African Video Movies and Global Desires. Carmela Garritano

in Ghana in the 1980s. Rather than seeing the birth of a national Ghanaian cinema as a complete turning away from colonial influence, I examine points of connection and disconnection between the feature films of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation and those of the Gold Coast Film Unit. To this end, I look closely at The Boy Kumasenu and A Debut for Dede, focusing on the cinematic production of modernity as articulated in the late colonial and the national films. Emerging out of institutions connected through the history of colonialism, these films share a gendered language of modernity, tradition, and nation. Kumasenu, the male subject, grows into a citizen as he moves from rural to urban space and into the conjugal, Westernized family. The nuclear family acts as a metaphor and model for the nation, and the film naturalizes male citizenship and imperial patriarchy. Films made by the Ghana Film Industry Corporation after independence articulated a new, national consciousness and imagined an African modernity distinct from its European counterpart, and in A Debut for Dede the female subject embodies this difference; her body is presented as a site for the articulation and preservation of an African interiority threatened by the modern. If Kumasenu must abandon his African past to become a modern citizen, Dede must internalize hers. Both films represent modernity as a relationship between space and time; the journey from village to city functions as an allegory for the evolution from African tradition to European modernity, and each narrative of modernity naturalizes gender difference.

      Entrepreneur Exhibition and the Gold Coast Film Unit

      In Ghana, cinema exhibition appears and develops within the larger context of an emergent culture of “modern commercial entertainment” (Barber, Collins, and Ricard 1997, 5), whose artists, aesthetics, and popular forms migrated among the coastal cities of West Africa, a heterogeneous zone inflected by a long history of contact with Europeans. As Barber, Collins, and Ricard point out (1997), new commercial entertainment forms were made possible by the sudden and dramatic changes that occurred throughout the colonial period and independence. Rapid urbanization and the increased availability of education contributed to the birth and growth of a culture of commercial entertainment. The enormous expansion of new classes of paid employees, including entrepreneurs, cash-cropping farmers, low-paid civil servants, and the highly educated African elite, all of whom had money to spend on new leisure activities, furthered the cultivation of this culture. It was the entrepreneurial class, primarily composed of local businessmen and expatriates, who brought motion pictures to the Gold Coast. The British merchandise company Bartholomew and Co. erected Merry Villas cinematograph palace, the first entertainment establishment in Accra, the capital of the Gold Coast, in 1913. Here, Gold Coast audiences were exposed to the novelty of imported films (Cole 2001; Dadson 1995a). In the 1920s, Alfred John Kabu Ocansey, a successful African merchant, opened the Cinema Theatre at Azuma and Palladium, both in Accra, where he showed silent films for 3p, 6p, and one schilling.16 The stratified admission fees allowed “a great range of Accra citizens to attend,” including Africans and Europeans (Cole 2001, 72). Between 1922 and 1925, Ocansey established cinemas in several large towns: the Park Cinema in Accra, the Recardo Cinema at Nsawam, the Capitol Cinema in Koforidua, the Royal in Kumsai, and Arkhurst Hall in Sekondi. Both Bartholomew and Ocansey were linked to the burgeoning transnational distribution of Hollywood films and imported titles such as Custer’s Last Stand, Al Jolson in Casino de Paris, and The Gold Diggers of Broadway, the first color film brought to the Gold Coast. Supported by the “incipient classes” of the Gold Coast (Cole 2001, 55), early cinema exhibitions were among a variety of commercial entertainments offered to patrons. According to Catherine Cole’s Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre (2001), the Palladium hosted some of the earliest performances of the Ghanaian concert party, a comic musical theater that fused Western and African influences to create an innovative combination of drama, music, and audience participation. Modeled on London’s music hall variety theater, the Palladium featured not only cinema shows, but magic acts, variety entertainments, and dances. Ocansey hired concert party performers such as Augustus Alexander Shotang Williams to do comic sketches and sing popular songs before or after a film showing.17

