In Curing Their Ills, Megan Vaughan offered a pioneering examination of colonial medical films as a powerful instrument in the ‘civilizing mission’ and a provocation to scholars to examine the subjectivity of African viewers.Footnote ¹ Between 1926 and 1963, British colonial officials in Kenya produced and screened hundreds of films aimed at instructing Africans in colonial agriculture, labor, healthcare, and moral discipline. What they neither intended nor anticipated were the diverse, disruptive, and often productive ways African spectators engaged in this new cinematic culture. In Instructional Cinema and African Audiences in Colonial Kenya, Samson Kaunga Ndanyi persuasively takes up Vaughan's call to center African spectators and their experiences of and influence on colonial cinematic production, consumption, and spaces as ‘contestable arenas of power’ (3).

In Chapter One, Ndanyi offers an overview of the history of cinematic production in East Africa, focusing on the Bantu Education Cinematograph Experiment (BEKE) and the writings of its founders, L. A. Notcutt and G. C. Latham. Racial theories of the ‘African mind’ and colonial priorities concentrated film production on simplistic narratives of development and paternalistic instruction. Chapter Two maps the exhibition of colonial films through mobile cinema units and their reliance on African labor. At screenings, Africans served not only as technical assistants but also as hosts, commentators, and translators, playing a key role in delivering the message of the films. Ndanyi examines the career of Joseph Odula, from film commentator in the 1940s to information officer and, eventually, deputy director of the Ministry of Information, Broadcasting, and Tourism in the early years of independence, to demonstrate how colonial intermediaries could leverage their training in the film industry to shape cinematic culture.

Chapter Three turns to the Mau Mau Rebellion and the use of cinema as propaganda. While other scholars have addressed the feature films produced during Mau Mau (David Anderson) and propaganda campaigns (Myles Osborne), Ndanyi focuses on how the rebellion interrupted screening itineraries yet still offered a potent means of projecting social control.Footnote ² In 1955 alone, Ndanyi estimates that the Department of Information produced up to eighteen reels of cinemagazines — serialized short programs and newsreels shown on the big screen — and forty-two reels of educational films that reached audiences in the hundreds of thousands (78). Mobile cinema vans traveled to detention camps in the hopes of instilling ‘lessons in “work” ethics, and “the history, horrors, and gradual liquidation of Mau Mau”’ (83).

Weaving official reports, oral interviews, and photographs, Chapter Four demonstrates the centrality of African children as spectators, even if few films were made explicitly for their consumption. In an innovative contribution, Ndanyi then theorizes two forms of cinematic space: ‘general space’ and ‘space within space’ (89). The ‘general space’ represented large screening spaces accommodating multiple audiences and producing practices of sociability and material encounters with screen worlds. Seating arrangements, Ndanyi argues, demonstrated hierarchies of power and ‘spatial governance’ (101). Yet these ‘general spaces’ quickly became zones of contestation. Gender and class expectations gave way to clashes between government officials and African spectators. The ‘space within space’ signified the ‘marked-off ground on which the cinema van stood during the show’ (105), a physical space intended to separate African audiences from the technology of cinema vans themselves. Temporally limited, the ‘space within space’ imbued screenings with colonial spectacle and projected power that was ‘regarded with awe, deference, and reverence’ (105).

Building on these spatial encounters, Chapter Five provides the crux of Ndanyi's argument: Africans did not simply passively ingest colonial cinema but rather, through disruptions and critiques, they appropriated, contested, and renegotiated cinematic discourses. Africans used a variety of techniques to voice their preferences or disapproval, from ‘talking-out-loud’ to the hurling of rotten eggs and toxic compounds into audiences (122–5). Colonial officials read these acts as apolitical, chaotic, and unruly; Ndanyi, however, reads these acts as forms of protest and expressions of cinematic critique related to the quality rather than content of colonial films. Oral interviewees bare this social engineering strategy out: while most did not remember any particular films, they did remember the lessons in agriculture, health practices, and morality. By the 1950s, colonial officials began to take African critiques of colonial films more seriously, giving greater priority to narrative style and aesthetics, and involving more Africans in film production. As Ndanyi argues, ‘by protesting against badly produced instructional films, African audiences inspired a national dialogue about changes in cinema production’ (128).

Instructional Cinema offers a glimpse into the making of colonial cinematic cultures; Ndanyi puts colonial Kenya into dialogue with other areas of the continent and deftly weaves examples from Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US into his study. In addition, he highlights underexplored themes in studies of colonial cinema in Africa of labor, masculinity, childhood, and the gendered dynamics of film production and colonial education.

Ndanyi's economical and elegant writing style and excellent use of images make this book a pleasurable read. While provocative and largely convincing, Ndanyi does leave the reader wanting more. While examples are drawn from multiple regions, with greater emphasis on the larger population concentrations in central and western Kenya, the reader is left to wonder: how ‘national’ was the debate about cinematic production? Were there regional variations in the response to instructional films based on diverse religious, linguistic, and cultural audiences? What did vernacular presses say about colonial films? Who was involved in these film productions? Ndanyi is to be credited for his variety of sources; yet engagement with a wider range of oral interviewees, particularly women, as well as closer analysis of the films themselves and integration of vernacular sources would have enriched an already fascinating study.

For undergraduates, this book offers an accessible and enjoyable introduction to the world of cinema in colonial Kenya. For scholars of African history and colonial film history, this book demonstrates the ‘bidirectional’ nature of instructional films in ‘educating’ colonial subjects and the value of studying the active role of Africans in the translation, appropriation, and production of colonial cinematic cultures.