The history of documentary in Africa -- The Colonial era

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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).

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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

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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).

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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).

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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).

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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”).

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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
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. 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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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).

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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)
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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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the Lumumba tragedy. On his part, Cameroonian
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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.”

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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

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concentration camp
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“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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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

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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

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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.

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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).

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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

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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”
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(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.

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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
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, 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

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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.

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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,
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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

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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).

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participated in the work of erasure of memory, confining itself to the role of paean to the
glory of Empire outside its borders.
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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.”

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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.

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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

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.”

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(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

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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)

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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.

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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:

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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.

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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.”

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“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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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).

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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.

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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

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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).

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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

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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?

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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

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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

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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)

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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).

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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.
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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)

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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).

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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

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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

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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.

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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).

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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(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

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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.

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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

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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

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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,”

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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

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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

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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

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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).

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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

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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

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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).

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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
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; 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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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,

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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-

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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.

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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.

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“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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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…

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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).

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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.”

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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?”

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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(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.

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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

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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

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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.
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To use a consecrated term in documentary, Africans were literally “caught unawares.”

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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.

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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.

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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).
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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)

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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,

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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

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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).

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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?

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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)

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(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

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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

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(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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The terrible war, which had ended with the defeat of fascism and Nazism on European
soil
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, 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

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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).

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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

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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

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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

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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."
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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

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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

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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
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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.”

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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
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. 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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.
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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

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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.

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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.

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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 presentation is that of the catalogue, the rhetorical power of the catalogue,
with technique of listing as a way of keeping count. Vautier shows us the trail of

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tears, blood, and destruction left in the wake of the passage of French troops. He
shows illustrative shots such as those of the village of Palaka where the “troops
came, shot, burnt and killed,” on February 27, 1949 because the chief failed to
fully pay taxes, or sites where pregnant women were executed, people literally
smoked out, of children murdered, of bullet holes in destroyed houses, or traces of
blood post summary execution.

6) Behind the picturesque: Level III - The Reign of the Vultures: The images
evoke both Sergei Eisenstein and Djibril Diop Mambety who would come later.
By crosscutting between shots of vultures and shots of colonial companies,
Vautier evokes the activities of rapacious gains they make on the backs of
Africans, providing figures of the incredible profits they garner. But here again
we see Vautier’s innovation. Indeed, unlike official colonial documentaries where
figures are mentioned and presented in view of convincing the viewer of the
necessity of the colonial enterprise, in Afrique 50 they are called upon to show the
unconscionable crimes of colonialism. Shots of cattle dead livestock with slit
throat complete the picture of the African condition under colonialism.

7) Behind the picturesque: Level IV - The bankruptcy of the infrastructure
argument. Here Vautier chooses to show us instead the reality of the black man’s
burden. In a lucid analysis of the “real relations of production” between the
colonizing and the colonized country, the filmmaker deconstructs the supposed

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benevolence of the “progress” paradigm. Again, the collision structure is at play.
Dams were built, but only to provide electricity for whites. Steamrollers exist in
Europe to build the proverbial roads. But it is cheaper, Vautier argues, to make
Africans work in quarries; agriculture is supposedly mechanized, but not for
Africans. Although Africans work and export cotton, cocoa, peanuts, mahogany,
the nature of colonial exploitation makes it impossible for them to afford clothes,
furniture, chocolate, soap, the finished products of these raw materials. The
deconstruction is double here. It first underlines the principle of pauperization at
the heart of the colonial system, as well as underscores the colonial economic
division of labor that is still with us today, that is, positioning France (Europe
more generally) as the processor of raw materials provided at very high physical
cost for Africans including child labor (which was not considered in a crime in the
days of colonialism).

8) Behind the picturesque Level V- The Logical Conclusion of all this: Uprising
and rebellion for the toppling, the destruction of colonialism. Indeed, Vautier
seems to say, the only moral choice left to the citizen of the colonizing power is to
be complicit with colonialism or to betray one’s country.

In many ways, the film marks an epistemological break in the documentary tradition in
the colonial era. It may be considered both thematically, politically and esthetically an
avant-garde film in that sense. The film is also a self-reflexive documentary, which cites

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itself. Foregrounding the gap between discourse and fact, it appears as a film in search of
authenticity in the philosophical sense of the term, that is, of an adequation between
words and deeds. The film also innovates in terms of its specificity. Indeed. Vautier
eludes a weightless humanistic discourse on the human condition, choosing instead the
specificity of (d)enunciation: The names of the dead, of the villages attacked, the dates,
hours and locations of the attacks, the numbers of the dead. In this sense, Vautier may be
said to differ from his colleague Alain Resnais who was critiqued for the lack of
specificity in his Holocaust documentary Night and Fog (1955).

Afrique 50 is also different way of making the colonies known to France from the way
Gérard Madieu and Albert Sarraut had thought it. Instead of the colonial sublime, what
we have is colonial dystopia, the reverse shot of the sublime actualized through the
critiques mentioned above: the critique of the technological/infrastructure argument (we
built dams, bridges, school, hospitals), a critique of the very structure of the colonial
economy (raw materials versus finished products).

The image of the boat waiting on shore also evokes the Tans-Atlantic world trade, where
slave ships waited on the coast for the capture and transfer of slaves to the New World. In
that sense, Vautier (unwittingly?) graphically puts colonialism and the slave trade on the
same continuum, which is a wonderful intuition, as colonial commerce followed the route
of the slave trade in the aftermath of the abolition of the latter in the nineteenth century.

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After all this, the film offers uprising, rebellion as the only solution. It is a highly moral,
ethical film in that sense, which denounces the barbarism of colonialism. The only ethical
stance, Vautier seems to say, is to join arms with Africans in order to destroy colonialism.
We witness a complete 180-degrees narrative revolution. The visitor who may have come
to Africa with preconceived notions of the rightfulness of his country’s civilizing mission
and who may have been seeking the ethnographic sublime has no choice by the end of his
visit,, (after visiting the regime of horror implemented by the colonial system) but to take
sides with Africans and fight against his own country. This is the stuff of Greek tragedies,
the choice between two orders of things: morality versus country, liberty versus
oppression. Which side are you on, Vautier seems to ask? We know which side his on,
and thank him for it. The film ends on the streets of Paris with Africans and their French
allies demonstrating in the streets against the colonial situation.

Afrique 50 also shows what a filmmaker can do when he finds himself in a situation of
deficit of images. In Vautier’s case, the deficit was double. On the one hand, he did not
physically witness the executions and massacres of Africans by French troops. He was
only able to shoot the aftermath. This is reminiscent about what Boleslaw Matuszeswski
said about the documentary in his book Une nouvelle source de l’histoire [A New Source
of History – my translation]: “history does not always happen where one waits for it, and
that effects are easier to find and photograph than causes” (qtd. in Barnouw 26-27). The
second level of deficit relates to the fact that more than half of the exposed footage was
confiscated by the French Police. These two lacks Vautier compensated for with

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memories of conversations with African politicians and populations who informed him
about the circumstances of the events. Thus, he was able to substitute missing images by
a voice-over narration that was replete with images. Indeed one cannot help but think of
Eisenstein in his discussion of the various levels of montage. In Afrique 50, Vautier offers
us a verbal and visual montage. Indeed, there is in this film, a bringing together of not
only voice and image, but words and images, words, images and music together.

What is also striking about this film is the ways in which the director deploys some
images that are in some ways no different from the usual image library of colonial and
ethnographic cinema. Yet instead of framing them with an ethnographic discourse of
timelessness, he politicizes them with a discourse of and on the present, confirming the
notion that images do not necessarily speak for themselves, that filmmakers and viewers
make them speak, so to speak. It is also important to note the pacing in the film. One
notices a marked difference between the beginning of the film, which is more in the slow,
contemplative mode and toward the end, which foregrounds an intensification of affect as
Vautier lists the innumerable crimes committed by France in this Africa. It is almost, to
some extent, a filmic equivalent of different passages of Césaire’s Discourse on
Colonialism, indeed a cinematic, a documentary discourse on colonialism.

Finally, there is also the question of the mode of address of Afrique 50. It is not the voice
of God documentary that placidly or impartially seeks to describe what happened,
unflappably, in an expository mode. Here we have a passionate voice, indeed an angry

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voice, a rightfully angered voice of documentary, which interpellates the viewer directly
not by the deferential French vous, but by tu (you), as to a comrade, a fellow citizen.
Vautier thereby makes the viewer the equal of the director, one whom the latter takes on
a visit that the former would not necessarily make. For like the French audience he is
directly interpellating, Vautier feels he has been betrayed. That he has been, in the words
of Malcolm X, “hoodwinked, bamboozled, duped,” that colonialism was not about
building schools and curing the sick, but instead a system of oppression and exploitation
and that French taxpayers had allowed this to happen in their name. The film is thus
directed at the French viewer who has been living in the false consciousness of colonial
propaganda. The colonial cinema has made this wonderful and exhilarating Kino Glaz
into a apparatus of veiling, of concealment, of “the real relations of production” (Marx),
through the ethnographic veil, the menimal (human zoo) genre. Afrique 50 is instead like
the Vertovian crosscutting between the eyes opening and the camera-eye, about the act of
seeing colonialism, of seeing (but also hearing) as the ultimate act of knowing
colonialism. What do these newly opened eyes see? French bullets that pierced through
the bodies of rebelling Africans, pierced through the houses of Africans, and brought
chaos and destruction.

B. Pioneers of Documentary in Africa: Paulin Soumanou Vieyra

Paulin Soumanou Vieyra is one of the most important figures in the history of African
cinema. Indeed he counts not only among the pioneering film directors (he started

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making films almost a decade before Ousmane Sembène), but he is also one of the first
historians and critics of the continent’s cinema, embracing it in its geographical totality.
Making 21 documentaries out of a total of 27 films, his documentary work spanned
nearly four decades, took him to the four corners of the world, and has yet to be looked at
as a whole.

As one of the first African graduates from the French IDHEC (Institut des Hautes
Edtudes Cinématographiques), he founded, with his colleagues Robert Caristan,
Mamadou Sarr and Jacques Mélo Kane, the Groupe Africain du Cinema, perhaps one of
the first African film collectives.
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Together with this group, Vieyra directed the now
canonical film Afrique-sur-Seine (1955), which has often been given pioneering status in
the history of cinema in Africa as the first African film.
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For the purpose of the present study, we shall focus on this film, leaving the rich and
diverse writing of Paulin Vieyra for a later date, as the author penned two crucial books
on African cinema, numerous articles and presentations. As a key witness to the

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According to René Vautier, “those who made [Afrique-sur-Seine] with Vieyra formed a group which
met and reflected on anti-colonialism” (Loftus 58).
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It must be noted that the colonial heritage has often led the former colonizers and sometimes Africans
themselves in looking at and analyzing the history of Africa from a colonial linguistic standpoint. Thus,
acknowledging somebody as the first African filmmaker in the so-called Francophone zone often does not
take into account what happens elsewhere in English, Arabic or Portuguese-speaking Africa. Vieyra
himself participates in this mythology. In his book Le Cinéma africain. Tome I, Des origines à 1973, he
claims: “the author of this book was at the origin of the first African films” (155). This is in effect a self-
contradiction, since he cites a number of pioneering figures before him, including Chikly, a Malagasy
director named Raberno, who is said to have filmed the centenary celebrations of a Malagasy martyr in
1937, and a Guinean named Mamadou Touré who directed Mouramani in 1954. One wonders how after all
these predecessors, Vieyra could still consider himself as having been at the origin of the first African
films. Even if he meant Francophone African films, that would not have been the case, since Chikly, Touré
and Raberno were all from French colonies, like himself.

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transitional phase of cinema in Africa, from the colonial to the independence era, his
itinerary, his historical and critical discourses as well as his filmic production require
special attention which we shall take up in due time.

The opening of Afrique-sur-Seine mentions that the film is shown under the patronage of
the Comité Ethnographique du Film, founded by Jean Rouch in 1953 at the Musée de
l’Homme in Paris. In other words, the Groupe Africain du Cinéma made of Vieyra and
his friends, had to be endorsed by Jean Rouch in order to have their film shown. This is
significant in terms of the discursive conditions for the existence of African filmic
expression under French colonialism.

