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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 August 2021
Prior to 1960, such countries as England and Belgium trained a number of Africans in the technical areas of “movie-making” through their colonial film units which produced health and educational documentaries as well as propagandist shorts praising the colonial order and/or disseminating the Christian faith. Nevertheless, little had been done to encourage native “movie-thinking.” The late Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (Benin/Senegal), one of the pioneers and early historians of African cinema, often pointed out how the French colonial authorities would refuse scholarships to aspiring African film students, arguing that priority was to be given to the training of African doctors and teachers. One could very well suspect that there also might have been some concern as to the kind of politically detrimental anti-colonialist images these film students would have later produced.
Françoise Pfaff is a Professor of French at Howard University, with emphasis on African film and literature. She is the author of The Cinema of Ousmane Sembène, A Pioneer of African Film (1984), and Twenty-Five Black African Filmmakers (1988), published by Greenwood Press. Her articles have appeared in a number of French and English-language publications. She has lectured on African cinema at various universities and cultural institutions in the United States and abroad. She has also curated several African film series in the USA.
