During 2020, as the pandemic halted television and movie production, Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming platforms reached further and further beyond their established sources of supply in search of material to entice customers in increasingly competitive markets. That was how it happened that in the late fall, cooped up in a small apartment in Washington, D.C., I briefly feasted on the South African melodramas Queen Sono and Blood and Water, which were for a short time among the most watched shows on Netflix. That I found myself binging on the story of “elite spy” Queen Sono and the mystery of the missing sister of a student at an elite Cape Town high school was just one small bit of evidence of the dramatic changes that have transformed African performance and media landscapes across the last two decades. The four very different books reviewed here suggest some of the contours of that transformation (and of the burgeoning scholarly literatures in these fields) and remind readers as well that film and performance are embedded in the vibrant, diverse, and evolving African popular cultures that Karin Barber and other scholars have described.Footnote ¹

Yet, even the performances of actors in the remote Tuareg settlements described by Susan Rasmussen in Persons of Courage and Renown owe some of their craft to external media influences, whether direct or indirect. Watching Blood and Water in Washington, I saw not only a distinctively South African style, but the long history of Southern African audience encounters with Hollywood and the more recent impact of shows such as Dallas and other American, as well as Latin American, soap operas. Each of these works under review illustrates those complex circuits of global popular culture crossings that Richard Shain has persuasively theorized in his recent innovative study of the complicated trans-Atlantic history of Afro-Cuban music in Senegal.Footnote ²

Studies of film and performance in Africa were rarely linked until the rapid emergence of Nollywood in the 1990s suddenly created a popular motion picture industry in Nigeria and subsequently in Ghana and elsewhere. Only one of the books considered in this essay deals directly with video film, but in one way or another the specter of Nollywood looms large over all of these works. In particular, Cara Moyer-Duncan’s sophisticated contemporary history of cinema in post-apartheid South Africa is troubled by the question of why in South Africa no equivalent mass-market film industry has developed. The Nollywood phenomenon has by now generated an enormous body of scholarship, including books and journal special issues too numerous to list. Interestingly, little attention has been paid to broadcast television, notwithstanding its very large audiences and the important role that TV has played (notably in Nigeria) both in training nascent video film makers and in transmitting video films. Boukary Sawadogo’s West African Screen Media transcends the typically rigid boundaries which separate motion picture media forms, broadly conceptualizing the subject as “screen media.” Sawadogo pays substantial attention to television productions and makes a not always consistent argument that the longstanding privileging of “film” as a strictly bounded category makes little sense in African media performance contexts (and indeed perhaps globally), where viewers engage almost all moving images on small screens.

With the partial exception of Rasmussen’s Persons of Courage and Renown, these studies give scant attention to the performance styles that define the material that is presented, whether before a live audience or on screen. That omission confirms a fundamental paradox in media studies generally and in African media studies in particular. Across the ideological spectrum, from white settler racial alarmists and paternalistic colonial authorities to developmentalists and cultural nationalists, all have agreed on the profound power of moving images, for good as well as bad, particularly in relationship to “impressionable” audiences. This has resulted in a preoccupation with the censorship of imported movies, both on the part of the colonial regimes and by independent governments, as Laura Fair has shown in her pathbreaking new work on cinema in Tanzania.Footnote ³ Yet scholarship on screen media has paid little attention to the very visual elements, including the performances of the actors, that has made some motion picture media so very compelling to audiences. Instead, scholars have tended to focus on the meanings of video, film, or television shows, effectively derived from the textual analysis of the scripts in isolation rather than an experiential approach in which audiences engage with plots mediated through aural and visual effects.

Each of these studies, in contrast to much other media scholarship, carefully positions the production of performances within historically specific social, economic, and political contexts. But among the works under review, only Sawadogo attempts to get at the character of performance in the ways that Rasmussen does. Persons of Courage and Renown seems at first far removed in subject matter and analysis from the screen media that is the focus of the other three books. Yet the actors and acting troupes that Rasmussen introduces us to have by no means been cut off from the electronic media that has transformed Africa’s entertainment landscape in recent decades. Many have traveled widely, even as the electronic technology that has supported this transformation has reached into their home communities. Various groups of actors have experienced their plays being transmitted on the radio—even if they have not apparently been circulated in video formats.

