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A Ghanaian History

Carmela Garritano

Ohio University Research in International Studies

Africa Series No. 91

Athens

Dla Mikołaja i Bartka, moich kochanych

Acknowledgments

Research for this project has been supported by grants from Michigan State University, FLAS, Fulbright IIE, the West Africa Research Association, and the University of St. Thomas. The professors I worked closely with at Michigan State, including David Robinson, Jyotsna Singh, and David Wiley, deserve special thanks for their help and encouragement. The support of the African Studies Center at MSU, and especially of John Metzler, was instrumental to obtaining the funding necessary to complete a significant portion of the research on which this project is built. I am grateful to Tama Hamilton-Wray, my boss at the African Media Center, who was a bright light during my time at MSU. Keyan Tomaselli, whom I had the pleasure of getting to know when he was briefly at MSU, has helped me along in various ways over the years.

I owe my deepest debt of gratitude to my advisor and dear friend Ken Harrow. His guidance and support have been my fortune. As a mentor, activist, and scholar, his is an example I hope to follow.

Since 1998, Socrate Safo has been a close friend and colleague. His gumption and creativity drew me to the industry of which he is a founding member, and he has been an unwavering source of support and encouragement. I thank him for sharing his knowledge and expertise with me these many years.

This work would not have been possible without the help of friends and colleagues in the Ghanaian film and video industries. For their generosity and patience, warm thanks to George Arcton-Tetty, Mark Colemen, Veronica Quarshie, and Bob Smith, Jnr. I am also grateful for the cooperation of Mustapha Adams, William Akuffo, Ashangbor Akwetey-Kanyi, Mohammed Al Hassan, King Ampaw, Fred Amugi, Emmanuel Apea, Nat Banini, Alex Boateng, George Bosompim, Nii Saka Brown, Munir Captan, Nanabanyin Dadson, Pascaline C. Edwards, Shirley Frimpong-Manso, Steve Hackman, Martin Hama, Rev. Dr. Chris Hesse, H.M., Idikoko, Ramesh Jai, Alfred Kumi-Atiemo, Albert Kuvodu, Albert Mensah, Vera Mensah, Mr. Mettle, Saul Mettle, Abdul Salam Munumi, Haijia Muzongo, Samuel Nai, Samuel Nyamekye, Samuel Odoi-Mensah, Helen Omaboe, Kofi Owusu, Albert Owusu-Ansah, Regina Pornortey, Brew Riverson, William Sefa, George Williams, and Moro Yaro. I remain indebted to Godwin Kotey, a talented friend who left the world too soon.

Many thanks to my hard-working research assistants: in Ghana, Adu Vera and Joseph Koranteng; in Nigeria, Oluchi Dikeocha; and in St. Paul, Nana Yiadom. Time spent in Ghana has been enriched by Lydia Amon-Kotey, Francis Gbormittah, Elijah Mensah, and Sam Nyeha. During the Fulbright year, I was privileged to have JoAnn Brimmer as a friend and intellectual interlocutor.

I thank Ato Quayson, who was generous enough to read several chapters of the manuscript while it was very much in process. I also thank Carmen McCain, who offered helpful comments on the introduction. I am indebted to the many colleagues and friends whose provocative responses to papers I have given at various conferences, in particular at the African Literature Association and African Studies Association conferences, have helped me reconsider and sharpen my ideas. I want to thank Lindiwe Dovey and Teju Olaniyan for their expressions of support. Thanks are due to Jean-Marie Teno for the rough cut of Sacred Places and talking with me on several occasions. Thanks, too, to fellow video movie researchers Moradewun Adejunmobi, Africanus Aveh, Jonathan Haynes, Ono Okome, and John McCall. I look forward to all that is yet to come! Jon Haynes deserves a special expression of gratitude for publishing my first article on Nollywood and, since then, supporting my work in countless ways. I thank him especially for his incisive and generous comments on this manuscript. I also wish to express my gratitude to the anonymous reader whose discerning and detailed comments made this a better book and to Gillian Berchowitz at Ohio University Press for her patience and assistance.

Laura Dagustino deserves huge thanks for helping with childcare and more during several very long and difficult years. If not for her, I would not have been able to complete research for this book. I am also grateful to my parents for the assistance they provided in St. Paul during a summer I spent in Ghana. I have benefitted in countless ways from Padmaja Challakere’s brilliant mind and caring heart.

Finally, to my beloved Bartek, unending appreciation.

Introduction: African Popular Videos as Global Cultural Forms

The emergence of popular video industries in Ghana and Nigeria represents the most important and exciting development in African cultural production in recent history. Since its inception in the 1960s, African filmmaking has been a “paradoxical activity” (Barlet 2000, 238). Born out of the historical struggle of decolonization and a commitment to represent “Africa from an African perspective” (Armes 2006, 68), the work of socially committed African filmmakers has not generated a mass audience on the continent. Under current conditions marked by the international hegemony of dominant cinema industries, the dilapidated state of cinema houses in Africa, and the prohibitive expense of producing celluloid films, African filmmakers have become locked in a relationship of dependency with funding sources and distribution networks located in the global North. As a consequence, African films remain “foreigners in their own countries” (Sama 1996, 148), more likely to be found in Europe and North America on film festival screens and in university libraries than projected in cinemas or broadcast on television in Africa.

Though the film medium has failed to take root in Africa, video has flourished. An inexpensive, widely available, and easy to use technology for the production, duplication, and distribution of movies and other media content, video has radically transformed the African cultural landscape. In perhaps its most consequential manifestation, video has allowed videomakers in Ghana and Nigeria, individuals who in most cases are detached from official cultural institutions and working outside the purview of the state, to create a tremendously popular, commercial cinema for audiences in Africa and abroad: feature “films” made on video. Freed from the requirements for cultural and economic capital imposed by the film medium, ordinary Ghanaians and Nigerians started making and exhibiting their own productions in the late 1980s. In Ghana, the tremendous success of William Akuffo’s Zinabu (1987), a full-length feature shot with a VHS home video camera, sparked what those working in the Ghanaian video industry call “the video boom.” Local audiences, who had been watching scratched and faded foreign films for years, responded to Akuffo’s video movie with enormous enthusiasm. They crowded into the Globe Theatre in Accra for weeks to watch the video on the large screen. In a few years, film projectors in all of the major film theaters were replaced with video projection systems and hundreds of privately owned video centers, of various sizes and structural integrity, sprung up throughout the country to meet the growing demand for video viewing. Within ten years of the first local video production in 1987, as many as four videos in English were being released in Ghana each month, and over twenty years later, in 2009, Ghanaian movies appeared at the rate of approximately six per week, one in English and five in Akan, a Ghanaian language spoken across the country.

The Nigerian video industry, which began to take shape around the same time, soon became the economic and cultural power of the West African region. Now one of the largest movie industries in the world, the Nigerian industry releases a staggering 1,500 movies each year (Barrot 2009). Nollywood, the name popularly used to refer to Nigerian English-language movie production, speaks to the size and ambitions of the industry, but also obscures its diversity. Large numbers of Nigerian movies are also made in Yoruba. In fact, more Nigerian movies are produced in Yoruba than English, and in the city of Kano in Northern Nigeria, there is a well-established and prolific Hausa-language industry, called “Kannywood.” Small numbers of Nigerian movies are also produced in Nupe and Bini (McCain 2011). Based on the models established in Ghana and Nigeria, budding industries in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Cameroon have emerged. Produced transnationally and broadcast on television, streamed over the Internet, distributed and pirated globally in multiple formats, African video movies represent, in the words of Jonathan Haynes, “one of the greatest explosions of popular culture the continent has ever seen” (2007c, 1).

The growth and expansion of African popular video has engendered a rapidly developing body of published work dispersed across three continents (Africa, Europe, and North America) and several disciplines.1Prominent among the numerous journal articles and book chapters on African video movies are the ongoing contributions of the pioneers in the field, Haynes and Onookome Okome, and important articles by Moradewun Adejunmobi, Akin Adesokan, John McCall, and Birgit Meyer. Noteworthy too are anthologies edited by Jonathan Haynes (2000), Foluke Ogunleye (2003), Pierre Barrot (2009), and Mahir S˛aul and Ralph A. Austen (2010), as well as Brian Larkin’s brilliant monograph Signal and Noise (2008). Important research on African video movies has featured in special editions of the journals Postcolonial Text (2007), Film International (2007), African Literature Today (2010), and the Journal of African Cultural Studies (2010). African Studies conferences regularly include panels on African video movies, and specialists in the field have organized several international conferences dedicated to the dissemination and sharing of research on this new cultural form.2 In addition, the many documentaries on popular video in Africa indicate a solid and growing interest among nonspecialists.3 Without question, the largest part of this scholarship has concentrated on the Nigerian industry, and in particular the English-language video industry based in Southern Nigeria.4 Too readily ignored or merely absorbed into Nollywood’s dominant narrative have been the more minor industries in Nigeria, such as the Hausa-language industry, and in the region, the historically and aesthetically distinct video industry in Ghana, which is the focus of this book.

