JAC 8 (3) pp.

233–248 Intellect Limited 2016

Journal of African Cinemas

Volume 8 Number 3
© 2016 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jac.8.3.233_1

KENNETH W. HARROW
Michigan State University

Women in ‘African cinema’

and ‘Nollywood films’: A shift
in cinematic regimes

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
There have been dramatic changes in depictions of women from the feminist perspec- digital
tives in the first decades of postcolonial sub-Saharan African celluloid cinema Nollywood
(1960s–80s), to women in a global digital era (1990s–present). A classic example of Fespaco
African celluloid cinema, its style and political gravitas, can be seen in Jean-Marie feminism
Teno’s latest film, Une feuille dans le vent (2013). Though it appeared in the digi- dispossession
tal period, and may technically be digital, stylistically and thematically it bears all genre
the hallmarks of ‘FESPACO cinema’. Conversely, the work of Tunde Kelani, one
of the stalwarts of Nollywood video film, falls under the rubric of ‘African video
film’, often dubbed ‘Nollywood’. To understand what the shift from ‘serious African
cinema’ to Nollywood has meant for women and feminism in African cinema, I will
elaborate on Butler and Athanasiou’s notion of dispossession in considering Teno’s
‘celluloid’ Feuille and Frank Arase’s digital Beyonce (2006). I hope to bridge issues
of early African feminism that focused on representation to those now framed in
terms of genre cinema.

There have been dramatic changes in depictions of women from the feminist
perspectives in the first decades of postcolonial sub-Saharan African celluloid
cinema (1960s−80s), to women in a global digital era (1990s−present). These
two regimes now sit side by side. Jean-Marie Teno’s latest film, Une feuille

233
Kenneth W. Harrow

1. Other important dans le vent (2013), shot on a DVCAM well into the digital period, may tech-
scholars writing about
video films include
nically be digital, but stylistically and thematically, it bears all the hallmarks
Jonathan Haynes, of what has been known as ‘African cinema’. Tunde Kelani, one of the stal-
Onookome Okome, warts of Nollywood video film, prefers to be known as an African film director
Brian Larkin, Matthew
Krings, John McCain, rather than as a Nollywood director. In fact, the conventional understanding
Alexander Jedlowski of ‘African cinema’, variously given as ‘African celluloid film’, ‘serious African
and many others. film’, ‘traditional African film’, or even ‘FESPACO film’ (Festival Panafricain
Garritano points
to the subtleties of du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou) has been contrasted with
terminology in her ‘African video film’, a designation now commonly given as ‘African popular
introduction:
video’ (see Garritano [2013]1) ‘African digital film’, ‘commercial African film’,
I use of the term and especially ‘Nollywood’.2 Although technological developments have been
‘video movie’
instead of the
central in creating the possibility for video films to be made, and for the digital
more common Nollywood industry to be born, these cannot account for Nollywood’s enor-
‘video film’ in a mous popularity. To understand that shift, and the role women have played
minor attempt
to acknowledge in it, I will first elaborate on the ‘celluloid’ tradition and the digital revolution,
the singular and then use Butler and Athanasiou’s notion of dispossession in considering
importance of Teno’s ‘celluloid’ filmwork, and then turn to the digital revolution, focusing
video technology
to the history of on Frank Arase’s Beyonce (2006). My purpose here is not to focus on how
African popular women directors have shaped the representation of gender, but to consider
video, which
to my mind is
two emblematic figures working in the different registers of celluloid and
diminished by video African cinema.
‘video film.’ … ‘Video
movie’ retains
an emphasis on
video as a medium ‘CELLULOID’: THE REGIME OF ‘FESPACO’ FILMMAKING
that generates Teno’s career began in 1983, and his films include Afrique, je te plumerai
particular material
conditions at the (Africa, I Will Fleece You, 1992) and The Colonial Misunderstanding (2004). He
level of the artifact, has long been considered one of Africa’s foremost documentary filmmak-
and it more
broadly highlights
ers. The early work, including Afrique, je te plumerai, Chef! (Chief!) (1999) and
video as a form Clando (Clandestine, 1996), were heavily invested in countering neocoloni-
of technological alism and colonial discourses. That work culminated in his Malentendu colo-
mediation and
commodification nial (The Colonial Misunderstanding) (2004) in which he takes us back to the
that is different German missionary implantation in Namibia a century earlier, at the time
from film. … Finally, of the slaughter of the Herero. His practice has been to insert himself into
‘movie’ calls up
very different the film as narrator and reporter, Here he registers the current viewpoints of
connotations than contemporary German missionaries at the time of the centenary marking the
‘film.’ Movies are
associated with
past genocide.
the commoditized With Lieux saints (Sacred Places) (2009) he takes a less polemical, more
forms of screen personal approach, exploring the conditions of exhibition of African cinema in
media produced
by dominant Ouagadougou (shot at the time of FESPACO) in a popular quartier of the city.
commercial His allegorization of artistic creativity, using the figure of a djembe maker,
industries, like rises to lyrical heights. The ‘sacred place’ referenced in the title is a local bar
Hollywood.
(2013: 23) which shows films − mostly western − to the neighbourhood locals. Teno sets
about an ‘investigation’ of why this is the case and what it would take for
2. ‘Nollywood’ here is
used not simply to African films to be shown.
denote Nigerian video His most recent, Une feuille dans le vent (A Leaf in the Wind) (2013) focuses
films, but the larger
body of ‘video’ films
on Ernestine Ouandié, the daughter of a well-known Cameroonian revolution-
(i.e. now digital) being ary leader. Ernestine’s hardships and death were marked by trauma. Although
produced in many Teno’s personal voice and style are recognizable, the film is based upon a single
parts of the continent.
Their designations long interview in which Teno’s recording of Ernestine’s life story emphasizes
might vary, from issues of the abuse African women have long experienced. The film highlights
Ghannywood to women’s vulnerability to abusive relations of power. Her life was marked by
Kannywood, from
Kenya to Tanzania and precarity, her fate that of the dispossessed (cf. Butler and Athanasiou 2013).

