed of “brotherhood and solidarity” of the Empire. Then comes perhaps one of the most compelling parts of the film, addressing the contribution of Kenyans to the war effort. We see an overhead shot of crowds of Africans sitting and standing in rows in front of their leader in a stadium like complex. The camera pans left to two people standing and facing the crowd, one of them, the leader of the Kikuyu who called the meeting. As the camera further pans on Kikuyu soldiers and citizens, the voice-over informs us that “nowhere could we find more loyal, more generous than the African tribe of the colony or more wholehearted support for the war effort.” Adding that the Kikuyu are considering what to contribute from “individual gifts 227 It is now apparent why it took Britain so long before “making a case for Ethiopia” against Italy’s colonial invasion. 421 of vegetables and tents through substantial cash contributions totaling over 50,000 pounds,” the film immediately moves into the ethnographic mode by cutting to the Masai, considered “Nilotic in origin, arrogant in bearing, magnificent in physique, they are nomads.” From them, the colonial authorities obtained no less than 6,000 heads of cattle to be sold, so that the money generated would contribute to the purchase of weapons. The clash of the ethnographic discourse of the eternal present of the ethnographed with the historical time of the war is clearly apparent here. After war preparations and contributions comes the battle itself. Hence, a shot of the map of East Africa with arrows showing various points of attack of Ethiopia from the different British colonies around or close to it (Kenya, Sudan, Uganda). The narrative quickens. We learn that 2,000 miles were crossed in 60 days, that Ethiopia’s cities fell one after the other in the hands of the Allies. We also see shots of the King’s African Rifles marching on Addis Ababa, following which is the pulling down of the Italian flag and the raising of the British (not Ethiopian) flag. This is followed by shots of Emperor Haile Selassie being restored to power. We see Ethiopian soldiers feting the return of their Emperor and the latter being welcomed into his palace by British General Cunningham with the voice- over adding “the first country to be stolen by Axis powers has been restored to its rightful owners, given back its liberty” and conclude that “the combined forces of Africa have left Kenya, to fight the enemy wherever he may be.” 422 To conclude on this section, it is important to know that the invasion of Ethiopia meant a lot for African nationalists. On the one hand, it was a terrible wound, as it marked the fall of the last bastion of freedom. On the other hand, it fueled their desire to completely do away with the colonial domination of the African continent. Thus, many of the early leaders of several African countries considered this invasion as a moment of rupture in their consciousness. Primus inter pares, Ghanaian Kwame Nkrumah who was in London at the time on his way to the United States and whose words about the invasion are worth quoting in full: But just as I was feeling depressed about the future, I heard an excited newspaper boy shouting something unintelligible as he grabbed a bundle of the latest editions from a motor van and on the placard, I read ‘MUSSOLINI INVADES ETHIOPIA.’ That was all I needed. At that moment, it was as if the whole of London had suddenly declared war on me personally. For the next few minutes, I could do nothing but glare at each impassive face wondering if those people could possibly understand the wickedness of colonialism and praying that the day might come when I could play my part in bringing the downfall of such a system. My nationalism surged to the fore. I was ready and willing to go to hell itself, if need be, in order to achieve my objective. (Ghana) Naturally, Nkrumah was by no means alone. In London itself other nationalists including Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, George Padmore and C. L. R. James of Trinidad along with the former wife of Marcus Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey and J. B. Danquah of Ghana among others, had formed the International African Friends of Abyssinia vowing to restore the sovereignty of Ethiopia. Indeed, C. L. R. James among many others offered to fight in Haile Selassie’s army against Mussolini’s troops. 228 Another major figure who played no small part in this process was Nigerian Nnamdi Azikiwe who wrote extensively in his newspapers West African Pilot and the Comet, against the Italian 228 James, C.L.R. “Intervening in Abyssinia” in New Leader, October 1935. 423 invasion. The significance of Ethiopia for African nationalism has remained strong over the years. It was thus no surprise that three decades later, Ethiopia became home to the Organization of African Unity (1963), and now the African Union (1999). Another major British documentary about African involvement in WWII, West Africa Was There (1945) changes the setting of the battle, to the Asian front. Here the Royal West African Frontier Forces formed in 1900 by the Colonial Office made of troops from Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and the Gambia, with Lord Lugard as one of the first in charge of the recruitment effort, was engaged in Burma. Unlike the previously discussed War Came to Kenya, this film can be considered a true paean to African troops, openly acknowledging their contribution without resorting to the laziness of the ethnographic mode of address. Engaged in Burma, the West African Forces enter in combat against Japanese forces. 