We hear the sound of the balafon on the soundtrack with a double bill for the directorial
credits. Both Paulin Vieyra and Mamadou Sarr share co-directing credits, yet it seems
history has only retained Vieyra’s name in relation to the film
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. The film was scripted
by Mamadou Sarr, photographed by Robert Caristan and edited by Paulin Vieyra, with
Jacques Mélo Kane, as production manager, and commentary written by both Vieyra and
Sarr. The film opens with African boys playing a dice-like game. A voice-over comes in
shot 1. African boys are playing dice or a similar game. It is significant here that the
footage is from Africa, while we know that Vieyra was not allowed to travel to Africa to

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Vieyra himself acknowledges the dual directorial credit. Referring to himself in the third person
singular, he argues that “he accepted to share the direction of the film with somebody else, Mamadou Sarr,
in their Groupe Africain de Cinema. Making a film is a team work no doubt, but this team must have only
one person in charge, the one who coordinates everything”(156), thereby raising the question of the
division of labor in a filmic collective, and of course the question of the role of the director/auteur. Vieyra’s
dissatisfaction with the experience makes one wonder how long the collective lasted and what happened to
its different members.

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make the film. There is therefore a level of intertextuality here in the sense that Vieyra
had to borrow footage of Africa from other filmmakers (René Vautier in particular) in
order to evoke his continent. This act alone speaks of the harshness of a French colonial
system that would not allow an African filmmaker the right to go to his own continent
and make a film. We see here colonialism actively killing the cinema itself.

The voice-over comes in as more images of African boys playing appear on the screen.
Yet, the time of the voice is not the time of the image. Hence, the commentary placing
the images as a before, implying in effect that “this is what we used to do in the past, this
is how we were in the past.” With this spatio-temporal split, the film participates in a
Senghorian move evoking the proverbial “royaume d’enfance” (childhood kingdom), a
sort of evocation of a happy and peaceful childhood. This is the time-space of childhood,
the time-space of innocence when one was unaware of the rest of the world, a Senghorian
conflict-free childhood. Indeed, the voice-over adds “This was a good time, the time of
all the children of the world,” in attempt to universalize this childhood experience.

At 2 minutes and 38 seconds into the film, we see shots of children jumping into a river
and having lots of fun (this is in some ways a pseudo-détournement of the Vautier
footage), while the voice-over adds that in “this little corner of Africa” they were
unaware of the world (a rather problematic statement). We then cut to a shot of Paris, as
the voice-over tells us “One had to grow, leave for Paris, Paris capital city of the world,
Paris, capital city of Black Africa.”

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This is interesting in that the move from Africa to Paris (note the incommensurability,
between an entire continent and a city, not even a country) is portrayed in terms of an
initiatic journey, a coming of age narrative of travel, going from the kingdom of
childhood (Africa) and reaching manhood in Paris. A sort of binary opposition is set
between the two spaces, which involves also a binarism in relation to the kinds of
temporalities at play in both places. In that sense, the commentary may be considered
tributary to the colonial episteme. At this point in the film, Vieyra does not seem to raise
the problem with Paris, the reasons why he had to leave Africa for Paris, what made Paris
the capital of the world and how it would not be what it is without the assistance of
Africans.

We get shots of buildings from above, followed by a panning shot (reviewing the city) as
the commentary keeps running, celebrating Paris as a city of hope, making this in effect a
variety of the city symphony genre of documentary, only this time as seen through the
eyes of a colonial subject who has made his some of tenets of the colonial episteme. The
colonial subject is celebrating the city of the colonial master. This may considered
surprising and not so surprising at once. One should not be surprised that colonized
subjects internalize the rhetoric of colonialism, especially upon going through the
colonial educational system. Yet, it may be seen as surprising if one zooms out of the
film and looks around to find out what was going on in Paris in 1954-55. The Indochina
War had just ended with a French defeat while the Algerian War had just broken out in
1954, the Bandung Conference would take place that same year in Indonesia, Aimé

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Césaire published his Discourse on Colonialism in 1955, Cheikh Anta Diop his famous
Nations nègres et culture in 1954 (where he demolished the epistemic move of putting on
the same continuum Africa and innocence, childhood, and backwardness) and Franz
Fanon his Black Skin, White Masks (1952). In other words, one may be surprised to hear
such a text from an artist who lived in Paris when all these changes were happening and
who often met with the Césaires and Diops at Présence Africaine, barely five years
before the end of colonialism, in most French colonies.

The dualism is further expressed through an editing contrast between the mist and the
sun, the machine versus nature Thus, images chosen to illustrate childhood are images of
children in nature (the African Savannah) semi or totally naked., whereas Paris is shown
as foggy, rational, Cartesian (buildings are shown as orderly, lined up, square with great
architectural precision). It is a dualism between nature versus science, reminiscent of the
famous Senghorian Negritude, perhaps making this one of the first Negritude
documentary. Indeed, this would put the film more in the Senghorian school of thought
than that of Diop, Fanon or Césaire.
249

We are then treated to a very long and slow panning shot (43 seconds) of Paris, followed
by shots of slices of life in the city of Paris, the tramway, which coincide with a change
of music, indeed a shift to more hunter music from Mali (donso ngoni). This music will
serve as transition in ushering in an appropriation of Paris by Africans, with a cut to a

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In that sense, it is no surprise that at independence, Vieyra became the official filmmaker of the Senghor
regime in Senegal, as he was put in charge of Senegalese Newsreels (Actualités Sénégalaises).

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shot of a man, an African running to catch the tramway. He manages to jump in it. He
will be the protagonist of our documentary, the one through whose eyes we will discover
the city of Paris. Significantly enough we never get to know more about his psychology,
why he is there, what makes him tick, whether he is happy, whether he misses home and
the like.

Then we get a cut to the tramway stopping. Our protagonist exits the tram and walks right
out of the frame, and another cut takes us to the man stopping to greet acquaintances and
walk away again. This part of the film stands out as clearly staged as the whole exchange
does not look spontaneous as he awkwardly pats one of the acquaintances on the back
(there are 5 people there, including one woman).

We then cut to him walking. The man is wearing a suit and a tie and carrying a briefcase
as he walks down Boulevard Saint-Germain. The voice-over still belabors the dichotomy,
from nature to Saint-Germain, Rue de l’Odéon, Café Molière, etc. As he walks the
student is stopped by a beggar who asks for money, clearly reminiscent of a practice in
Muslim countries where people are used to giving alms, but in the French colonial
context, it is different, because unemployment is the cause of begging.

Through our protagonist, we get to visit some of the most famous streets of the 5th
arrondissement of Paris, both the intellectual and cultural center of the city, as the voice-
over adds. These streets are la rue de Médicis, la rue Soufflot, le Quartier Latin. After

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paying homage to the fifth arrondissement, the film goes on to offer us a long shot of the
Pantheon and pay respect to the “illustrious dead of the Pantheon,” with our protagonist
walking toward it. Our tour of the fifth arrondissement would not be complete without a
visit to the Sorbonne, at the famous Faculty of Law from which we see African students
emerge.

After this intellectual and cultural tour, it is time for lunch. This is introduced by a shot of
an African man stretching out. He works at a restaurant, a staple of student life in Paris as
in any other metropolis then and now. Then we get a shot of four Africans entering the
frame right and stopping by the restaurant. The man who was stretching out and who
works at the restaurant shows them to the menu, which they look at. It appears to be
expensive. They decide not to eat there and walk away. The question of class erupts in
the film. This motif of hunger and pennilessness is highlighted by a shot of another
African walking down the street as the voice-over goes “Paris of the days without bread,
Paris of the days without hope” acknowledging an awareness that the utopian view of
Paris must be broken, as it is belied by the separation of classes.

The first part of the Paris section involved an attempt to situate city and then exploring
ways in which Africans make it theirs, appropriate it, or at last attempt to. But how is this
Paris that Africans are trying to appropriate. It is, according to the voice-over, the “Paris
of solitude.” Through these intermittent interventions of the voice-over in the film (it is
not the dominant, crushing voice-over of the expository film), we are offered an almost

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humanist approach to Paris, a universalist humanist and to some extent existentialist
approach to Paris, where one experiences the blues, hunger and poverty. It attempts not to
specify the African experience. Indeed, one may wonder, how is it that Africans are
hungry in Paris, while their resources have been making the fortune of Parisian banks and
businesses as aptly demonstrated by Vautier? One may wonder the extent to which this
quasi-philosophical approach to the film is not a form of self-censorship meant to prevent
the application of the Laval Decree to against the film. Could recourse to universalism
serve as a ploy to avoid film censorship?

Later in the film, we are shown a shot of a building from which the camera pans down to
the Seine, which makes its first appearance in the film. We now have the title of our film,
Africa-upon- the Seine, with the camera effecting a cinematic appropriation of the city.
This is done through the very act of filming itself, which dissects and reframes the city to
the whim of the directors. The city is hereby recomposed cinematically in an attempt to
possess it.

In many ways the films is also about affect, feelings, experience. These feelings are
however localized in some ways, that is, when they are put through the prism of the lives
of Africans in Paris, they get actualized in meeting each other, chance encounters,
freedom. Indeed, the voice- over explores the complexities of displacement, of being
elsewhere, of the blues but also of the hopes of the exilic experience. It is a film about
displacement, and exile, about attempting to put one’s imprints in this indifferent

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megalopolis. In that sense, it could be said that the poetics of displacement are well
captured in the film.

But Paris must be sung, hence the voice-over adding such notes to the symphony, “Hope
to find civilization? Let us salute the genius of the men of liberty, of equality. Let us
salute pacific victories, of pacific men, Let us salute the monuments of Paris, witnesses to
past and present greatness.” Once again, the ambiguity of the tone of the film resurfaces.
Indeed, it is difficult in hearing this commentary not to wonder whether there is a form of
irony in this text or whether indeed it is an attempt to mystify the censors. For sure, it
cannot be dead serious, as Vieyra himself was well aware of the colonial massacres, as he
had seen French pacifism at work in Afrique 50 from which he culled an image. To what
extent, we may ask Vieyra, could the recent Indochina War be referred to as “pacific”?
What of the pacifism of a system that would not let him, an African “man with a movie
camera” simply pack his film equipment and set out for Africa to make films? Finally
this voice-over covers over another major paradox. As said earlier, because he could not
travel to Africa, Vieyra had to ask for African footage from René Vautier, whose film
had been banned by colonial authorities. Yet it is clear by looking at the footage and at
listening to the voice-over, that Vieyra did not use the most “controversial” footage by
Vautier, but instead chose the most ethnographiable. Thus, instead of saluting, as Vautier
did, the greatness of those who resisted in Côte d’Ivoire and elsewhere in the colonies,
we hear instead about liberté, égalité, fraternité.

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After showing us the obligatory sites of the city of Paris, such as the Eiffel Tower,
Montmartre, Sacré-Cœur, we are introduced to the theme of interracial relationships. We
are thus shown a series of shots around that theme, such as an African man riding a bike
with a blonde girlfriend or an African woman waiting for her friend. Then an African
man who has been observing her for a while attempts to court her. But almost
simultaneously, a white man comes, hugs her and takes her away. The voice-over insists
on the fact that interracial relations (white/black, black/white) transcend historical
limitations. We see Vieyra and his companions engaged in a proto-métissage discourse.
As he shows us more scenes involving interracial couples going to restaurants and
nightclubs, he posits them as another way of appropriating Paris as this happens “in spite
of the machinations of men.” Indeed, the film seems to affirm the possibility of love to
transcend ideological boundaries of race. It seems in particular to isolate the Latin
Quarter from the rest of the city of Paris as the site where such “transgression” is
possible. Indeed the voice-over adds, “and it is in this old neighborhood of sciences and
letters that the winds of hope and of love blow” as if knowledge would conquer racism
and allow love to grow among the peoples.