The focus on Nollywood, moreover, has overlooked the transnational interaction between the two industries and has tended to simplify and reify “the local” that Nollywood is said to represent, flattening the multiplicity of transnational cultural articulations that move through regional cultural economies in Africa and often in relations of disjuncture and competition. By subsuming all West African video under the example of Nigeria, the region’s dominant national power, critics have erased the movement, complexity, and contestation that mark the West African regional videoscape, where “the local” remains a contested signifier, not a self-evident descriptor. Faced with the relentless onslaught of Nigerian videos in Ghana, some Ghanaian videomakers have come to regard Nollywood as a far more pressing threat to their survival than Hollywood. Seen from this point of view, Nollywood looks a lot like an invader, a regional cultural power whose success has endangered local production. This study of Ghanaian video, including its points of intersection with and divergence from Nollywood, reminds us that margins, like centers, are multiple, relational, and shifting. African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History accounts for the singularity of the history of Ghanaian film and video as it has been shaped by national and transnational forces and strives to enrich our understanding of the diverse cultural ecology of West African screen media.

African Popular Video and African Film Scholars:

A Brief Historical Overview

I first learned of the emergence of the local video industries in Ghana and Nigeria at the 1997 Annual Conference of the African Literature Association (ALA), the theme of which was FESPACO (Festival Panafricain du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou) Nights in Michigan, a decade after Akuffo screened Zinabu to audiences in Accra. Organized by Kenneth W. Harrow and hosted by Michigan State University, where I was a PhD student at the time, the conference was unprecedented: the first conference of the ALA dedicated to screening, discussing, and celebrating African cinema. Many African filmmakers were in attendance, and so not surprisingly, discussions and debates concerning the obstacles impeding African film production and distribution in Africa consumed a fair amount of time and energy. Looking back, it seems remarkable, given the preoccupation with funding and the limited availability of African films and functioning cinema houses in Africa, that not one paper was proposed on the thriving local, low-budget, commercial video industries in West Africa.5 In the margins of the main event, video, mentioned by chance, came to represent little more than a notation. It was at the Women’s Caucus luncheon that I initially heard about African video movies and only during the question and answer session that followed the well-received talk by Tsitsi Dangaremgba, the Zimbabwean novelist and filmmaker, who spoke on the making of her first feature film Everyone’s Child (1996). After commending Dangaremgba for her sensitive and honest representation of AIDS and its impact on families and communities, an audience member who had recently been to West Africa spoke briefly about the booming market for locally produced videos in West Africa. Unlike Everyone’s Child, an artistic African film animated by social justice and activism, the videos, she claimed, were brazenly amateurish and profit-driven. Influenced by Hollywood, they promoted stereotypical and extremely negative images of Africa. She reached out to the audience with a sense of urgency, as if this example of local cultural production were a harmful, invasive pestilence that needed to be eradicated. She wondered how we, the experts and intellectuals, could intervene in the local cultural scene on behalf of Africa.

I have included this anecdote because it expresses the moralistic overtones that dominated the initial responses of African film and literature scholars to popular video and that, although far less frequently, continue to color criticism of the videos. Carmen McCain’s (2011) description of the position assigned to Nollywood at FESPACO 2011 attests to its ongoing marginalization. The founding figures of African cinema set the still widely held notion that popular or commercial cultural products were little more than imitations of Western forms that provided distraction in the form of cheap entertainment, and as Alexi Tcheuyap notes, these governing ideologies mandated that African cinema “was meant not for pleasure, but for (political) instruction” (2011, 7). Unabashedly commercial and melodramatic, video movies have frustrated expectations of what African film is supposed to be. Frank Ukadike has described video productions as “devoid of authenticity” (Ukadike 2003, 126), and Josef Gugler argues that these “market-driven” products promote the “political processes that engender extreme inequalities” (2003, 78). Lindiwe Dovey states that commercial videos “tend to affirm” violence, while serious and oppositional African films “[explore] restorative, nonviolent means of resolving social and political problems” (2009, 23). Most problematic is that these generalizations are stated without substantiation or reference to any of the thousands of popular movies that have been released in Ghana and Nigeria since the late 1980s. They demonstrate little awareness of the incredible range and variety of popular movies or interest in the audiences who consume and take pleasure from them. These criticisms, it seems, have functioned chiefly to produce and police a particular idea of what African screen media is or should be.

African film scholars’ reluctance to engage popular video in a serious way explains why the earliest and some of the best work, with the noteworthy exceptions of writing by Haynes and Okome, has been done by anthropologists. Tcheuyap (2011) has shown that the governing ideologies of African cinema, though animated by proletarian and emancipatory desires, were instituted and have been policed by elite intellectual institutions, which I would emphasize, remain detached from African sites of cultural consumption. Like the makers of other popular products in Africa, the producers of popular videos, in most cases, are not affiliated with intellectual institutions or institutions of official culture; most have not attended film schools or university, have little formal training in video or film production, and so have not been initiated into the political and aesthetic disposition and conceptual vocabulary of African cinema.6As Haynes remarks, “The international dimension of their cultural horizon is formed more by American action films, Indian romances, and Mexican soap operas than by exposure to English literature” (2003a, 23). The makers of popular movies have never been principally concerned with authenticity, cultural revival, or cultural preservation, the founding motivations of elite African cinema. Addressing a popular, mass audience in Africa, the videomakers are not obliged to speak on behalf of an African minority community to an audience of outsiders and remain unencumbered by “the burden of representation” (Desai 2004, 63) that inflects the criticisms voiced by makers and scholars of serious African film.7

Since the 1990s, the differences between African popular video and serious African film have become less pronounced. Advances in digital video technologies have obscured the lines separating film and video, and over time, as the Ghanaian and Nigerian industries have become more formalized and videomakers have developed significant expertise and experience, the disparities between “amateur” videomakers and “professional” filmmakers have diminished. In content and form, recent big-budget, flashy African films such as Gavin Hood’s sentimental drama Tsotsi (2005), which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture, and Djo Tunda Wa Munga’s gangster thriller Viva Riva! (2010) resonate more with Nollywood than politicized African film, further troubling simplistic binaries between the two forms of African screen media. The features of Nigerian moviemakers Tunde Kelani and Kunle Afolayan, which grow from and are marked by Nollywood aesthetics and modes of production, self-consciously invoke and revitalize Yoruba cultural antecedents and move in and out of film festival and academic circuits if not quite effortlessly, than with less and less resistance.8

As technologies and forms change, the divide between critics of popular video and elite African cinema has started to close, too. Several important books on African film have discussed the unparalleled significance of the local video movie phenomenon to the study and production of African film and media (Harrow 2007; Dovey 2009; Tcheuyap 2011). Tcheuyap’s Postnationalist African Cinema (2011), referencing Nollywood, illustrates that entertainment and performance have always been features of serious African cinema, even if rarely discussed by critics more concerned with history and politics. A conference at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 2007 provided the opportunity for comparative analyses of the two forms and cultivated dialogue between scholars of local video and African film, and two significant publications, a special edition of the Journal of African Cultural Studies (2010) edited by Lindiwe Dovey and Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century (2010), a collection of essays edited by Mahir Saul and Ralph Austin, the conveners of the conference, grew from that meeting. Manthia Diawara’s African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics (2010) combines analyses of film and video, treating them with equal attention and rigor. In Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics (2011) Akin Adesokan situates African cultural production, including literature from Africa and the diaspora and the films of Sembene Ousmane and Tunde Kelani, along the transition from decolonization to globalization, reading across several genres to demonstrate the interpenetration of the material, the historical, and the aesthetic. These efforts have gone a long way toward bridging the divide between scholars writing about different forms of African screen media, provoking critical methods and theoretical questions attuned to the spirit of Kenneth Harrow’s (2007) call for change. And although I agree with Dovey, who argues that the opposition between local video and elite African film has been “rendered obsolete” (2010, 2), I do think we can attend to the meaningful differences among African cultural forms without falling into binary logic. Rather than elide these differences, we should probe their sources and effects. Whether subsidized or produced commercially, African screen media circulates and has value symbolically and economically, and as in all cultural forms, these different configurations of value overlap and interact. Serious African film, African popular video, and the many hybrid forms that fit neatly into neither category are enabled and constrained by different material conditions of creation, circulation, and consumption. To my mind, the study of video movies has been crucially important to African film criticism because the videos have resisted incorporation into the field’s dominant critical discourse and engendered methodologies attentive to materiality. Looking seriously at African video movies, and with critical scrutiny, has facilitated exciting new ways of defining, analyzing, and teaching many types of African screen media.

