Colonial Cinema in Africa

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.

Glenn Reynolds is a professor of history at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, New York. He specializes in forgotten cinemas at the margins, especially colonial cinema in Africa, and the global proliferation of missionary films. He lives in Ossining, New York.

Glenn Reynolds
Format: softcover (7 x 10)
Pages: 240
Bibliographic Info: 17 photos, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2015
pISBN: 978-0-7864-7985-6
eISBN: 978-1-4766-2054-1
Imprint: McFarland

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments  vi

Preface  1

Introduction: Flash Forward: A Century of Cinema in Africa  3

1. In Search of Origins: Screening Motion Pictures in Africa  17

2. The Scramble for Images: Strange Savages, Paid Primitives, Negotiating Natives  39

3. Silver Screens and Cities of Gold and Copper: The Mines’ Compound Cinema Circuit  86

4. You Don’t Know Jack: Hollywood, Hybridity and the African Cowboy  115

5. From Red Blanket to Civilization: Movies and Migration in South Africa  131

6. Image Imperium: The Origins of British Film Policy in Africa  153

7. Films of Africans, Made in Africa, for Africans, Under Effective Control: The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment  171

Conclusion: From Reel to Real: New Horizons  197

Chapter Notes  203

Bibliography  227

Index  231