The ambiguity of the film invites by definition at least a double overall reading of it.
From the prism of humanistic discourse, it may be considered to some extent audacious.
Indeed, at the height of a period of colonial repression founded on the idea of racial
superiority, it dares to imagine a post-racial society in which, “together, Black and
Yellow friends, Black and White friends, in our love wanderings, heart to heart, elbow to

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elbow, beyond the shadows, we win the battle of lights in front of the gods, in front of the
others.” Indeed, against eugenics, against racial purity, the film advocates the possibility
of transcending racial barriers.

In the same vein, it invites another gaze, which may fault it for circumscribing such a
project to the inter-subjective. Indeed, the film declines to take a systemic look at the
conditions of possibility of this very “lack” of racial harmony, which it euphemistically
attributes to “the machination of men.” Thus, one may consider that by choosing the safe
route, within the context of colonial turmoil of its day, it falls short of meaningfully
registering the trembling of history, which would have made it a truly unforgettable film,
beyond its mere pioneering status. Instead, it chooses to be what may be considered a
spineless albeit poetic meditation of some Africans in Paris, too broad to allow us to
actually offer any meaningful proximity to his characters, who are nameless, weightless,
shadow-like, indeed invisible black men and women in a light saturated colonial
metropolis, creating perhaps a rather uncanny city symphony.

It would be a mistake to judge the work of Paulin Vieyra in light of this single film,
which also had merits such as returning the gaze to some extent. It is one of the only
films of the colonial period in which Africans are showing their views of the colonial
capital, are in the position of looking at the colonizers (although arguably not frontally,
but rather sideways or upward), even if he does not manage to completely think himself
out of the dominant colonial episteme.

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Vieyra was also a major documentary filmmakers and one of his masterpieces was Une
nation est née (1961) made to celebrate Senegal’s first anniversary as an independent
country, a real classic of African documentary, which incidentally would be boycotted by
French authorities. In addition to his film work, Paulin Vieyra was a major film critic and
historian. He attempted the first comprehensive histories of African cinema
250
from the
colonial era to the 1970s, defended a doctoral thesis (Doctorat d’Etat) at the University
of Paris X in 1980. Indeed he penned two famous articles entitled “The Responsibilities
of the Cinema in the Formation of National Consciousness” in 1959 and “Cinema and the
African Revolution” with Présence Africaine
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and republished them in his book Le
Cinéma et l’Afrique and participated along with Ousmane Sembène in all the major
debates around African cinema in the aftermath of independence. Indeed Sembène had
the following to say about Afrique-sur-Seine, his relationship to Vieyra and the latter’s
importance for African cinema:
Afrique-sur-Seine was screened in all the academies of France that had African
students and served as a basis for all kinds of debates. He, a student in Paris and I
working in Marseilles often met at Prèsence Africaine, to mutually enrich our
common interests: the cinema, literature and theater… A witness of the great
moments, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra filmed everything… day and night. Nothing
left him indifferent. Sharing hotel rooms or train cabins with him, I was his “little
assistant” carrying his chargers. Fifty years after the premiere of Afrique-sur-
Seine, as a companion of his itinerary, I still wonder what happened to the
kilometers of film footage he exposed. [He was] always a living witness of this
moment of our history … our visual patrimony… On the occasion of the fiftieth
anniversary of Afrique-sur-Seine, I often ask myself the following question: Had
it not been for the rich and profound relationship I had with Paulin S. Vieyra,
would I ever have made films? (Sembène 21-22).

250
In that sense, the current work is but a continuation of his pioneering work.
251
We will revisit the theoretical, critical, historical work of Paulin Vieyra along with other dimensions of
his filmic work in volume II of this research.

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Another enduring contribution of Vieyra to the cinema and thus documentary in Africa,
was his relationship to Présence Africaine, which offered him the opportunity to take part
in the major debates pertaining to the politics of culture (and thus of the cinema) in a
soon-to be independent Africa. Thus, Vieyra would both attend and film Second World
Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Rome in 1959 organized by Présence Africaine.
It is this institution which was at once a meeting place (as Sembène put it), a publishing
house, a journal, and a sort of laboratory of cultural theory that we shall proceed to
briefly present, as a major element in the dispositif of the intellectual and cultural
traditions of dissent on the African continent.

C. Présence Africaine in the Domain of Documentary

As discussed throughout this thesis, the colonial context had as part of its dispositif a set
of discourses and practices that aimed at turning Africans into its subjects, justifying their
exploitation, at pillaging the continent’s riches with arguments that made it possible for
the conscience of the colonizers not to tingle. In other words, wealth was taken out of
Africa while books were written and films made about the necessity of the taking of that
very wealth (colonialism). The perniciousness of the pro-colonial arguments even to a
large extent began to seep into the psyches of Africans, especially those schooled in the
colonial system who found themselves with conflicting ideas about the continent.

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It was within this context that a group of intellectuals and writers, gathered in Paris,
around a young Senegalese academic, Alioune Diop, and founded Présence Africaine in
1947, a review that aimed at producing knowledge about African cultures and making
them known to the rest of the world. This approach rested on what might be referred to as
the refutational paradigm, in that it took on the claim by the thinkers of colonialism, that
Africans had no culture, no history and thus deserved to be colonized in order to precisely
compensate this supposed lack. Although the premise of this work may seem rather
strange in our contemporary eyes, it was within the colonial context very significant in
articulating an idea of African specificity and universality, in rejection of the
assimilationist paradigm.

This project of production and dissemination of knowledge looked at the problem of
Africa from a global perspective, i.e. it also took as part of its domain of investigation,
the culture and politics of Africans living outside the borders of the continent. The project
devised several forums through which it could actualize itself. Thus, Présence Africaine
was first a journal, which featured an illustrious coterie of continental and diasporic
Africans on the editorial board alongside a French committee of patronage. On the
African side, the two fathers of the Negritude movement, Aimé Césaire and Leopold
Senghor featured prominently alongside world-renowned African American writer
Richard Wright. Colonialism being a regime of repression of ideas, Alioune Diop
adopted (not unlike Vieyra, we may say), a strategy consisting in creating a barrier
against censorship by including on the editorial board of the journal famous French

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intellectuals, artists and writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, André Gide, Emmanuel
Mounier, Michel Leiris and Albert Camus among others.

The second strategy deployed by Présence Africaine was the claim that it sought to be a
cultural rather than a political journal. Yet to the mind of any prescient observer, it could
have been clear that within the context of colonial domination, the cultural can be nothing
else but political. In the context of Présence Africaine and in spite of the claim that the
journal was open to all men of goodwill (white, yellow and black) to work on presenting
Africa, to the world, i.e. in spite of adopting a universalist approach, which fit perfectly
within French republican ideas, the journal first and foremost opened up a space for
Africans to express themselves about their own conditions. This very act was always
already political because it jettisoned the monopoly of discourse on Africa from
colonialism, and placed it squarely within the hands of Africans and people sympathetic
to their cause.

In addition to being a publishing house, Présence Africaine was also a meeting place, an
oasis of exchanges and discussions between writers intellectuals, students, which,
although not often recorded in the history books, served in no small manner in shaping
the destiny of the African continent, as it affected many figures who would play a major
role in various spheres of responsibility in the aftermath of independence. It was both a
formal and informal workshop or laboratory for the forging of cultural concepts and ideas
aimed at the liberation of Africa and at providing guidance for the post-colonial era.

471
One of the most important and publicized domains of intervention of Présence Africaine
was the organization of high-profile congresses which gathered artists and intellectuals
from Africa and its diaspora. The First Congress of Black Artists and Intellectuals, the
most famous of them, was thus held in Paris from September 19 to 22, 1956 in the
famous Descartes Amphitheater of La Sorbonne and for which Pablo Picasso designed
the poster.
252
Among the 68 delegates, were names that would count a great deal in the
history of decolonization and post-independence era in Africa and beyond, such as
Amadou Hampâthé Bâ, Frantz Fanon, Cheikh Anta Diop, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar
Senghor, Abdoulaye Wade and Jacques Rabemananjara among others. This Congress and
the one that would follow in 1959 were in effect interventions in the field of the theory of
culture, articulating the relationship between culture and politics in the colonial context,
and engaging the question of the role of the intellectual in the struggle for the liberation
of the Africans continent. For Alioune Diop, founder of Présence Africaine, this
gathering constituted a “cultural Bandung conference” organized only 18 months after
the historic Afro-Asian conference of Bandung, which called for the end of the colonial
regime in both Africa and Asia. Diop saw the congress as an occasion to “enunciate
together and assess the wealth, crisis and promises of our culture.”
253
Post-presentation
debates counted among the priceless moments of this conference, where one could hear a
battle of minds between Richard Wright, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Paul Hazoumé, Aimé

252
The reason for this was simple. Picasso, in contact with African art, which, in the colonial context, was
referred to as “primitive” art, decided to forego what he had learned in the European heritage in the history
of painting, and instead to adopt a style of painting inspired by the African masks he saw. This poster was
in some ways a token of recognition of what he and many members of the historical European avant-garde
more generally owed to the continent.
253
In Le Premier Congrès International des Ecrivains et Artistes Noirs (Paris: Sorbonne 19-22 Septembre
1956) - Compte rendu complet. Présence Africaine 8-9-10 (1956): 17.

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Césaire, Jacques-Stephen Alexis and others. Fundamental questions emanated from these
sessions such as whether or not it was possible to speak of black cultures as one, the
question of the metaphysicization of culture, the problem of situating culture both
temporally and spatially, the impact of colonialism on African cultures, the validity of the
ethnological heritage in a discourse of affirmation of African culture, the status of pre-
colonial African cultures, whether it was possible to discuss aesthetics outside of history,
the question of the epistemology of the cultural inventory at heart of the Présence
Africaine project, in other words, the question of the relation to the past, but also the
desire to position oneself in relation to the present and naturally to the future.

In addition to publishing its own journal, Présence Africaine also published novels, short
stories, plays and essays by African artists and intellectuals, which are now part of the
canon of African knowledge production. From publishing such celebrated poets as Aimé
Césaire and Senghor to introducing new writers like Ousmane Sembène, Mongo Beti,
and others the organization had a major impact on the literature and the arts of the
continent. Classic essays such Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism or Cheikh Anta
Diop’s Nations nègres et culture, which acquired almost Bible-like status in the age of
decolonization, were all published by Présence Africaine.

In the field of the cinema, Présence Africaine played several roles. First as film producer,
when, having published a book on African art, Alioune Diop and his colleagues
commissioned Chris Marker and Alain Resnais to make a film on the subject. Out of this

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commission came a film entitled Les statues meurent aussi (1953), which was
immediately censored by French authorities, for daring to articulate an anti-colonial
position.
254

In addition to producing a film, Présence Africaine also organized film screenings. Thus,
they hosted a screening of René Vautier’s Afrique 50 and had a discussion with him on its
meaning and implications. Additionally, Présence Africaine offered publishing space for
some of the very first critical writings on African cinema, mainly by Paulin Soumanou
Vieyra who also attended their Congresses. Vieyra thus published his most important
writings in the journal Présence Africaine and two full-length books on African cinema
entitled respectively, Le Cinéma et l'Afrique and Le Cinéma africain. Tome I, Des
origines à 1973.
255

Here we see Présence Africaine nurturing African cinema intellectually/theoretically by
providing a context for global discussions on African culture and well as helping produce
a discourse on African cinema. Ousmane Sembène, the Elder of elders also published
most of his novels and short stories with Présence Africaine and it was at the publishing
house that he often met with Paulin Vieyra and exchanged ideas about the cinema in

254
Much and not enough seems to have been said about this film. We shall not operate a close textual
analysis of it here, choosing instead to write a BFI-style book length text on it, which would possibly
feature interviews by Resnais, Marker and people associated with Présence Africaine. In the spring of
2006, along with Steve Ungar, I had a conversation with the widow of Alioune Diop, Christiane Diop,
about the film. But we were unable to obtain exact details as to how the film was commissioned, what
specifically was asked of Resnais and Marker, what interactions did Présence Africaine have with the two
directors in the pre-production, production and post-production processes. It appears though that Présence
Africaine was not completely happy with the final product, something that also calls for more investigation.
255
In 2005, Présence Africaine devoted an entire issue to Paulin Soumanou Vieyra entitled Cinquante ans
de cinéma africain: Hommage à Paulin Soumanou Vieyra.

