Table Of ContentANU
Black + White
Black and White in Colour
Black and White in Colour
African History on Screen
edited by Vivian Bickford-Smith
and Richard Mendelsohn
JAMES CURREY
Oxford
OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
Athens
DOUBLE STOREY
Cape Town
Published
in the UK by
James Currey Ltd
73 Botley Road
Oxford OX2 OBS
www.jamescurrey.co.uk
and in southern Africa by
Double Storey Books
a division of Juta & Co. Ltd
Mercury Crescent
Wetton, Cape Town
© 2006 the editors and contributors
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available on request
ISBN 10: 1-84701-522-0 (James Currey paper)
ISBN 13: 978-1-84701-522-8 (James Currey paper)
ISBN 10: 1-77013-057-8 (Double Storey)
ISBN 13: 978-1-77013-111-9 (Double Storey)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
utilised in any form and by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, without permission in writing from
the publisher.
Printed by Paarl Print, Paarl, South Africa
Contents
List of Contributors
vil
Introduction Vivian Bickford-Smith and Richard Mendelsohn
1 History as cultural redemption in Gaston Kabore’s 11
precolonial-era films
Mahir Saul
ie Beyond ‘history’: two films of the deep Mande past 28
Ralph A. Austen
Tradition and resistance in Ousmane Sembene’s films 4]
Emitai and Ceddo
Robert Baum
The transatlantic slave trade in cinema 59
Robert Harms
‘What are we?’: Proteus and the problematising of history 82
Nigel Worden
6 The public lives of historical films: the case of 97
Zulu and Zulu Dawn
Carolyn Hamilton and Litheko Modisane
Breaker Morant: an African war through 120
an Australian lens
Richard Mendelsohn
From Khartoum to Kufrah: filmic narratives of 136
conquest and resistance
Shamil Jeppie
Cheap if not always cheerful: French West Africa in the 148
world wars in Black and White in Colour and Le Camp
de Thiaroye
Bill Nasson
10 Whites in Africa: Kenya’s colonists in the films 167
Out of Africa, Nowhere in Africa and White Mischief
Nigel Penn
11 Beholding the colonial past in Claire Denis’s Chocolat 185
Ruth Watson
12 The Battle of Algiers: between fiction, memory and history 203
Patrick Harries
13 Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: history or hagiography? 223
David Moore
14 Flame and the historiography of armed struggle 240
in Zimbabwe
Teresa Barnes
15 Picturing apartheid: with a particular focus on 256
‘Hollywood’ histories of the 1970s
Vivian Bickford-Smith
16 Hotel Rwanda: too much heroism, too little Zio
history — or horror?
Mohamed Adhikari
17 Looking the beast in the (fictional) eye: 300
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission on film
David Philips
Endnotes ono
Index 372
Contributors
Mohamed Adhikari is an Associate Professor in the Historical Studies Department
at the University of Cape Town and author of Not White Enough, Not Black
Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community. His current
interests include the history of genocide in Africa.
Ralph A. Austen is Professor of African History and co-chair of the Committee
on African and African American Studies at the University of Chicago. He is
the editor of In Search of Sunjata: The Mande Epic as History, Literature and
Performance and author (with Jonathan Derrick) of Middlemen of the Cameroon
Rivers: The Duala and their Hinterland, His many publications include African
Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency.
Teresa Barnes, an Associate Professor of History at the University of the Western
Cape in Cape Town, has published widely on gender and labour history in
colonial Zimbabwe. Her current research interests include nationalism and
education in Zimbabwe, and gendered intellectual trajectories and institutional
histories of universities in Africa.
Robert M. Baum is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies
and co-ordinator of the African Studies Initiative at the University of Missouri,
Columbia. He is author of Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in
Precolonial Senegambia, which won ap rize in 2000 from the American Academy
of Religion for the best first book in the history of religions.
Professor Vivian Bickford-Smith works in the Historical Studies Department at
the University of Cape Town. He has published extensively on South African his-
tory, including several books on the history of Cape Town. Together with Richard
Mendelsohn, he has pioneered teaching and research in film and history at the
University of Cape Town.
Professor Carolyn Hamilton, an historical anthropologist, leads the Constitution
of Public Intellectual Life Research Project at the University of the Witwatersrand
in Johannesburg. She has published widely on the production of history, and on
archives, historiography and Zulu history.
vii
Robert Harms is Professor of African History at Yale University. He is the author
of two books on the slave trade: River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central
Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, and The Diligent: A Voyage
through the Worlds of the Slave Trade. He is currently working on a book about
early colonialism in the Congo River Basin.
Patrick Harries is Professor of African History at the University of Basel,
Switzerland. He is the author of Work, Culture and Identity: Migrant Labourers in
Mozambique and South Africa, c.1860-1910. His new book on Swiss missionaries
and systems of knowledge in southeast Africa, Butterflies, Barbarians and Swiss
Missionaries, is in press.
Shamil Jeppie, a graduate of Princeton University, teaches African and Middle
East history in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape
Town. He has worked on both South African social history and on the history of
Sudanic Africa.
Richard Mendelsohn is currently the head of the Department of Historical Studies
at the University of Cape Town. He has published extensively on South African
Jewish history, and together with Vivian Bickford-Smith has pioneered teaching
and research in film and history in South Africa.
Litheko Modisane is a doctoral fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand
in the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Project. He is an accomplished
actor, director and scriptwriter. His research interests span three major areas:
black intellectual history, South African film and literature.
David Moore teaches economic history, development studies and politics at the
University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. He writes on Zimbabwean politics and
history, development theory and on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His
edited book The World Bank: Poverty, Development and Global Hegemony has
recently been published.
Bill Nasson is currently Professor of History at the University of Cape Town
and is a former editor of the Journal of African History. His publications include
Abraham Esau’s War, The South African War 1899-1902, and Britannia’s Empire.
Nigel Penn was born in Kenya. He is an Associate Professor in the Historical
Studies Department at the University of Cape Town and the author of Rogues,
Rebels and Runaways: Eighteenth Century Cape Characters and The Forgotten
Frontier: Colonists and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the 18th
Century.
Vili