Whether adopting the theoretical language of Marxism, feminism, cultural nationalism, or psychoanalysis, critics of African film, in the main, have practiced what Julianne Burton (1997) has called an immanent criticism, a critical methodology that locates meaning within the world of the film text. Typically, in order to amplify the African film’s political message, the critic positions herself beside the film text, carrying out a formalist analysis of the text or describing its explicit content. Even when the critic sets out to engage history, that history is understood to be located and made present in the film. This methodology has functioned primarily to facilitate African cinema’s founding objective, which, as Harrow explains, was to be “a genuine expression answering the needs of the people through a cinema of struggle and cultural representation” (2007, 42). Yet, immanent criticism, as Burton convincing shows, abstracts and reifies the film text, sealing it off from the “dynamic historical and social forces” (1997, 167) it is intended to transform. A committed intellectual, Burton sets out to reroute politicized critical practice as it applies to oppositional filmmaking. In particular, she calls for the implementation of a more “constructive and meaningful critical relationship to the tradition of oppositional filmmaking in Latin America” (1997, 167). This relationship is based on a contextual criticism, a practice that charges the critic with “attempt[ing] to demonstrate how interacting contextual factors impact upon the film text itself and the interpretation of that text at a given point of reception” (168). Though Burton addresses her critique to politicized critics and has developed this methodology for Latin American oppositional filmmaking, her intervention inspires the method adopted in this book about African video movies. Contextual criticism attempts to account for the fluidity and complexity of context, which Burton describes as “a mutually influential dynamic between the film product, the organizational structure in which it is produced, the organizational structure in which it is consumed, and the larger social context” (Burton 1997, 170). As practiced here, contextual criticism posits a dialectical relationship between the cultural form and its many contexts and investigates how those contexts shape the text and how the text affects its context. Far from abandoning close reading, it couples that reading with the investigation of the materiality and social life of the video-text. An inherently interdisciplinary method, it recognizes that meaning is contingent and variable, constructed by the text’s modes of production and consumption and the dynamic circuits it migrates along.

Whereas the critical discourse of politicized African cinema has privileged the film-text, what have yet to be fully accounted for in the scholarship on popular video movies are their formal properties and aesthetics. This is not to discount or diminish the importance of Birgit Meyer’s provocative analyses of Pentecostal modernity or Brian Larkin’s brilliant discussion of the aesthetics of astonishment that inflect Nigerian videos. Nor do I want to ignore Esi Sutherland-Addy’s article in which she describes the affiliations shared by video movies and West African oral forms. Still, much more attention needs to be paid to the videos as texts, to the narrative conventions and generic modes they deploy, to the anxieties they seek to quell, and to the spectatorial processes they put in motion. This book brings the insights of literary and film analysis to bear on a range of video movies. Close readings of select video features highlight the ambivalent significations produced by Ghanaian movies amid profound material and ideological transformation and investigate how Ghanaian video reconstitutes, even as it is complicit with, the grand narratives of modernity and globalization.

The booming commercial video industries in Ghana and Nigeria, which produce movies meant first and foremost to entertain, have brought pleasure into visibility as a crucial dimension of analysis. Early scholarship on video movies, drawing on the explanations offered by the videomakers themselves, explained their appeal as representational. Video movies presented Ghanaian and Nigerian audiences with characters who looked and talked like them and with stories that were familiar. Meyer explains that Ghanaian popular video “was born out of people’s desire to see their own culture mediated through a television or cinema screen” (1999, 98). Recent writing has associated the appeal of the movies with not only their content, but their function, as well. Adesokan offers that the lavish displays presented by Nollywood domestic dramas fulfill “a mass desire for wealth and power” (2004, 191), and Larkin (2008) has associated the appeal of Nigerian videos with their capacity to express and imaginatively contain the vulnerabilities and desires associated with everyday life in the African postcolony. Moradewun Adejunmobi (2010) has considered the transnational reach of African popular movies to audiences outside the countries where the movies are made and has theorized the specific types of identification audiences find in Nollywood movies and the various pleasures spectators across Africa and the diaspora, from a variety of places and backgrounds, derive from watching them. Adejunmobi uses the term “phenomenological proximity” to capture this transnational appeal. She explains, “Nollywood films in English are able to generate audiences in diverse locations in Africa because they present recognizable struggles, they appeal to widespread fears and familiar aspirations” (Adejunmobi 2010, 111). Audiences identify with the hardships that drive characters to corrupt and immoral acts, and they admire the lifestyles achieved through illicit means. Both Adejunmobi (2010) and Larkin (2008) associate the appeal of videos with their adoption of melodramatic narrative and visual conventions. Melodramatic movies “provide a medium for rationalizing” the attractions of global modernity in the face of the extreme poverty and distress that signal Africa’s exclusion from the status of modernity (Adejunmobi 2010, 114).

In this book, I draw from and build on this research to more closely examine the pleasures the movies offer and the ambivalence they generate. Statements about audiences’ responses to video movies are grounded in extensive ethnographic research conducted over a ten-year period during numerous stints in Ghana, which included formal and informal conversations with ordinary Ghanaians, as well as with producers, distributors, marketers, and others involved in the video industry. Film reviews and commentary published in local newspapers have also contributed to my understanding of audiences’ responses. In close readings of the videos, I have tried to pay attention to the televisual and cinematic codes that suture the spectator to a particular point of view or subject position. In other words, I think it is crucial to attend to the subject positions created by the video-text in our attempts to understand the responses of real audiences and to acknowledge the role of the unconscious in pleasure and identification. Although I do not draw directly on psychoanalytic film theory to elaborate on the functioning of the unconscious, this theory informs my analyses. My use of the word “desire” in the title and throughout the book is meant to signal the interpenetration of the psychic and the sociopolitical in the formations of pleasure, anxiety, and aspiration.

Addressing spectators similarly marginalized by global modernity, the videos offer a multiplicity of pleasures derived from the oscillations between mimesis and fantasy, proximity and distance, desire and revulsion. Audiences imaginatively experience the fantasy of a glamorous lifestyle far removed from their everyday experiences. They identify, too, with a character’s struggles to escape poverty and suffering and disidentify with the immoral practices that the same character engages in to get rich. Again and again, the videos generate profound ambivalence; they issue strong moral condemnations of greed and the immoral attainment of wealth and yet position the spectator as a consumer, one who gazes on and desires the movie’s extravagant commodity displays. They criticize the dehumanizing impulse of capitalism and, simultaneously, produce spectator-subjects who desire the luxuries exhibited. Daniel Jordan Smith (2007) identifies similar expressions of ambivalence in Nigerian witchcraft accusations and stories of the occult. On the one hand, they articulate discontent with the appropriation of wealth and power by a privileged few and illustrate “the continuing power of moralities that privilege people and obligations of social relationships above the naked pursuit of riches” (Smith 2007, 138). On the other hand, they “highlight the intimate connections between popular condemnation of the unequal accumulation of great wealth and the widely shared fantasies about being rich” (142). Here, I argue that a split between narrative condemnation and visual desire commonly structure the movies. Narratives denounce and punish the greedy or selfish protagonist, engaging the spectator as a moral witness, while a visual economy of pleasure that aestheticizes consumption addresses the spectator as a desiring subject. Produced and consumed under circumstances of dire shortage and scarcity, video movies narrate and domesticate the desires and anxieties engendered by Ghana’s incorporation into the global cultural economy. They are fertile ground for the growth of an “imaginaire of consumption” (Mbembe 2002, 271) and of a morality that is highly critical of materialism and capitalistic values.

Ghallywood and Its Global Aspirations

About fifty miles outside of Accra on a vast track of land that sits beside the Tema-Accra highway, Ghanaian videomaker William Akuffo has been constructing a movie production complex called Ghallywood, which he hopes will become the creative center for video movie production in Ghana (see figures I.1 and I.2). When I traveled to Ghana in 2009, I drove out to Ghallywood to call on Akuffo, whom I had first met in 1999, and to tour this most ambitious project. Crossed by streets named after Ghanaian actors and filmmakers, the complex houses Akuffo’s large office and editing studio, a restaurant, and a classroom building. Pushing through the tall grass were the foundations of several other structures, which, when complete, will be the housing units for actors and production crews. Akuffo’s plans also include the construction of a studio, several film sets, and an outdoor movie theater.