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Africa. It was possibly in that context that Sembène decided to move from writing to
cinematic practice in order to better reach his people, taking up in effect Présence
Africaine’s call regarding the responsibilities of artists and intellectuals in the context of
decolonization and independence.

Alioune Diop often reminisced about the fact that the MPLA (The Popular Movement for
the Liberation of Angola) was born at Présence Africaine with Mario de Andrade. As
history would have it, this cultural and political figure would marry Guadeloupean
filmmaker Sarah Maldoror who would later go on to direct Sambizanga (1972), one of
the classics of African cinema, along with becoming the only filmmaker to have made
documentary films about the three fathers of Negritude, two of whom were co-founders
of Présence Africaine, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas.

Finally, on the eve of the independence for the majority of African countries in 1960,
Présence Africaine held its Second Congress of Black Artists and Intellectuals in Rome.
On that occasion, the cinema was featured in several ways. Unlike the Paris conference
three years earlier, the organizers of the Rome conference allowed cameras to be present
and document the event.
256
Among those with their movie cameras was Paulin Soumanou
Vieyra, who directed a documentary entitled Présence Africaine à Rome (1959).

Yet the cinema was not simply in Rome to document the proceedings of this landmark
Congress. It also featured in the deliberations of the Commission on the Arts, which

256
It would be interesting to find out what remains of this footage with Italian television.

475
alongside the Commission on Literature, on the Human Sciences, and on Mathematical
and Technical Sciences proposed resolutions offering a road map for the respective
disciplines in the post-colonial era. The Commission on the Arts looked at painting,
sculpture, architecture, music, dance and the cinema and was pre-occupied with a desire
to think through “the spirit and general laws underpinning “Black plastic arts” (visual
arts). Seeking to study of the creative conditions of painters and sculptors from Africa
and its diaspora, it attempted to trace the sources of these artistic zones, chartering the
influences of African visual arts on European art and conversely the influence of Western
art on African art.

Regarding the cinema, the commission first acknowledged the role the cinema could play
“revitalizing African culture” contra the way in which it had been used as an “instrument
of propaganda and indoctrination often unfavorable to the self-respect and national pride
of African peoples” (“Résolution” 415-417). For the new Africa, the commission called
for a “constructive use of the cinema in the interest of African nationalism” Considering
the cinema not simply as a means of entertainment, they contended that its function was
to be a window through which a nation could look at the rest of the world” (“Résolution”
415-417).

Cognizant of the problems of the political economy of the cinema, they called for the
collaboration between African states in creating common cinema institutions with all
necessary equipment. The State had an important role to play in funding these regional

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institutions. The commission even devised a plan for individual and collective action.
Thus, each country would finance short educational (documentary?) films geared toward
its own interests. For “feature films with an international interests (of interest to the
whole continent), mutual contributions were called for. In framing the cinema this way,
they considered it a fundamental element in their Pan-African project. Indeed, they
thought that the cinema should contribute to the building of a United States of Africa.

The resolution was prescient in that it argued that these films “would be presented as
international films, and not as Guinean, Ghanaian… films but simply as African films.”
This part of the resolution is to some extent still very much relevant in 2009, fifty years
after its adoption. Many films today directed by Africans are presented at international
films festivals as African films even as they are accompanied by the director’s country of
origin and the various co-producing countries.

The commission also defined some of the topics that an independent African cinema
should deal with: the screen adaptation of the great moments of African history, the
African liberation struggle and of course “African cultural and artistic values.” It may be
argued that a significant number of African filmmakers, in the aftermath of
independence, made this their mission, not least of which Ousmane Sembène, Flora
Gomes, Souleymane Cissé, Med Hondo, and Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina among others.
In other ways, and in light of the complexity, richness, and variety of historical moments
evoked in the present thesis, one may pause a moment and, paraphrasing Aimé Césaire,

477
contend that, to a large extent, the work of African cinema, and thus of African
documentary, has just begun…

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CONCLUSION

This is the end of a long journey, which took us to the four corners of the African
continent and to several European countries in our move to strike a path for a history and
historiography of documentary in Africa. In many ways, this process involved developing
a methodology specific to the project. It may now be time to reflect on some of the major
findings of this dissertation along with some of their implications.

Indeed, this work has explored issues pertaining to debates in early and silent cinema, the
cinema of attractions, the question of authorship in early cinema, problems of
periodization and of a global history of African cinema, the question of the meaning of
the Lumière brothers’ work in Africa, the problem of the pioneering figures in African
cinema, the question of relationship between film history and colonial cinema, and the
status of theories of colonial cinema as part of general look at the theory of the cinema
among many others. Let us examine them in detail.

The chapter on the Lumière opens up the field of early cinema and of Lumière studies to
Africa as well as opens African cinema to those debates. Firstly, it contributes
significantly to the scholarship on the Lumière brothers, which from now will have to
take the perspective of Africa into account. This is quite significant as Lumière
scholarship has resonance in debates pertaining to the origins and evolution of both the
technology and the form of cinema. It often serves as the key reference point on the basis

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of which statements regarding the nature, function and features of the cinema are
articulated. In other words, it very much conditions many theoretical postures in various
areas of film studies. As a result, an intervention in the scholarship of the Lumière
brothers almost ipso facto becomes an intervention in those debates as well.

A few examples will suffice to illustrate this point. It is now a truism that the Lumière
brothers have often been equated with the birth of non-fiction/documentary. Many
scholars in an attempt to trace an archeology of the documentary have theorized these
early moments of cinema as moments of cinematic naïveté, so to speak. Thus, Bill
Nichols in his Introduction to Documentary argues that
Lumière films seemed to record everyday life as it happened. Shot without
adornment, or editorial rearrangement, they reveal the shimmering mystery of
events. They appear to reproduce the event and preserve the mystery. A note of
humility was in the air. The cinema was an instrument of extraordinary power. It
required no exaggeration or spectacle to win our admiration. (83-84)

One may first note the ambiguity of Nichols’s rhetoric in this quote. There seems to be at
least two things happening. One: the desire to create a skeptical discourse on
documentary, which requires the use of such qualifiers as “seems to record everyday life”
or “appear to reproduce the event.” Yet these rhetorical precautions appear skin-deep as
they are immediately followed by such assertions (without qualifiers this time) that the
“Lumière films were shot without adornment” and that they needed “no exaggeration,
editing or spectacle to win our admiration” (Nichols 84). This may be true of some of the
Lumière footage, but certainly not of the Lumière Africa corpus. We have looked
extensively in our study at the ways in which Alexandre Promio, the chief operator of the

480
Lumière, was deliberate about his shots, and how he and the operator who filmed the
Ashanti in Lyon were very much concerned with spectacle, and indeed meant their films
to be spectacular. The concern was not simply about recording the event but also about
how to record that event, indeed in some cases, how to stage that event in order to make it
look like a simple record. One needs only to remember the sequalization of the Pont de
Kasr-el-Nil [Kasr-El-Nil Bridge] films to realize that in addition to recording the event of
Egyptians crossing the bridge, Promio sought to create narrative continuity in camera by
shooting the different stages of the procession of people with their animals. In other
words, in-camera editing itself was involved. “Exaggeration” was also involved in the
contrived mise-en-scène of the Ashanti children struggling with an empty food bowl to
produce a spectacle of difference in order to “win our admiration” (sic).

It is possible to further complicate the cinematic naïveté argument of the Lumière by
considering the brothers’ photographic background. Indeed, when the Lumière invented
the Cinématographe in 1895, photography had been in existence for at least 70 years, if
we take to account the Nicephore Niepce invention of 1825. One wonders if it is possible
to imagine a process of transference of photographic “vocabulary” and “grammar” into
the cinema by the inventors and early users of the cinema. Indeed, we know that the two
brothers, along with Promio and many others, were all photographers. To what extent,
one may ask, was the cinema in its infancy in 1895, if films like L'arrivée d'un train à La
Ciotat or Alexandre Promio’s Rue Bab-Azoum shot in front of a public bath in Algiers,
display such mastery of composition? Could it be argued that as far as formal questions

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related to the spatial language of camera placement, to framing, composition, volumes
and even depth of field (foreground, middle ground, background), the cinema may have
already been grown up because of photographic-cinematic transference?

Another major debate that could be opened up here is a retrospective application of the
term “auteur” to Alexandre Promio. Indeed, if as Jean Claude Seguin argues, Promio was
responsible for at least half the entire Lumière production, is there not ground for looking
at his work as indeed perhaps that of (one of) the first auteur(s) in the history of the
cinema, who could be looked at non only discursively but also formally, thematically, in
relation to the evolution of his own cinematic language (as the inventor of traveling shot,
as an experimenter with in camera-editing), having shot in such various locations as the
United States, Spain, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt? Such an exploration would no doubt
make strange such statements by Bill Nichols as “what [the Lumière operators] shot
mattered more than how they shot it” or that “the voice of the filmmaker was silent…” or
even still that “the distinctive point of view of the director took second place” (86).
257

As argued in chapter one, the analysis of the Lumière also complicates the notion of
cinema of attractions put forth by Tom Gunning and Andre Gaudreault. Our analysis
brings forth a glaring absence, indeed to some extent “the elephant in the room’ as far the
question of the ethics of attractions is concerned. Nowhere in their discussion do the two
authors pause to examine the ethical implications of their concept. In their view, the
cinema of attraction is more related to shock value, the jolting aspect of modernity that

257
Indeed, to be an auteur is, by definition, to have a voice, a point of view, to be interested in the “how.”

482
these films provide. Yet we may contend, the regime of visibility of attractions is not
reducible to the arrival of trains, phantasmagoria and the like. Instead, it did also involve
the live exhibition of human beings from distant lands often side by side with animals, or
at least on the same continuum. In that sense, the Lumière Africa corpus both of the
Ashanti in Lyon and of Promio in North Africa could be said to participate in a regime of
attractions. Yet, one may wonder, what kind of “attractions” is it that puts human beings
in a zoo-like environment and have their fellows pay to look at them? To what extent
should a cinema engaging in such a regime be referred to as a cinema of “attractions?”
Could it not be called instead “the cinema of repulsion?” In other words, don’t we have a
cinema of repulsion and one of attractions side by side in the days of early cinema?

The concept of the cinema of attractions also (if not primarily) makes an argument
regarding the relationship between narrative and spectacle in early cinema, in a quasi
teleological approach with spectacle as an antecedent to narrative, indeed affirming the
primacy of spectacle over narrative. It seems that looking at the Lumière Africa corpus
may also be helpful in problematizing this argument. Indeed, Tom Gunning and
Gaudreault argue that the cinema of attractions was essentially one of monstration with
narrative as secondary. The cinema of attraction was exhibitionistic they add, not
voyeuristic. Yet, what the Lumière films in Lyon show us is that we have within the films
an exhibitionism (that is the monstration of Africans and others like animals, in what we
referred to as the menimal genre), that was always already a voyeuristic spectacle of
difference. Moreover, at the heart of the project of the presence and thus the filming of

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the Ashanti in Lyon was a narrative of racial hierarchization, with a mise-en-scène
dispositif that was very clear in terms of spatial demarcation of the positions of power
and powerlessness. In other words these films told the narrative of colonial domination as
they exhibited the bodies of Africans for the voyeuristic pleasure of early cinema
spectators. From this perspective, we could deduce that from the very early days of the
cinema, narrative was as consubstantial to the cinema as spectacle was. In other words,
there is not, at least taking the Lumière Africa corpus as our reference (these films were
shot in 1896, 1897 and 1903, i.e. they are part of the time frame of early cinema and the
cinema of attractions) a relationship of gradation and consecution between narrative and
spectacle but instead one of co-presence and mutual imbrication on equal terms at least in
the Lumière work in Africa. Thus perhaps between the two extremes of the debate, that
is, the classical narrative approach premised on the dominance of narrative and the
cinema of attractions relying on the predominance of spectacle, a median plane could
perhaps be found, that would give equal weight to narrative and spectacle, as is arguably
the case in the Lumière Africa corpus. One wonders thus, the extent to which this median
plane alternative might “worry” the problem of periodization, that is, the caesura between
early cinema and its aftermath?

