Lifestyle/Culture have been held in the hands of Western companies through their distribution rights, which has created several barriers for screening these films across the continent. As a result, many of them remain unknown to African audiences. “I think about art as children. If you are going to return something, it should feel safe. It shouldn’t feel as if it’s going to be suffocated or abandoned. I don’t like seeing art in cemeteries–be it libraries that are inaccessible or about to be run down, but I also don’t want to see art suffocated in placelessness. People that don’t fully understand it–the language, the context. Many of these films are decontextualized when they are not available to those whose culture they come from.” This is according to Sheila Chukwulozie, a Nigerian creative producer and artist, who also recently starred in an award-winning short film, Egúngún (Masquerade), which will be showing at Sundance 2022.
As Africa’s Artifacts Start to be Returned, What About its Films? By Priya Sippy
IN A HAUNTINGLY MEMORABLE closing scene for the film La noire de…, by the “father of African cinema” Ousmane Sembene, a young Senegalese boy hides behind a ceremonial mask as he follows a white man through the streets of Dakar in a newly-independent Senegal. The white man hastens his pace, eventually running, but the young boy, unperturbed, keeps pace with him, always there, always watching. This image is strangely emblematic of the position that Europe finds itself in right now as calls for the return of Africa’s looted assets escalate. Up Funding is the main explanation for to 90% of southern Africa’s material cultural why African classics are owned by the legacy is outside of the continent, according west to the French government-commissioned 2018 report by Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr, and French historian Bénédicte Savoy. No matter which way the former colonial powers turn, they cannot escape the calls for restitution. This year, amid fresh scrutiny, several European countries started returning certain art and artifacts taken from Africa during the colonial period. At the end of October, France handed back 26 works of art to Benin. A Cambridge college and Scottish university quickly followed suit. These moves were hailed by activists and officials as turning points in the long battle by African countries to recover their stolen artwork.
African film has recently joined the restitution debate While the focus of the recent debate on African cultural restitution has been on artifacts, some activists are now turning their attention to other works from Africa that remain in the hands of Western institutions: films. While African artifacts have been housed in European museums, classic African films
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Ousmane Sembene Much of the reason why these films are sometimes virtually unknown to Africans and mostly available in the west has to do with funding. Many postindependence African films were funded, if not partially, then fully, by European governments and
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www.africabusinessassociation.org
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