How African cinema has evolved through the decades
African cinema has gone through a significant development path. It evolved from British colonial cinema into an art form that gained worldwide fame, largely thanks to pioneers such as Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, whose travels significantly influenced the narrative of African films.
African cinemas originated as a colonial learning tool. In the 1930s and 1940s, the colonial administrations of East Africa launched educational mobile cinemas, such as the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment, in Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), and Nyasaland (now Malawi). These silent films, which focused on hygiene and agriculture, were funded by the Carnegie Corporation and colonial governments and specifically created to shape behavior in colonial communities. Similarly, in 1926, British director Geoffrey Barkas made a silent feature film, The Conversation, which featured Nigerian extras, but its plot glorified colonial rule. These early productions imposed foreign plots rather than conveying African realities.
Everything changed with the revolutionary turn of Ousmane Sembène. Born in 1923, a self-taught writer, dockworker, and activist of the Marxist Party, he decided to “talk to people … about the issues that concern us all” through the film. After an internship in Moscow in 1962, he released the film Borom Sarret in 1963, the first African film made by an African in sub-Saharan Africa. His 1966 feature film The Black Girl won the Jean Vigo Prize in France and became a seminal work of postcolonial African cinema. Sembene insisted on using Wolofian and local languages, rejecting Western norms of storytelling.
Semben’s films of the 1970s — Xala, Ceddo, Emitaï used satire, spiritual symbolism, and political commentary as social criticism to analyze corruption, cultural conflicts, and the legacy of colonialism. His 1988 film “Camp de Thiaroye,” about the mass murder of Senegalese soldiers by French troops after World War II, won the Grand Prize of the Venice Jury, but remained banned in France for ten years. Sembène used the principle of “cinema as an evening school” to turn cinema into an instrument of liberation and education.
Passionate authors have emerged in French-speaking Africa, such as Mauritania-born Med Hondo, whose 1970 debut Soleil Ô and 1979’s West Indies: Fugitive Slaves of Freedom questioned colonialism and the identity of the diaspora. Visit. A F R I N I K . C O M . For the full aerticle. Meanwhile, experimental and political short films flourished in North Africa and Kenya.
In recent decades, nostalgia for African subjects has increased worldwide. Nigerian Nollywood has grown into the second-largest film industry in the world, although it has been criticized for shifting its focus from social media to formulaic entertainment. However, festivals such as FESPACO and the growing popularity of critically acclaimed films, like Angola’s Sambizanga, are changing perceptions, highlighting art that “reinterprets the continent.”
The transformation of African cinema from colonial screen propaganda into a powerful postcolonial expression testifies to its resilience and cultural revival. The Foundation was founded by pioneers like Sembène, and modern African filmmakers continue the tradition by combining regional languages, life realities, and aspirations for a global audience.