This thesis also participates in debates on the very historiography of the cinema in Africa,
of African cinema. Indeed, unlike previous work which emphasized African agency in
the cinema as coterminous with the continent’s access to independence, our work,
through the practice of “reading [colonial cinema] against the grain” was able to rescue

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multiple forms of agency, which participate in pushing back the beginning of African
cinema to the very beginning of the cinema itself. Indeed, we have demonstrated that Mr.
Oko, the Ghanaian teacher who accompanied the Ashanti in Lyon, could be considered as
one of the very first film directors to come from Africa and indeed one of the very first
film directors in the world.

Also and without closing the discussion, this work revisits the debate on the pioneers of
African cinema. It discovers such figures as Mr. Oko and William Wilberforce
Kajiumbula Nadiope who had so far not been acknowledged in the history of African
cinema and thus of documentary. It also examines the work of other pioneers such as
Félix Mesguich, Albert Samama Chikly and Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. Another important
figure who deserves to be cited is Sudanese Gadallah Gubara who graduated from the
University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles in the 1950s.
258

Still regarding the historiography of African cinema, this work demonstrates that
producing a general history of the cinema on the continent requires a passage through the
65-some years of colonialism that preceded the accession of many countries to
independence (taking 1960 as the dividing line). This opens up the space for studying to
not only film production, but also film spectatorship, which was contemporary with that
of the rest of the world. Questions of acting, scoring, screenwriting, producing (in its
various forms) can all potentially be discussed since the beginning of the cinema with
Africa as a point of departure.

258
Gadallah Gubara passed away in 2008. His work is also yet to be fully recovered and rediscovered.

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This thesis also engages with debates pertaining to the relationship between colonialism
and cinema and the status of the colonial cinema in film studies. For the discipline of film
studies generally, it demonstrates that the colonial is a fertile ground for theorization and
historicization, which may help expand the vocabulary of the discipline. It also rejects the
idea of colonial cinema as an outside of the discipline. The epistemological distribution
of space in our discipline today to a large extent considers that there is cinema on the one
hand and colonial cinema on the other, documentary on the one hand and colonial
documentary on the other.

The methodology adopted in this thesis has sought to underscore the implications of the
study of the colonial cinema for the larger discipline of film studies. Indeed in relation to
a cartography of theories of cinema, one must now include Gérard Madieu’s theory of the
colonial cinema elaborated as early as 1916 or those of the Bantu Educational Kinema
Experiment or the Colonial Film Unit who created the category of the “illiterate African
peasant” for a production of knowledge about the cinema, with a specific aesthetics, a
specific technique of filming, of editing, a specific ideological a priori, indeed an entire
coherent (internally that is), global approach of cinema.

Finally, this thesis is also a conversation with the general history of the African continent,
indeed constitutes, in the field of cinema, perhaps the first comprehensive linkage with
those debates. This made it possible to examine the history of the continent in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries and analyze some of the consequences of its study for

486
the cinema/documentary. Among those is the possibility to attempt an archeology of
documentary within the positivity of African history itself, as well as in its relation to
Europe in what we termed the Age of Catastrophe, which manifested itself through the
infamous Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 and which has durably structured the lives of
Africans since.

Looking at the general history of the continent also allowed us to evaluate the cinema, its
history and theory through the prism of History itself. Indeed, the question of the
structuring absence of much of African history in the cinema in the age of colonialism
appears glaring after our study. In that cinema, there is no room for the Age of
Revolution, nor for the moment of anti-colonial resistance, nor for the many intellectual,
artistic and political attempts to end colonialism. In that sense, institutions like BEKE and
the Colonial Film Unit, through their practices and theories of cinema, or governmental
decrees like the Laval Decree participated in the cultural logic, or rather the cinematic
logic of colonialism, in their attempt to make eternal its totalitarian regime of vision.

This takes us back to the very beginning of this entire dissertation, to one of the initial
driving questions of this dissertation, i.e. whether or not documentary carried within
itself, its features, its rhetoric, its practice, the episteme of colonialism. Should we thus
surmise that the end is often at the beginning?

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FILMOGRAPHY

An African in London. Dir. George Pearson. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain,
1941.
African Troops on Active Service. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain, 1942.
Afrique 50. Dir. René Vautier. France, 1950.
Afrique, je te plumerai. Dir. Jean-Marie Téno. Cameroon, 1992.
Afrique Occidentale Française: Bas Dahomey et Bas Togo. Prod. Pathé Frères. France,
undated.
Afrique-sur-Seine. Dir. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. France, 1955.
Agricultural Education at Bukalasa, Uganda. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema
Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Ain-el-Ghazal. Dir. Albert Samama Chikly. Tunisia, 1924.
A la rencontre du soleil. Dir. J.-K. Raymond-Millet. France, 1935.
Alger la blanche. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1930.
Alger le Cap. Dir. Serge de Poligny. France, 1953.
Alger son port et son commerce. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1930.
Anaesthesia. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
L’âme hindoue. Dir. Alfred Chaumel. France, 1927.
Animals from Kenya for London Zoo. Colonial Cinemagazine no. 8. Prod. Colonial Film
Unit. Great Britain, 1947.
L’Appel du silence. Dir. Léon Poirier. France, 1936.
Arrivée à la revue d’Alger de la délégation anglaise. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod.
Lumière. France, 1903.
Arrivée de M. le Président sur le terrain de la revue à Alger. Dir. Alexandre Promio.
Prod. Lumière. France, 1903.
L'arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat. Dir. Auguste and Louis Lumière. France, 1896.
L’arroseur arrosé. Dir. Louis Lumière. France, 1895.
Artificial Insemination of Cattle. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great
Britain, 1935.
Au Cameroun. Dir. Alfred Chaumel. France, date unknown.
Au pays des Dogons. Dir. Marcel Griaule. France, 1941.
Au pays des mages noirs. Dir. Jean Rouch. France, 1949.
Autopolis. Dir. Léon Poirier. France, 1934.
Baignade de nègres. Prod. Lumière. France, 1896.
Barrage du Nil. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Basuto Troops on Active Service. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain, 1952.
The Benguela Railway A Milestone in African Civilization. Prod. British Instructional.
Great Britain, 1928.
Ben-Hur. Dir. William Wyler. USA, 1959.
The Birth of a Nation. Dir. D. W. Griffith. USA, 1915.
Black Cotton. Prod. British Instructional, Great Britain, 1927.

488
Blazing the Trail. Prod. British Instructional, Great Britain, 1926.
Le Bled. Dir. Jean Renoir. France, 1929.
Boer Attack on a Red Cross Outpost. Alternate title: Shelling the Red Cross. Prod.
Mitchell and Kenyon. UK, 1900?.
Brazza ou l’épopée du Congo. Dir. Léon Poirier. France, 1940.
Britain Can Take It. Dir. Humphrey Jennings and Harry Watt. Great Britain, 1940.
The British Army. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain, 1940.
British Soldiers. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain, 1940.
Caïn, aventure des mers exotiques. Dir. Léon Poirier. France, 1930.
Camp de Thiaroye. Dir. Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow. Senegal, 1987.
Un campement de tirailleurs tunisiens près du front. France, 1918.
Cape to Cairo. Great Britain, 1930.
La caravane de la lumière. Dir. Marie-Anne Colson-Malleville. France, 1948.
Cattle and Disease. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Le char des dieux. Dir. Alfred Chaumel. France, 1946.
Chasse à la panthère. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1909.
Chasse à l’hippopotame sur le Nil Bleu. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1908.
Le chemin de Madagascar. Dir. J.-K. Raymond-Millet. France, 1935.
Chasse en AEF. Dir. Albert Mahuzier. France, 1947.
The Chief. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Chronicle of a Summer. Dir. Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch. France, 1960.
Le cinéma en Afrique. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1911.
Coffee Marketing. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Coffee under Banana Shade. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain.
1935.
The Colonial Misunderstanding. Dir. Jean-Marie Téno. Cameroon, 2005.
Congo-Méditerranée. Dir. Charles Fasquelle. France, 1949.
Constantine. Prod. Éclair. France, 1921.
Constantine. Dir. René Moreau. France, 1922.
Continent noir. Dir. Alfred Chaumel. France, 1952.
Co-Operatives. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain. 1935.
Le cortège. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1903.
Cortège arabe. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1896.
Cows. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain. 1935.
La croisière noire. Dir. Léon Poirier. France. 1926.
Croisière noire de la santé. Dir. René Gosset. France, 1951.
Crossing the Great Sahara. Prod. The Angus Buchanan Expedition. Great Britain, 1924.
Danse de femmes. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Danse de jeunes filles. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Danse du féticheur. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Danse du sabre I. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Danse du sabre II. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Danse égyptienne. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1896.
Dans le Sud-Oranais. Prod. Éclair. France, 1921?.
Dans l’ombre des ailes. Dir. Jean d’Esme. France, 1938.

489
Débarquement de M. le President à Alger. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière.
France, 1903.
Défilé de la tribu. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Défilé des chameaux avec les bassours. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France,
1903.
Descente de la grande pyramide d’Egypte. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière.
France, 1897.
Discussion de Monsieur Janssen et de Monsieur Lagrange. Dir. Louis Lumière. France,
1895.
Drifters. Dir. John Grierson. Great Britain, 1929.
Early Training of African Troops. Dir. Arthur Champion. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great
Britain, 1942.
Ecole de négrillons. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Egyptian Bullock-Pump Drawing Water. Dir. Henry Short. Prod. Paul’s Animatograph
Works. UK, 1897.
Egyptian Street Scene. UK, 1897?.
Empire Trade. Prod. Conservative and Unionist Films Association (Britain Under
National Government Series). Great Britain, 1934.
En Afrique Centrale: Fachoda. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1910.
En Afrique Occidentale. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1907.
Entrée du Cinématographe. Dir. Louis Lumière. France, 1896.
A Farce. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Farm Implements. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Les fêtes du centenaire de la conquête de l’Algérie: Voyage de Monsieur Doumergue.
Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1930.
Les feux ne s’éteignent pas. Dir. Edmond Séchan. France, 1949.
Fight Tuberculosis in the Home. Prod. Colonial Film Unit, 1946.
Les fils du soleil. Dir. René Le Somptier. France, 1924.
The First Year. Prod. British Instructional. Great Britain, 1948.
Food and Health. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
France - Congo sur un cargo. Dir. Charles Lemaire and J. K. Raymond-Millet. France,
1930.
Français, voici votre empire. Dir. Philippe Este. France, 1942.
La France est un empire. Dir. Gaston Chelle, Hervé Missir, Georges Barrois, Raymond
Mejat, André Persin. France, 1939.
Gold Coast Police Band in London. Colonial Cinemagazine no. 9. Prod. Colonial Film
Unit. Great Britain, 1947.
La grande caravane. Dir. Jean d’Esme. France, 1936.
La grande case. Dir. Jacques Dupont. France, 1949.
Grande chasse d’Afrique. Dir. Albert Mahuzier. France, 1947.
La grande inconnue. Dir. Jean d’Esme. France, 1939.
Gumu. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
The Hare and the Leopard. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain,
1935.
Healthy Babies. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.