Of particular interest to me was the name Ghallywood, which like its predecessor Nollywood, aligns this marginalized, African video movie industry with Hollywood and Bollywood. During this trip to Ghana, I was struck by how often I heard the term Ghallywood, or another variant of it (Gollywood or Ghanawood), used by movie producers to refer to the Ghanaian commercial video movie industry. The name had also appeared in numerous movie and entertainment publications and, on one particular occasion, inspired a provocative debate among members of FIPAG, the Film and Video Producers’ Association of Ghana. Among those reluctant to adopt the label was Richard Quartey; he voiced the minority opinion that Ghallywood is inappropriate to Ghana’s movie industry because it is imitative. “Shouldn’t we tap into our unique cultural reserves to find a better name?” Quartey asked. “Maybe Sankofa?” Supporters of adopting Ghallywood as the official name of the industry argued that imitation was precisely the point. Videomaker Socrate Safo answered, “We have Hollywood, then Bollywood, now Nollywood. Why not Ghallywood, too? We can be as good as those!” This sentiment was echoed by many others. Safo’s adamant support for the label Ghallywood, like Akuffo’s substantial investment in the creation of a Ghanaian movie production center, demonstrates the reach and intensity of the aspirations of moviemakers in Ghana. For those who have adopted the label, Ghallywood is a call to be taken seriously in the global arena of commercial cinema. Quartey’s reluctance replays a concern familiar to African cultural producers, a concern about maintaining African authenticity and originality. James Ferguson has noted that the authenticity of African aspirations to be modern have consistently been called into question out of fear “that the [African] copy is either too different from the [Western] original or not different enough” (2006, 16). In both configurations, Africa is the shadow of the West, its distorted and empty projection. In his book called Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (2006), Ferguson insists on a different way of reading Africa’s shadowing of the West. He torques the metaphor to show that a shadow is not only a distorted double; it also “implies a bond and a relationship. A shadow, after all, is not a copy but an attached twin. . . . Likeness here implies not only resemblance but also a connection, a proximity, an equivalence, even an identity” (2006, 17). This conceptualization of shadowing glosses Safo’s proclamation: “We can be as good as those,” reading it not merely as an attempt to imitate or assimilate to the Western model, but as an expression of a desire for proximity, a desire to attain the status and success of global film industries and to stand beside those global media industries as equal partners. The difference is worth elaborating on. To dismiss the ambitions of Ghanaian videomakers as iterations of cultural imperialism means disregarding their efforts to overcome their marginalization and participate fully as producers of their own cultural forms in the field of global culture.

Borrowing from the conceptual vocabularies of Ferguson, Achille Mbembe, and Sarah Nuttall, this book treats African popular video as a practice through which Africans articulate “worldliness.” Worldliness, as defined by Nuttall and Mbembe,

has to do not only with the capacity to generate one’s own cultural forms, institutions, and lifeways, but also with the ability to foreground, translate, fragment, and disrupt realities and imaginaries originating elsewhere, and in the process place these forms and processes in the service of one’s own making. (Nuttall and Mbembe 2008, 1)

As cultural forms and commodities, popular video movies, like other forms of African popular culture, embrace foreign influences as sources of newness and singularity (Barber 1987). Their appeal is linked to their enormous capacity to recontextualize and localize forms and styles associated with global mass culture, and much as in the African urban environments in which video movies circulate, it is the meeting of the local and the global that generates the energies and uncertainties that drive their production and consumption. As modern African cultural articulations, they participate in the “worlding” of Africa (Simone 2001) and the “indigenizing” (McCall 2002) of global technologies, styles, desires, and discourses.9 As global vernacular forms, they trouble generalizations about an African or national identity because they emerge from, are shaped by, and reshape “a mass-mediated imaginary that frequently transcends national space” (Appadurai 1996, 6).

Despite the expressions of global membership they convey, African popular videos have gone unnoticed outside African area studies by critics and scholars of world cinema. Largely attuned to cinematic forms and flows predominant in the first world institutions of global cine-literacy—film festivals, art-house cinemas, classrooms, and libraries—the current configuration of global media and cinema studies has included scholarship on elite African cinema, but eclipsed minor and commercial cultural forms and circuits that never intersect with these institutions.10 Produced and disseminated through decentralized, private, and nonlegal circuits that variously have been called “minor” (Lionnet and Shi 2005), “unofficial” (Adejunmobi 2007), and “parallel” (Larkin 2004), African video movies move across local landscapes as well as through global cities (Sassen 2001) and media capitals (Curtin 2003), but travel along networks located under, around, and adjacent to major commercial and academic institutions and networks of exchange. They are among the multiplicity of unmapped media flows and forms that have emerged in the wake of the many changes linked to globalization: increased privatization, a proliferation of new, small media and electronic technologies, including video, satellite TV, and the internet, and the expansion of informal markets. Centered on this new African grassroots media form, and the uncharted media migrations and publics in West Africa and the African diaspora it has created, this study deepens our understanding of globalization and its cultural ecology. It pries open the closed circuit of the academic domain of cultural production by investigating a popular and commercial visual form that circulates within the space of the African everyday.

My notion of the everyday evokes Ravi Sundaram’s description of the electronic everyday of Indian technoculture (1990).11 Sundaram describes the electronic everyday as “a space” wrought from vast inequalities of wealth “where practices of quotidian consumption, mobility, and struggle are articulated” (1990, 48). It is a space of nonlegality maintained in large part outside the reach of the state, where mobility and innovation are rewarded, and much as in the Ghanaian video industry, its agents exploit new technologies to improvise creative survival strategies and practices of piracy. The fragmented and dispersed networks of production and distribution of the everyday are organized by small entrepreneurs, or the petty-commodity sector. Part of the informal economy, “the actors in this space have simply ignored the state as the regulator of everyday life” (Sundaram 1999, 64), and they take little notice of the official conventions that govern the formal economy.

In the Ghanaian video industry, the space of the everyday shares several important characteristics with Sundaram’s electronic everyday. Most obviously, its networks and processes operate in a zone of nonformality, which can frustrate the researcher’s attempts to gather numerical data and precise information. Transactions are conducted without documentation. If records are kept, they are often irregular and not reliable. Very little in the system is codified. Artists and crew negotiate their fees with producers, directly and privately; payments for equipment or services rendered are often made in an ad hoc manner. On the set of a movie, money is readily exchanged informally for favors, as small loans, as gifts, or to fulfill social expectations. Producers always seem to be waiting to receive their money from distributors, and the people involved in the making of a movie, at every level, always seem to be waiting for the producer to pay them an outstanding balance. The ubiquity of piracy, the expansion of opportunities for domestic viewing, and the fluidity of the multiple sites for consuming videos publicly confound attempts to figure out how many people actually see any one video movie. Neither the state nor independent producers could possibly regulate the public, informal sites of movies consumption, which include the video parlor, “tie-in spaces” (Ajibade 2007), and numerous, temporary “street corner” gatherings (Okome 2007b) that assemble unpredictably throughout the city. It is also nearly impossible to state with certainty how profitable a movie might have been. Haynes and Okome note, “All figures on sales and profits need to be treated with extreme caution, as they are frequently inflated for publicity purposes, or deflated in order to defraud partners” (2000, 69). And because money and favors are continually being exchanged, and because the financial life of one movie project runs right into the next production, producers themselves have a hard time knowing exactly how much profit they might have made from any one movie. It is perhaps for these reasons that the everyday tends to be an overlooked space, one largely absent in the critical discourse on global cinema, which, like the discourse on technological globalization, has tended to center on “elite domains of consumption and identity” (Sundaram 1999, 63) and, I would add, the artistic and politicized products that move through those domains. This book sketches the broad parameters and shifts of the everyday culture of Ghanaian video movies, while conceding that its fluidity and informality continually disrupt this aim.

Adding to the many articles that examine, and often criticize, the representation of women in Nigerian and Ghanaian movies, this book attends to the enunciation of gender difference in the videos. In other words, it analyzes not only the ways women are portrayed but uncovers the gender norms and ideologies that the movies produce. Without question, video technology has expanded opportunities for women to work as producers of media in Nigeria (Haynes and Okome 2000; Okome 2007c) and in Ghana. As I note in chapter 4, no Ghanaian women had directed or produced a documentary or feature film before the advent of video movies. Yet, today in the Ghanaian industry, the number of men who hold positions as producers, directors, editors, screenwriters, and so on is far, far larger than the number of women in the same roles. That the products of a male-dominated media industry would be misogynistic or sexist is not inevitable, of course. It is true, however, that many Ghanaian movies do tend to recycle gender stereotypes with a long history in African popular culture and naturalize a similarly deep-rooted “ideology of patriarchy” (Okome 2007c, 166). Wisdom Agorde (2007), for example, has described an ethic of masculinity reiterated in Nollywood movies. Rooted in gender difference, this ethic defines manhood through violence, wealth, and ownership of women. Newell has identified the good-time girl and “the infinitely patient wife” as two common feminine character types in Ghanaian popular literature (2000, 37), and these characters appear frequently in videos, too. Agbese Aje-Ori (2010) has added the “mother-in-law” as another female stock character, and in this book, I describe the figure of the “monstrous woman.” A reimagining of the good-time girl, this frighteningly powerful woman unleashes evil on the men who misuse or abuse her. Highly symbolic, she dwells at the limits of morality; her punishments reinstate social norms violated by selfish men with enormous appetites for women, food, and money.

