Introduction

After more than half a century of cinematic productions, it is striking to realize that documentaries have been and remain at the center of African cinema. Whether one considers colonial documentaries that flooded the continent, those produced and shown in various cinema halls in newly independent countries, or the hundreds produced daily on the continent with the benefits of technological transformations, there is today ample evidence that Africa has been exceptionally well documented, probably better than fictional cinema ever did.

Yet over the decades in film scholarship, there seems to have been a silent and commonly admitted equation between “African cinema” and “African feature films.” If one considers only books, it would not be an overstatement to contend that apart from a few cinema-studies researchers such as Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike (1994), Manthia Diawara (1992), Henry François Imbert (2007), Sada Niang (2014), and Olivier Barlet (2012) whose respective critiques include a few paragraphs and rarely a chapter on documentary film in Africa, very little attention has been paid to this genre, henceforth literally abandoned. Yet the history of documentary is intimately related not only to that of cinema itself, but also to that of African cinema. In this special issue of Critical Interventions, the first academic issue ever to be entirely dedicated to African documentary cinema, our aim is not only to underscore the significance of the genre, but also to highlight its political and social orientation and its aesthetic innovations in order to illustrate its interconnectedness with African cinematic productions from its very inception.

Celluloid image making came to the African continent through the documentary genre. It is the first such semiotic construction to have penetrated the African continent, and it has remained central to African film creations since then. A mere 10-year window separates the Berlin conference (1884) from the first Lumière Brothers film (1895). And once L'Arrivée d'un train à la Ciotat (1895) was produced, this documentary film was rushed to various parts of the colonial world, Africa among the most prominent ones, to dazzle local audiences and to fan the flames of racial and cultural superiority of many a colonial administrator (Malkumus & Armes, 1991). In subsequent years, the colonial archive of images was and remains populated by a multitude of documentaries aiming to help masses of French or British audiences discover the African continent, the bravery of their compatriots during the Boer War, or the accomplishments of the colonial enterprise after 1900. Clearly, the documentary genre was a major tool for lobbyists and apologists of the colonial enterprise in Europe, as witnessed by the efforts of the African Geographic Company, the London Zoological Society, the Urban Bioscope Company, and various popular magazine such as the African World Weekly. In France, the state became much involved in the production of documentaries promoting French civilization and the French colonial enterprise, among schoolchildren in particular.

In all these cases, the creation and production of documentaries located themselves in Africa, among African peoples—indeed, presented and represented African peoples without any significant input from them. Fauna and flora, spaces and customs prevalent in the continent were featured as a background for celebrating the European genius in sciences, in social engineering, and in everyday living. In the colonial archive, Africa was made to assume the negative role against which Western civilization—indeed, French national identity—was defined, appreciated, and promoted in Europe and around the world.

Thus when, in 1973, Africans interested in fictional filmmaking met in Algiers to attempt to streamline the production of films on the continent, rebutting the reductive (imaged and otherwise) discourses the continent and its peoples had been subjected to in the colonial archives, it became a major concern. In spite of its prescriptivist nature, the Algiers Charter (see Cham & Bakari, 1996; Tcheuyap, 2011) that came out of the various workshops read not so much as an invitation to creative incentives but, more importantly, as a set of directives for effective anticolonial rhetoric, using at times, images similar to those found in the colonial archives. It follows that from the very beginning, fictional films engaged directly with documentary filmmaking of years past. It also follows that throughout the African continent and the French former colonies more so than in others, the documentary cinematic inheritance left by the former colonial powers had a significant impact on the emerging cinemas of the 1960s and beyond. It is therefore only fitting, historically as well as scholarly significant, that Critical Interventions dedicate a special issue to this central, yet often neglected, facet of African visual culture.