490
Here’s The Gold Coast. Prod. Central Office of Information. Great Britain, 1947.
Hides. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
High Yields from Selected Plants. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great
Britain, 1935.
Hookworm. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
How the West Was Won. Dir. John Ford, Henry Hathaway, George Marshall, Richard
Thorpe. USA, 1962.
Improved Agriculture. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Infant Malaria. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Instantanés malgaches. Dir. Léon Poirier. France, 1929.
Instruments of the Orchestra. Dir. Muir Mathieson. Great Britain, 1946.
Jaguar. Dir. Jean Rouch. France, 1967.
The Jazz Singer. Dir. Alan Crosland. USA, 1927.
Kasr-el-Nil. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Kenya Building Roads. Colonial Cinemagazine no. 8. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great
Britain, 1947.
Labor Conditions at Geita Mine. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great
Britain, 1935.
Life Story of the Tawny Owl. Dir. Mary Field. Prod. British Instructional. Great Britain,
1936.
The Lion King. Dir. Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff. USA, 1994.
London: Nigerians Compete with Empire Athletes. Colonial Cinemagazine 20. Prod.
Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain, 1948.
Lumumba: Death of a Prophet. Dir. Raoul Peck. Haiti, 1992.
Les magiciens noirs. Dir. Jean Rouch. France, 1949.
Les maîtres fous. Dir. Jean Rouch. France, 1955.
La maladie du sommeil. Dir. Alfred Chaumel. France, 1931.
La maladie du sommeil au Cameroun. Dir. Alfred Chaumel. France, 1930.
Man with a Movie Camera. Dir. Dziga Vertov. USSR, 1929.
La marche vers le soleil. Dir. René Le Somptier. France, 1928.
Marketing Export Native Maize. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great
Britain, 1935.
Mauvaises Herbes. Dir. Auguste Lumière. France, 1896.
Milk from Native Cows. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain,
1935.
M. Le Président au Palais d’Hiver. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1903.
Moi un noir. Dir. Jean Rouch. France, 1958.
More Milk. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Mouramoure. Dir. Alfred Chaumel. France, 1947.
Mr. English at Home. Dir. Gordon Hales. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain, 1940.
Msukuma Farmer. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Nairobi. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain, 1950.
Nanook of the North. Dir. Robert J. Flaherty. USA, 1922.
Une nation est née. Dir. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. Senegal, 1961.

491
Native Veterinary Assistants. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great
Britain, 1935.
Nègres Ashantis: danse d'hommes. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Nègres Ashantis: leçon de danse. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Nègres dansant dans la rue. Dir. Charles Moisson. Prod. Lumière. France, 1896.
Nigerians Compete with Empire Athletes. Colonial Cinemagazine no. 20. Prod. Colonial
Film Unit. Great Britain, 1948.
Night and Fog. Dir. Alain Resnais. France, 1955.
L’oeuvre civilisatrice de la France au Maroc. France, 1920?.
L’oeuvre médicale française en A.E.F. et au Cameroun. Dir. Jacques Schiltz. France,
1949.
The Oil Palm of Nigeria. Prod. British Instructional. Great Britain, 1930.
Les oiseaux d’Afrique et leurs ennemis. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1911.
Okoume. Dir. Jacques Dupont. France, 1951.
Opening of Takoradi Harbor. Prod. British Instructional, Great Britain, 1928.
Our Indian Soldiers. Prod. Colonial Film Unit, Great Britain, 1942.
Palaver. Dir. Geoffrey Barkas. Great Britain, 1926.
Palmes. Dir. Jacques Dupont. France, 1949.
Panorama du port d’Alger. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Panorama en Guinée (pris à l’avant d’un train). Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1906.
Peasant Holdings. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Petit à petit. Dir. Jean Rouch. France, 1971.
Le petit blanc à la camera rouge. Dir. Richard Hamon. France, 2006.
Photographe. Dir. Louis Lumière. France, 1895.
Place de la citadelle. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Place de l’Opéra. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Place du Gouvernement [Algiers]. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1896.
Place du Gouvernement [Cairo]. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Place Mehemet Ali. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Place Soliman Pacha. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
La plus grande France. Dir. Lea William de Lane. France, 1939.
Pont de Kasr-el-Nil. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Post Office Savings Bank. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain,
1935.
Présence Africaine à Rome. Dir. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. Senegal, 1959.
Preserving Eggs. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
A Primitive Man’s Career to Civilization. Dir. Cherry Kearton. Great Britain, 1911.
Products of Kenya - Sugar and Coffee. Prod. British Instructional, Great Britain, 1930.
Progress. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Progress in the Colonies. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain, 1941.
Promenade au Soudan. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1909.
Promenade en AEF. Dir. J. K. Raymond-Millet. France, 1931.
Les pyramides (vue générale). Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Rassemblement populaire en Afrique. France, 1946?.
La remise des décorations. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1903.

492
Repas de bébé. Dir. Louis Lumière. Prod. Lumière. France, 1895.
Repas de négrillon I. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Repas de négrillon II. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Roosevelt in Africa. Dir. Cherry Kearton. Great Britain, 1910.
The Royal Air Force. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain, 1942?.
Rue Ataba-el-Khadra. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Rue Bab-Azoum. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1896.
Rue de France. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1896.
Rue El-Halfaouine. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Rue et porte Bab-El-Khadra. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Rue Mascara. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1896.
Rue Sayeda-Zeinab. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Rue Sharia El-Nahassine. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Rue Sidi-Ben-Arous. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Rue Sidi-Bou-Medine. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1896.
Sambizanga. Dir. Sarah Maldoror. Guadeloupe, 1972.
San Pietro. Dir. John Huston. USA, 1945.
Sarraounia. Dir. Med Hondo. Mauritania, 1986.
Savage South Africa: Attack and Repulse. Prod. Warwick Trading Company. Great
Britain, 1899.
Les sentinelles de l’empire. Dir. Jean d’Esme. France, 1938.
Soil Erosion. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Soil Erosion at Machakos. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain,
1935.
La sortie des usines Lumière. Dir. Louis Lumière. France, 1895.
Sortie du pont de Kasr-el-Nil (chameaux). Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière.
France, 1897.
Sortie du pont Kasr-el-Nil (ânes). Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Sous les masques noirs. Dir. Marcel Griaule. France, 1938.
Southern Rhodesia - Is This Your Country? Prod. British Instructional, Great Britain,
1948.
Les statues meurent aussi. Dir. Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. France, 1953.
Stromboli. Dir. Roberto Rossellini. Italy, 1950.
La Sultane de l’Amour. Dir. Charles Burguet and René Le Somptier. France, 1918.
Takoradi Harbor and Railway Terminus. Prod. British Instructional, Great Britain, 1929.
Tanga Travel. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Tax. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Tchad, paradis des animaux. Dir. Albert Mahuzier. France, 1951.
Tea. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
The Ten Commandments. Dir. Cecil B. DeMille. USA, 1956.
These Are Paratroops. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain, 1941.
This is an Anti-Aircraft Gun. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain, 1941.
Les tirailleurs. Prod. Lumière. France, 1900.
Les tirailleurs sénégalais en Alsace. France, 1918.
Tobacco Growing. Prod. British Instructional, Great Britain, 1949.

493
Toilette d’un négrillon, I. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Toilette d’un négrillon, II. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Uganda Boy Scouts. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Up Country with the Settler. Prod. British Instructional, Great Britain, 1930.
Vacances au pays. Dir. Jean-Marie Téno. Cameroon, 2000.
Visions de la Grande Ile. Dir. Charles Barrois. France, circa 1930.
Voila nous! Dir. Dir. Jacques Dupont. France, 1951.
Voyage en Afrique du Nord. Dir. J.-K. Raymond-Millet. France, 1930.
Voyage mauve. Dir. J.-K. Raymond-Millet. France, 1932.
Voyages et grandes chasses en Afrique. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1909.
Vues d’Afrique: Au Congo. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1906.
War Came to Kenya. Dir. Guy Johnson. Prod. Kenya Information Office. Great Britain,
1941.
Wend Kuuni. Dir. Gaston Kaboré. Burkina Faso, 1982.
West Africa Calling. Prod. British Instructional for Conservative and Union Central
Office. Great Britain, 1928.
West Africa Was There. Made by British Movietone News. Prod. Central Office of
Information. Great Britain, 1945.
Women Fetching Water from the Nile. UK, 1897?.
Yeelen. Dir. Souleymane Cissé. Mali, 1987.
Yaaba. Dir. Idrissa Ouedraogo. Burkina Faso, 1989.
Zohra. Dir. Albert Samama Chikly. France, 1922.

494
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Brändle, Rea. “La monstration de l’Autre en Suisse: plaidoyer pour des micro-études.”
Bancel et al. 221-226.

Brazza ou l’épopée du Congo. Dir. Léon Poirier. France, 1940. Film.

Britain Can Take It. Dir. Humphrey Jennings and Harry Watt. Great Britain, 1940. Film.

The British Army. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain, 1940. Film.

British Film Institute. “Boer War.” 13 Nov. 2007. Web.
.

British Soldiers. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain, 1940. Film.

Busch, Annett and Max Annas, eds. Ousmane Sembène: Interviews. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2008. Print.

511
Caïn, aventure des mers exotiques. Dir. Léon Poirier. France, 1930. Film.

Campbell, John. Negro-mania: Being an Examination of the Falsely Assumed Equality of
the Various Races of Men. Philadelphia, Campbell & Power, 1851. Print.

Camp de Thiaroye. Dir. Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow. Senegal, 1987. Film.

Un campement de tirailleurs tunisiens près du front. France, 1918. Film.

Cape to Cairo. Great Britain, 1930. Film.

La caravane de la lumière. Dir. Marie-Anne Colson-Malleville. France, 1948. Film.

Cattle and Disease. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Film.

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. Print.

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. 2
nd
ed. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2000. Print.

“C.F.U. Films at the University of Paris.” Colonial Cinema 4.1 (1947): 87-90. Print.

Le char des dieux. Dir. Alfred Chaumel. France, 1946. Film.

Chasse à la panthère. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1909. Film.

Chasse à l’hippopotame sur le Nil Bleu. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1908. Film.

Le chemin de Madagascar. Dir. J.-K. Raymond-Millet. France, 1935. Film.

Chasse en AEF. Dir. Albert Mahuzier. France, 1947. Film.

The Chief. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935. Film.

Chronicle of a Summer. Dir. Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch. France, 1960. Film.

Le cinéma en Afrique. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1911. Film.

Cinquante ans de cinéma africain. Hommage à Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. Présence
Africaine 170 (2004). Print.

512
Cissoko, Sékéné Mody. “L’Afrique Noire à la veille de la Conférence de Berlin.”
Ministère de la culture et des arts du Congo, Société africaine de culture and Université
Marien-Ngouabi (Brazzaville). Centenaire de la Conférence de Berlin: 1884-1885: actes
du colloque international (Brazzaville, 26 mars-5 avril 1985). 75-86.

Clarke, Peter B. West Africans at War, 1914-18, 1939-45: Colonial Propaganda and its
Cultural Aftermath. London: Ethnographica, 1986. Print.

Coffee Marketing. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Film.

Coffee under Banana Shade. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain.
1935. Film.

Cohen-Séat, Gilbert. Essai sur les principes d'une philosophie du cinéma. Paris: Presses
universitaires de France, 1946. Print.

The Colonial Film Unit. Colonial Cinema 1.1 (1942). Print.

---. “Editorial.” Colonial Cinema 3.1 (1945). Print.

---. “The Colonial Film Unit.” Colonial Cinema 5.2 (1947): 27-31. Print.

The Colonial Misunderstanding. Dir. Jean-Marie Téno. Cameroon, 2005. Film.

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.

Congo-Méditerranée. Dir. Charles Fasquelle. France, 1949. Film.

“The Congo River.” 15 Oct. 2007. Web.
.

Constantine. Prod. Éclair. France, 1921. Film.

Constantine. Dir. René Moreau. France, 1922. Film.

Constantine, Stephen. “‘Bringing the Empire Alive’: The Empire Marketing Board and
Imperial Propaganda, 1926-33.” John MacKenzie Imperialism 192-231.

Continent noir. Dir. Alfred Chaumel. France, 1952. Film.

513
Convents, Guido. A la recherche des images oubliées: Préhistoire du cinéma en Afrique
(1897-1918). Bruxelles: Organisation catholique internationale du cinéma et de
l'audiovisuel, 1986. Print.

Co-Operatives. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain. 1935. Film.

Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine. L’Afrique et les Africains au XIXe siècle: mutations,
révolutions, crises. Paris: Armand Colin, 1999. Print.

---. “Colonisation ou impérialisme: la politique africaine de la France entre les deux
guerres.” Le Mouvement social. 107 (1979): 51-76. Print.

Le cortège. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1903. Film.

Cortège arabe. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1896. Film.

Cows. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain. 1935. Film.