Like Stephanie Newell (1997; 2000), I conceptualize African popular culture as a gender apparatus, a technology that produces and naturalizes particular gender ideologies. Gender is not incidental or supplemental to the worlds and identities imagined in the videos, but necessary to the articulation of these identities (Garritano 2000). The work of gender theorist Judith Butler undergirds the feminist readings included here. In her writing, Butler theorizes “the performative” function of gender norms, demonstrating that through repetition across multiple sites of culture, gender ideologies sanction and naturalize ways of being and of desiring. As Butler notes, “A performative” works “to produce that which it declares” (1993, 107). Crucially, then, cultural forms do not simply reflect dominant ideologies but are productive of those ideologies. They have the capacity to reiterate norms and to question or parody them. Women videomakers such as Veronica Quarshie and Shirley Frimpong-Manso have challenged gender stereotypes common in Ghanaian movies. Like the female writers Newell describes (2000), these women moviemakers speak from within dominant narratives of gender and open possibilities for the emergence of alternative ways of being men and women.

Although mainly centered on Nollywood, the scholarship on African video does include some very promising book chapters and articles on Ghanaian video movies. Several of these studies, in their attempts to introduce readers to and generate interest in Ghanaian video, have tended to be either wide-ranging and overly general, or limited in scope, discussing common thematic or generic features of small selections of video texts. A notable exception to this preliminary scholarship on Ghanaian video is the groundbreaking work of anthropologist Birgit Meyer, whose series of articles have examined Ghanaian popular video as an articulation of Pentecostalism. For Meyer (2004), Ghanaian popular video, the emergence of which converged with a marked increase in the number of Pentecostal-charismatic churches, represents one of many “pentecostalite” expressive forms that have flourished as a result of the liberalization of the media. Video enacts a “pentecostalite style” that “recasts modernity as a Christian project” (Meyer 2004, 93), warning against the evils modernity introduces and promoting Christian discipline as the only method for warding off those evils. In Ghanaian video features Meyer finds that “pentecostal concerns merge almost naturally with melodrama as an aesthetic form” in that both assert “the need to go beyond the surface of the visible to reveal hidden reality underneath” (2004, 101). Video functions then as a technology of modern pentecostal subjectivity and vision. Meyer writes: “Moviegoers are positioned in such a way that they share the eye of God, technologically simulated by the camera. Indeed, audiences are made mimetically to share the super vision that enables God to penetrate the dark; they are addressed as viewer-believers and even as voyeurs peeping into the otherwise forbidden” (2004, 104). The appeal of video, then, involves the attainment of vision that is panoptical and voyeuristic. It is all-encompassing, secretive, and illicit.

Following the path cleared by Meyer, critics have tended to center on this one genre, variously called the occult video (Okome 2007a), the horror film (Wendl 2001, 2007) or a pentecostal expressive form (Meyer 1998, 1999, 2003, 2004). Although much of this work is compelling, its limited scope has created the false impression that Pentecostalism and its representation of occult practice figures prominently in all Ghanaian movies. Attention to the Christianity-occult binary has overshadowed the other ideological investments the videos make, the meanings they enact, and the subjectivities they produce. Certainly, Pentecostalism animates many Ghanaian movies, and even when not championed or invoked explicitly, it remains a significant discursive strand in many more. But video movies are not monolithic, nor are they controlled by one dominant way of looking or mode of narration. Unrestrained and unruly heterogeneity is a pronounced feature of videos movies. They are, in the words of James Ferguson, noisy.12 Borrowing from Ferguson’s Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (1999), this book advocates for and strives to employ an analytics of noise. Noise, Ferguson writes:

has its social logic—a logic that makes itself visible only if one is able at some point to set aside the search for signal, and to maintain a decent respect for the social significance of the unintelligible, for the fact that signs may produce puzzlement, unease, and uncertainty (and not only for the ethnographer) just as easily as they may produce stable and unequivocal meanings. (Ferguson 1999, 210)

Ferguson’s analytic seems well suited to video movies because, like the ethnographic sites and situations he interprets, videos are messy, crisscrossed by multiple flows of meaning. They grow out of and speak to an urban, African context not entirely dissimilar to that studied by Ferguson, and as urban cultural texts they are held together by “conflicting strands of meaning and style” (1999, 229). They resist ideological domestication (Ferguson 1999, 229) and instead invite multiplicity, complexity, and contradiction. Ferguson insists that to plot the noise of a particular scene is to listen for “multiple implied and imagined communities of meaning that only partially exist, only partially overlap and are geographically and socially dispersed” (Ferguson 1999, 227). By conceptualizing popular video as an expression of one master and overarching discourse, contained by a consistently deployed logic of surface and depth, or even assimilated to one dominant ideology, we risk silencing the flow of noise and closing off the multiplicity of potential meanings, looks, styles, and sensations produced by video features across time. Plotting the dynamic range and variable tempo of the noise, narratives, and silences of video movies also allows us to capture their incredible diversity and ideological implications, which have, so far, gone unheard.

In the emergent scholarship on African video movies, little attention has yet been given to historical change. African Video Movies and Global Desires aims to enrich our understanding of African video movies by bringing historical specificity to bear on the study of locally produced video features. Popular video is described here as a shifting and historically contingent discursive field marked by myriad ideologies, anxieties, discourses, and desires, and each chapter examines a loosely defined historical period as demarcated by significant structural changes in the industry. The chronological organization of the book outlines the changes in narrative forms and cinematic features that mark the thousands of videos produced by Ghanaian videomakers for over twenty years, and it engages the often ambivalent and contested meanings and identities produced by Ghanaian cinema at different historical moments and for different publics. It examines historical and technological change within the local, national, and transnational contexts in which video texts circulate and as it is revealed in the style and content of the video-texts.

The readings of the films and videos contained in each chapter purposefully complicate the neat and linear chronology implied by the chapter organization. Each text, much like a palimpsest, carries artifacts from that which came before, and in this way, the textual analyses present Ghana’s cinematic history more like a layering than an unfolding. Traces of the pedagogical imperative that informed the colonial film productions of the Gold Coast Film Unit inflect the most recent video features, for example, while iterations of the figure of the monstrous woman, who consumes selfishly and excessively, appear in movies made during all periods of Ghana’s film and video history. The close readings of visual texts are not intended to suggest a chronology of development from amateur to professional productions, from the visual pleasures of spectacle and astonishment to narrative containment, or from analog to digital technologies. Rather, in each period, we can see variations in aesthetics, narrative form, and modes of spectator engagement and in the anxieties, desires, subjectivities and styles reiterated across multiple video texts. These changing textual properties are analyzed as effects of the economic, technological, and political shifts indicated in each chapter division.

The first chapter of the book, “Mapping the Modern: The Gold Coast Film Unit and the Ghana Film Industry Corporation,” describes the early years of Ghana’s film history. Beginning with the earliest film screenings in the 1920s, this chapter offers an account of colonial film production in the Gold Coast and the formation of a national film company after independence. Rather than seeing the birth of a national Ghanaian cinema as a complete turning away from colonial influence, I identify the discontinuities and continuities between the feature films of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation and those of the Gold Coast Film Unit. Close readings of The Boy Kumasenu (1952) and A Debut for Dede (1992) permit us to focus on the cinematic production of modernity as articulated in the late colonial and the national film. Emerging out of institutions connected through the history of colonialism, these films share a gendered language of modernity, tradition, and nation. 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 both films illustrate that each narrative of modernity relies, for its production, on gender difference.

Chapter 2, “Work, Women, and Worldly Wealth: Global Video Culture and the Early Years of Local Video Production,” investigates the period between roughly 1980 and 1992, when the erosion of state support for and control of filmmaking coupled with the ready availability of video technology allowed individuals situated outside of the networks of official cultural production to produce features entirely unregulated as commodities and artistic objects. The first video movies articulate the deep ambivalences generated by Ghana’s encounter with global capitalism and the concomitant shift from economies of production to consumption as illustrated in three representative examples: Zinabu (1987), Big Time (1988), and Menace (1992). In these early video movies, it is gender that structures and distinguishes these two articulations of capitalistic value.