234   Journal of African Cinemas

 Women in ‘African cinema’ and ‘Nollywood films’

More significantly, Une feuille dans le vent represents the continuum of a beyond, but the general
traits are comprised
tradition of African film originally associated with the ideologically inflected of commercial film
films of Ousmane Sembène and others of the late 1960s and 1970s, whose attributes, and contrast
adherence to the underlying principles of Third Cinema created an agenda with the older celluloid
traditions that by and
marked by a vocabulary of national independence and, concomitantly, female large saw themselves
emancipation. The vehicle for delivering the message was celluloid cinema more as defined as
(especially the films of Ousmane Sembène, Souleymane Cissé, Cheick Oumar politically committed
filmmaking. Their
Sissoko, Mahama Johnson Traore, Idrissa Ouédraogo, Sarah Maldoror, Jean- genres are ‘popular’ as
Pierre Dikongué-Pipa, Gaston Kabore and Safi Faye) that had the follow- opposed to ‘serious’.
This is changing
ing traits: they were ‘well-made films’: their plots were linear, culminating rapidly, but the broad
in resolutions that enlightened the viewers about ‘the truth’; they were social tendency has been
realist; their protagonists were generally made comprehensible in terms of driven by commercial
considerations more
their historical and social context, both of which conveyed the films’ ideol- than ideological ones.
ogy symbolically and symptomatically. In film studies terms, they exemplified
Third Cinema as semiotic vehicles available for hermeneutic analysis. In short,
they were made to order for a certain African feminism, one in which female
struggle and emancipation would be the by-words.
The project of struggle, emancipation and national liberation marked the
films defined as Third Cinema. Their initial inspiration arose from the revolu-
tionary manifestoes and practices of the Latin American cineastes, Ferdinand
Solanas, Octavio Getino, Humberto Solas, Julio Garcia Espinosa, Glauber
Rocha and Tomas Gutierrez Alea. Getino and Solanas’s Hour of the Furnaces
(1968) exemplified the revolutionary and experimental style espoused by the
young filmmakers whose resistance to imperialism and colonialism carried
over to the rejection of mainstream, commercial cinema that was dominated
by Hollywood. Their styles and approaches varied, but class-based, dialectical
ideological formulations defined their conception of ‘lucidity’, the comprehen-
sion of capitalism and its political institutions, and praxis, in which filmmaking
and exhibition were considered tools in the struggle. Early African filmmak-
ers like Sembène, Cissé and later Abderrahmane turned to The Soviet Union
for their training, which was more classically framed as socialist realism.
Although they were influenced by Third Cinema, their styles were less coun-
ter-cultural (as with Espinosa’s ‘Imperfect Cinema’), and more classic oppo-
sitional cinema. The formulations of African and Latin American filmmakers
inspired the studies of Teshome Gabriel (Third Cinema in the Third World: The
Aesthetics of Liberation [1982]), Keyan Tomaselli (The Cinema of Apartheid: Race
and Class in South African Film [1989]), and Férid Boughedir (Le cinéma africain
de A à Z [1987]), who set the agendas for a political, engage practice of film-
making. If women were represented in the early films of this period, it was
as figures whose struggle was subordinated to the larger goals of achieving
national liberation or combatting neocolonialism (cf. Sembène’s La Noire de…
[Black Girl] [1966]). The portrayal of women whose own gender based strug-
gles were of concern only emerged after the primary goals of national libera-
tion were accomplished (cf. Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga [1972]). Eventually
women directors were to change this primary orientation.
In these early years of African filmmaking, dominated by male direc-
tors, women were often, if not always, portrayed as victims, oppressed, weak
or dominated. But the turn to realism, under the banner of Third Cinema,
generated a prevailing pattern in which most narratives either conveyed a
sense of woman as victim (classically as in Sembène’s La Noire de… or Tauw
[1970], or Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa’s Muno Moto [1975] and Le Prix de la
liberté [1978]), or, conversely, confirmed the same framing of the issue by