229 Made by British Movietone News for the Ministry of Information, with commentary written by Captain J. A. Danford and spoken by Leslie Mitchell, the film follows the activities of the 81 st West African Division of the RWAFF. It shows them marching in the Burmese forest, through the difficult landscapes, sometimes carrying their equipment and supplies over their heads as they crosses marshes. In some ways, the scenes with porters are reminiscent, from an iconographic standpoint, of the images we have referred 229 This battle is doubly significant for Africans. They are not only fighting against Japanese imperialism, but also internalizing the fact that a non-European army had been successful in defeating the Allies in Singapore, Burma and other colonies of Asia, something they would use against the British at the end of the war. 424 to as part of the “black man’s burden” regime, as if WWII was yet another burden that this time soldiers have to carry over their heads. Thus the film features scenes of mobility, scenes of rest (soldiers receive their mail) scenes of combat. Regarding the latter, we are shown several battle scenes, with the soldiers camouflaging, manning cannons, rifle guns, firing endlessly at Japanese troops. After heavy battles and exchange of fire, we are shown wounded soldiers carried on stretchers to bungalows. It is through the voice-over that we learn that the Japanese army was defeated, using such phrases as “the Japs had met their masters in jungle warfare and they left ample proof of that behind them.” At one point, the African soldiers are joined by Indian troops for other stages of the battle. We are also shown British commanders who fly in to thank the African soldiers including Lord Mountbatten. What is striking in this film is the celebratory tone found in the voice-over and the text it reads. In most colonial documentaries, the celebratory tone is reserved for the colonizer. Yet it seems that within the framework of war, the power relationship changes, as if having been weakened by war and having had to appeal to Africans to their rescue, the British and French for that matter, were compelled by that very fact to change the tone of their discourse as embodied in the voice-over among other places. It is almost as if war injected the necessary humility in the proverbial voice of God. Indeed, war appears here to be one of the most forceful critiques of the colonial voice-over. It may not be an accident that the text was written by a Captain of the British army. 425 Indeed, unlike the typical colonial situation, where Europeans and the colonized live in separate spheres, in the context of war, the principle of proximity is predominant. It seems that this context makes it possible for the colonizers to realize the truism that they are in effect no better than the colonized. In that regard, WWII may be credited, to some extent, to have affected the nature of the colonial documentary, at least in the period of the war. 4. Africans and WWII in the French Context The participation of Africans in WWII in the French context was significantly different from that of those under British colonial rule. Indeed, unlike Britain, which was never defeated or occupied by Hitler’s forces, France’s army was literally wiped out within six weeks by the German blitzkrieg. This came as a shock to the French and a major surprise for the colonized Africans. As is well known, France headed by Maréchal Pétain capitulated. But General Charles De Gaulle called on his compatriots not to surrender. In his famous June 18, 1940 appeal to the Free French forces, De Gaulle relied on the empire (the largest part of which was in Africa) to uplift the spirit of his followers: Has the last word been said? Must we lose hope? Is the defeat final? No! Believe me, I know what I am talking about and I tell you that nothing is lost for France… Because France is not alone! She is not alone! She is not alone! She has a vast empire behind her. (qtd. in Duval 229) Reflecting back on those days at the 1944 Brazzaville Conference, De Gaulle declared that Brazzaville had literally been the “refuge of our honor and our independence” during 426 the dark days of German occupation. One may note the paradox that France’s independence and honor was safeguarded by an Africa that had lost her independence in the hands of that very France. But it is historically factual to note that when the majority of French officers towed the line of the Vichy regime, it was an Afro-descendent Guyanese Félix Eboué, then Governor of French Equatorial Africa and headquartered in Brazzaville, who first rallied De Gaulle and offered his support. Indeed, Emile Derlin Zinsou, a former President of the Republic of Benin reflected in the following terms about African participation on the French side in WWII: The participation of France in the war [WWII] after the French defeat, her presence later in the victory had been conditioned, motivated, encouraged, supported, and made possible by the presence of African countries on the side of General De Gaulle. Had African territories not rallied General De Gaulle [the latter], in spite of his courage and determination, would have been but the head of small band of Frenchmen… (M’Bokolo and Sainteny, CD1) Thus, it seems, Africans helped France not only regain her sovereignty but also a seat among the powers of the world in the aftermath of the war at very high cost. Hundreds of thousands of African soldiers were mobilized for battlefields in Europe and Africa. In Africa itself, they took part in the Tunisia campaign (1942-1943), the Libyan campaign (1940-1942). In Italy, they are known to have re-captured the island of Elba for the Allies, fought in Marina di Campo and Foce, all in June 1944. In France itself, they were engaged on various battlefields, from the beginning of the war, in Aisne, La Loire, le Cher, l’Oise, Meuse, the Somme, Marne among many others. They also took part in several of the liberation campaigns in Corsica, Normandy, Provence, Lyon, etc. 427 As in any war, the conditions were very difficult. They suffered numerous casualties, especially as they were often put in the first line, to take enemy bullets and fire while their white comrades and commanders often stayed behind, prompting the use of the term ‘canon fodder’ to refer to them. When wounded, they were often amputated without antibiotics. Their encounters with German soldiers were often overdetermined by WWI. Indeed, at the end of WWI, the French troops that occupied Rhineland were Black Africans. This was reportedly considered intolerable for Germans who referred to it as “Die Schwarze Schande” (the Black Shame). Thus, for German soldiers, WWII was also the right occasion to avenge the “affront.” The cruelty, which African soldiers met at the hands of Germans, is often indescribable. According to Charles Onana, in one incident German soldiers asked captured Africans to run away to freedom and as they did so, gunned them down. As death was not enough, they lined up their bodies on the ground and ran over them with their tanks. There are also reports of atrocious medical experiments performed on them. 5. Documentary Representations Although there seems to be a paucity of images of African soldiers in the British context in WWII, such is not the case for soldiers from French colonies. Indeed French army newsreels are replete with footage and reports on the wartime activities of Africans on 428 both the European and African fronts. Thus, one finds several