In Persons of Courage and Renown, Rasmussen’s explicit goal is to contribute “to anthropological understandings of culture, memory, and performance, as well as African Studies and to ethnographies of the Tuareg” (193). With many decades of fieldwork experience in the region and a record of important scholarship, she is extraordinarily qualified to deliver on these objectives, and she certainly does. During the first decade of the twenty-first century which is the focus of this study, there were more than twenty acting troupes active in the remote Kidal town and region of northeastern Mali. The first half of the book explores the actors and acting groups in highly evocative detail, enriched with detailed accounts of several of the actors’ lives. The second half focuses on the plays that were performed, some of which have deep roots while others are contemporary. At least for the time being, Tuareg performance in this region is a thing of the past. Since 2012, recurrent and escalating political violence has led to thousands of deaths and the dislocation of many more people, effectively ending the performance culture described in this fascinating book—although perhaps it has resurfaced in the refugee camps where many find themselves now living.

Rasmussen has clearly succeeded in exploring “the significance of acting, roles of actors, and their prevalent play plots,” and in so doing has opened a perspective on Tuareg society in northern Mali that a more conventional study would miss (11). Although Rasmussen certainly draws on a broad literature of performance in Africa (although oddly Karin Barber’s essential work is not citedFootnote ⁴), she misses an opportunity to explore how the performance tradition she masterfully describes speaks to and perhaps challenges that larger literature. And for all the illumination she provides to the contexts in which Tuareg actors work and develop or revise their plays, she misses an opportunity to reveal more to us about the explicit textures of performances and the techniques that actors bring to their art. Similarly, her sophisticated analyses of the meanings of these plays lacks a parallel analysis of what audiences draw from these performances and the plays, what inspires laughter or tears, and what brings them back time and again.

Cara Moyer-Duncan’s history of South African cinemas since the end of apartheid asks some of the same kind of questions in a quite different context. Repeatedly surfacing through this engrossing study of the efforts, official and otherwise, to develop a national cinema that speaks for the entire population of the country is the poignant question: why has South African film failed to contribute in significant ways to efforts to build a just post-apartheid society? As the title Projecting Nation suggests, Moyer-Duncan traces across more than two decades the efforts to harness cinema to the task of nation building. Such efforts invoked similar initiatives in the early independence period, when iconic filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembene famously saw cinema as an “evening school” committed to the agenda of cultural nationalism. A very substantial body of scholarship (including Dominica Dipio’s Gender Terrains in African Cinema which is discussed below) have analyzed these films, few of which found mass audiences in African countries. In the early decades of independence, the commercial structures of film distribution effectively excluded all but mass-market imported movies, and jittery regimes were unlikely to take steps to promote local productions that might subtly or explicitly challenge local power structures. During the immediate postwar decades, millions of Africans thronged to cinemas to see American, European, and Indian movies, but by the 1980s a variety of factors—some local and others global—had conspired to dramatically reduce cinema-going.Footnote ⁵

The post-apartheid government in South Africa set out to develop a globally competitive filmmaking infrastructure that could both stimulate economic development and produce films that would contribute to decolonization. In five thematically focused and roughly chronological chapters, Moyer-Duncan documents South Africa’s considerable success in attracting substantial film production to the country, which has in turn provided opportunities for profit and employment in various enterprises that support the production of films—including some notable and highly profitable international productions. A number of internationally popular movies such as Invictus (2009) which address South African topics (however disappointingly) do not feature South African performers or involve South African directors or producers, and even major productions that have more local participation and address serious questions (such as the hugely successful District 9 [2009]) have failed to attract large audiences within South Africa itself.

The explanations for this are complex. Cinemas in South Africa are increasingly located in upscale shopping areas, ensuring that Black audiences will most often experience moving pictures on television screens. As elsewhere on the continent, film distribution remains tied to international film production, with little economic incentive to support serious local films (or films with subversive content). Even in major markets such as the U.S. or Europe, such independent movies only rarely generate much box office activity. In fact, innovative, politically engaged movies such as Zulu Love Letter (2004) and Necktie Youth (2015) bombed in South Africa itself. Quoting South African filmmaker Khalo Matabane, Moyer-Duncan argues that “the audience around the world is colonized by the images put out by Hollywood,” (96) a claim that fails to appreciate the diversity and intelligence of film audiences, but certainly reflects the frustration of South African filmmakers.

