Video booms and the manifestations of “first” cinema in anglophone Africa

Until the 1960s, almost all the films shown in Africa were of Euro-American or Asian origin. During the pioneering decade of African cinema, the aspirations of the pioneers coincided with those of the 1960s tricontinental revolutionary movements ¹ and ideologies which were channeled toward decolonization and liberation. In the arts, liberationist literatures, often pervaded with an orthodox Marxist philosophical rhetoric, impacted on the evolution of revolutionary cinema which thus developed as an antithetical structure to counter dominant cinemas, particularly Hollywood. Operating from geographically divergent zones, the cinema in the Third World – including, of course, the third or fourth world within the first world – the documentary film practice of Latin America and the engaged or the questioning cinema of Africa adopted denunciative cinematic structures. Although different techniques were applied to render the narrative structures culturally and politically specific, the unifying factor for achieving this goal, in its varying practices, was the creation of cinematic art based on the philosophy that film and politics are inextricably interwoven. As I shall show, this position is diametrically opposed to what is happening in the video-film world, which I have termed the manifestation of a “first” cinema in anglophone Africa.