Colonial Cinema

The cinema reached Africa at much the same time as it spread across Europe and the United States. There were film shows in Cairo and Alexandria as early as 1896, in Tunis and Fez in 1897, Dakar in 1900 and Lagos in 1903. The initial impulse behind this worldwide spread was purely commercial: the desire to exploit to the full the commercial potential of what its inventors, like the Lumière Brothers, feared might be just a passing novelty. But as film narrative developed in length and complexity, the export of film took on a new significance. As Ferid Boughedir has observed: ‘Cinema reached Africa with colonialism. Its principal role was to supply a cultural and ideological justification for political domination and economic exploitation’. In many ways cinema succeeded in this role: ‘A native worker performs better when he believes that the representatives of colonial power are his betters by race, and that his own civilisation is inferior to that of the whites’.

Little one-minute films were also shot in Africa at the turn of the century, as the Lumière operators made a habit of shooting local ‘views’ (a comparatively simple procedure since Lumière's cinematograph was both camera and projector combined).