La croisière noire. Dir. Léon Poirier. France. 1926. Film.

Croisière noire de la santé. Dir. René Gosset. France, 1951. Film.

Crossing the Great Sahara. Prod. The Angus Buchanan Expedition. Great Britain, 1924.
Film.

Dachs, Anthony J. “Missionary Imperialism - The Case of Bechuanaland.” The Journal
of African History 13.4 (1972): 647-658. Print.

Daly, M. W. Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898-1934. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print.

Danse de femmes. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Danse de jeunes filles. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Danse du féticheur. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Danse du sabre I. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Danse du sabre II. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Danse égyptienne. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1896. Film.

Dans le Sud-Oranais. Prod. Éclair. France, 1921?. Film.

514
Dans l’ombre des ailes. Dir. Jean d’Esme. France, 1938. Film.

Davis, J. Merle. Foreword. The African and the Cinema: An Account of the Work of the
Bantu Educational Cinema Experiment during the period March 1935 to May 1937. By
Leslie Alan Notcutt and George Chitty Latham. London: Edinburgh House Press, 1937.
7-21. Print.

Débarquement de M. le President à Alger. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière.
France, 1903. Film.

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. 9-15.

Défilé de la tribu. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Défilé des chameaux avec les bassours. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France,
1903. Film.

Délégué à la paix, aux droits de l’Homme et à la démocratie, O.I.F. Le mouvement
panafricaniste au vingtième siècle: Recueil de textes. Paris: Organisation internationale
de la Francophonie, 2007. Print.

De L’Estoile, Benoît. “Rationalizing Colonial Domination? Anthropology and Native
Policy in French-Ruled Africa.” De L’Estoile, Neiburg and Sigaud 30-57.

De L’Estoile, Benoît, Federico Neiburg, and Lygia Sigaud, eds. Empires, Nations, and
Natives: Anthropology and State-Making. Durham; London: Duke University Press,
2005. Print.

Descente de la grande pyramide d’Egypte. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière.
France, 1897. Film.

Deschamps, Hubert. Les Méthodes et les doctrines coloniales de la France. Paris: A.
Colin, 1953. Print.

Deuxième Congrès des Ecrivains et Artistes Noirs (Rome: 26 mars - 1
er
avril 1959) -
Tome 1: L’Unité des cultures négro-africaines. Special Issue. Présence Africaine 24-25
(1959). Print.

Dickson, W. K.-L. The Biograph in Battle: Its Story in the South African War Related
with Personal Experiences. Facsim. reprint ed. Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England: Flicks
Books; Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995. Print.

515
Diop, Cheikh Anta. The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. New York: L.
Hill, 1974. Print.

---. “Apport de l’Afrique à la civilisation universelle.” Ministère de la culture et des arts
du Congo, Société africaine de culture and Université Marien-Ngouabi (Brazzaville).
Centenaire de la Conférence de Berlin: 1884-1885: actes du colloque international
(Brazzaville, 26 mars-5 avril 1985). 41-71.

---. Nations nègres et culture. Paris: Éditions africaines, 1954. Print.

Discussion de Monsieur Janssen et de Monsieur Lagrange. Dir. Louis Lumière. France,
1895. Film.

Drifters. Dir. John Grierson. Great Britain, 1929. Film.

Du Bois, W. E. B. “The African Roots of War.” The Atlantic Monthly 115.5 (1915): 707-
714. Print.

---. The Negro. 1915. Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization Ltd., 1975. Print.

Duval, Eugène-Jean. L’épopée des tirailleurs sénégalais. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005. Print.

Early Training of African Troops. Dir. Arthur Champion. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great
Britain, 1942. Film.

Easen, Sarah. “British Instructional Films.” Aitken 146-147.

Ecole de négrillons. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Egyptian Bullock-Pump Drawing Water. Dir. Henry Short. Prod. Paul’s Animatograph
Works. UK, 1897. Film.

Egyptian Street Scene. UK, 1897?. Film.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952. Print.

Empire Trade. Prod. Conservative and Unionist Films Association (Britain Under
National Government Series). Great Britain, 1934. Film.

En Afrique Centrale: Fachoda. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1910. Film.

En Afrique Occidentale. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1907. Film.

Entrée du Cinématographe. Dir. Louis Lumière. France, 1896. Film.

516
Fanon, Franz. Black Skins, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York:
Grove Press, 1967. Print.

---. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Print.

Fabri, Friedrich. Bedarf Deutschland der Kolonien? Eine politisch-ökonomische
Betrachtung. Gotha: F. A. Perthes, 1879. Print.

A Farce. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935. Film.

Farm Implements. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Film.

Feld, Steven, ed. and trans. Ciné-Ethnography: Jean Rouch. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2003. Print.

Les Fêtes du Centenaire de la Conquête de l’Algérie: Voyage de Monsieur Doumergue.
Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1930. Film.

Les feux ne s’éteignent pas. Dir. Edmond Séchan. France, 1949. Film.

Fight Tuberculosis in the Home. Prod. Colonial Film Unit, 1946. Film.

The Film in Colonial Development: A Report of a Conference. London: The British Film
Institute, 1948. Print.

Les Fils du Soleil. Dir. René Le Somptier. France, 1924. Film.

Firmin, Anténor. The Equality of the Human Races: (Positivist Anthropology). New
York: Garland Pub, 2000. Print.

The First Year. Prod. British Instructional. Great Britain, 1948. Film.

Fodéba, Keita et son ensemble guinéen. Aube africaine: Poème mandingue: 4 parties. 2
discs, 78 rpm. Le Chant du Monde, 1955. LP.

Food and Health. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Film.

France - Congo sur un cargo. Dir. Charles Lemaire and J. K. Raymond-Millet. France,
1930. Film.

Français, voici votre empire. Dir. Philippe Este. France, 1942. Film.

517
La France est un empire. Dir. Gaston Chelle, Hervé Missir, Georges Barrois, Raymond
Mejat, André Persin. France, 1939. Film.

Garvey, Amy Jacques, ed. Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, or, Africa for the
Africans. London: Cass, 1967. Print.

Gaudreault, André, Catherine Russell, and Pierre Véronneau, eds. The Cinema: A New
Technology for the Twentieth Century. Lausanne: Editions Payot Lausanne, 2004. Print.

“General Act of the Berlin Conference on West Africa, 26 February 1885.” 30 Sep. 2007.
Web. .

Gobineau, Arthur de. Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines. Paris: Firmin-Didot frères,
1853-1855. Print.

Gold Coast Police Band in London. Colonial Cinemagazine no. 9. Prod. Colonial Film
Unit. Great Britain, 1947. Film.

La grande caravane. Dir. Jean d’Esme. France, 1936. Film.

La grande case. Dir. Jacques Dupont. France, 1949. Film.

Grande chasse d’Afrique. Dir. Albert Mahuzier. France, 1947. Film.

La grande inconnue. Dir. Jean d’Esme. France, 1939. Film.

Gran, Peter. Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760-1840. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 1998. Print.

Gueye, M’Baye and Albert Adu Boahen. “Initiatives et résistances africaines en Afrique
occidentale de 1880 à 1914.” Boahen L’Afrique 137-170.

Gumu. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935. Film.

Gunning, Tom. “Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions and Wonder:
Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic Apparatus.” Gaudreault, Russell and
Véronneau 31-44.

Hardy, Forsyth, ed. Grierson on Documentary. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1966. Print.

The Hare and the Leopard. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain,
1935. Film.

518
Havinden, Michael A. and David Meredith. Colonialism and Development: Britain and
Its Tropical Colonies (1860-1960). London; New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.

Healthy Babies. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935. Film.

Here’s The Gold Coast. Prod. Central Office of Information. Great Britain, 1947. Film.

Hides. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935. Film.

High Yields from Selected Plants. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great
Britain, 1935. Film.

Hookworm. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935. Film.

How the West Was Won. Dir. John Ford, Henry Hathaway, George Marshall, Richard
Thorpe. USA, 1962. Film.

Ibrahim, Hassan Ahmed. “Initiatives et résistances africaines en Afrique du Nord-Est."
Boahen L’Afrique 87-110.

Improved Agriculture. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Film.

Infant Malaria. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935. Film.

Instantanés malgaches. Dir. Léon Poirier. France, 1929. Film.

Institut français d'Afrique noire, Centre du Cameroun. Histoire et coutumes des Bamum,
rédigées sous la direction du Sultan Njoya. Trans. Henri Martin. Dakar: Institut français
d'Afrique noire, 1952. Print.

Institut Lumière. “Les projections privées du Cinématographe.” 7 Aug. 2007. Web.
.

Instruments of the Orchestra. Dir. Muir Mathieson. Great Britain, 1946. Film.

Isaacman, Allen and Jan Vansina. “Initiatives et résistances africaines en Afrique centrale
de 1880 à 1914." Boahen L’Afrique 191-216.

Jaguar. Dir. Jean Rouch. France, 1967. Film.

Jaikumar, Priya. “More Than Morality: The Indian Cinematograph Committee Interviews
(1927).” The Moving Image 3.1 (2003): 82-109. Print.

James, C. L. R. “Intervening in Abyssinia.” New Leader, October 1935. Print.

519
The Jazz Singer. Dir. Alan Crosland. USA, 1927. Film.

Johnson, Hildegard Binder. “The Location of Christian Missions in Africa.”
Geographical Review 57.2 (1967): 168-202. Print.

Kamian, Bakari. Des tranchées de Verdun à l'église Saint-Bernard: 80 000 combattants
maliens au secours de la France, 1914-18 et 1939-45. Paris: Éd. Karthala, 2001. Print.

Kaminsky, Arnold P. “Colonial Office.” Olson and Shadle, 317-318.

Kasr-el-Nil. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Kenya Building Roads. Colonial Cinemagazine no. 8. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great
Britain, 1947. Film.

Knox, Robert. The Races of Men: A Fragment. London, H. Renshaw, 1850. Print.

Labor Conditions at Geita Mine. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great
Britain, 1935. Film.

La Harpe, J.-F. Abrégé de l’Histoire générale des voyages. Paris: Ménard et Desenne
Fils, 1825. Print.

Lavigerie, Charles. 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. Alger: A. Jourdan, 1875. Print.

Lebovics, Herman. La vraie France: les enjeux de l’identité culturelle, 1900-1945. Paris:
Belin, 1995. Print.

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.

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monde. Paris: J. Susse, 1945. Print.

Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. La mentalité primitive. Paris: F. Alcan, 1922. Print.

---. Primitive Mentality. Trans. Lilian A. Clare. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.;
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1923. Print.

Life Story of the Tawny Owl. Dir. Mary Field. Prod. British Instructional. Great Britain,
1936. Film.

520
The Lion King. Dir. Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff. USA, 1994. Film.

Lisette, George. Le combat du Rassemblement Démocratique Africain. Paris: Présence
Africaine, 1983. Print.

Livingstone, David and Charles Livingstone. Exploration du Zambèse et de ses affluents
et découverte des lacs Chiroua et Nyassa: 1858-1864. Trans. Henriette Loreau. Paris: L.
Hachette, 1866. Print.

Loftus, Maria. “Entretien avec René Vautier.” Cinquante ans de cinéma africain.
Hommage à Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. Présence Africaine 170 (2004): 55-62.

London: Nigerians Compete with Empire Athletes. Colonial Cinemagazine 20. Prod.
Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain, 1948. Film.

Lord Lugard, F. “Colonial Administration.” Economica. 41 (1933): 248-263. Print.

Lumumba: Death of a Prophet. Dir. Raoul Peck. Haiti, 1992. Film.

Mackenzie, Jean Kenyon. African Adventurers. West Medford, MA: The Central
Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions, 1917. Print.

MacKenzie, John M., ed. Imperialism and Popular Culture. Manchester: University of
Manchester Press, 1989. Print.

---. Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Print.

Madieu, Gérard. Le cinéma colonisateur. Alger: Typographie Adolphe Jourdan, 1916.
Print.

Les magiciens noirs. Dir. Jean Rouch. France, 1949. Film.

Les maîtres fous. Dir. Jean Rouch. France, 1955. Film.

