filmmaker engagée.
Several women were among the film professionals who established the Pan African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) and the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI), both created in 1969. These two exemplary African cinema institutions continue to be a reference for continental co-operation and organisation in the area of culture. Zalika Souley, trailblazing actress from Niger, served on the founding committee of FEPACI, while Burkinabé Alimata Salembéré, one of the founding members of FESPACO, and whose compatriot Odette Sangho was also a member, presided over the organising committee of the first festival. The documentary Tam Tam à Paris, made in 1963 by journalist Thérèse Sita-Bella, was among the entries at the festival and is considered the earliest film by an African woman. Four years later, in 1967, Ghanaian dramatist and writer Efua Sutherland collaborated with the US television network ABC in the production of Arabia: The Village Story, a major documentary film. These pioneering women continued in their respective fields of journalism and drama, having made only one film, a common practice among the women who also utilise the moving image as a mode of expression in their chosen career. Moreover, recent developments in the seminal organisations FESPACO and FEPACI attest to the desire to continue to include women in key decision-making positions. Seipati Bulane-Hopa of South Africa served as general secretary of FEPACI from 2006 to 2013, and at the 23rd edition of FESPACO, in 2013, women took on leadership roles – one of them as president of the main juries. At the same edition, Alimata Salembéré was in the spotlight as guest of honour, in recognition of her pioneering role in the organisation.
The 1960s also witnessed the first World Festival of Black Arts, a seminal event hosted in Senegal in 1966, during which Safi Faye, Senegalese film director and ethnologist, and the first sub-Saharan African woman to direct a commercially distributed feature film, would enter a world that would change the course of her career (Pfaff 2004).
The 1970s, a decade of unprecedented global focus on women, heralded a call to action in all spheres of women’s lives: the declaration of the United Nations Decade of Women (1976–1985); the evolution of a universal women’s rights movement; and the maturation of second-wave feminism, which would influence the development of women’s studies in the academy, feminist film theory and a critical inquiry into the visual representation of women all brought about global changes. A noteworthy development during the decade was the emergence of the bilingual feminist research group the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD), created in 1977 and based in Senegal. Moreover, from this defining decade emerged a sustained presence of African women filmmakers. Pioneer Safi Faye recalls the curiosity in the early 1970s around her enrolment at the École Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière in Paris as the first African woman to attend the prestigious film school.4
The internationality of the UN Decade of Women engendered the notion of a global sisterhood, though not without tension5 – at five-year intervals (1975, 1980, 1985) three conferences were convened on three continents, in America, Europe and Africa (Mexico City, Copenhagen, and Nairobi respectively). With it came a flurry of research, conferences, reports and monographs, reflecting the diverse experiences of women around the world. For example, in 1978 women scholars throughout the African continent participated in a study visit organised by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa to conduct research on African women in the media (Anani, Keita & Rahman 1981). One of the first of its kind, the study’s purpose was to analyse images of women in the media and the representation of women in policy-making positions in the African media. One of the principle premises postulated was that if there was an increase in the number of women representatives in media policy-making decisions, there would be the likelihood of more positive images appearing in the media, since a cadre of women in positions of power would serve as role models. Similarly, in 1984, in preparation for the final UN Women’s Decade Conference, and in collaboration with the Association of Women Professionals in Communications, AAWORD organised the seminar ‘Women, Communication, Development: What perspectives for Nairobi 1985?’ This initiative underscored AAWORD’s understanding of the importance of women at the intersection of media and African development.
In the 1980s many African women’s films reiterated the themes of the UN Decade for Women. It is no coincidence that during and after the UN Decade for Women there was a surge of African women filmmakers and, correspondingly, international visibility of these filmmakers and their films, many of which focused on the subjects of women and empowerment, calling attention to economic, social and cultural development from the perspective of women. The 1980s also witnessed a remarkable growth in film production by women. Many of the first generation of Burkinabé women passed through the doors of the Institut Africain d’Education Cinématographique (INAFEC), the historic film school based in Burkina Faso (which closed in 1987). Similarly, the first wave of Kenyan women film practitioners appeared during the early 1980s, many of whom studied at the Film Training Department at the Kenya Institute of Mass Communication. This impressive showing confirms the observations of Kenyan scholar Wanjiku Beatrice Mukora that women performed a key role in shaping a national cinema in Kenya (Mukora 1999).
In the final decade of the 20th century a combination of disparate movements would be instrumental to the professionalisation of African women in cinema and their growth throughout the continent and beyond.
The strengthening of networks through organising, outreach and advocacy during the 1990s ensured a visible continent-wide and international presence. Having already developed a framework for action at the seminal ‘Colloque Images de Femmes’, the women’s film forum at Vues d’Afrique (Montreal) in 1989, the genesis of an organised movement emerged. The 12th edition of FESPACO in 1991 marked a historical moment for African women in the visual media as they forged a framework for the organisation that is now known as the Pan-African Union of Women in the Image Industry.
Paradoxically, at the end of the Decade for Women in 1985, second-wave feminism started to wane, with a post-feminist discourse arising in the 1990s and asserting that feminism had achieved its goal of eradicating sexism and confronting masculinity and machismo. At the ‘L’Engagement de femmes cineastes’ roundtable organised by the Cinemas of the South Pavilion at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival (Africultures 2008), the use of the word ‘generation’ initially suggested a shift in attitudes about and among women.
Veteran filmmaker Moufida Tlatli recounted her experiences as a young student at the ‘l’IDHEC École Nationale Supérieure des Métiers de l’Image et du Son’ in Paris in 1968, at a time when women were expected to settle into careers as film editors or script supervisors. Her younger counterparts talked about very different experiences, much more on par with their male counterparts. The most edifying aspect of the discussion was its inter-generational and inter-continental focus on the plurality of experiences across generations, ethnicities, cultures and locations. Personal histories and post-colonial legacies were part of the mix of a very exciting dialogue among women of the South in general, and of African women in particular, who expressed a genuine willingness to address the complex issues in their experiences head on. In spite of the generational shift in experiences vis-à-vis women’s role as film practitioners, the current practices and experiences of women in Africa echoed those sentiments expressed by the first generation of African women film practitioners. For instance, as I have explored elsewhere:
feminists [sic] film studies that emerged in the 1970s were centred around the term “women and cinema” as [their] point of departure … [whereas] Safi Faye of that generation had already taken a nongendered position, thus not distinguishing herself from a male filmmaker: “I do not make a difference between Safi the woman or Safi the man”. This position echoes the present-day sentiments of Osvalde Lewat, who comes from a later generation of filmmakers, [and who] brought into question the gendering of the term cineaste in the colloquy title at Cannes