If Projecting Nation seems at points weighted by the failure of South Africa to develop an independent popular cinema, the individual chapters are wonderfully evocative explorations of key themes in South Africa’s recent cinema history. Each outlines critical developments relevant to the themes and describes and analyzes emblematic filmmakers and films—surprising numbers of which are currently available on popular streaming services. In the early heady days of majority rule, some imagined that a distinctive “Third Cinema” would take root in South Africa. Meyer-Duncan repeatedly returns to the concept in film studies of a “national cinema” and laments the failure of South Africa to develop a cinema committed to the aspirant “Rainbow Nation.” She might instead have more profitably explored the historically specific and Eurocentric roots of the very notion of “national cinema” and its limited explanatory value in the context of post-apartheid cinema in South Africa and more broadly the Global South.

Rather than charting the emergence of a cinema that increasingly reflected a new nation, Moyer-Duncan found herself documenting the persistence of film cultures rooted in apartheid racial division, even if she characterized it as ”refragmentation.” Although Black filmmakers found substantially increased opportunities, among those making movies and watching them, Black South Africans were dramatically under-represented. The locally made movies that regularly attracted the largest audiences and made the most money remained niche films aimed either at white or South Asian audiences.

As late as 2018, the most popular of all South African filmmakers, Leon Schuster, was still making movies in which whites appeared in blackface (although these films were withdrawn from streaming in 2020). In recent years, Afrikaans language teen movies have made money by marketing apartheid nostalgia to youths who were born after its demise. Similarly, Keeping up with the Kandasamys (2017) and its sequels project an almost exclusively South Asian world. Moyer-Duncan’s understandable decision to focus on film alone instead of the broader terrain of “screen media” perhaps missed an opportunity to grapple with a broader South African motion picture culture that is more responsive to mass audiences. As the author indicates, there is much greater Black representation in television production and perhaps more evidence of screen media supporting a more unified vision of South Africa—in terms of race if not of class.

Gender Terrains in African Cinema in some respects represents a more conventional approach to African performance and media studies than the other three books under review. In this work, supported and facilitated by the American Council of Learned Societies’ Carnegie-funded Africa humanities initiative, Dominica Dipio takes a fresh look at some of the best-known and most highly regarded works of African cinema. In her introduction, Dipio draws on and extends the work of well-known film studies scholar Manthia Diawara to propose a gendered exploration of women’s presence in about twenty films produced between the early 1970s and the early 2000s.Footnote ⁶ She is careful to make no claims that these films are particularly representative and stresses the diversity of African films. Her analysis unfolds in three main chapters, corresponding to her three areas of focus: the girl child, the young woman and wife, and finally the elderly woman or grandmother. The prominence of characters corresponding to these categories dictated the selection of the particular works, almost all of which are in French. All of the films examined involve substantial female roles, and all are the work of male directors. Dipio justifies the exclusion of work from female directors on the basis of their extremely small number. Her decision to focus exclusively on serious films by major directors presumably reflects her training in film studies and perhaps the fact that Gender Terrains was originally published in 2014 and is thus based on research that was undertaken more than a decade ago.

In her analysis, Dipio displays a quite remarkable mastery of the films that form the basis of her study, as well as a range of other movies she references. In contrast to Moyer-Duncan, she avoids discussion of the processes through which the films she discusses were made and their reception by critics and audiences. Many of the movies she examines will be familiar to Africanists, notably several works by Ousmane Sembene, as well as Gaston Kaboré’s Wend Kuuni (1982), Souleymane Cissé’s Finyé (1982) and Yeelen (1987), and Dani Kouyaté’s Sia le Reve du Python (2001). Few of these found wide release, and in many cases even cinema buffs and film students in the countries where they were produced may never have seen them. As in a great deal of film studies scholarship, Dipio focuses largely on the stories that these filmmakers tell rather than the ways that the filmmakers imagine their works and the actors convey the stories—in other words, the performance styles. As a historian of cinema in Africa, I am by no means prepared to explore in any great depth Dipio’s methodology or her insights regarding the films that she analyzes. To her credit, she explores gender issues in these films with great clarity. Her close readings of these movies reveal not only a full understanding of their content, but also their relationship to the wider terrain of African film. Given the importance that many of these filmmakers have placed on gender and gender relationship, Dipio’s work is certainly timely and important. Her approach to her subject through the female life cycle is both innovative and revealing in its implicit challenge to the ways that gender has often been addressed in African films and its rootedness in African cultures.

