The African Gaze – Magazine

Med Hondo’s 1986 epic Sarraouniaabout the eponymous warrior queen (played by Aï Keïta Yara) of Aznas (present-day Niger) in the late 19th century, opens with a haunting sequence. Soldiers, merchants, workers and refugees – in exodus – walk or ride resolutely in a dreamlike scene reminiscent of rock drawings: the blur of the enlarged Techniscope format, the haze of the pink Sahara dust and an overlapping seascape that radiates from the bottom of the frame. Djibril Diop Mambéty’s mid-length features The Frank (1994) and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (1999) are also an example of a related, yet clear emphasis on forward movement amid structural displacement. The main characters – Sili (Lissa Balera), a disabled girl who sells Senegal’s daily newspaper The Sun while you are face to face with the police or street vendors (The Sun); and Marigo (Dieye Ma Dieye), a traveling, broke musician (The Frank)—wander through the city in atypical ways. Marigo, in particular—a modern-day Sisyphus—wanders through industrial ruins, bustling streets, polluted fields, and the restless Atlantic coast. He wears a Congo-Kinshasa (thumb piano) in his arms or the door (to which he has taped a lottery ticket), torn from the hinges of his house, on his back. The burdens that are on the heads of Sarraounia‘s marchers and the door on Marigo’s back in The Frank Both reveal a shared condition of ongoing displacement as a result of colonialism, from the historically neglected perspective of the displaced.

It portrays wartime campaigns, the criminalized mobility of the poor, and the idiosyncratic movement of city dwellers. Sarraounia, The Frank, And The Sun are an example of African image makers’ embrace of what Hondo called a “cinema of rupture,” which Amy Sall celebrates in her new book The African gaze. Featuring critical essays by scholars Yasmina Price and Zoé Samudzi, The African view is a dazzling compendium that brings photographic and cinematic practices from across the continent into long-overdue dialogue. The book celebrates a heterogeneous tapestry of visual approaches grounded in a common material context: the collective project of refusing, subverting, or altogether bypassing colonial ways of seeing.

Spectatorship is a crucial terrain of warfare in both Hondo’s and Mambéty’s cinematic worlds. During the colonial era, official censorship, such as the Laval Decree in the French colonies, prohibited or restricted the colonized from making films. It was with formal decolonization that African storytellers were finally able to appropriate the camera in unprecedented numbers. These artists produced unruly counter-images that were embedded in their own palimpsest realities. Sarraounia, The Frank, And The Sun express the scope and stylistic creativity that Sall’s book promotes: the small gens and the royals, the pre-colonial past and the neo-colonial present, big productions and tight budgets – imaginatively bringing together a wide range of genres including fiction, non-fiction, comedy, epic, theatre, opera and animation. The African view argues, along with other theories of spectatorship rooted in the black experience (e.g., Du Bois’s double consciousness and bell hooks’s opposed gaze), that there is no innocent relationship with the camera, yet visualization remains an unexplored territory.