The diversely sourced birth of such a visual culture is the subject of Vincent Bouchard's “The Nonfiction Film Production at the Origins of Francophone West African Cinema.” How does one become a (documentary) filmmaker in Africa (today)? A program such as AfricaDoc that funds the training of young Africans in documentary cinema may be considered, in Jean-Marie Teno's opinion (Martin & Moorman, 2015), a continuation of the colonial cultural project. Teno argued that this project shapes African imagination. Yet technology has now made film practice much more accessible. Bouchard's rich and informative contribution shows that the documentary genre should, if anything, be credited with acting as a training ground for all the major filmmakers of the 1960s. As it uncovers the institutional hurdles facing the budding filmmakers, Bouchard's article also documents the ways filmmakers in West African Francophone countries “used various tactics to adapt the diverse cultural, educational, and audio-visual projects—financed by the newly former colonial power (France) or by international institutions (UNESCO)—to their goal of creating movies” (Bouchard, 2017, p. 214)

Sada Niang's “Fiction and Documentary African Films: Narrative and Stylistic Affinities” builds on this impact to argue that documentary film practice has been instrumental in the stylistic and ideological positioning of African filmmakers since the 1960s. It is telling that African feature films as well as literatures often have been considered anthropological documents, not really representations of matters relating to the continent. Niang's analysis comes to confirm what most theorists claim, that is, the often unclear boundary between fiction and documentary and their often overlooked interconnectedness.

Taking this idea as a point of departure, Sheila Petty's article explores the cinematic rendition of the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco. Petty argues that The Turtles’ Song, a Moroccan Revolution/Le Chant des Tortues, une révolution Marocaine (2013) by the Moroccan documentary filmmaker Jawad Rhalib “gives voice” through cinematic expression to those who have been silenced by history and politics. Much like many contemporary documentary films, Rhalib's film is a hybrid creation blending the interactive with the performative, the experiential with the historical. The film weaves the emotional into the factual, and consequently challenges and invites the viewer's involvement in what turns out to be a performance. In fact, much as The Turtles’ Song is a documentary, it also is a work of a creative imagination, as much an unearthing of marginalized histories as a fictional recreation of events past, as much an informative piece as an object of desire. Petty's conclusion emphasizes the ultimate didacticism of the film, but one could also argue that The Turtles’ Song blurs the frontiers between documentary and fictional genres. It is, in fact, through its location in this interstitial zone that the film renews its expressive and aesthetic modes.

In the history of African cultural productions, there is one category that, similar to those to whom The Turtle's Song “gives voice,” as Petty puts it, have often been either missed or underrepresented: African women. Often less educated, they often published novels and directed movies after men. Thanks to technological transformations, women now challenge their male counterparts in the field of cultural production. More importantly, in their effort to challenge oppression (male, female, social, political), women may resort to unconventional strategies, one of which is nakedness. In “The Cinematic Language of Naked Protest,” Naminata Diabaté examines a set of documentaries that explore nakedness and nudity as a form of resistance deployed by women subjected to extreme oppression. The language of disruption is not only verbal and military, but also unconventionally and defiantly sexual. By “punishing” viewers with “shocking” nudity, the films analyzed by Diabaté show how “limit texts” can be an effective way of combining form and content to effectively subvert oppressive social norms. That is clearly a form of renewal, a departure from conventional and prudish African documentaries where nudity is often a taboo.

Paula Callus analyzes other forms of documentary transformations, focusing specifically on animation, a fast-growing genre in East Africa. Her contribution explores re-mediations of nonfiction through an examination of animated and interactive documentary. It proposes that while these processes and methods are not conventionally aligned with documentary practice in a customary sense, they offer aesthetic strategies that allow artists and filmmakers to consider their position reflexively as authors, curators, and participants in the narratives that they seek out to explore. Callus's contribution finds its antecedent in the daring innovations of the late Moustapha Alassane and points to the highly stylized animation artistry of filmmakers such as Celia Sawadogo. To be sure, linguists and theoreticians of style have long questioned the iron-clad separation between form and content.

Whereas Callus's contribution shows what form means and the ways in which it may be strategized to accommodate the staging of the filmmaker or greater involvement of audiences in the narrative, Justin Izzo's “Anxiety as Cinematic Sensation: History and Form in African Documentary Film” fuses form and content into a unique category circumscribed by meaningfulness. Izzo contends that documentaries “code, configure, and transcribe a range of affective possibilities that both emerge from and respond to social and aesthetic forms.” Hence, the affective rendition of historical experiences, particularly those tinged with anxiety, frustration, and unfulfilled expectations predetermine the staging of the filmmaker in contemporary African documentaries.