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Kenneth W. Harrow

3. For example, see the portraying revolutionary women as exceptional (see Rama in Xala [1974] or
novels of Mariama
Ba, especially Une si
the princess in Ceddo [1976], or Med Hondo’s 1986 Sarraounia). The revolu-
longue lettre (1980), as tionary camera, for Third Cinema, especially in Latin America was described
well as those of Buchi famously by Solanas and Getino in 1969 as a gun that could shoot 24 frames
Emecheta and Flora
Nwapa, all of whom per second (Solanas and Getino 1997). It was as intended to enable the audi-
sought to exemplify the ence to perceive the causes of capitalist and imperialist oppression, i.e., to
notion of a liberated achieve ‘lucidity’, this a favoured term of the time. Feminist concerns were
and modern African
woman whose struggle not always central for this cinema. However, in African cinema of the 1960s
was often against and 1970s the liberation of the African woman from oppressive patriarchal
patriarchy.
systems recurred as a general theme, in line with the contemporary notions
4. In his study of of women’s emancipation (Boyce-Davies and Graves Ngambika [1986]). This
the history of
African cinema,
‘first-wave’ of feminist activism raised the question of the ‘New African
Manthia Diawara Woman’ lifting the barriers of women entering into ‘modernity’ alongside the
(1992) delineates African man.3 If the revolutionary struggle in Africa was to become free from
the creation of a
federation of African European colonial domination, this feminist agenda represented a subse-
filmmakers (FEPACI) quent stage where liberation now had to take into account issues of gender.
whose progressive, This tension between what was becoming a feminist agenda and the national
revolutionary goals
included the fight for liberation could be seen as early as the 1950s and early 1960s in the works of
independence and Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth [Originally published in 1961; 1965]
the emancipation
of African cinema
and Studies in a Dying Colonialism [1965] − especially the chapter ‘Algeria
itself so that it could unveiled’). Fanon called for a revolution that prioritized national liberation,
serve as a tool for the and that call was echoed in the dominant strains of Third World politics. At
liberated nations. The
reigning notions of the same time, it was not possible to ignore the correlations between patri-
Third World liberation archal domination and colonial oppression. When the latter was ended,
were ideological as the former became increasingly important, as could be seen in the films of
well as cultural. FEPACI
was created in 1969 Sembène and the novels and films of Assia Djebar.
following the first Teno’s film on Ernestine Ouandié shows that this heritage continues
World Festival of Black
Arts.
into the present, that ‘celluloid’, like ‘FESPACO’, signifies a lineage of works
grounded in anticolonial struggles for independence, against neocolonialism
5. Boyce Davies cites
Filomina Steady in
and for the liberation of women from both African patriarchy and western
her identification Imperialism.4
of African feminist Sembène Ousmane and his generation of filmmakers were known for
issues as including
‘female autonomy having taken up these issues. Yet the language that conveys this familiar
and cooperation; an message is not only that of the ‘father of African cinema’ (a title often reserved
emphasis on nature for Sembène), but of the entire generation whose day has long since passed.
over culture; the
centrality of children, The classics concerned with ‘women’s liberation’ include Sembène’s La noire
multiple mothering de… (1966) and Xala (1975), Cissé’s Den Muso (1975), Dikongué-Pipa’s Muna
and kinship; the use
of ridicule in African
Moto (1975) and Le Prix de l’Indépendence (1978); Safi Faye’s Lettre Paysanne
women’s worldview’ (1975); Sissoko’s Finzan (1990) and Ouédraogo’s Yaaba (1989). The issues
(Davies and Graves these films often raised conform to what might best be called stage one African
1986: 6). Boyce
Davies then goes feminism (see Boyce and Graves 19865), with dramas created around forced
on to delineate the or polygamous marriages, the conflict between ‘modern’ romance and ‘tradi-
‘inequities’ to which tional’ marriage arrangements, patriarchal oppression of wives and daugh-
African women were
subject, and I believe ters, excision and the exclusion of marginalized widows or single women who
this list actually were often attacked as ‘witches’ ((Sissoko’s Finzan [1989]), Kaboré’s Wend
corresponded to what
most novels and films
Kuuni [1983], Ouédraogo’s Yaaba [1989] − cf. Nnaemeka 1997; Harrow 2002).
were addressing: These issues arise out of a notion of tradition often set in conflict with
‘lack of choice in the ideal of the ‘modern’ African woman − women who would acquire west-
motherhood and
marriage, oppression of ern education, enter into the colonial economy, speak European languages,
barren women, genital shake off old patriarchal traditions, end polygamy and become the equal of
mutilation, enforced their husbands. When male filmmakers represented the ‘women’s condition’,
silence and a variety
it was to show how women were oppressed and needed to become ‘modern’.

236   Journal of African Cinemas

 Women in ‘African cinema’ and ‘Nollywood films’

However, when women were the directors, the female characters were often of other forms of
oppression intrinsic to
more empowered (one thinks of Safi Faye’s Lettre paysanne [1975], or Mossane various societies which
[1996]; Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga [1972]; Fanta Nacro’s short films [espe- still plague African
cially Puk Nini, 1996], and The Night of Truth [2004]). The great marker of women’s lives…’ (Davies
and Graves 1986: 7).
the shift in this tendency can be seen in Sembène’s own work. In Faat Kine
(Sembène, 2000) the protagonist Kine is a middle-aged mother and success-
ful business woman who owns and runs a gas station. She is portrayed as
powerful and assertive, and dominates the men in her life. In contrast, when
she was a young, she was abused by her teacher, beaten and cast out by her
father, and cheated by her lover. Sembène uses her story to signal the change
in women’s roles; in the process he enacts the change in representation of
African women within the modern economy.

WOMEN FILMMAKING IN THE REGIME OF CELLULOID

During the early years of the celluloid period, only a small number of African
or African diasporic women filmmakers worked in the industry, much less
were able to direct films. A notable exception was Sarah Maldoror, with her
revolutionary Angolan film Sambizanga [1972]). However, many other women
struggled to create more modest, short documentary films, driven by the
commitment to aid women to overcome difficulties in finding work, being free
to choose their own spouses and raise their children despite onerous condi-
tions (cf. Anne-Laure Folly’s Femmes aux yeux ouverts [Women with Open Eyes]
[1992] and Flora M’mbugu-Schelling’s These Hands [1993]). Others like Safi
Faye were influenced by the traditions of cinéma-vérité started by Jean Rouch
(for whom she worked as assistant director). Her Kaddu Beykat (commonly
known as Lettre paysanne or Peasant Letter [1975]) was a classic docu-drama,
rather than an ideological social realist narrative. Her use of voice-over
established intimacy with the narrator, and the camera’s proximity to village
images and sensibilities generated an ideal texture for the rural world of the
Casamance.
The Ethiopian Salem Mekuria carried the personal, autobiographical tradi-
tion into the next generation of African women filmmakers with Deluge (1996),
her memoir of the revolution in Ethiopia, where she narrates the disappear-
ance of her brother and best friend. Both men had fought the dictatorship
of Haile Selassie and trained in the Soviet Union, but ended up in bitterly
opposed camps on their return to Ethiopia. In the end both were murdered.
Mekuria personalizes the narrative of Deluge by framing the history within an
account to her daughter of their past. Mekuria and her generation of women
filmmakers felt empowered by producing personal, experimental cinematic
forms; their approaches and imagery might better be associated with post-
colonialism than Third Cinema, as seen in films like Fanta Nacro’s La nuit de
la vérité (2004) where the horrors of child soldiers, rape, trauma and military
violence supplant the earlier issues of consciousness, national liberation or
women’s emancipation.
The cinematic trajectory of women passing from possessions and objects
to owners and subjects can be seen in the films created over the long career
of Sembène Ousmane. In his earliest films women are objects of pity or
desire (especially La noire de…, (1966) but also Xala [1975]), and even when
portrayed strikingly and powerfully, as in Ceddo (1977), they fulfil Mulvey’s
dictum that the audience is expected to gaze at them while the men move
the plot forward. If they resist, as Diouana does in La Noire de…., it is still

www.intellectbooks.com   237
Kenneth W. Harrow

patriarchal oppression that provides the context for revolt. With Faat Kine
(2000) that all changes, and although men’s power remains contested in
Moolaade (Sembène, 2004), women are no longer peripheral to the action.
Until Nollywood, most African cinema could be read through these lenses,
with an older notion of feminism (I once referred to this as ‘the feminism of the
old man’ − Harrow [2010]), than what now marks the new millennium. In the
1990s Fanto Nacro changed the scenario somewhat by highlighting women’s
perspectives. In her early short films, there is a strong pedagogical func-
tion (Femmes capables [1993], and especially Le truc de Konaté [Nacro, 1998],
which deals with women’s insistence on the need for men to use condoms
in an age of AIDS). With Puk Nini (1995) she redefines the power relations
between men and women to hilarious effect. Salif, a dentist, cheats on his
wife when a beautiful Senegalese prostitute, Astou, comes to Ouagadougou.
But when Salif’s wife Isa combines forces with Astou, the conventional narra-
tive is turned inside out, and the women ultimately humiliate Salif. More
significantly, this plot turns on the images of Salif and Isa as the ‘modern’
urban couple, both of whom work as professionals. Their child’s education is
stressed, and their technological engagement with modernity is highlighted
by their buying appliances and using the VCR to show their daughter clips of
their wedding. Nacro is committed to the ‘New African Woman’ motif, but
without sentimentalizing or idealizing it.
Her most ambitious film, La Nuit de la vérité (2005), shot in the aftermath
of Rwanda, is much darker, as she addresses the violent conflicts of contem-
porary times. Still insisting upon a pedagogical function, she portrays how
women were victims of war, driven insane by the violence, and yet collectively
able to overcome the traumas visited upon them by war that turned men, and
occasionally also women, into monsters.

THE DIGITAL REGIME

A sea-change in portrayals of women occurred with the advent of video films
in Ghana and Nigeria in the late 1980s and 1990s. Engagé, serious, auteur-
ist cinema centred in Third Cinema values gradually become supplanted by
a mode of inexpensive video production where the directorial role was less
pronounced and genre determined style and content − a cinema of enter-
tainment in which profit trumped all other considerations. Beginning with
the 1980s, Structural Adjustment Programmes began to be implemented
in Africa, affecting this new cinema, which is usually read in terms of neo-
liberalism and globalization. Their impact is felt in the diminishing presence
of the state in people’s lives, the ascendancy of the local over the national,
greater economic precarity, and above all a sense of individual helplessness
in the face of seemingly overwhelming mysterious forces that were generat-
ing wealth (Geschiere 2009, 2013; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). In cinematic
terms, this translated into a focus on urban landscapes, the desire for wealth,
the inexplicable rise of some to prosperity and power, and the need for aid
from spiritual forces (rather than political transformations). The ascendancy
of Pentecostalism can be seen in the portrayals of protagonists tempted by
Satan, saved by Jesus, and above all surrounded by images of luxuriousness as
the locus of this struggle.
Women are portrayed variously as sexually desirable, naïve, perverted or
lesbian (Jezebell [Safo, 2007]), prostituting themselves (Jénífà [Ayinde, 2008]),
as conduits to power, transmitters of sexual diseases (Thunderbolt [Kelani,

238   Journal of African Cinemas

 Women in ‘African cinema’ and ‘Nollywood films’

2000), or betrayers corrupted by the desire for wealth (Osuofia in London 6. Although Ghanaian and
Nigerian video films
[Ogoro, 2003]). They are too close to power and luxuriate in the objects had been made before
money provides (Beyonce, 2006), but also inspire men to turn from evil to good Living in Bondage,
(Abeni [Kelani, 2006]). They animate the regime of affect in melodramatic it was by far the
most successful, the
situations (Abeni, Figurine [Afolayan, 2009]), and provide the excitement in most professionally
modernity’s clothes (Figurine, Phone Swap [Afolayan, 2012]). In short, having produced and acted
been objects of men’s sympathy and understanding in the celluloid era, they film up to that point.
Haynes (2016) provides
have become movers and shakers in the digital. Even as their image as sexual details on the film’s
objects has been highlighted, they have acquired agency, albeit in a tinsel genesis and important
impact on subsequent
world of commerce and gilded palaces. filmmaking practices.
There are limits to these broad generalizations about the difference Although I list Nnebue
between ‘celluloid film’ and ‘video movies’. Despite being ‘celluloid’ Faat Kine as the ‘author’ of this
film, it was actually
moves us closer to melodrama’s structures and affects; conversely Kelani’s directed by Chris Obi
latest film on sickle cell (Dazzling Mirage [Kelani, 2014]) aims to provide the Rapu. Nnebue wrote
entertainment features of Nollywood with a heavier emphasis on pedagogi- and financed the film,
and basically oversaw
cal function − as was also the case of Thunderbolt (2001, the first Nollywood the production.
film distributed in the United States). Melodrama and pop cinema features
were also exhibited in films derived from the ‘celluloid’ tradition of higher
quality, intellectually challenging works. For example, Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Les
Saignantes (Bekolo, 2005) is set in Cameroon in 2025, and brought to a climax
his hip hop futuristic jump-cutting style, first exhibited in Quartier Mozart
(Bekolo, 1992). The film centres on young women who are ‘saignantes’ −
sexy, ultra brash in their language, and mentally and physically powerful. Les
Saignantes attempts to break with conventional male narratives that entailed
sons vying fathers. Nonetheless, despite its neo-noir stylistics, it remained
within the regime of serious celluloid cinema.
Nollywood represents a real break with celluloid filmmaking. The digital
wave, beginning with video filmmaking in the late 1980s and turning digi-
tal by the 1990s, conformed to the principles of neo-liberalism in represent-
ing a world devoted to consumerism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Harvey
2005). Even when the resolution of the film entailed punishment for those
who sold their own relatives, and souls, for money (as in the ‘first’ important
Nollywood film, Kenneth Nnuebe’s 1992 Living in Bondage6), the Pentecostal
moralism barely covered the visual pleasures of representing wealth, along
with erotic, powerful, transgressive and above all beautiful women − women
played by actresses now part of a larger star system (Tsika 2015). Nollywood
set out not only to create commercially successful films but also an indus-
try, something the celluloid films never were able to accomplish. To do so it
had to reconfigure the way that women were represented in the service of
consumerist desire. Issues of gender were not incidental, but central to the
question of what kind of films would sell. As Garritano (2013) put it, ‘African
popular culture [is] a gender apparatus, a technology that produces and natu-
ralizes particular gender ideologies. Gender is not incidental or supplemen-
tal to the worlds and identities imagined in the videos, but necessary to the
articulation of these identities’ (17−18).
Setting Teno’s Une feuille dans le vent over against such Nollywood block-
busters as Jénífà, Jezebell or Beyonce enables us to see how these two divergent
approaches to gender and cinema have always also depended upon funda-
mentally different representations of women. In the former, subjectivity and
identity are foregrounded; in the latter, desire and material values prevail.
In celluloid films, women come to subjectivity through complicated mecha-
nisms of submission and revolt; in Nollywood, even as women themselves are

www.intellectbooks.com   239
Kenneth W. Harrow

7. The phrase ‘Africa’s objects of consumption, they are also consumers. In the former, the roles of
night school’ has been
widely attributed
women are debated in terms of a feminist agenda; in the latter, the dominant
to Sembène, and is ideological framing of gender is always already assumed and normalized. If
quoted by Samba it is challenged, then it is so as to return us to conventional assumptions. If
Gadjigo in his California
Newsreel description the challenge becomes too subversive, we move in the direction of ‘serious’
of his film on cinemas that call into question the framing of norms. The films that ‘cellu-
Sembène, http://www. loid’ women filmmakers have tended to make reconfigure how subjectivity
newsreel.org/articles/
ousmanesembene.htm. is formed, whereas the pressures of commercial cinema have turned more
in the direction of narrative and visual pleasures honed over the decades by
Hollywood genres (Mulvey 1975; De Lauretis 1984).
The dominant modes that conveyed this conflicting set of worlds originally
were social realism versus melodrama, now reflected across popular genres
from crime thrillers to occult dramas (Haynes 2000). For Sembène’s gener-
ation the goals were ‘serious’ −’raising consciousness’ in what he famously
termed ‘Africa’s night school’.7 For Nollywood, it entailed the need to real-
ize a profit at all costs. The two trends in cinema produce radically different
representations of women that call up Butler and Athanasiou’s (2013) concept
of dispossession, which is built around notions of the subject and of material
loss, the two facets of celluloid and digital cinema that bear most directly on
the question of female representation.

DISPOSSESSION: THE SUBJECT AND MATERIALITY

For Butler and Athanasiou dispossession has two facets: the loss that consti-
tutes subjectivity and the loss that derives from being disowned and abjected.
The former is focused on the psychic processes of becoming a subject, and is
marked, almost counter-intuitively, by submission or subjection to one who
imposes regimes of loss on the subject.

[D]ispossession encompasses the constituted, preemptive losses that

condition one’s being dispossessed (or letting oneself become dispos-
sessed) by another − exposed to and affected by the other’s vulnera-
bility: one is moved to the other and by the other’s vulnerability. The
subject comes to ‘exist’ by installing within itself lost objects along with
the social norms that regulate the subject’s disposition to the address of
the other.
(Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 1−2)

Dispossession is defined here in ways that resemble the psychic processes

caused by trauma where the subject incorporates the figure of the lost one
into his or her psyche. The crux lies in the resonances of the term ‘dispos-
session’ as entailing loss that necessarily arises when opening oneself up to
another (‘letting oneself become dispossessed’). This process inevitably entails
the incorporation of and submission to social norms as the subject comes to
be formed. Subjectivity, for Butler, is produced through this act of ‘assujetisse-
ment’ − subjecting of oneself to the other (1997). We are all dispossessed
because we cannot become subjects without relating to the other, a relation-
ship that entails our incorporation of their vulnerability and loss. We learn to
understand and regulate that relationship to the other via social norms.
Although celluloid films were often driven by social issues, the ideological
pressures of the grand narratives of class and race entailed the oppression of
subjects who were led, along with the spectator, to a position of revolt. Revolt,

240   Journal of African Cinemas

 Women in ‘African cinema’ and ‘Nollywood films’

for the conscientized subject-in-formation could never reach its completion

without a simultaneous act of submission. For Spivak (1999) this might be
seen in the colonial horizon of expectations that frames any revolt against it;
for Mudimbe (1988) the revolt against the western episteme is also framed in
terms of that very episteme. The subject seeking to redefine her relation to the
other cannot address her own sense of loss and vulnerability without simulta-
neously evoking the model for loss incorporated from the other.

DISPOSSESSION IN TENO’S UNE FEUILLE DANS LE VENT AND

SEMBÈNE’S LA NOIRE DE…
This painful notion of a subject whose revolt is already grounded in submis-
sion might be seen as underlying Teno’s portrait of Ernestine Ouandié. For
although her subjectivity is captured by the digital camera over the course of
the long interview, what Teno has reconstructed through his editing, dialogue,
voice-over and imagery is indeed a portrait of the abused daughter whose
childhood was marked by loss, subjection and trauma. Ernestine’s mother
essentially abandoned her at an early age to her aunt, a woman who beat her
throughout her childhood. Interspersed with Ernestine’s bitter account is the
haunting question she has for her father: why did he abandon her and her
mother, leaving her to cope with her misery on her own.
Ernest Ouandié was one of the last leaders of the Cameroonian revolution-
ary UPC party that Ahidjo and the French set out to destroy on Independence.
After the deaths of the original leaders of the movement − Ruben um Nwoye,
leader of the UPC, who was killed in 1958 by French forces in Cameroon,
and Félix-Roland Moumié who was poisonied by French secret services in
Switzerland in 1960 − Ouandié was left as head. Ouandié carried on the
struggle in western Cameroon until his means and willpower were exhausted.
According to Ernestine, he turned himself in, and was executed in 1971. His
daughter, living in exile in Ghana, was 10 years old. She was left with the
memory of a revolt, stifled by the newly independent Cameroonian govern-
ment. She could not explain to her children why that government considered
their grandfather a traitor.
In her account of abandonment and abuse, Ernestine exposes to her
interlocutor a double bind of her vulnerability, both as a woman and as a
Cameroonian. Her own politics return us to the intimately personal. We are
‘exposed to and affected by the other’s vulnerability: one is moved to the other
and by the other’s vulnerability’ (Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 1). The address
to the camera becomes the address to the spectator whose sympathies are
solicited through Ernestine’s voice. The tragedy of her life is recounted almost
matter-of-factly and is thus all the more compelling. In this regard, Une feuille
dans le vent bears some significant resemblances to Sembène’s La noire de…
In both films, the narrative centres on the figure of the single protago-
nist whose life is framed by the narrow possibilities offered to disadvantaged
woman. In each she is obliged to sell her labour to those who have control
over her life. For Diouana in La noire de … it is to her French patrons, and
especially her patronne for whom she works in Dakar as the children’s nanny,
and in Antibes as her maid. Her initial excitement at the prospect of moving
to France where she would be able to complete her transformation into a
‘modern’ woman, dressed in stylish heels and skirts worn by Frenchwomen,
leads her to break off with her fiancé and to take the ocean liner Ancerville
(like the slave transport of earlier times) to Marseille.

www.intellectbooks.com   241
Kenneth W. Harrow

Diouana’s thoughts are presented in voice-over, giving them an imme-

diacy. If her excitement is muted by this indirect evocation of her feelings, her
worries and precarity are presented to the spectator as something we can hear,
as though unmediated by visual codes. As her despair grows, the closeness to
her interiority becomes chilling, in precisely the same way as we are deeply
affected when learning the news of Ernestine’s death in Une feuille dans le
vent. The dispossession of both women, ensconced in their misery, trapped by
the past and disillusioned over their future, leads them to end their lives off-
camera. Yet we have given their narratives access to our emotions, are ‘moved
to the other and by the other’s vulnerability’. Their deaths become instances
for us to experience cinematic trauma, and as such for the constitution of our
own subjectivities to be shaped to the extent that we must now deal with
the social norms regulating our disposition to the other. Their deaths provide
the ultimate shock to our acceptance of and disposition to them as abused
women, and to their struggle to assume subjectivities that would enable
women under colonialism and under postcolonialism to seek fulfilment. From
Sembène’s politics of emancipation to Teno’s politics of decolonization, the
central act of dispossession retains its ambiguity in its ties to the assumption
of subjectivity, to the struggles for freedom in the performance of the political
and personal, and to the traumas that attend the ‘installation’ of loss in our
experience of their accounts.
The films open the possibility of trauma enabling resistance to the social
norms that regulate the viewer’s engagement with the two women characters.
Dispossession is the flip side of revolt; each requires the other to be completed
for the trauma not to remain indefinitely trapped within, like melancholic loss.
Here is where celluloid cinema’s focus upon subjectivity, through the address
to the viewer, through the character’s own portrayal of loss, can go beyond
the limited lessons of ‘night school’ politics. For the latter, an ideology of
struggle often excludes the fuller implications for the subject’s independence,
which leads us to Nollywood and the second facet of dispossession for Butler
and Athanasiou, its materiality.

DISPOSSESSION IN NOLLYWOOD
In the familiar context of colonialism, we expect the colonized to have lost
their land, autonomy, agency and even family members and lives. The past
mechanisms of conquest are repeated in the current age of globalization and
neo-liberalism, and thus evoke the second definition of dispossession. Here
persons are ‘disowned and abjected’ by ‘normalizing powers’ that ‘regulate
the distribution of vulnerability’. This involves:

Loss of land and community; ownership of one’s living body by another

person, as in histories of slavery; subjection to military, imperial, and
economic violence; poverty, securitarian regimes, biopolitical subjecti-
vation, liberal possessive individualism, neoliberal governmentality, and
precaritization.
(Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 2)

Ironically, whereas Butler and Athanasiou intend this list to be an indictment

of the current neo-liberal world order, most of this is converted into positive
categories in Nollywood’s framing of the ideal society where the dominant
ideology is that of the wealthy. When prosperity is seen as being acquired

242   Journal of African Cinemas

 Women in ‘African cinema’ and ‘Nollywood films’

immorally, it is represented as the work of Satan against which the magi-

cal, healing powers of Jesus, and not the revolution of an awakened people,
are the only recourse. If a film like Sembène’s Xala (1975) must end with the
revolt of the masses, the typical Nollywood film will conclude either with
divine retribution or the removal of the threat to untold wealth. The very signs
of modernity and affluence in Xala that were intended to expose the ills of
neocolonialism are now celebrated as gifts from the divine for those who kept
the faith. And inevitably, the proper gendering of this melodramatic situation
must be effected.
That gendering is marked by the twin terms Butler and Athanasiou
employ: the performative, by which the subject is marked by ‘psychic and
social attachment to the law’; and the political, where dispossession is a
‘condition painfully imposed by the normative and normalizing violence that
determines the terms of subjectivity, survival, and livability’ (2013: 2). What
both positions have in common is ‘the subject’s relation to norms’ (2013: 2).
What both cinemas have in common is also the framing of the narratives
by those norms. But where celluloid cinema typically challenged the condi-
tions that made possible excision (Moolaade [2004], Finzan [1989]), or forced
marriages (Muna Moto [1975], Djeli [Kramo-Lanciné, 1981], Mossane [1996]),
asserting the need for a new, typically ‘modern’ order, in Nollywood there
might be at most a small nod to the need for some kind of reform, but in the
face of fantastical norms (material or spiritual) that the desirability of change,
instantiating class or gender consciousness, evaporates.
It is a short step from Ramatou in Mambety’s anti-globalization master-
piece Hyènes (1992) to Nollywood’s Beyonce (Arase, 2006). Beyonce, the
protagonist, has infinite wealth, an array of faceless guards operating at her
beck and call, and will brook no refusal to her desires (she disfigures her rival,
and breaks her lover’s will until he timidly submits). She has no conscience,
like a ‘bad copy’ of the original global star of the same name. As the daughter
of the president she combines power, desire and wealth − the ultimate spoiled
rich girl to whom nothing can be refused.
Like the objects she craves and surrounds herself with, she exceeds
normal social boundaries as most Nigerians understand them: her appetites
are monstrous, and she fills her huge bed with the handsome Raj already
promised to the poor but honest Ciera. Beyonce’s desire for Raj stops at noth-
ing, like the cars she drives and gives him − expensive sleek black models,
that convey power. All she owns, like her mansion, bed and liquor cabinet, is
unbounded.
Beyonce is immune to dispossession. She is, in fact, the embodiment
of possession, just as Ramatou embodied the World Bank or the spirit of
Globalization. In Žižek’s terms, Beyonce could be seen as a figure of ‘patho-
logical narcissism’ (1992: 5) − a figure that he associated with late capital-
ism. Her condition could further be interpreted as ‘painfully imposed by the
normative and normalizing violence that determines the terms of subjectivity,
survival, and livability’ (Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 2). Yet there is a kind of
glee she displays in overriding the demands for livability, much less survival
for anyone else. In the last scene, when she is finally shot, the equally bound-
less pain of religious self-righteousness ultimately prevails, while her disfig-
ured, ‘dead’ rival Ciera returns alive in a taxi to watch and ensure that the
hitman carries out his job.
Nollywood abounds in such women. We can glimpse them in such films
as Safo’s Jezebell (2007) where the married figure of Nana Ekua makes a

www.intellectbooks.com   243
Kenneth W. Harrow

8. ‘A result is that African ‘pact with the devil’ by agreeing to Susu’s promises of wealth. Nana Ekuahe
film criticism has no
real model for dealing
is seduced into a lesbian relationship, abandons her responsibilities to her
with a mass, national husband, and turns from frowsy housewife to ‘sex bomb’. In the process
phenomenon, whose she becomes a devotee of ‘Jezebell’, the classic figure of dangerous female
claims on scholarly
attention are perhaps power, rising out of the ocean, with her light skin, green eyes, long hair and
more sociological evil mysterious powers to bestow wealth at the price of motherhood. Safo’s
than political or purely Jezebell skirts on the edges of self-parody in this revision of the familiar warn-
aesthetic’ (Haynes
2000: 10). ings against the liberated woman − her unmitigated glee, exuberance and
  [T]o understand enjoyment of power and wealth undermine the moral codes intended to be
its [Nollywood’s]
structures and
set in place with the film’s denouement.
resources we need The unlimited power unleashed by esoteric forces turns the norms that
something like frame gender possibilities into mirrors of the helplessness of the social order
an ethnographic
description of to control such figures as ‘the President’ or his daughter with all her guards,
the entire media cars and wealth. Even Beyonce’s over-the-top ending merely confirms the
environment, focusing vision of a world where struggling against dispossession has lost any reason-
on media consumption
as well as the able possibility. The melodramas impose a new set of questions for women
methods of video film that arise only within a melodramatic framing: Why cannot Raj marry Ciera,
production, which do
not much resemble
in Beyonce, but is continually frustrated in his attempts to forge a relationship
those of the rest of with the woman he loves? Why does Beyonce always succeed in defeating
African cinema. The the couple Ray-Ciera, in killing Ciera, in forcing Raj to marry her, when in
literature on African
cinema has in general scene after scene Raj demonstrates his love for Ciera and dislike of Beyonce?
not taken on these These theatrical questions arise in the viewer’s resistance to the disman-
broader tasks (Haynes tling of all social norms except those marked by extravagance and the spec-
2000: 12−13).
  ‘Fortunately, tacles of consumerist, millennial capitalism. The excess and materialism of
another, possibly more Nollywood has displaced the viewer’s expectations of scenes in which subjec-
useful paradigm is
at hand: that of the
tivity might be tamed by the encounter with social norms, or embraced by
African popular arts, shared emotional charges. Assujetissement has surrendered in the wild maze of
or more generally dispossession as the display of wealth sweeps all in its path.
African popular culture’
(Haynes 2000: 13). The trajectory that led from celluloid liberation to digital exhilaration has
been marked by new representations of women now given in terms of excess
and fantasy, rather than realism or liberation. The new age is moving swiftly
along tracks driven more and more by the economics of a burgeoning film
industry, even as the older concepts of filmmaking continue to provide us
with such poignant and compelling portraits as that of Ernestine Ouandié.
Though we might want to attribute the changes to neo-liberal dictates,
in Garritano’s words, African popular digital film must be understood as
‘a technology that produces and naturalizes particular gender ideologies.
Gender is not incidental or supplemental to the worlds and identities imag-
ined in the videos’ (Garritano 2013: 17). Gender was once crucial to the
framing of ‘Third World’ perspectives at the beginning of African cinema. In
moving from ‘cinema’ to ‘film’ to the ‘movies’, from celluloid to the digital,
the norms of gender performances have been simultaneously marked by a
new grammar of the political that would seem to be distant from its libera-
tionist beginnings.

CONCLUSION
Along with that change in gender representation has come the shift in theo-
rizing cinema − the enormous shift once predicted by Jonathan Haynes
with his groundbreaking approach to Nollywood (2000)8 where he called
for attention to the cultural and material rather than the ideological or
psychological. The swing has taken us away from the dominance of Mulvey

244   Journal of African Cinemas

 Women in ‘African cinema’ and ‘Nollywood films’

and De Lauretis’s focus on female subjectivity to the work of Butler and

Athanasiou, and now that of a new generation of Nollywood scholars like
Garritano, Dovey, Green-Sims, Adejunmobi, as well as the older generation
of Larkin, Haynes, and Okome, for whom historical, material readings and
cultural studies have provided new approaches. The high theory approaches
that centred on ‘identity’ in African cinema, what I am calling subjectivity
in this paper, has changed with the onset of digital commercial film, and
this reflects Butler’s focus on precarity that arises with material disposses-
sion − the dominant sign of the millennium, as the Comaroffs have so well
established.
Beyonce represents a model for crass materialism and dispossession that
has been replicated innumerable times in Nollywood films and has been tied
to the kind of ‘occult economies’ that the Comaroffs have associated with
neo-liberalism and globalization. The struggle to find an appropriate critical
approach to this new body of work has led to a shift away from the older
film studies approaches for which questions of subjectivity were central. The
newer studies often focus on material conditions of production, distribution,
and exhibition. However, questions that have been central to feminism remain
relevant, and require us to address them in new ways. In this article, I have
attempted to find the bridge that will enable us to move from issues of African
feminism detailed earlier by Boyce-Davis and Graves and a generation of
scholars working on representations of African women to those now framed
in the radically new formats and styles of digital filmmaking. We can see
continuity in the old questions of patriarchy, colonialism and social oppres-
sion in Teno’s oeuvre and his latest film. But we can also see how the radical
break represented by Nollywood has obliged us to find new approaches, just
as Haynes had predicted back in his original video film studies of the late
1990s. For the scholarly work that links materialism and precarity, in terms
of psychic harm, trauma and physical loss, Butler and Athanasiou’s approach
to the political and performative notions of dispossession provide us with the
key concepts to make that bridge. The passage from ‘cinema’ to ‘film’ − video
film, digital film − traces a trajectory that is familiar enough to scholars of
World Cinema, and now to African cinema as well, especially when viewed
through the lens of feminist critique.

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SUGGESTED CITATION
Harrow, K. W. (2016), ‘Women in “African cinema” and “Nollywood films”:
A shift in cinematic regimes’, Journal of African Cinemas, 8: 3, pp. 233–48,
doi: 10.1386/jac.8.3.233_1

www.intellectbooks.com   247
Kenneth W. Harrow

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Kenneth Harrow is distinguished professor of English at Michigan State
University. His work focuses on African cinema and literature, diaspora and
postcolonial studies. His latest work is Rethinking African Cultural Production,
co-edited with Frieda Ekotto. He is also the author of Trash! African
Cinema From Below; Postcolonial African Cinema: from Political Engagement
to Postmodernism; Less Than One and Double: A Feminist Reading of African
Women’s Writing; and Thresholds of Change in African Literature. Prof. Harrow
has also edited African Cinema: Postcolonial and Feminist Readings, and a special
issue of Matatu on women in African literature and cinema.
Contact: Dept of English and Film Studies, Michigan State University, 619
Red Cedar Rd, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA.
E-mail: harrow@msu.edu

Kenneth W. Harrow has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

248   Journal of African Cinemas