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African cinema has traversed a remarkable arc. It evolved from British colonial messaging to globally celebrated art, thanks in large part to pioneers like Senegal’s Ousmane Sembène, whose journeys rewrote the narrative for African storytelling on film.

African cinemas originated as a colonial teaching tool. In the 1930s and ’40s, colonial administrations in East Africa launched educational mobile cinemas like the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment in Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), and Nyasaland (Malawi). These silent films on hygiene or agriculture, funded by the Carnegie Corporation and colonial governments, were explicitly designed to mold behaviors in colonized communities. Similarly, in 1926 Nigeria, British director Geoffrey Barkas shot Palaver, a silent feature using Nigerian extras—but its narrative glorified colonial rule. These early productions imposed foreign narratives rather than conveying African realities.

Everything changed with Ousmane Sembène’s revolutionary pivot. Born in 1923, a working-class dockworker, self-taught novelist, and Marxist activist, he resolved to “speak to people… about problems that concern us all” through film. After training in Moscow in 1962, he released Borom Sarret in 1963—the first sub-Saharan African film made by an African. His 1966 feature Black Girl won France’s Prix Jean Vigo and became the foundational work of post-colonial African cinema. Sembène insisted on using Wolof and local languages, rejecting Western norms of storytelling.

Sembène’s films from the 1970s—Xala, Ceddo, Emitaï—used satire, spiritual symbolism, and political commentary as social critique to analyze corruption, cultural conflict, and the legacies of colonialism. His 1988 Camp de Thiaroye, about the massacre of Senegalese soldiers by French troops after WWII, won Venice’s Grand Jury Prize yet remained banned in France for a decade. Sembène used “cinema as night school” to transform film into a tool for liberation and education.

Across francophone Africa emerged passionate auteurs like Mauritania-born Med Hondo, whose 1970 debut Soleil Ô and 1979’s West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty interrogated colonialism and diaspora identity. Meanwhile, in North Africa and Kenya, experimental and political short films flourished.

In recent decades, global nostalgia for African narratives has surged. Nollywood in Nigeria evolved into the world’s second-largest film industry, albeit criticized for shifting focus from social messages to formulaic entertainment. Yet festivals like FESPACO and the rise of critically acclaimed films like Angola’s Sambizanga are reshaping perceptions, highlighting art that “reimagines a continent”.

African cinema’s transformation from colonial screen propaganda to potent postcolonial expression is evidence of its tenacity and cultural reclamation. The foundation was established by pioneers such as Sembène, and contemporary African filmmakers continue the tradition by fusing regional languages, lived realities, and aspirations for a global audience.

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