ABSTRACT
Objectification of the Black female body is a perennial issue for African women and female African filmmakers, who critique colonialist ideologies that eroticised and exoticised the female African body. The “desiring machine” and its view of the Black female body is still perpetuated in film, advertising and visual media world-wide. A lot of the scholarship, activism and much of the filmmaking about African women’s bodies is the result of a reaction against Westernised or Eurocentric conceptions of, and insistence on, beauty and health. Indeed, beauty is usually seen as a reflection of the condition the body is in, and its overall health. The body as a tool in the development of a subject and that subject’s agency is a less concrete and more socio-philosophical concept. Both Maki’la and High Fantasy prompt people to consider the physical, psychological, philosophical and ideological construction of the Black female body in particular.