resources in that area in the film archives of the French Army 230 covering both WWI and II. Regarding WWII, the largest number of images regarding African troops is often found in weekly newsreels the name of which seems to have changed in the course of the war. Thus, while in 1939 they were referred to as Journal de guerre (War News) with numbers following them, by 1944, they seem to have come under the heading Nouveau magazine du SCA [New Magazine of the Army Film Unit], and in 1945, under Journal Filmé de l’Armée [Army Newsreel], Magazine du SCA [Magazine of the Army Film Unit] and Magazine des Armées [Army Magazine]. Topics varied, covering a range of war-related activities. Thus, as early as November 4, 1939, one could find footage of Senegalese tirailleurs in Journal de Guerre No.6. Two aspects of their lives are shown: daily life with playing cards, eating and dancing and scenes on the battlefield featuring their transportation by truck, the charging of a Saint- Etienne M 1907 machine gun, and 81mm infantry mortars. We even get a bonus commentary, which extols the synchronicity with which the African soldiers cohabit with French villagers, underlying the notion that they joined the war in order to fight German colonial expansion based on “notions of racial superiority.” The following issue of the newsreel (Journal de Guerre No.7) features Josephine Baker singing to the troops, while Journal de Guerre no. 8 dated November 18, 1939 features Moroccan tirailleurs digging 230 Known in French as Etablissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Defense, the ECPAD is both a repository of image (still and moving) and a film production resource for the French Ministry of Defense. Newsreels and films cited in this section come from a document communicated to me in 2006. I was unfortunately not able to visit the actual site in order to view these films. 429 anti-tank ditches, drinking tea, eating mechoui as part of Ramadan celebrations. But as in WWI, it appears at this stage difficult for the colonial war newsreel from escaping the heritage laid out by it predecessors, and thus scenes of dancing are filmed along with a mock marriage to fully satisfy the die-hard ethnographic impulse. As is well known, the tide of the war started changing significantly by 1942 and this seems to be reflected in the newsreels as well. Among several battles and victories, African troops of the 9 th Colonial Infantry Division 231 liberate the city of Elbe in Italy in four days, as well as the Alsace region of France. In the November 15, 1944 issue of the Nouveau Magazine du SCA no. 2, they are shown landing in Elbe carrying their guns and their backpacks. Explosions are heard, evoking the fierce battles that led to the capture of the city. The newsreel ends with images of French General De Lattre de Tassigny reviewing a unit of Moroccan soldiers and giving them medals 232 . 6. Epilogue The two world wars were watershed events for Africa in her struggle to recover her liberty from the asphyxiating grips of colonialism. Together they had fundamental implications for the psyche of Africans. Indeed, in the recent memory of Africans, their fight against Europeans had ended in defeat, so that there was in some quarters of the 231 The Division was made of regiments of Senegalese tirailleurs originating from all of French West Africa along with regiments of Moroccan tirailleurs. 232 This very short survey only barely begins to scratch the surface of the exploration of documentary images of Africans during WWII. 430 African continent, an impression on a purported invincibility of Europe. With WWI, Africans took part in war for the first time on a European front, fighting alongside European soldiers in order to liberate Europe. This new situation had tremendous significance from several perspectives. Fighting alongside Europeans, against them reading cowardice and fear of pain and death in their eyes and demeanor, but also dying for them, was equivalent to a form of psychological liberation for Africans. Indeed, this meant for many Africans that Europeans were no more human beings than they were. It contributed to the “ordinarization” indispensable for any fight for freedom and helped Africans begin to demand changes in their status within the colonial system itself. WWII had a similar if not more profound consequence for Africans. With the extremeness of the violence of the war, of the Holocaust, of Europeans turning against Europeans, along with demands from other quarters of the empires such as Indochina or India for immediate independence, WWII accelerated the movement of African countries toward independence. Documentary, Decolonization and the Tradition of Dissent The aftermath of WWII is a central transitional moment in the history of the African continent, and to some extent of documentary in Africa, in relation to the ways in which the form will be deployed on tracks parallel to political and cultural developments on the continent. 431 The terrible war, which had ended with the defeat of fascism and Nazism on European soil 233 , had also left Europe weakened and destroyed, and in some ways, offered a unique space and moment for the articulation of nationalist desires for the end of the colonial system and the advent of independence. The contribution of Africans to Allied victory had been tremendous. On battlefields in Asia, Europe and Africa, millions of African soldiers faced off with the Nazis and the fascists. Yet even as victory was nigh, some colonial powers sought to clench their fists and crush any attempt at rebellion. So much so that certain events that took place in the lead up to the end of the war or its aftermath have remained indelibly printed in the memories of Africans. One such event was the massacre of returned tirailleurs from all over French speaking Black Africa in Thiaroye, Senegal, on December 1 and 2, 1944, brilliantly reconstructed in the cinema by WWII veteran Ousmane Sembène in his fiction film Camp de Thiaroye (1987). These soldiers who were massacred for only demanding a fair exchange rate for their hard won pension deserve more cinematic treatment, including in the documentary. Another major massacre would take place in Algeria, in the cities of Setif and Guelma, on the day of the armistice itself, May 8, 1945. Thus, while the world at large was welcoming the return of liberty and the end of war, France went on to perform an unconscionable massacre of Algerian populations, as if to drive home the point that the end of Nazism should not be equated with the end of colonialism 233 Indeed, according to Yves Benot, Leopold Senghor reportedly wrote en article dated May 1, 1945 in which he said that although Germany had been defeated, Nazism had not, neither in France, nor in the colonies. In Benot, Yves. Massacres coloniaux: 194-1950: la IVeme République et la mise au pas des colonies françaises. Paris: Editions La Découverte, 1994, p. 32. Yves Benot wonders after Senghor, whether it still has, either in France or in the former French colonies (i.e. with regard to French action in so- called Francophone Africa). 