Finally, both Suzanne Crosta and Doris Posch explore and highlight the relevance and sophistication of political documentary in African cinema. In her analysis of Moubarack Idriss Nour's feature documentary, Le Tchad entre histoire et espoir (2014) and Mahamet-Saleh Haroun's Hissein Habré: Une tragédie tchadienne (2016), Crosta discusses the strategies both filmmakers use to record, explore, and investigate Chadian history, in particular contemporary political events, engaging in such topics as the violent struggles for social and political transformation, the violation and defense of human rights, and alternative visions for the future. Arguably, both filmmakers share a desire to participate either as a voice for their national history (Nour) or as an advocate for social justice and reparation of survivors and relatives of victims of human rights violations (Haroun). Significantly, political documentary cinema in Tchad reflects on political activism from distinct perspectives, using different resources (archival and found footage, television news, testimonials, among others) and approaches (e.g., varying degrees of directorial authority, selective focus, critical distance or close-up views produced by the camera). Clearly, Crosta's corpus focuses on the political and contemporary documentary, offering insights into the stories of Tchadian political leaders or into the testimonies of survivors’ haunted past and struggles for empowerment. So, too, does Doris Posch, whose analysis of Rama Thiaw's The Revolution Won't Be Televised (2016) resonates with diasporic overtones. Moreover, Posch examines the modalities of the “documentation” of a recent crucial moment in the Senegalese people's quest from total freedom in a context where, as is often the case, the “Global North” gives little attention, if any, to the struggles of the “wretched of the earth.” Her contribution pays special attention to the importance of popular culture as a catalyst of social transformation.

Transformation and innovation are undoubtedly the main features of most documentary filmmaking. Our foray into African documentary filmmaking practices has shown its commitment to political, social, and cultural transformation, to giving voice and/or agency to those muted or rendered invisible by dominant discourses and varying forms of oppression. With this first study focusing specifically on African documentary cinema, we have also attempted to draw attention to the innovative filmic techniques and strategies used by our filmmakers to encourage audiences to think and reflect on the personal stories and collective histories they are staging and sharing with their viewers. In a context where “the machinery of entertainment” (Nichols, 2016) threatens to standardize and normalize culture, contemporary African documentaries tend to position themselves as a unique opportunity to make African experience known in various venues. This issue of Critical Interventions has attempted to bring together several scholars from various backgrounds. Essays also address (which is very rare in available scholarship) documentaries from various geographical locations and linguistic spaces, hence breaking some artificial boundaries. In any case, we have only scratched the surface, and there is still a lot to discuss in the field of African documentary, and we believe this issue is an excellent step in a much-needed direction.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Suzanne Crosta

Suzanne Crosta ([email protected]) is professor of Francophone literatures and cinemas at McMaster University. She has written extensively on issues of representation, mobility, identity, narration, and nation in African and Caribbean diasporic literatures and screen media. Author of several monographs, she has contributed chapters to more than 20 collections of essays and books and the same number of peer reviewed articles in her these fields. Her current research focuses on African documentaries, Sino-African documentaries and films, as well as rhetorical strategies for analyzing aesthetic cultural practices in word literatures written in French.

Sada Niang

Sada Niang ([email protected]) graduated from the Universities of Paris X-Nanterre (France), York University (Canada), and the University of Toronto (Canada). He is the co-author of a three-volume textbook introducing African literature in English to African ESL students (Elsewhere in Africa, 1978), coeditor of African Continuities (1990), editor of Litterature et cinema en Afrique francophone (1996), author of Djibril Diop Mambety: un cineaste a contrecourant (2002), and author of Nationalist African Cinema: Legacy and Transformations (2014). With Alexie Tcheuyap (2001) and Samba Gadjigo (2009), he edited two issues of Presence Francophone. His other publications have appeared in numerous collections of essays, in Research in African Literatures, The Dalhousie Review, Notre Libraire, and Etudes Francophones. Sada Niang teaches and researches on African/Caribbean literatures and cinemas. Niang is Professor of French at the University of Victoria in Canada.

Alexie Tcheuyap

Alexie Tcheuyap ([email protected]) is Professor and Chair of the Department of French, University of Toronto. He is a leading scholar of African literature, media and cinema. Among his major publications are De l'écrit à l'écran (University of Ottawa P, 2005), Postnationalist African Cinemas (Manchester University P, 2011) and Autoritarisme, presse et violence au Cameroun, 2014).