Chapter 3, “Professional Movies and Their Global Aspirations: The Second Wave of Video Production in Ghana,” traces the shift toward more professionalized production and a more organized and regulated industry during the second phase of commercial video production in Ghana, from 1992 until around 2000. In this period, the privatization of the national film company and the emergence of several independent media outlets in Ghana parallel the privatization of cinematic space, as viewing shifts from the public cinema hall or video parlor to the privacy of watching a video or video compact disc (VCD) at home. In addition, as opportunities for employment with state institutions diminish, professionally trained film- and videomakers enter into the commercial video industry in large numbers, bringing new ideas about professionalism, art, and modernity. These dramatic changes in the economic and structural organization of film and media institutions, in no small part driven by the state’s liberalization policies, correspond to the iteration of a professional style, a “performative competence” (Ferguson 1999, 99) that signaled aspiration toward an imagined global standard. This chapter focuses on the emergence of the “professional” movie, describing the historical changes linked to its appearance and then analyzing the themes taken up by and stylistics deployed in several groundbreaking professional videos.

Chapter 4, “Tourism and Trafficking: Views from Abroad in the Transnational Travel Movie,” maps the transnational networks and flows that link West Africa to global cities such as Amsterdam and New York, concentrating mainly on Ghanaian video movies about travel. The analysis focuses on several examples of transnational Ghanaian popular movies, including Wild World (Ghana and Italy 2002), Amsterdam Diary (Ghana and Amsterdam 2005), London Got Problem (Ghana and UK 2006), and Love in America (Ghana and USA 2008), examining this genre of movie as a site crossed by overlapping and intersecting discourses of gender, globalization, and consumerism. It argues that Ghanaian travel movies capture the aspirations of Ghanaians to be modern and mobile global subjects and imaginatively link Ghana to the global city.

Chapter 5, “Transcultural Encounters and Local Imaginaries: Nollywood and the Ghanaian Movie Industry in the Twenty-first Century,” investigates how the inundation of the commercial video movie market by Nollywood and the shift from analog to digital technologies have fragmented and realigned the Ghanaian video movie industry in the last decade. I read representative examples of two types of video movies: the transnational “glamour” movies of Shirley Frimpong-Manso and a series of local “sakawa” movies. I suggest a correspondence between these two types of movies, which at first glance seem completely dissimilar. I argue that “sakawa” and similar types of occult movies made for local audiences bring into visibility the uncanny excised from Frimpong-Manso’s aesthetics of consumption.

African Video Movies and Global Desires adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Ghana’s commercial video movie industry, coupling contextual criticism with close readings and formalist analysis of individual video texts so as to contribute to the burgeoning scholarly conversation on African video movies. It investigates how video movies participate in the normalization and refashioning of dominant discourses of globalization, gender and sexuality, neoliberalism, and consumerism and highlights the ambivalence generated in the reproduction and repetition of those discourses across time and in the thousands of video movies that have been made since the 1980s. This ambivalence, the contradictions, and the cracks revealed through reiteration, matter a great deal because it is ambivalence that creates spaces for new imaginings of self, subject, family, and community.

A final note about terminology: In the title and throughout the book, I use of the term “video movie” instead of the more common “video film” in a minor attempt to acknowledge the singular importance of video technology to the history of African popular video, which to my mind is diminished by “video film.” The technology, or medium, of the text is not incidental to its symbolic life. “Video movie” retains an emphasis on video as a medium that generates particular material conditions at the level of the artifact, and it more broadly highlights video as a form of technological mediation and commodification that is different from film. Larkin (2000; 2008) has written on both of these aspects of video, and I draw on his work at various points in this book to describe the role of video technology in the history of Ghanaian screen media. Finally, “movie” calls up very different connotations than “film.” Movies are associated with the commoditized forms of screen media produced by dominant commercial industries, like Hollywood. The word “movie” best captures the aspirations and ambitions of video producers in Ghana, which might be why “movie” is widely used in the Ghanaian industry, by journalists, movie producers, and actors alike. The national industry’s annual awards ceremony, The Ghana Movie Awards, most obviously speaks to the term’s prevalence.

1: Mapping the Modern

The Gold Coast Film Unit and the Ghana Film Industry Corporation

In 1995, to mark the centenary of cinema, the Ghanaian Ministry of Information sponsored a one-week film festival and symposium organized around the theme of North-South cross-cultural influences in cinema. The celebration featured screenings of films made in Ghana by the national film company and the internationally recognized independent filmmakers Kwah Ansah and King Ampaw. Among the titles included in the festival program was The Boy Kumasenu (1952), a British colonial film created by the Gold Coast Film Unit (GCFU). The film, organized around the motif of the journey, replays the colonial opposition between tradition and modernity. Kumasenu, the protagonist, migrates from the traditional village to the city, where the film’s voice-over narration explains, “Everything is new,” and his journey to modernity allegorizes Ghana’s evolution from primitive tradition to modern nationhood. In a series of promotional articles published in the government-owned daily newspaper, the Mirror, Nanabanyin Dadson described The Boy Kumasenu as “the first full-length feature film to be made in Ghana” (Dadson 1995c). Sean Graham, the founding director of the GCFU and the director of The Boy Kumasenu, was an invited speaker at the festival, and coverage of his visit was given prominence in Dadson’s coverage. An article by Dan Adjokatcher, this one announcing Graham’s visit, called Graham the “father of Ghanaian cinema” (Adjokatcher 1995).13

Aside from references to the film in books by Rouch (2003) and Diawara (1992) and brief commentary by Tom Rice (2010) intended to supplement its viewing in the online archive Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire, The Boy Kumasenu has attracted little scholarly attention.14 Yet, the rather laudatory characterization of this unabashedly colonial film in Ghanaian public discourse speaks, I think, to its significance as a nexus of several important historical, ideological, and aesthetic crosscurrents. Not surprisingly, The Boy Kumasenu shares affinities with colonial educational films and British imperial cinema, but it also has much in common with the documentaries of John Grierson and with Hollywood cinema of the 1930s and 1940s. Although obviously imperial in its narrative and mode of address, the aesthetics of the film mark a radical departure from the “primitive style” of many colonial film productions, a style developed by the Colonial Film Unit for the “illiterate” African who was thought to lack the capacity to read cinematic images. Graham moves far away from the conventions of narrative and spectatorial address established in colonial educational cinema, focalizing long segments of the film through the point of view of Kumasenu, an African subject, whose desires and anxieties are represented as driving much of the film’s action. Although written and directed by Graham, The Boy Kumasenu was shot, edited, and acted by Africans. It was one of the last productions of the Gold Coast Film Unit, and many of the feature films made by the Ghana Film Industry Corporation betray its influence; its creation and narrative stand between the final period of British colonial rule and the beginning of Ghana’s independence.

Likewise, the Ghana Film Industry Corporation’s 1992 production A Debut for Dede, the second film closely examined in this chapter, bears the imprints of an important liminal moment in Ghana’s film history. A Debut for Dede, like The Boy Kumasenu, narrates the protagonist’s migration from her village to the capital city of Accra. The journey signifies Dede’s turn from the rituals and customs practiced in her village toward a modern female subjectivity in the city. The film, too, appeared during a crucial transitional period, one shaped by technological change, when GFIC moved away from film to video production, and by structural and ideological transformation as state-funded filmmaking gave way to independent, commercial video production. The feature was the last production shot on film by the Ghana Film Industry Corporation. Four years after its release, as part of the IMF program to liberalize the economy, GFIC was privatized; 70 percent of the company shares were sold to TV 3 Malaysia, while the Ghanaian government retained a mere 30 percent of the corporation. In subsequent years, the restructured and renamed film company, now called the Ghana-Malaysia Film Company Limited (GAMA Film), became little more than a video production unit, producing feature-length movies for TV3 Ghana, the first independent television station in Ghana.15

This chapter describes the early years of Ghana’s film history, from the earliest film screenings in the 1920s to the formation of a national film company after independence and, finally, to the end of celluloid film production 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: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (2006) describes the context this way:

If World War I exposed the extent to which imperial Britain was vulnerable to a changing global economy and polity, World War II revealed the moral anachronism of the British Empire. With the visible cruelties of German and Italian Fascism and the invisible exploitation of American finance capitalism, Britain’s brand of colonialism looked awkwardly similar to the former and just plain awkward compared to the latter. Symptomatic of Britain’s changing imperial status in this new century, the British State became invested in earning the approbation of an emerging international community of nations by demonstrating its moral responsibility toward its colonies. (11)

Colonial officials described the formal inauguration of film units in the colonies as one of its moral responsibilities, and this is clearly demonstrated in remarks made by Jones in his opening address at the 1948 conference “Film in Colonial Development”:

