In Instructional Cinema and African Audiences in Colonial Kenya, 1926–1963, the author argues against the colonial logic instigating that films made for African audiences in Kenya influenced them to embrace certain elements of western civilization but Africans had nothing to offer in return. The author frames this logic as unidirectional approach purporting that Africans were passive recipients of colonial programs. Contrary to this understanding, the author insists that African viewers were active participants in the discourse of cinema in Kenya. Employing unorthodox means to protest mediocre films devoid of basic elements of film production, African spectators forced the colonial government to reconsider the way it produced films. The author frames the reconsideration as bidirectional approach. Instructional cinema first emerged as a tool to “educate” and “modernize” Africans, but it transformed into a contestable space of cultural and political power, a space that both sides appropriated to negotiate power and actualize their abstract ideas.

This book argues that African film audiences in colonial Kenya were not passive recipients of British cultural programs created to "teach" and "civilize" them. Rather, they rejected mediocre films and actively participated in the cinema discourse that brought about changes in cinema production.

This book introduces readers to the rich discipline of Africana Studies, reflecting on how it has developed over the last fifty years as an intellectual enterprise for knowledge production about Africa and the African diaspora. The African world has always had a wealth of indigenous knowledge systems, but for the greater part of the scholarly history, hegemonic Western epistemologies have denied the authenticity of African indigenous ways of knowing. The post-colonial era has seen steady and deliberate efforts to expand the frontiers of knowledge about black people and their societies, and to Africanize such bodies of knowledge in all fields of human endeavor. This book reflects on how the multidisciplinary discipline of Africana Studies has transformed and reinvented itself as it has sought to advance knowledge about the African world. The contributors consider the foundations of the discipline, its key theories and methods of knowledge production, and how it interacts with popular culture, Women’s Studies, and other area studies such as Ethnic and Afro-Latinix Studies. Bringing together rich insights from across history, religion, literature, art, sociology, and philosophy, this book will be an important read for students and researchers of Africa and Africana Studies.

In recent decades historians and film scholars have intensified their study of colonial cinema in Africa. Yet the vastness of the continent, the number of European powers involved and irregular record keeping has made uncovering the connections between imagery, imperialism and indigenous peoples difficult. This volume takes up the challenge, tracing production and exhibition patterns to show how motion pictures were introduced on the continent during the "Scramble for Africa" and the subsequent era of consolidation. The author describes how early actualities, expeditionary footage, ethnographic documentaries and missionary films were made in the African interior and examines the rise of mass black spectatorship. While Africans in the first two decades of the 20th century were sidelined as cinema consumers because of colonial restrictions, social and political changes in the subsequent interwar period--wrought by large-scale mining in southern Africa--led to a rethinking of colonial film policy by missionaries, mining concerns and colonial officials. By World War II, cinema had come to black Africa.

In the conference Africa and the History of Cinematic ideas which took place in London in 1995, film-makers, cultural theorists and critics gathered to debate a range of issues that both united and divided them. These included the historical contexts for African cinema and the implication of new distribution and exhibition networks for a group of increasingly diasporic cinemas. The event provided a forum for debate between the different African cinematic community and for exchanges of views on different topics ranging from the problems of production, exhibition and distribution, to the problematics of modernity, post-colonial theory and the stubborn presence of Western cultural imperialism.

Many studies focus on film in Africa. Few, however, study cinema as a leisure activity: one that has influenced several generations and opened up spaces to dream, discuss or contest. Movie theatres offered a break from the daily routine, as places of escape and of education. Cinema was also potentially subversive, offering an alternative to colonial discourse. Tropical Dream Palaces seeks to trace this history in a West African context: of broadening horizons on the one hand, and of censorship and control on the other. It fills a historiographic void, following cinema's arrival in the region in the early twentieth century up until the Independence era, and also looking further afield to Central Africa and its different models. Goerg addresses questions of film distribution in colonial times; of screening venues, their implantation, spread and different categories; while also focusing on audiences, their gender or age; the acquisition of a film culture; and the impact of screening foreign images. Her book draws on extremely varied sources to paint a broad picture of this cinematographic landscape: archives, the accounts of African and European spectators or administrators, novels, autobiographies, the local press, interviews and iconography.

Burns (history, Clemson U.) examines the relationship between cinema and society in colonial Africa, with a particular focus on the colonial settler state of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He discusses several aspects including production, distribution, censorship, and audience reception. He analyzes seventy years of public discussion regarding the appropriate role of cinema in colonial society, the attempt by the colonial state to use film as an instrument of social and cultural hegemony, and ways in which the state lost its control over the medium. Source material for the study included official and unofficial written documents and scores of films at the National Archives in Harare, as well as interviews with both black and white filmmakers and African audience members. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Harry Thuku (1970: 32), the doyen of Kenyan nationalism and founder of the first political party in that country, raised the issue of taxation and involuntary labour with the colonial administration and demanded that the government explain why 'young girls and women' worked with no pay under the supervision of tribal policemen when Winston Churchill had outlawed such practices. [...] The final scenes show the mother knitting with her daughter, the father reading his newspaper and smoking a pipe, the mother helping the sleepy daughter to bed, and father and son working together on a model aeroplane. [...] Eager to lessen, if not close, the existing gap in trust between the public and the police force, a gap that was increasingly widening in Africa following the clamour for independence that sparked wars of land and freedom - such as the Mau Mau war in Kenya and the Algerian civil war - the narrator quickly reminds viewers that 'the policeman is a friend of the people and he knows that they will alw. [...] The ignorance continued even in the face of Africans' agitation for 'equal pay for work of equal value'.13 Constituting the bulk of the labour force in the country, African workers in public and private spheres were routinely underpaid. [...] In passing, however, I should point out that the war occupied the minds of British officials in the colony and in London, including European settlers who feared for their lives and safety and asked the government to spare no resources in dealing with 'these thugs'.

Shaka argues that the construction of modern African identity in all spheres of life, particularly the cinematic institution, is a product of the Euro-African contact that started in the fifteenth century. Traditional African institutions, which were overlaid with European substitutes during the period of colonialism, were transformed by this contact, and although the post-colonial period sought to romanticise traditional institutions, a pragmatic marriage of both emerged, resulting in a hybrid culture, identity and, as explored here, cinema.