432 It must also be added that the desire for the end of colonialism was being expressed on all sides of Empire. India was calling for immediate independence and Vietnam had in effect declared its independence in 1947. On the African side, it was the Fifth Pan-African Congress that launched the first major salvo against the weakened colonial empires. This Congress, held in Manchester from October 15 to 19, 1945 has been remembered in history as the most radical of all Pan- African Congresses. Indeed, while the first four congresses were organized by Du Bois, who was more of an intellectual and an academic than one with mass mobilization skills, the fifth one was spearheaded by two younger militants who merged intellect with a redoubtable capacity for engaging with the masses, that is, Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore, the two secretaries of that Congress. With them, the Congress was successful in establishing direct links with very active trade union, student, youth and peasant movements, starting during the war years. Thus in their major declarations and resolutions the participants immediately raised the stakes against colonialism. The era of accommodating colonialism had ended. Consequently, in the Declaration of the Colonial Workers, Farmers and Intellectuals penned by Nkrumah and the Challenge to Colonial Powers penned by Du Bois, the delegates of the Congress affirm the principle of self-determination for Africans and all peoples under colonial domination, as well as the right of peoples to fight with all means at their disposal. Although the delegates elected to use strikes and boycotts (inspired by 433 the Gandhian method of nonviolent non-cooperation), they left the door open for recourse to violence as well. Then one reads in “The Challenge to the Colonial Powers” that: The Delegates of the Fifth Pan-African Congress believe in peace…Yet if the Western world is still determined to rule mankind by force, then Africans, as a last resort, may have to appeal to force in the effort to achieve freedom, even if force destroys them and the world. (Padmore History 5) The aftermath of the Congress saw the implementation of the ideas of Pan-African struggle in concrete farmers, trade union, student, women and political movements all of which, from1945, will start the countdown to the end of colonialism in Africa. But the global situation at hand was one of two forces colliding. On the one hand, the colonial desire to maintain its grips on the colonies ad seculae seculorum and on the other, the sense of the inevitability of the wind of independence, the ineluctability of the end of the colonial system. To this, the colonial system would respond in two major ways: a) offer concessions through minimal institutional or policy reforms b) massacre and repress when things became “untenable.” In the French context, the technique of temporary concession was manifested by the creation of a new framework of relationship known as the Union Française, which came into being in 1946. With this new dispensation, colonies were given the euphemistic name of overseas territories, and for the first time Africans were allowed seats in the French National Assembly. This change would accelerate political activities in Africa and in France itself. With this, a multi-party system was put in place and Africans were 434 allowed to take part in the political process both in the so-called territories and in the metropolis. This was also the moment where political parties were finally allowed to come into being, as were trade unions. It was in this context that one of the most effective political parties, at least during the days of colonialism, the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) came into being in Bamako, in 1946. A. The Political Party as Documentary Producer: The RDA The RDA was a political party very much feared by the colonialists who swore to bring it to its knees. The context was the beginning of the Cold War. Allies, France included, had welcome the Soviets on their side in the fight against fascist troops, yet, in the aftermath of the war, a red scare re-emerged, which would affect not only the United States and Europe, but African colonies as well. In the eyes of the colonizers, nationalist movements were communist movements. At least this was the excuse put forward in order to crush Africans’ desire for independence. One of the striking things about the RDA was the fact that they displayed a certain interest for the cinema, that is, they sought to use the cinema to document their activities and meetings. It is not clear whether they were able to have their founding Congress, which was held in Bamako in 1946, filmed. After all, the Laval Decree, which had been taken before the colonies became territories, was still in effect in the aftermath of the war, even though, the Minister whose name was attached to it, i.e. Pierre Laval, was one of the 435 key figures of the Vichy regime which African soldiers helped boot out of office. It seems however, that for their Second Congress in 1949 in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, the RDA decided to put the cinematic apparatus at their own service. Indeed, among the discoveries that make archival work truly compelling, is a film listed on the website of the Centre National de la Cinématographie as Rassemblement populaire en Afrique. Dated 1946 (with a question mark), it is silent, black and white, with the director listed as unknown. The film is summarized as follows: "In Africa, in the aftermath of WWII, an anti-colonialist meeting gathers several personalities of color, including Gabriel d’Arboussier, in front of a public essentially made of Africans. We see as complement, images showing destroyed villages, poverty, and on-the-ground anti- colonialist mobilization." 