I think we visualize today our colonial responsibility in a manner constructive and positive, in effect the creation of nationhood, the establishment of free political institutions, the creation of colonial democracies, democracies possessed with that sense of values which we prize in Western Europe and democracies supported by our social services and good economic conditions. (4)

He continued to explain that training African filmmakers was imperative because “we are recognizing today that Empire (if we continue to use that particular word) is not an opportunity of exploitation to our material advantage, but the occasion of service” (Jones 1948, 4). At the same conference, the filmmaker John Grierson, who was at the time Films Controller at the Films Division of the Central Office of Information, emphasized that “international criticism is growing on how we use and develop our work in the colonies” (Grierson 1948, 12). He affirmed the new objective of the CFU: “It is no longer a question of people dropping into Africa to make a picture, to ‘do something’ for the natives as, only a generation ago, the Squire and his lady ‘did something’ for us. . . . It is a question of working with Africans and of creating a genuine African Unit that can work with native units in the other Colonies” (13). CFU’s motives, certainly, were not entirely in the interest of “serving” Africans. Film was believed to be an essential tool in educating Africans for citizenship, in the development of a national outlook, and in creating a Commonwealth sensibility among the soon-to-be former colonies of Britain (Smyth 1992; Jaikumar 2006).

Film production began in West Africa in 1946 when a four-person production team came to the Gold Coast. Its inaugural film was Fight TB at Home (1946), followed by Weaving in Togoland (1948). In 1949, the CFU set up a film training school in Accra for West African students. Its aim “was to train students to a standard which would enable them to film local events in newsreel fashion and also to produce simple instructional films of more lasting importance” (Smyth 1992, 168). Among the first class were several Nigerians and Ghanaians, including Sam Aryeetey, who later became director of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation, R. O. Fenuku, and Bob Okanta. That same year, the Gold Coast Film Unit was organized, largely as a result of the success of the film training program. In 1949 the Unit was reorganized under the guidance of Sean Graham, and within seven years it had become one of the best-equipped film units in Africa capable of shooting films and completing postproduction editing and sound recording in its Accra facilities. The GCFU shot on 35mm film, and Africans were trained in all aspects of filmmaking. It was Graham, however, who directed most productions; even African students trained under him were rarely given the chance to create and direct their own films. This system, Manthia Diawara (1992) argues, impaired the Ghanaian national film company, leaving it at independence with an inexperienced production team and, because the unit used 35mm instead of 16mm film, reliant on the Overseas Film and Television Unit in London for film processing. Before independence, the unit’s staff consisted of three Europeans and twenty Africans. All were men. A few of the African filmmakers were sent to London for advanced training (Advance 1956, 9), and between 1949 and 1956, the unit made forty-four films. The majority of these films were educational documentaries, although a few feature films were also produced. Titles included Amenu’s Child (1950), The Boy Kumasenu (1952), Theresa, the Story of a Nurse in Training (1955), and Mr. Mensah Builds a House (1955).20 Many of the unit’s films were released commercially in Ghana while they were exported for nontheatrical release in Britain and other Commonwealth countries.21

African film units operating under the jurisdiction of the Colonial Film Unit (CFU) were guided by the filmmaking theories of George Pearson and William Sellers, leading figures at the CFU. Pearson and Sellers believed that films made for African audiences would be most effective if they employed a primitive film style: “a simple doctrine for gaining by cinema, and holding by cinema, the attention of an illiterate audience, while imparting knowledge that is appreciated and later applied” (Pearson 1948, 24). Informed by colonial and racist notions about the “native” African, the primitive style purged from its productions “all the conventional methods for short-circuiting time and place” (25), such as mixes, montage, and wipes. Camera movements such as panning and dollying were prohibited because “trees seemingly running along the far horizon, buildings apparently rising or sinking, static objects seeming to move of their own volition, only divert [the native’s] attention from the scene message to the mystery of seeming magic” (25). Films were required to maintain “visual continuity from scene to scene” and, because “the native mind needs longer time to absorb the picture content,” to adopt a slow pace. Manthia Diawara (1992) aptly points out that the CFU

wanted to turn back film history and develop a different type of cinema for Africans because they considered the African mind too primitive to follow the sophisticated narrative techniques of mainstream cinema. Thus they thought it necessary to return to the beginning of film history—to use uncut scenes, slow down the story’s pace, and make the narrative simpler by using fewer actors and adhering to just one dominant theme. (4)

Most significant to the analysis of The Boy Kumasenu is Pearson’s effort to distinguish the primitive style from “our British Documentary” (Pearson 1948, 25), a reference to the work of Grierson and the filmmakers who worked with him in developing the British Documentary Movement of the 1930s and ’40s. While acknowledging the British documentary’s “power, under wise control, to do magnificent work towards colonial development,” Pearson insists that its comprehension lies beyond “the illiterate field” that is Africa (25). He writes: “In that field of work Documentary technique, excellent as it is for its cinema-minded audiences, is useless for ours. It uses a pictorial idiom beyond the comprehension of the illiterate” (26).

In Close-Up: The Boy Kumasenu

Although firmly rooted in colonial discourses of modernity and in imperialist ideology, many of the films made in the Gold Coast are noteworthy in their deviations from the primitive aesthetics developed for colonial educational and propaganda films. Smyth notes that the Gold Coast Film Unit distinguished itself by “attempting to break new ground in the format to get around the problem of patronizing commentaries and simplistic plots of many of the CFU films” (1992, 169). Jean Rouch, too, has remarked on the “high quality, both technically and dramatically” of the unit’s films (2003, 66). Rouch credits the unit’s achievements to the decision, made by Graham, to “split off fairly early from the Colonial Film Unit, in favor of association with groups of independent English producers” (2003, 66). Graham recruited filmmakers such as Basil Wright, Terry Bishop, and George Noble to participate in various capacities in GCFU productions. Additionally, according to Sam Aryeetey, Graham worked collaboratively with the young African trainees involved in his productions (personal communication). He drew on their creativity and solicited from them information about local audiences.

Larkin (2008) describes two types of cinema distribution in colonial Nigeria: commercial cinema theaters, which exhibited feature films from the US and UK; and the mobile cinema vans, which screened colonial content exclusively. In The Boy Kumasenu Graham merges commercial and colonial forms in an entertaining and educational colonial feature film that audiences both in the colonies and in England would pay to see. The Boy Kumasenu incorporates the conventions of the British documentary and Hollywood narrative cinema to create a sympathetic African subject, Kumasenu, from whose point of view most of the film is focalized. In this and other ways, it also challenges the pervasive, racist representations of Africa in British and American commercial films. It featured only black African actors, recasting the great white, benevolent colonizer, embodied by Lord Sandy in Korda’s Sanders of the River (1935), as an educated, elite Ghanaian. And unlike the entrenched stereotypes of Africans as unfeeling savages or childlike adults, many of the Africans we meet in Graham’s film are individuals capable of participating in the modern nation as citizens. This difference is important because the film was the most successful film made by the Gold Coast Film Unit; according to Graham, it recovered its costs in the first few days of its screening in Gold Coast theaters and was exhibited abroad, in Britain, the Commonwealth, and America, to acclaim (Adjokatcher 1995; Dadson, 1995c). It also was screened at several international film festivals. In 1953 it earned a diploma at the Venice Film Festival and was shown at the Berlin Film Festival the same year (Rice 2010).

In her analysis of the redemptive aesthetics of British imperial cinema, Priya Jaikumar argues that British imperial film policies and aesthetics of the late colonial period were marked by “the divergent legitimacies granted to imperialism and nationalism” (2006, 11). British Empire Films attempted to rehabilitate the image of the colonial encounter and resolve the inconsistencies and contradictions inherent in Britain’s dual identity as colonizer and liberal nation-state.

Cinema, coming in the late 1890s, participated in the internal contradictions of a modernized language of empire. Liberalism’s impulse toward self-governance put pressure on imperialism’s essential unilateralism to define the internal form and formal contradictions of British film policy and commercial film style. (9)

Employing a redemptive rhetoric, late colonial British commercial films “rearticulat[ed] Britain’s’ identity as demonstrably liberal in relation to its imperium” (Jaikumar 2006, 25). Here, I want to suggest that The Boy Kumasenu, though the production of a state-funded colonial film unit in Africa, enacts a similar imperial redemptive aesthetics. Through the motif of the journey from the premodern to the modern, the feature works at erasing the contradictions inherent in Britain’s dual identity as liberal nation and colonial power by superimposing a narrative of national modernity onto the urban and rural landscapes and, therefore, constructing the modern as a spatiotemporal relation. In this way, it naturalizes what Timothy Mitchell calls “the time-space of European modernity” (2000, 16). For Mitchell, the time-space of the modern relies on the non-West to “play the role of outside, the otherness that creates the boundary of the space of modernity” (16). The African village, rendered through an ethnographic gaze, signifies “the place of timelessness, a space without duration, in relation to which the temporal break of modernity can be marked out” (16). The coastal city of Accra, ushered into modernity by British imperialism, stands as the imminent outcome of Africa’s evolution.

