ABSTRACT
African cinema, insofar as it generally seeks exchanges between art and life, and has affinities with introspection and social critiques, has been an “instrumentalist” cinema in very distinct ways. Rather than blissful escapes from reality, African cinema, right from its inception, has favored critical engagements with it. Africans appropriated cinema as a cultural form with incisive features and expressive verve for social and political analysis. Hence, the screen becomes a ruminative site where, through their films’ narratives, “issues of the day” and broader discourses are critically examined and worked through. This predilection has involved the search for forms of representation that consolidate political activism and cultural expression. It has also involved struggles for self-definition, positioning cinema in relation to the complex and shifting dynamics of society and establishing critical grammars of representation to articulate these dynamics (see, for instance, Malkmus and Armes, 1991; Diawara, 1992; Ukadike, 1995).
