Questioning African Cinema: Conversations With Filmmakers

344 Pages·2002·1.54 MB·English

by  Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike

QUESTIONING AFRICAN CINEMA
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University of Minnesota Press / Minneapolis London
QUESTIONING AFRICAN CINEMA
c o n v e r s a t i o n s w i t h f i l m m a k e r s
Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike
Foreword by Teshome H. Gabriel
Copyright 2002by N. Frank Ukadike
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint the following. The interview
with Chief Eddie Ugbomah originally appeared as “Towards an African Cinema: Chief Eddie Ugbomah, Nigeria’s
Leading Independent Director Discusses Film, Finances, and the Obsolescence of the Jungle-Melodrama,”
Transition63(1994):150–63; copyright 1994W. E. B. Du Bois Institute and Duke University Press; reprinted with
permission. The interview with Flora Gomes originally appeared as “In Guinea-Bissau, Cinema Trickles Down:
An Interview with Flora Gomes,” Research in African Literatures26, no. 3(fall 1995):179–85; copyright 1995Indiana
University Press; reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press. The interview with Djibril Diop Mambety
originally appeared as “The Hyena’s Last Laugh: A Conversation with Djibril Diop Mambety,” Transition78(1999):
136–53; copyright 1999W. E. B. Du Bois Institute and Duke University Press; reprinted with permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank.
Questioning African cinema : conversations with filmmakers /
Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike.
p. cm
ISBN0-8166-4004-1(alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-4005-X (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Motion pictures—Africa. 2. Motion picture producers and directors—Africa—Interviews.
I. Title.
pn1993.5.a35 u45 2002
791.43′096—dc21
2001008023
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For all those who stand against injustice
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Contents
Foreword: A Cinema in Transition, a Cinema of Change
Teshome H. Gabriel
ix
Preface
xiii
Acknowledgments
xv
Introduction
xvii
PART I. THE TRADITION: PIONEERING, INVENTION, AND INTERVENTION
Kwaw Ansah (Ghana)
3
Souleymane Cissé (Mali)
19
Safi Faye (Senegal)
29
Gadalla Gubara (Sudan)
41
Med Hondo (Mauritania)
57
Lionel Ngakane (South Africa)
73
Chief Eddie Ugbomah (Nigeria)
85
PART II. VISION AND TRENDS
Flora Gomes (Guinea-Bissau)
101
Gaston Kaboré (Burkina Faso)
109
Djibril Diop Mambety (Senegal)
121
Ngangura Mweze (Congo)
133
Idrissa Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso)
151
Brendan Shehu (Nigeria)
161
Cheick Oumar Sissoko (Mali)
181
PART III. BOUNDARIES AND TRAJECTORIES
King Ampaw (Ghana)
203
Jean-Pierre Bekolo (Cameroon)
217
Salem Mekuria (Ethiopia)
239
Haile Gerima (Ethiopia)
253
Ramadan Suleman (South Africa)
281
Jean-Marie Teno (Cameroon)
301
Distributors of African Films in the United States
317
Foreword
A Cinema in Transition, a Cinema of Change
Teshome H. Gabriel
The art of the skillful question puts the questioner in a stance of opposition to con-
ventional wisdom and provides a framework for the development of new insights, new
methods, new ways of seeing and thinking. In this volume, Professor N. Frank Ukadike
certainly asks the pertinent questions, eliciting responses that speak to the nature of
African cinema and African culture more generally. Yet, as Ukadike suggests in the
book’s title, African cinema is itself a matter of questions and questioning, an ongo-
ing questioning that never merely accepts the supposed givens of African reality. In
many ways, Ukadike’s questions in this book are in part, but probe deeper into, the
questions that African cinema and filmmakers have asked and continue to ask: ques-
tions about the relationship of contemporary African life to Africa’s past, to its tradi-
tions; questions about the political and ideological institutions imposed by colonial
rule and maintained by postcolonial power structures; questions about the roles of
men and women in African society; questions about the importance of language and
oral narratives, and about the ways in which myths and mythmaking are recast by
cinema, as in the case of SafiFaye’s most recent film, Mossane. Yet the questions that
Ukadike asks, like the questions that African cinema asks, are not eternal questions.
Indeed, they serve to disrupt the perception—so common in Western representations
of Africa—of an unchanging, monolithic Africa. Neither Africa nor African cinema
can be reduced to a fixed, eternal essence. To say that African cinema is a questioning
cinema is also to say that it continually moves and changes.
African cinema connects the past and the future of Africa. In making this con-
nection, it often employs a nonlinear structure, moving from one time frame to
another, so that sometimes the past resides in the present, and sometimes the future
is in the present. To many Western observers, these films may seem to be rooted in
ix