ABSTRACT
The moving image arrived on the African continent not long after its invention in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, with Egypt on the continent’s northernmost point, and South Africa at its southern tip, boasting the first and second oldest African industries respectively. While South Africa, due to its long history of Black oppression and White domination, has a more complex history, women were active in Egyptian cinema, in front of and behind the camera, from the early twentieth century onwards. Cinema in North Africa can be divided into two, or even three, regions that influence one another to a certain extent. First, there is Egypt, the centre of Arab filmmaking with a Golden Age in the 1940s and 1950s, but also characterised in North Africa as the industry against which Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian filmmakers made their films. Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain in 1980, after a brutal liberation struggle.