      The influence of cinema reached far beyond the urban centers of the Gold Coast. Individual, itinerant film exhibitors, who relied on portable 16mm cinema projectors, introduced film exhibition and Hollywood fare to rural audiences in the late 1920s. Dadson (1995a) reports that many of these traveling exhibitors bypassed merchant distributors such as Ocansey, obtaining their films from seaman arriving at the Takordi port, which opened in 1928. Their mobile cinema shows toured small towns and villages in the cocoa growing regions of the country. An account of the film show of one of these exhibitors, Ata Joe, who toured the Eastern region of the country, reads as follows:

      When he arrived at a village, he and one assistant would hire a courtyard of a house, set up an electricity generator and projector and show a number of films for a few days. The films were mainly American cowboy, war and Charlie Chaplin types. (Qtd. in Dadson 1995a, 11)

      In subsequent years, the number of film exhibitors and commercial theaters increased substantially in the Gold Coast, and by 1942, West African Pictures Limited, Captan Cinema Company, and the Nankani Cinema Company, three privately owned distribution and exhibition companies, owned approximately twenty-five theaters (Dadson 1995a; Sakyi 1996). Munir Captan, who inherited the Captan family cinemas, explained that most of the films screened at these commercial theaters were Hollywood movies and, periodically, independent features made by the fast-growing Indian commercial film industry; feature films from Britain and South Africa were also exhibited, although infrequently (personal communication).

      Colonial Interventions in Film Exhibition and Production

      Prior to World War II, it was the influx of Hollywood films into the colonies by independent commercial exhibitors that brought cinema to the attention of British colonial authorities.18 The Colonial Office Films Committee presented a report to the Conference of Colonial Governors (1930) that highlighted the crucial need to censor films exhibited in the colonies “as the display of unsuitable films is a very real danger” to “primitive communities” in Africa (qtd. in Smyth 1979, 437). Rosaleen Smyth explains that Hollywood “was seen as a threat to the British imperium because of the unsavory image of the white race that was being projected” (1979, 438), and, therefore, colonial governors were provided with guidelines for censoring films exhibited in the colonies and advised to be mindful of “the special character and susceptibilities of the native people” (qtd. in Smyth 439). According to Advance of a Technique: Information Services in the Gold Coast (1956), a pamphlet published by the Gold Coast Information Services, the censorship panel was made up of volunteers who applied “the terms of reference of the British Board of Film Censors . . . with extra vigilance against racial discord, violence, and new methods of committing crime.” The effectiveness of these increased censorship measures in the Gold Coast were negligible. Newspaper advertisements from the period indicate that commercial cinemas continued to feature a range of Hollywood films. Commercial exhibitors had little motivation for submitting their films to be censored, and the censorship panel had no power to prohibit exhibitors or distributors from making Hollywood films available to audiences.19

      Attention shifted from censorship to the distribution of British war propaganda films to the African colonies at the start of World War II. To this end, the British Ministry of Information created the Colonial Film Unit (CFU), which established branches in East, Central, and West Africa. This was the beginning of cinema aban, or government cinema. In the Gold Coast, a cinema van, imported from London, toured towns and villages exhibiting films and short documentaries such as The British Empire at War series and Burma: West African Troops Cross the Maturahari River. The large majority of the CFU films were made in Britain, although the content was often adjusted to appeal to African audiences. The Raw Stock Scheme, implemented in 1942, provided 16mm cameras and film to information officers in the African colonies who would film African scenes and locations. The exposed film would be sent to Britain to be developed, edited, and spliced into CFU productions.

      At the end of WWII, facing escalating anticolonial criticism, the CFU redirected its focus toward the production of films in Africa by Africans. According to Smyth, in 1947, Creech Jones, the Secretary of State for Colonies, “dramatically revised Britain’s colonial policy. Suddenly decolonization was pushed to the top of the agenda. The life expectancy of the Empire was reduced from a leisurely eighty years to twenty” (1992, 164). Priya Jaikumar’s book Cinema at the End of Empire: