Table Of Content

ANU Black + White Black and White in Colour Black and White in Colour African History on Screen edited by Vivian Bickford-Smith and Richard Mendelsohn JAMES CURREY Oxford OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS Athens DOUBLE STOREY Cape Town Published in the UK by James Currey Ltd 73 Botley Road Oxford OX2 OBS www.jamescurrey.co.uk and in southern Africa by Double Storey Books a division of Juta & Co. Ltd Mercury Crescent Wetton, Cape Town © 2006 the editors and contributors British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available on request ISBN 10: 1-84701-522-0 (James Currey paper) ISBN 13: 978-1-84701-522-8 (James Currey paper) ISBN 10: 1-77013-057-8 (Double Storey) ISBN 13: 978-1-77013-111-9 (Double Storey) All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form and by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed by Paarl Print, Paarl, South Africa Contents List of Contributors vil Introduction Vivian Bickford-Smith and Richard Mendelsohn 1 History as cultural redemption in Gaston Kabore’s 11 precolonial-era films Mahir Saul ie Beyond ‘history’: two films of the deep Mande past 28 Ralph A. Austen Tradition and resistance in Ousmane Sembene’s films 4] Emitai and Ceddo Robert Baum The transatlantic slave trade in cinema 59 Robert Harms ‘What are we?’: Proteus and the problematising of history 82 Nigel Worden 6 The public lives of historical films: the case of 97 Zulu and Zulu Dawn Carolyn Hamilton and Litheko Modisane Breaker Morant: an African war through 120 an Australian lens Richard Mendelsohn From Khartoum to Kufrah: filmic narratives of 136 conquest and resistance Shamil Jeppie Cheap if not always cheerful: French West Africa in the 148 world wars in Black and White in Colour and Le Camp de Thiaroye Bill Nasson 10 Whites in Africa: Kenya’s colonists in the films 167 Out of Africa, Nowhere in Africa and White Mischief Nigel Penn 11 Beholding the colonial past in Claire Denis’s Chocolat 185 Ruth Watson 12 The Battle of Algiers: between fiction, memory and history 203 Patrick Harries 13 Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: history or hagiography? 223 David Moore 14 Flame and the historiography of armed struggle 240 in Zimbabwe Teresa Barnes 15 Picturing apartheid: with a particular focus on 256 ‘Hollywood’ histories of the 1970s Vivian Bickford-Smith 16 Hotel Rwanda: too much heroism, too little Zio history — or horror? Mohamed Adhikari 17 Looking the beast in the (fictional) eye: 300 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission on film David Philips Endnotes ono Index 372 Contributors Mohamed Adhikari is an Associate Professor in the Historical Studies Department at the University of Cape Town and author of Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community. His current interests include the history of genocide in Africa. Ralph A. Austen is Professor of African History and co-chair of the Committee on African and African American Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the editor of In Search of Sunjata: The Mande Epic as History, Literature and Performance and author (with Jonathan Derrick) of Middlemen of the Cameroon Rivers: The Duala and their Hinterland, His many publications include African Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency. Teresa Barnes, an Associate Professor of History at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, has published widely on gender and labour history in colonial Zimbabwe. Her current research interests include nationalism and education in Zimbabwe, and gendered intellectual trajectories and institutional histories of universities in Africa. Robert M. Baum is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and co-ordinator of the African Studies Initiative at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He is author of Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia, which won ap rize in 2000 from the American Academy of Religion for the best first book in the history of religions. Professor Vivian Bickford-Smith works in the Historical Studies Department at the University of Cape Town. He has published extensively on South African history, including several books on the history of Cape Town. Together with Richard Mendelsohn, he has pioneered teaching and research in film and history at the University of Cape Town. Professor Carolyn Hamilton, an historical anthropologist, leads the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Research Project at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She has published widely on the production of history, and on archives, historiography and Zulu history. vii Robert Harms is Professor of African History at Yale University. He is the author of two books on the slave trade: River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, and The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade. He is currently working on a book about early colonialism in the Congo River Basin. Patrick Harries is Professor of African History at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He is the author of Work, Culture and Identity: Migrant Labourers in Mozambique and South Africa, c.1860-1910. His new book on Swiss missionaries and systems of knowledge in southeast Africa, Butterflies, Barbarians and Swiss Missionaries, is in press. Shamil Jeppie, a graduate of Princeton University, teaches African and Middle East history in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. He has worked on both South African social history and on the history of Sudanic Africa. Richard Mendelsohn is currently the head of the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. He has published extensively on South African Jewish history, and together with Vivian Bickford-Smith has pioneered teaching and research in film and history in South Africa. Litheko Modisane is a doctoral fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand in the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Project. He is an accomplished actor, director and scriptwriter. His research interests span three major areas: black intellectual history, South African film and literature. David Moore teaches economic history, development studies and politics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. He writes on Zimbabwean politics and history, development theory and on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His edited book The World Bank: Poverty, Development and Global Hegemony has recently been published. Bill Nasson is currently Professor of History at the University of Cape Town and is a former editor of the Journal of African History. His publications include Abraham Esau’s War, The South African War 1899-1902, and Britannia’s Empire. Nigel Penn was born in Kenya. He is an Associate Professor in the Historical Studies Department at the University of Cape Town and the author of Rogues, Rebels and Runaways: Eighteenth Century Cape Characters and The Forgotten Frontier: Colonists and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the 18th Century. Vili