If Dominique Dipio’s close readings of classic film texts reflect traditional approaches in Africanist cinema scholarship, in West African Screen Media Boukary Sawadogo directly challenges the sharp bifurcation in studies of motion pictures and performance between the rapidly growing scholarship on Nollywood and the persistent emphasis of criticism on the very kinds of serious films that are the focus of Gendered Terrains. Influenced by Diawara’s important reassessment of African film and film scholarship, and especially Kenneth Harrow’s provocatively titled effort to engage with popular cinema, Trash, Sawadogo explores the characteristics of comedy in what he refers to as “entertainment” film.Footnote ⁷

Sawadogo’s analytical frame embraces all the categories of screen media, from iconic works of cinema to Nollywood, but his focus is on popular comedies and television series from Francophone West Africa. Privatization has led to a rapid expansion of television across much of urban Africa and a concomitant development of production to provide shows that are cheaper and more appealing than the imported soaps that have sometimes dominated African television screens. Many of these films are comedies, but as Sawadogo stresses, there has been little attention paid to that genre in the scholarship. Even movies, such as a number of Sembene’s satires, that play for laughs, are typically analyzed for their “serious” content. Sawadogo asks a simple but important question: what makes comedies funny and popular? Ironically, this was a question that very much troubled colonial officials and missionaries, who were often perplexed about what made African audiences laugh. Sawadogo does not explicitly address the nature of film performance, but his discussion is inescapably bound up in performance technique. Although West African Screen Media does not explore in any great depth the social contexts in which films are viewed, Sawadogo’s perspective is explicitly audience-based. He directly challenges the media-dominance scholarship rooted in the Frankfurt school critiques of cinema, which continues to reverberate in criticism and lean heavily on textual analysis. As he puts it, he is less interested in what media does to people than in what people do with media.

Sawadogo approaches his ambitious effort to explore comedy and popular series through the tension between the pull of “local proximity” on the one hand and “global appeal” on the other (180). He is interested in understanding local traditions of performance and story-making, such as those that Susan Rasmussen describes, but at the same time he recognizes the powerful importance of global impulses, including and especially westerns. In that context, he asks, “Should African cinema be read through a global analytical framework such as world cinema, international cinema, black cinema or a critical framework based on African epistemology and ontology?” (180). His answer, evoking similar themes to those illuminated by Richard Shain in Roots in Reverse, is to embrace a raucous hybridity which incorporates multiple influences. To make that argument, he cites the Zouglou music phenomenon Magic System and their 2002 hit “Premier Gaou,” which embodies hybridity not just in the lyrics themselves but most persuasively in the music (87). He goes on to build his case through a discussion of the enduring and powerful impact of westerns in West African media storytelling.

Sawadogo’s analysis of African westerns and the impact of westerns more broadly not only elaborates on the critical tension he emphasizes between local or indigenous roots in screen media and the influence of the global, but also has the effect (however unintentional) of drawing together these four works under review. On the stage, Tuareg actors and plays reference traditional stories and techniques as they engage the social, economic, and political tumult that engulfs them. In a dramatically different setting, the movie production business in South Africa is determined to produce a product that is global in appeal, while the only locally produced films are those that appeal very directly to ethnic audiences with stories that invoke a South Africa in which change seems hardly to have occurred. Although in his discussion of the cowboy tradition Sawadogo unfortunately does not address gender explicitly, that theme reverberates beneath the surface in his account evoking the important analysis that Dipio applied in her study.

As a film fan myself, I am grateful to Sawadogo for focusing attention on one of my personal favorites, Ouaga Saga (2006), made by the well-known Burkinabé director Dani Kouyaté. The movie, a bittersweet comedy set on the streets of Ouagadougu, threads together several loose stories about young men on the make with a pulsating score and digitally enhanced visual effects. A flashing cinema sign draws viewers (and the characters) to the ramshackle theater that was once a commonplace feature in African urban life. Kouyaté pays homage to the westerns (in this case Rio Bravo [1959]) that he grew up with and that Sawadogo argues have shaped a great deal of African film-making. Only one of the friends can afford the ticket, although others look through the gaps in the walls to try to catch some of the action, which is heightened by the raucous response to the movie from those inside—a number of whom can recite the dialogue from memory. When the show is over, our movie-goer gathers his friends and recounts the plot—bringing to it a distinctive Ougadougu understanding. Sadly, in contrast to the popular South African series that are easily accessible on global platforms, Ouaga Saga was never widely distributed, although it can be enjoyed online, albeit visually diminished. However, Sawadogo might well argue that a great deal of the essence of Ouaga Saga—its humor, its visual style and score, its reflection of the lives of urban youth, and its representation of the western style—has found its way into the popular entertainment films and a film industry that he has explored with great insight and originality and in the process perhaps suggests an important path for future scholarship on African performance and entertainment media.