CHAIR: Rebecca Ohene-Asah

Cecilia Järdemar and Freddy Tsimba

Bokundoli – Re-Framing the Colonial Archive

This paper will explore how a material part of Sweden ́s colonial history – colonial troves of films and photographs – can support present day discourses, processes and practices of recovery from colonial epistemicide in the Congo DR, and at the same time support a re-evaluation of colonial involvement in Sweden. Swedish missionaries were important actors during the Belgian colonization of the Congo, and the opening of the mission fields coincided with the dissemination of photographic technology. The camera's capacity to collect and construct the world soon became entwined with colonialism and Christian missions. The Church deployed camera equipment with its missionaries, and the resulting photographs and films served to entice parishes at home to donate funds. The missionaries were also part of a process of colonial epistemicide - paradoxically documenting the existing culture in the villages where they settled, and then changing, or even destroying it. Today glass-plate negatives and reels of 35mm film are spread across various archives and private collections in Sweden. In the Congo DR on the other hand, very little historical materials remain. The images include multiple entry points, not only describing the encounter from a Swedish point of view, but also pointing towards counter histories and acts of resistance. How can a dispersed colonial archive be remade by Congolese communities, encountering and re-evaluating both history and the present post- colonial condition in the process? Simultaneously allowing Sweden to confront its colonial past, which a discourse of innocence has all too often obscured? An intercultural collaboration between Congolese artist Freddy Tsimba and Swedish artist Cecilia Järdemar resulted in a series of workshops and performative public screenings in the Congo and Sweden. The artistic research project explores the different temporalities of the colonial archive – from colonial detritus located in the past in Sweden to the archive as a contemporary catalyst for change in the Congo DR.

Martha Evans and Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk

Colonial Archives, Digitisation and Inaccessibility

African archives have always been subject to colonial practices of assembling, indexing and displaying materials. This is particularly true of visual archives. Photography and cinema provided a vital space to record, display and disseminate representations of Western superiority reinforcing the structures of colonialism through its industrialized form. Wolfgang Fuhrman argues that, “it is impossible to imagine cinema’s emergence without imperial colonialism’s modern infrastructure that gave the first film operators access to formerly remote and unknown places.” (148) What, then, does the push to digitise national and private archives across Africa imply for researchers? While it might suggest better access to African histories, in practice the process can also result in lopsided, biased and/or inaccessible versions of archive materials, as certain narratives and histories are rendered visible and searchable, while others remain secret and inaccessible. The digitisation of archives should encourage ethical and epistemological debate. What are the ethics of viewing and using archive materials once they are digitised? Should African archives be heavily curated, and how might this occur in the digital space? To what extent does digitising African archives introduce what Premesh Lalu refers to as a ‘virtual stampede for Africa’ (2007), whereby the costs associated with digitisation and management introduce new regimes of exclusion? And what might be lost in the process of digitisation and expanded accessability? We discuss these and other questions in the context of the devastating fire that gutted the University of Cape Town’s renowned Jagger library. The process of salvaging lost and damaged collections (like the extensive African film collection which includes rare films and donated collections on celluloid and tape), has thrown these questions into sharp relief, as librarians, historians and archivists alike seek to reimagine the ways in which the university preserves and displays its future archives.

Jennifer Blaylock

‘The Bard Wouldn’t Recognize Hamlet’: The African Film Archive and the Medium of Shakespeare

One of the few feature films made by Ghana’s post-independence state film industry that can be viewed today as of the result of archival collection and preservation best practices is a Ghanaian adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Hamile: The Tongo Hamlet is based on the 1964 University of Ghana stage production adapted by the Ghanaian playwright Joe de Graft. The film, however, was directed by the British national Terry Bishop with the explicit purpose of being shown at the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival. A later broadcast of Hamile on WNET in 1970 led to a copy being deposited with the Library of Congress which would result in its eventual preservation. In this paper, I analyze the history of Hamile’s production, distribution, and preservation to highlight the coloniality of power that structures the conditions of possibility within Ghanaian film historiography. I will show how Hamile’s survival is owed to a Western pleasure in seeing the familiar made strange as part of a re-centering of Western culture through the novelty of difference. Additionally, I will demonstrate how the theatrical and dance adaptations of the film by Martin Owusu and Victor Bah in in 1998 and 2008, exemplify an embodied archival practice that preserved Hamile despite Ghanaian state institutional failures to do so. I argue that while the Ghanaian state, through its neglect of state archival institutions, may have left the preservation of its cinematic heritage to the US in the case of Hamile, Ghanaian artists have been actively preserving Hamile through alternative methods.

Brett Bowles

“Extremely Harmful, with Potentially Vexing Repercussions”: René Vautier’s Anti-Colonial Guerrilla Documentary Afrique 50 (1950)

Today film historians widely recognize Afrique 50—a seventeen-minute documentary shot illegally by Communist filmmaker René Vautier (1928-2015) in Ivory Coast during 1949 at the age of 21—as the first French-language film to explicitly denounce and to provide graphic visual evidence of the violence and exploitation at the root of European colonialism in Africa. Smuggled back to France by African acquaintances of Vautier, much of the raw footage was seized anddestroyed by French police, butVautier salvaged enough to finish the project despite being briefly arrested and condemned to a year inprison.Starting in 1952 the film was shown clandestinely in private screenings across much of the country through a network of Communist youth groups and politically progressive ciné-clubs. It circulated internationally as well, shown at festivals across Eastern Europe in Karlovy-Vary (Czechoslovakia), Dresden (East Germany), and Warsaw (Poland), where in August 1955 it won thegold medal for documentary at the World Youth Festival. Yet the film remained banned in France, and out of circulation until 1989, when in a striking reversal of policy that corresponded with a shift in François Mitterrand’s foreign policy, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs purchased its distribution rights and began loaning copies free of charge to institutional partners under the auspices of promoting Francophonie, particularly in West Africa. This move paved the way for the film’s eventual rehabilitation in France as well. Though its first public screening at the Cinéma du réel festival at the Pompidou Center in March 1996 constituted a clear institutional endorsement, the film remained unavailable commercially for another seventeen years, in part because by French policy no heritage film without a registered production visa was eligible for restoration for public funding. Finally released on DVD in 2013 after a long fundraising campaign, Afrique 50 has since then become standard viewing in university courses covering African and colonial / anti-colonial cinema and featured regularly at retrospectives and festivals devoted to documentary. Based on new archival research in France, as well as secondary sources including interviews with Vautier prior to his death, his written memoirs, and a range of newspapers and periodicals, my paper will offer a comprehensive, contextualized reading this groundbreaking film’s production, distribution, and reception histories from 1949 to the present.