Broadcasting and Film Industries in Africa: Re-Animating African Cultural Agency

Using case studies mostly drawn from Southern Africa and West Africa, this chapter begins by chronicling the colonial histories of radio, television, and film in Africa and how these cultural industries emerged as a critical part of the colonial edifice. The fact that broadcasting and film were the epicenter of the colonial audio-visual cultures continues to pose huge challenges to the initiatives of postcolonial Africa to decolonize its cultural industries. Several centuries of colonization in the continent have culminated in a form of coloniality with its own internal logic and agency. There are challenges for media practicers to think and act in non-colonial ways particularly at the levels of form, content, and worldviews. At the national leadership level, a toxic mix of self-hatred and inferiority complexes has fossilized in the minds of the Black elite who ought to develop policies that confront old and new forms of cultural domination. In post-apartheid South Africa, for example, the apartheid legacy of institutionalized and systemic anti-Black racism remains intact to the extent that decolonizing television and film industries by bringing in black actors and democratizing broadcasting policies has not necessarily transformed post-apartheid audio-visual cultures. In the film industry, for example, the filmmaker and actor Leon Schuster continued to use racist tropes like the ‘black face’ in ways that were prejudicial to the Black people. Leon Schuster appropriated this well-known racist trope to make mega-profits out of what I have dubbed the post-apartheid race-pleasure economy, a sub-economy of South Africa’s white stream economy that is driven by the mockery of Blackness to entertain White audiences and black colonial subjects of the post-apartheid moment. The race-pleasure economy is based on the active reproduction of the color line performed through Black colonial stereotypes, parodies, and caricatures invented by the apartheid racism machinery of various media and cultural industries. The chapter presents West African films of Sembene Ousmane and Nollywood’s Tunde Kelani as gesturing to alternative Afrocentric film traditions for postcolonial Africa. They symbolize decolonial visual cultures for the continent where Blacks are subjects and not objects of history and where Black film celebrates African cultures as a source its codes and conventions. Both Ousmane and Kelani regarded their role as African film makers as that of transforming both their culture industry and their societies through story telling. African film makers were not only supposed to create disruptive narratives to the grand narrative of the Western gaze, but were also supposed to resist the hegemony and dominance of Euro-American cinematography by creating distinct African film genres. Thus, their films were rich in symbolism, song, metaphor, and diverse folkloric narrative devices that resurrected forms of story telling that were steeped in African culture and traditions.