234 First remark: neither the date of the making, nor the director, nor even the production company of the film are known to the CNC archivists. One possible lead could be a trail of letters one encounters in the CAOM archives in Aix-en-Provence of an exchange between the director of a French film production company named PROCINEX, the Political Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of the Colonies (recently renamed Minister of Overseas France) which supervised the cinema in the colonies and the offices of the High Commissioners (former colonial governors) of French and Equatorial Africa (AOF, AEF). The sequence of exchanges goes as follows: 1. Letter from G. Bruneau, director of 234 The editing of the film was never completed. Indeed, it is listed as “rushes,” i.e. unedited footage. See http://www.cnc-aff.fr/internet_cnc/Fiches/Oeuvre/ResultatRechercheSimple.aspx 436 Procinex to the Ministry of Overseas France 2. The Ministry writes the High Commissioners of AEF and AOF 3. The High Commissioners reply to the Ministry. 4. The Ministry of Overseas finally responds to the film company. This bureaucratic dance offers a unique window into the processes of colonial film censorship as authorized by the infamous Laval Decree of 1934. We shall focus on the letters of the two principals on the ground, that is, PROCINEX and the High Commissioner of French West Africa. In his letter dated January 28, 1948, G. Bruneau gives us a background to the problem. He informs the Ministry that the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) commissioned his company PROCINEX to make a “reportage cinématographique” (a film report) of its Congress held January 2-6, 1949, and that his company received shooting authorization from the French Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) along with the necessary raw materials (film stock? equipment?). He adds that the film is meant for non-commercial distribution. Upon arrival in Abidjan, he argues, the film crew 235 visited the colonial administration and informed them of the reason for their presence, as well as showed them the equipment to be used, all of which were vetted. After fifteen days of shooting however, and without any notice, their footage was seized. Bruneau requested from the Ministry that it be returned for editing at the Éclair labs at Epinay-sur-Seine, following which the 235 The PROCINEX crew consisted of Bertrand Rondeau du Noyer (film director), André Dumaire as operator and Sacha Vierny who went on to have a rich career as a cinematographer working with such directors as Alain Resnais on Night and Fog (1955), Mon Oncle d’Amerique (1980), Muriel (1963), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Luis Buñuel on Belle du Jour (1967) and Peter Greenaway on The Belly of an Architect (1987), Prospero’s Book (1991), The Pillow Book (1996) among others. 437 two producers, i.e. the RDA and PROCINEX, would submit the final product to censorship both at the CNC and at the Ministry of Overseas France. He also requested the return of the seized unexposed film stock as well as authorization to shoot, exclusively for his own company, PROCINEX, two films on African art and on hunting wild animals to be made in Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon and AEF. He concludes with a paragraph regarding the costs incurred as a result of the shooting interruption and highlights the need for speedy decision to avoid further losses to his company. Upon receipt of this letter, the Minister sent it to his men on the ground, the two High Commissioners in Equatorial and West Africa. Their responses are important to look at, as they are, in effect the depositaries of the Laval Decree. Indeed, one should remember that the decree itself was initiated by the then Governor of AOF. In his response, the High Commissioner of AOF in a letter dated February 19, 1949 (11 days after receipt of the Minister’s letter dated February 8) reminds the Ministry that the film crew did not respect the dispositions of the Laval Decree, namely that the power to authorize the shooting of a film lies not with the Governor General of all West African colonies but with the Governor of the territory, in this case Côte d’Ivoire. 236 236 This is a strange explanation because nowhere in his letter does Bruneau mention going through the Governor General. The letter says that PROCINEX obtained authorization from CNC and, upon arrival in Abidjan, got clearance from the administration. The letter does not specify whether the administration is the central one in Dakar, or the territorial one in Abidjan. It is however unlikely although not impossible that the crew would reach Abidjan, and rather than request clearance from the Governor of the territory, would bypass him and request it from the Central Governor in Dakar. It seems that the most PROCINEX could have perhaps been faulted was to have gone through the CNC which had no jurisdiction over the colonies, which is not the argument brought forth here. The only time and place Dakar is mentioned in the correspondence in when Bruneau adds a cover letter to request from the officials of the Ministry to transmit his letter to the Minister, soon due to travel to Dakar. 438 More interestingly though, the High Commissioner of French West Africa, informs the Minister that the Governor of the territory of Cote d’Ivoire filed a complaint with the Tribunal of Grand-Bassam against the filmmakers for filming without authorization as stipulated by Laval Decree. But we know that the question of authorization was no formality in the eyes of colonial gatekeepers. What was at stake was the filming of the Congress of the major political party in Cote d’Ivoire, the RDA. Hence the seizure of the footage and the lawsuit. The Dakar High Commissioner proceeded to drop the mask by adding that “as far as I am concerned, I believe that returning the exposed footage will be tantamount to abetting political activities hostile to France.” We are later informed that the head of the film crew, Rondeau du Noyer, after the seizure of the film, requested permission to film three other scripts. The first film would include: a) a mise-en-scène about the readjustment of the pensions of war veterans (the long shadow of Thiaroye) b) The increase of the price of food commodities produced by the peasant farmers c) The creation of a league against ignorance d) The abolition of hard labor (the black man’s burden) e) The RDA Congress All these topics happen to be in fact part of the RDA platform. The other two films for which PROCINEX requested permission, according to the High Commissioner, were to deal with the hunting of wild beast and local fishing habits. African art, the High 439 Commissioner adds, was not part of the project. We can imagine what the verdict on these three shooting authorization was. No! to the first project, which dealt with the unacceptability of the various forms of colonial oppression and the move of Africans to resist it. Yes! to the perpetuation of the filmic imaginary of the bestiary, dating as far back as the beginnings of the cinema itself and for which no customs taxes were to be levied and for which the colonial administration declared itself ready to take all necessary dispositions to facilitate the shooting. In that sense, colonial censors must be considered an intrinsic part of the narrative of the colonial documentary and fiction films as they defined in effect the range of the narratively possible. This decision is corroborated by the colleague on the other side, that is, the High Commissioner for Equatorial Africa. Upon receiving a letter from the Ministry regarding the PROCINEX complaint, his office responded in a letter dated March 7, 1949, highlighting the fact that PROCINEX crew that was trying to come over to central Africa and shoot a film on hunting and fishing was the same that was ‘busted’ in West Africa for filming the RDA Congress, and that as a result: "I gave instructions to the territories concerned so that the activities of these filmmakers be subject to surveillance and I will keep you informed of further developments." 237 The archives leave no trail as to the epilogue of the trial that the PROCINEX company had to endure and whether or not the films were returned and if not what happened to the 237 Ministère des Colonies: Documents soumis à la signature du Ministre: Objet: Saisie des films tournés au Congrès du RDA - Autorisation de tourner des films documentaires en Afrique - Lettre au Directeur des Etablissements PROCINEX demandant la restitution des films saisis. 2 Mars 1949. 440 footage. But we could advance that the film Rassemblement populaire en Afrique, hesitantly dated 1946 by the CNC, may have been more likely made in 1948-49, as this coincides with both the RDA Congress and also the massacres that the French colonial administration perpetrated in that region of Africa. There were no massacres in 1946. They started in the years 1948-9 and lasted until the mid 1950s. Indeed, according to George Lisette, a founding member of the RDA, such cities as Bougouanou, Bocanda, Ferkessedougou, Bondoukou, Abengourou, Dabou, Agboville, Bouake, Bouafle, Yamoussokro, Seguela, among others were the site of confrontation between French colonial troops and Africans who supported the RDA (Lisette 111-112). Infuriated by the harassment and arrest of their leaders along with the unbearable colonial situation, thousands of people demonstrated in the different cities and areas mentioned and were met by ruthless repression, the aftermath of which is documented in the film Rassemblement populaire en Afrique. The film begins at a transportation station. We get shots of RDA militants jumping off trucks, riding bikes and walking in numbers in order to come and listen to their leaders. The crowd is mixed, men, women, schoolchildren, the old, the young. There is then a cut to the meeting place and a shot of the first speaker from the RDA who is none other than Daniel Ouezzin Coulibaly, from Upper Volta colony (contemporary Burkina Faso). The editing pattern of this section of the film is a crosscutting between the speaker and the audience. A second speaker comes forward, and because of the lack of sound (we may guess that it was either seized, or escaped seizure, which might be interesting to find 441 perhaps if sonic archives of PROCINEX still exist if only to hear the grain of the speakers’ voice on that day in history, at that place in time). In spite of the lack of sound, it is possible to read the speakers’ lips and, to some extent, make out small parts of sentences. Thus, the second speaker seems to be saying “Malgré les brimades … les populations les plus profondément atteintes” [In spite of the vexations … the most profoundly affected populations], which allows us to surmise that we are in a situation in which the leaders of the RDA are in effect denouncing a colonial dispensation that can no longer be tolerated. The following speaker we see is Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the leader of the RDA, 238 who at that time was on the right side of history, prior to being blackmailed into submission by colonial authorities. His shot is followed by a high-angle shot of the audience clapping. We then get seven consecutive shots of audiences clapping, before the speaker is shown again, evidence of the popularity of the RDA and its leadership as representing the aspirations of the population at the time. After Houphouët-Boigny, we are shown another speaker whose antics convey the idea that he is as much interested in addressing the masses as he is in the how to do so, in the effects his oratorical skills have on them, as his eyes carefully study audience reactions during his pauses between sentences. We also see a slogan “Learning for the Struggle, Struggling While Learning.” 239 As for any political rally, speakers speak and thus we are shown a string of speakers including another major figure of the RDA. Gabriel D’Arboussier. The film then cuts to 238 Félix Houphouët-Boigny went on to become the first President of the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire. 239 In French “Apprendre pour lutter, lutter en apprenant.” 442 another location. We see Houphouët-Boigny surrounded by d’Arboussier and another speaker. Yet something curious happens. We get a shot of a North African market, which clearly does not belong, in the film. In this shot lasting only a few seconds, we see men riding donkeys, women walking covered from head to toe, and children walking around 240 . Then we cut back to an establishing shot of a village, with hills in the background. The camera pans left and right before taking us to a market scene with shots of women sitting and selling their merchandise. The film cuts to another gathering, with Houphouët-Boigny flanked by two aides, standing at a table and explaining something to his audience. We may guess that this is a meeting being held at an RDA school, which the party set up as part of their campaign to raise the consciousness of the masses as to the untenability of the colonial system. There is then a cut to shots of destroyed houses, as if the leadership was trying to mobilize the masses regarding the destruction of their villages. Indeed, a very evocative shot of a very old woman standing in front of her house with a broken door introduces us to a series of shots showing low angle shots of destroyed rooftops, destroyed houses, walls broken to pieces, all evidence of the passage of the colonial brute. We then see another shot of Houphouët-Boigny (shot from the back) visibly and justifiably angry as he addresses the masses. The dynamic language of crosscutting is most effective here as it builds up on our anger as we witness successive shots showing destroyed villages, Houphouët-Boigny speaking and audiences listening. The footage ends with more images of destruction without credits. 240 It is a major question how these few seconds of films from North Africa appear in the continuity of this RDA. This is clearly the mark of enunciation as editing. Somebody may have trampled with the footage. But why? Where? When? To what end? 443 Rassemblement populaire en Afrique is a truly intriguing film, because it raises multiple questions, such as the status of the North African market footage (a non-diegetic insert for all intents and purposes). We may wonder why it was included in this film. Could it be that the PROCINEX crew sought to make their film pass for a non-threatening in the eyes of colonial censors, by including ethnographic footage (non-diegetic purpose)? Or was there rather a desire to express a continuity of suffering in the different regions of the continent (diegetic purpose)? The language and rhythm of editing in the film is so elaborate that it barely requires a voice-over, or even the actual voices of the protagonists. It is very likely that the RDA, as the film’s producer, never saw this footage, which may be the only footage of this highly historic congress. This gives it an inestimable historical value. Indeed, not only does it evoke this transitional moment, when the only Pan-African (in terms of scale) political party was on the spot and frontally attacking colonialism, but it also may be one of the only records of the famed massacres of 1949-1950. It may not be surprising to find out that perhaps no African may have seen this film since the last decade of colonialism, as it may have been in archival vaults since. There might be room for further archival detective work in terms tracing its itinerary of the film from conception to directing, from its confiscation to finding out how it made its way to the CNC and perhaps finally showing it in Africa, as part of the documentary heritage of the decolonization era. 444 In spite of the seizure of the film known in the archives as Rassemblement populaire en Afrique, the RDA’s desire to use the cinema as a way to expose the crimes of colonialism was undaunted. Indeed, they would, in the same year, convert to their cause another French filmmaker, René Vautier, who had been sent by the Ligue de l’Enseignement to West Africa to document the triumph of civilization and the enlightenment of the barbarians. Instead, after Vautier met two of the previously mentioned RDA leaders, Félix Houphouët-Boigny and Daniel Ouezzin Coulibaly, he realized that the barbarians were not those he came to film, but instead that civilization was the code name barbarism deployed to excuse and justify its crimes. Indeed the story of the making of René Vautier’s Afrique 50 is a film unto itself. Rightly thus, five decades after Afrique 50, another French director Richard Hamon turned this story into a documentary film entitled Le petit blanc à la camera rouge (2006) [The Little White Man with the Red Movie Camera]. 241 We learn a lot of precious information about Afrique 50 from the film as well as the post-screening discussion with both René Vautier and Richard Hamon. Indeed, we learn that Vautier graduated from IDHEC, where his teachers were for a large part communist filmmakers and technicians, which is said to have influenced him. In 1949, Vautier was commissioned by the Ligue de l’Enseignement (a French institution founded in 1866 to support public education), to go to West Africa and make a film about 241 I was able to see this film in Paris on October 20, 2007, at a special event organized at the Magic Cinema in Bobigny (a suburb of Paris) where René Vautier had been invited to show Afrique 50. I had a chance to spend a few minutes with him. 445 the virtues of colonialism to be shown to French schoolchildren. Vautier himself admits that he started the film believing in the colonial mission as taught to him by school textbooks. He arrived in Dakar (the capital of French West Africa) on July 13, 1949 wearing a colonial helmet and holding a camera, after a trip paid for by the colonial administration. We were in 1949, forced labor had just been abolished, a French Union had turned colonies into territories, and African parliamentarians were seated at the French National Assembly. Colonialism sought to present an improved image of itself. This image however was different from what Vautier saw on his trip from Dakar to Bamako and then to Mopti. He filmed the famous Markala dam, supposedly a major technological feat, but one that only provided electricity to the whites. As he went on his trip, he encountered two RDA founding members and members of the said French National Assembly, Daniel Ouezzin Coulibaly 242 and Félix Houphouët-Boigny who would in effect help him with the shooting process by taking him to the Cote d’Ivoire territory and showing him evidence of recent colonial massacres. Considered a traitor to his country, Vautier was arrested in the city of Bobo-Dioulasso in current Burkina Faso and Ouezzin Coulibaly reportedly mobilized 2,000 people to demonstrate in front of the police station in order to have him released. 243 Through the RDA network, Vautier was put in the hands of Modibo Keita (who also became the first President of the Republic of Mali) who would hide him 242 Ouezzin Coulibaly was poised to become the first President of Upper Volta (current Burkina Faso) until his untimely death under mysterious circumstances, in 1957. 243 This information, not mentioned in the film, was conveyed directly to me by René Vautier himself on the occasion of the above-mentioned meeting. 446 in the Dogon country. 