La maladie du sommeil. Dir. Alfred Chaumel. France, 1931. Film.

La maladie du sommeil au Cameroun. Dir. Alfred Chaumel. France, 1930. Film.

Mansour, Guillemette. Samama Chikly: un Tunisien à la rencontre du XXème siècle.
Tunis: Simpact Editions, 2000. Print.

Man with a Movie Camera. Dir. Dziga Vertov. USSR, 1929. Film.

La marche vers le soleil. Dir. René Le Somptier. France, 1928. Film.

521
Marketing Export Native Maize. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great
Britain, 1935. Film.

Mauvaises Herbes. Dir. Auguste Lumière. France, 1896. Film.

Mazenot, Georges. Sur le passé de l’Afrique Noire. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005. Print.

Mazrui, Ali A. The Africans: A Triple Heritage. Boston: Little, Brown, 1986. Print.

M’Bokolo, Elikia. “Absence et présence: à propos de l’économique à la Conférence de
Berlin.” Ministère de la culture et des arts du Congo, Société africaine de culture and
Université Marien-Ngouabi (Brazzaville). Centenaire de la Conférence de Berlin: 1884-
1885: actes du colloque international (Brazzaville, 26 mars-5 avril 1985). 137-150.

---, ed. Afrique Noire: Histoire et civilisations. Du XIXe siècle à nos jours. 2
nd
ed. Paris:
Hatier; AUF, 2004. Print.

M’Bokolo, Elikia and Philippe Sainteny, eds. Afrique: une histoire sonore, 1960-2000. 7
CDs. Radio France Internationale; INA, 2002. CD box set.

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Brace and Company, 1922. Print.

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sociologie de la colonisation. Alger: S.N.E.D., 1982. Print.

Mesguich, Félix. Tours de manivelle, souvenirs d'un chasseur d'images. Paris: Editions
Bernard Grasset, 1933. Print.

Meyer, Jean, Jean Tarrade, Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer and Jacques Thobie. Histoire de la
France coloniale. 1. Des origines à 1914. Paris: A. Colin, 1991. Print.

Miège, Jean-Louis, ed. Paroles d’action / Lyautey. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1995.
Print.

Milk from Native Cows. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain,
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522
Ministère de la culture et des arts du Congo, Société africaine de culture and Université
Marien-Ngouabi (Brazzaville). Centenaire de la Conférence de Berlin: 1884-1885: actes
du colloque international (Brazzaville, 26 mars-5 avril 1985). Dakar; Paris: Présence
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M. Le Président au Palais d’Hiver. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1903.
Film.

“The Mobile Cinema Van is A New Weapon in Mass Education.” Colonial Cinema 7.1
(1949): 9-16. Print.

Moi un noir. Dir. Jean Rouch. France, 1958. Film.

More Milk. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935. Film.

Mouramoure. Dir. Alfred Chaumel. France, 1947. Film.

Mr. English at Home. Dir. Gordon Hales. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain, 1940.
Film.

Msukuma Farmer. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
Film.

Murphy, Robert, ed. The British Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute, 1997.
Print.

Mutibwa, Phares M. and Faranirina V. Esoavelomandroso. “Madagascar, 1800-1880.”
Ajayi 453-488.

Mwanzi, Henry A. “Initiatives et résistances africaines en Afrique Orientale de 1880 à
1914." Boahen L’Afrique 171-190.

Nairobi. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain, 1950. Film.

Nanook of the North. Dir. Robert J. Flaherty. USA, 1922. Film.

Une nation est née. Dir. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. Senegal, 1961. Film.

Native Veterinary Assistants. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great
Britain, 1935. Film.

Nègres Ashantis: danse d'hommes. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Nègres Ashantis: leçon de danse. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

523
Nègres dansant dans la rue. Dir. Charles Moisson. Prod. Lumière. France, 1896. Film.

Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
2001. Print.

Nigerians Compete with Empire Athletes. Colonial Cinemagazine no. 20. Prod. Colonial
Film Unit. Great Britain, 1948. Film.

Night and Fog. Dir. Alain Resnais. France, 1955. Film.

“1931-2006. 75 ans après, regards sur l’Exposition coloniale de 1931.” Paris: Mairie du
12e arrondissement, 2006. Print.

Nkrumah, Kwame. Africa Must Unite. London: Panaf Books, 1963. Print.

---. Consciencism; Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization and Development with
Particular Reference to the African Revolution. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964.
Print.

---. Ghana; the autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. New York: Nelson, 1957. Print.

Notcutt, Leslie Alan and George Chitty Latham. The African and the Cinema: An
Account of the Work of the Bantu Educational Cinema Experiment during the period
March 1935 to May 1937. London: Edinburgh House Press, 1937. Print.

Nott, Josiah Clark. Indigenous races of the earth. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.;
London: Tru ̈bner & Co., 1857. Print.

Nott, Josiah Clark and George R. Gliddon. Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological
Researches Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of
Races, and upon their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History.
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854. Print.

Odunton, G. B. “One Step Ahead.” Colonial Cinema 8.2 (1950): 29-32. Print.

L’oeuvre civilisatrice de la France au Maroc. France, 1920?. Film.

L’oeuvre médicale française en A.E.F. et au Cameroun. Dir. Jacques Schiltz. France,
1949. Film.

The Oil Palm of Nigeria. Prod. British Instructional. Great Britain, 1930. Film.

Les oiseaux d’Afrique et leurs ennemis. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1911. Film.

Okoume. Dir. Jacques Dupont. France, 1951. Film.

524
Olson, James S. and Robert Shadle, eds. Historical Dictionary of the British Empire.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Print.

Opening of Takoradi Harbor. Prod. British Instructional, Great Britain, 1928. Film.

Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie. “Introduction.” Délégué à la paix, aux
droits de l’Homme et à la démocratie, O.I.F. Le mouvement panafricaniste au vingtième
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Our Indian Soldiers. Prod. Colonial Film Unit, Great Britain, 1942. Film.

Padmore, George. Africa and World Peace. 2
nd
ed. London: F. Cass, 1972. Print.

---, ed. History of the Pan-African Congress: Colonial and Coloured Unity, A
Programme of Action. London: The Hammersmith Bookshop, 1947. Print.

Palaver. Dir. Geoffrey Barkas. Great Britain, 1926. Film.

Palmes. Dir. Jacques Dupont. France, 1949. Film.

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Panorama du port d’Alger. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Panorama en Guinée (pris à l’avant d’un train). Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1906. Film.

Park, Mungo. Travels in the Interior of Africa. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black,
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Peasant Holdings. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
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Petit à petit. Dir. Jean Rouch. France, 1971. Film.

Le petit blanc à la camera rouge. Dir. Richard Hamon. France, 2006. Film.

Photographe. Dir. Louis Lumière. France, 1895. Film.

Place de la citadelle. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Place de l’Opéra. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

525
Place du Gouvernement [Algiers]. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1896.
Film.

Place du Gouvernement [Cairo]. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Film.

Place Mehemet Ali. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Place Soliman Pacha. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

La plus grande France. Dir. Lea William de Lane. France, 1939. Film.

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idées, 1907-1952. Tours: Imprimerie de Mame, 1953. Print.

Pont de Kasr-el-Nil. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Post Office Savings Bank. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain,
1935. Film.

Pouquet, Jean. L’Afrique Occidentale Française. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1954. Print.

Le Premier Congrès International des Ecrivains et Artistes Noirs (Paris: Sorbonne 19-22
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Présence Africaine à Rome. Dir. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. Senegal, 1959. Film.

Preserving Eggs. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935.
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A Primitive Man’s Career to Civilization. Dir. Cherry Kearton. Great Britain, 1911. Film.

Products of Kenya - Sugar and Coffee. Prod. British Instructional, Great Britain, 1930.
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Progress. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935. Film.

Progress in the Colonies. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain, 1941. Film.

Promenade au Soudan. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1909. Film.

526
Promenade en AEF. Dir. J. K. Raymond-Millet. France, 1931. Film.

Proyart, Liévin-Bonaventure. Histoire de Loango, Kakongo, et autres royaumes
d'Afrique; Rédigée d'après les mémoires des préfets apostoliques de la Mission
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Les pyramides (vue générale). Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
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Boahen L’Afrique 67-86.

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La remise des décorations. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1903. Film.

Repas de bébé. Dir. Louis Lumière. Prod. Lumière. France, 1895. Film.

Repas de négrillon I. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Repas de négrillon II. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

“Résolution de la commission des arts.” Deuxième Congrès des Ecrivains et Artistes
Noirs (Rome: 26 mars - 1
er
avril 1959) - Tome 1: L’Unité des cultures négro-africaines.
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Louis Lumière. Paris: Editions Cahiers du cinéma, 1994. Print.

Roberts, Andrew D. “Africa on Film to 1940.” History in Africa. 14 (1987): 189-227.
Print.

Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture
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Roosevelt in Africa. Dir. Cherry Kearton. Great Britain, 1910. Film.

Rouch, Jean. “The Situation and Tendencies of the Cinema in Africa.” Feld 47-86. Print.

The Royal Air Force. Prod. Colonial Film Unit. Great Britain, 1942?. Film.

527
Rue Ataba-el-Khadra. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Rue Bab-Azoum. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1896. Film.

Rue de France. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1896. Film.

Rue El-Halfaouine. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Rue et porte Bab-El-Khadra. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Rue Mascara. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1896. Film.

Rue Sayeda-Zeinab. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Rue Sharia El-Nahassine. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Rue Sidi-Ben-Arous. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897. Film.

Rue Sidi-Bou-Medine. Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1896. Film.

Sadoul, Georges. Georges Sadoul. Le cinéma français, 1890-1962. Paris: Flammarion,
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---. Louis Lumière. Paris: Seghers, 1964. Print.

Said, Edward W. L’orientalisme: L’Orient créé par l’Occident. Paris: Editions du Seuil,
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Sambizanga. Dir. Sarah Maldoror. Guadeloupe, 1972. Film.

San Pietro. Dir. John Huston. USA, 1945. Film.

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Savage South Africa: Attack and Repulse. Prod. Warwick Trading Company. Great
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“The School of Instruction, Accra, Gold Coast.” Colonial Cinema 6.3 (1948): 78-80.
Print.

528
Sedra, Paul. “Imagining an Imperial Race: Egyptology in the Service of Empire.”
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Soil Erosion. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935. Film.

Soil Erosion at Machakos. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain,
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La sortie des usines Lumière. Dir. Louis Lumière. France, 1895. Film.

Sortie du pont de Kasr-el-Nil (chameaux). Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière.
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Sortie du pont Kasr-el-Nil (ânes). Dir. Alexandre Promio. Prod. Lumière. France, 1897.
Film.

Sous les masques noirs. Dir. Marcel Griaule. France, 1938. Film.

Southern Rhodesia - Is This Your Country? Prod. British Instructional, Great Britain,
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529
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Tea. Prod. Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Great Britain, 1935. Film.

The Ten Commandments. Dir. Cecil B. DeMille. USA, 1956. Film.

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530
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Voyage mauve. Dir. J.-K. Raymond-Millet. France, 1932. Film.

531
Voyages et grandes chasses en Afrique. Prod. Pathé Frères. France, 1909. Film.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Sanogo, Aboubakar Sidiki (author)

Core Title The history of documentary in Africa -- The Colonial era

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 12/05/2011

Defense Date 05/05/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Africa,Berlin Conference,British colonial cinema,Colonialism,documentary,early cinema,French colonial cinema,History,Lumiere brothers,nineteenth century,OAI-PMH Harvest,Pan-Africanism,Présence Africaine,World War I and II

Place Name Africa (continents)

Language English

Advisor Kinder, Marsha (committee chair), Jaikumar, Priya (committee member), Norindr, Panivong (committee member), Renov, Michael (committee member)

Creator Email aboubakar_sanogo@carleton.ca,sanogo@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2786

Unique identifier UC1150732

Identifier etd-Sanogo-2933 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-304371 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2786 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Sanogo-2933.pdf

Dmrecord 304371

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Sanogo, Aboubakar Sidiki

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email uscdl@usc.edu

Abstract (if available)

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.