244 That was still not the end of the story. Later, Daniel Ouezzin Coulibaly would drive René Vautier in the trunk of his car to the Gold Coast (current Ghana) border where he would be put in the hands of none other than Dr. Kwame Nkrumah (who would become the first Prime Minister and later the first President of Ghana). This truly rocambolesque back story contributes to making Afrique 50, a film of also immeasurable historical value, bordering even on the legendary as it involves four of the founding fathers of African independence. The narrative of the making of Afrique 50 is thus not only that of a lone filmmaker against his society, his country (which it was in effect). For daring to make the film, René Vautier would spend no less than a year and a day in French prisons. It was also a narrative of solidarity between African leaders (who would become part of the who’s who of independent Africa) and their populations (the Dogon, the population of Bobo- Dioulasso and no doubt populations in Côte d’Ivoire as well) for the defense of the cinema, for the rights and freedoms of the filmmaker, the possibility for counter- hegemonic documentary images. Running across four territories which would end up becoming four independent states in West Africa (Ghana, Burkina Faso, Mali and Cote d’Ivoire), it is a narrative of Pan-Africanism, the deployment of Pan- Africanism in defense of the cinema as an instrument of liberty. What we have here is thus a geography 244 This is highly ironic because the Dogon were made the poster group of French ethnography involving all prestigious figures from Marcel Griaule to Germaine Dieterlen to Jean Rouch himself, all of whom would be buried in the Dogon country. It is ironic that Vautier whose cinema who is anti-ethnographic by definition, would find refuge with the Dogon, that is, his approach to them would not be as for ethnographers, for their mystical worldview, but instead for the inaccessibility of their location to colonial authorities as they lived on very steep hills. Here we have the Dogon as opponents to colonialism, not as native informants for ethnographic literature. 447 as well as a geopolitics film. Finally, Afrique 50 may be the only film in the history of the cinema to have received support (in effect co-produced) from four would-be heads of states in the direst of circumstances. But what exactly happens in Afrique 50? What is this film on that worried colonial authorities so much and involved four founding fathers of African independence in a “game” of hide and seek with them, we may ask. The film itself is quite short, 17 minutes 245 . It has a narrative arch of a journey of maturation from darkness (colonialism) to light (rebellion against colonialism) organized as follows: 1) Arrival of the stranger of the visitor. We have a stranger comes to town type narrative but not any stranger: a French person in a land colonized by France. Vautier sets up the context of this visit. It is not happening in a vacuum. Indeed, “the only whites who entered this village before you were either the administrator who came to collect taxes, of the recruiter who came for the conscription of men for the army.” We are already informed that we are already entering a highly politicized space, a space of abuse, a space where contact between whites and blacks is one of relinquishing (of money and people) by Blacks and of taking away (by whites). In other words, the encounter between the citizen of the colonizing country and the colonized is always already overdetermined by the 245 Having shot 50 reels during his trip to Africa, Vautier’s entire footage was turned over by the commissioning institution, the Ligue de l’Enseignement to the Paris Central Police Precinct where the filmmaker would be detained. Asked by the Police to identify the reels as his, he managed to smuggle 17 reels out. These 17 reels make up the 17 minutes of the film. It would be interesting to find out what happened to the remaining 33 reels. 448 colonial situation itself, which is one of exploitation and abuse. Hence the feeling of mistrust on the part of the villagers. 2) The visitor’s legitimacy is called into question. Here Vautier shows us children coming to the encounter of the imaginary visitor. The children are looking at the camera. Here the visitor is at once Vautier, the French citizen, and we as viewers. We see children examining the camera, sticking out their tongues, and making gestures. This is interesting, because these gestures which were made for the camera, are translated to us by Vautier as referring to the imaginary viewer/visitor who after scrutiny, “passed the test, you’re adopted. They might be willing to give you a tour of their village. Follow them…...” Here, the stranger is made to appear modest, to respect his surroundings. There is the sense that nothing is owed to him that people may or may not accept to take him on a tour of their reality. 3) The warning about the picturesque. Cognizant of the heritage of colonial cinema that preceded him, Vautier informs his viewer that although he may encounter scenes that may seem picturesque, the picturesque is only the surface of things, the first layer of vision. The viewer has to go beyond the veil, to the other side of the mirror. It is as if he was entering walls within walls, doors within doors of knowledge, of consciousness. It is like an initiation into successive orders of knowledge, as if the picturesque, the ethnographic was only phase one of this journey and that 99% of colonial cinema unfortunately only stopped there. 449 4) Behind the picturesque - Level I: Misery - Destitution. Here Vautier shows us the toiling of women, the difficulty of building and maintaining houses, in other words, slices of hard life under the colonial regime; the use of the director’s razor to cut hair due to an inability to afford a razor. At this stage, the film is organized in the form of a dialectic: this, but that, that is through the presentation of a situation and yet the contradiction of the expectation of the thing presented. Indeed one may think of clash between the aesthetics of ethnos (ethnographic/colonial cinema) and the aesthetics of revolution. Examples: Thesis: Children are shown playing, apparently enjoying themselves. Antithesis: what the colonialism is not telling you: they cannot go to school because unlike France where school if free and compulsory, in the colonies there is only room for 4% children, who will be needed by the colonial administration and companies. Here we also have a collision of words, that is, by virtue of the absence of images, the text of the voice-over needs to have its own images, to evoke images. Thus, there is a collision montage at the level of the images inside the words themselves. 5) Behind the picturesque: Level II- Destruction- In this second layer of reckoning, Vautier invites the viewer to discover the destructive reality of French colonialism by representing the reality of destruction through French bullets. The style of presentatio