The Boy Kumasenu tells the story of Kumasenu, an orphan, who lives in a quiet fishing village with his Uncle Faiwoo, his aunt, and his older cousin Agboh. Kumasenu, enchanted by Agboh and his tales of the city, begs for permission to follow his cousin to Accra. Uncle Faiwoo refuses. He tells Kumasenu that he wants him to grow up and become a leader among the people. After a poor fish harvest, however, Faiwoo concludes that Kumasenu’s “restlessness” is frightening the fish and that it is best for the village if he be allowed to go and “to know what is beyond, to read and write, and find out why iron cars go as swift as the shark.”

Uncle Faiwoo finds Kumasenu his first paid employment in a small store on the city’s periphery. All goes well for Kumasenu, who is happy among the new people, music, manners, and languages he encounters there, until Agboh turns up, dressed like a gangster in a Hollywood movie and full of swagger. Kumasenu, desiring to please and impress Agboh, shows his cousin where the storekeeper hides his money. Agboh steals the money without Kumasenu’s knowledge, suddenly sending Kumasenu off to the city with a ten pound note, remaining behind so he can frame Kumasenu for his crime.

Kumasenu, alone and dressed only in the clothes he carried from his village, finds Accra foreign and inhospitable; he is frightened by its traffic, unfriendliness, and crowds. On his first day in Accra, he wanders the streets cautiously, and when night falls he has no place to sleep. He is rescued by a beautiful woman, Adobia, who speaks to Kumasenu in Ewe and invites him to stay with her. Adobia is a successful trader, and she hires Kumasenu to be her assistant. An economically and sexually independent woman, Adobia is involved with two men: the rich and powerful lawyer, Mr. Mensah, and his driver, Yeboah. Mr. Mensah, unaware of Adobia’s affair with Yeboah, is furious when he finds the two together. He assaults the couple, and, the next day, uses his position in the courts to have Adobia and Yeboah arrested for attacking him.

Kumasenu, having lost his guide and friend, finds himself alone and on the city streets again. Hungry and desperate, he attempts to steal a loaf of bread from a bread seller, but is arrested and taken to juvenile court before he can carry out the deed. The court sends him to Dr. Tamakloe for a physical examination before his trial. Moved by Kumasenu’s demeanor, the doctor and his wife, Grace, decide to adopt him. Under the couple’s care and support, Kumasenu is cleared of the charges against him and released into their custody. The doctor finds Kumasenu work as a member of a fishing crew that sails and maintains motorized boats, and his labor, like his subjectivity, is brought into the realm of the modern.

Historically, the film links directly to Grierson and the British documentary film movement. Basil Wright, one of Grierson’s “disciples” who is perhaps best known for his acclaimed documentary Song of Ceylon (1934), was the coproducer of the film, and Graham, who wrote the screenplay for the film and directed it, was Grierson’s student.22 Ideologically, the feature shares with the Griersonian documentary tradition a deep faith in the British Empire and an unquestioned belief in its evolutionary development. In her analysis of British documentary film, Jamie Sexton makes an observation about Song of Ceylon pertinent to The Boy Kumasenu: It “links nature and tradition to the process of modernization, all configured as part of a natural, evolving pattern” (Sexton 2002, 54). The Boy Kumasenu erases economic exploitation, violence, and colonial agents from its narrative of British imperialism, which is portrayed as a force for good in Africa, bringing civilization, justice, medicine, the rule of law, education, order, and, finally, national independence. The film presents modernity as the end result of an evolutionary narrative that unfolds naturally from colonialism. The opening montage visualizes the binary on which this chronology depends. It sets in opposition the natural landscape, portrayed as if untouched by modernization and industrialization, and the bustle and productivity of the modern West African city. The first sequence, composed of a combination of multiple shots from close, medium, and long focal distances, sees African men and women dressed in formal Western clothes in a dance hall where big band music plays and couples jitterbug. This shot dissolves into a fast-paced and dynamic sequence, assembled from several shots of the wide streets of Accra, along which cars, buses, and crowds of people move. The voice-over reads as follows:

This is the story of the old and the new where the changeless ways of uncounted centuries collide with the changing ways of our own. Here the city of Accra sprawls its growth on the west coast of equatorial Africa with no buffer between the new and the old.

The words “the old” signal a visual transition to the village. Rendered naturalistically in one static long take of a beach, bordered by a line of coconut trees and empty except for two people, a large fishing boat, and several small fishing shacks, the village landscape appears unmoving, unchanged, and unmarked by modernity.

In Kumasenu, the camera, in effect, works like a virtual time machine, reenacting for the spectator the movement from the primitive to the modern by positioning the spectator differently in each space. First, the spectator adopts the perspective of an outside observer, one far removed from the space and time of the village. Later, the spectator is aligned with the subject of sight in the city. Through variations in scale and spectator address, the film represents time as a spatial relation between the spectator and the world that unfolds on the screen, incorporating her into the spaces of village and city through different modes of realism. As the narrative migrates from village to city, an ethnographic mode of realism gives way to a narrative mode of realism, simulating cinematically the passage of time.23 In the village segments, the film deploys an ethnographic mode of realism in which an ethnographic chronotope organizes time and space. Long takes and slow pans produce visual space between the viewing subject and filmed object, creating a sense of spatial and temporal distance between the modern spectator, aligned with the narrator’s objectifying voice and gaze, and the traditional and exotic African village he observes. An ethnographic gaze contains the colonized and aligns the spectator with the observing eye of the camera, here a metaphor for modernity. This is perhaps best illustrated in a staged reenactment of Uncle Faiwoo and a group of fishermen casting and pulling in their nets to the accompaniment of African drums. Seen through medium and long focal lengths and shots of extended duration, the men seem far away. They resemble a moving, primitive exhibit. Kumasenu, frequently presented in a panoramic long shot as a solitary figure on the beach, seems as if he, too, were a feature of the village landscape. Reproducing several of the archetypal images of African safari and adventure films, the feature captures the boy as he frolics in the waves of the ocean, climbs a coconut tree, walks along the shore, and sits on the beach, dreaming of the city. After his uncle refuses to let him leave the village, Kumasenu, seen through an extreme long shot, walks against a vast cloudy sky (see figure 1.1). The threatening sky and Kumasenu’s isolation are meant to express his unhappiness and restlessness; in this, the film translates and externalizes his interiority for the spectator, producing physical and psychological distance between the spectator and the African subject.

As Kumasenu moves from the changeless time and space of the village to the “outside world,” the camera repositions the spectator, moving inward and creating the illusion of closeness. Long takes and slow pans of the village landscape give way to close-ups, mid-takes, and shot-reverse-shot sequences as ethnographic realism gives way to narrative realism. As Phil Rosen notes in his reading of Sembene’s Ceddo, such a shift in scale signifies “movement into a scene normalized as physical closeness” (2001, 274). In presenting Kumasenu at work in the store where, the voice-over remarks, he “first met the twentieth century,” the frame of the camera narrows considerably, replacing the expansive village landscape at which the spectator looked from a distance, with the intimate and immediate interior of the store, which is focalized through Kumasenu’s point of view. The spectator enters the time and space of the narrative of the film, where the act of looking is concealed by continuity editing that simulates “real” time and creates what Teresa de Lauretis refers to as “the achieved coherence of a ‘narrative space’ which holds, binds, entertains the spectator at the apex of the representational triangle as the subject of vision” (de Lauretis 1984, 27). The first close-up in the film appears here, as Kumasenu discovers the joy of listening to a record on the gramophone while the men who have come to the store to buy beer dance (see figure 1.2). The scene recalls a similar, iconic moment in Flaherty’s Nanook of the North in which the primitive subject marvels at what is to him a strange and wonderful European technology. This shot, however, expresses Kumasenu’s interiority, the pleasure he derives from listening to music. It humanizes and passes narrative authority to him. From this moment forward, point-of-view shots and eyeline matching position Kumasenu as a subject of sight, and although his is not the only perspective from which the remainder of the film is focalized, his is the foremost point of view from which the spectator sees.

The film’s soundtrack, a layering of extra-diegetic narration and music, ambient sounds, including music and speech, and character dialogue inflects space as rural and urban.24 In the opening segments of the film, almost imperceptible ambient sounds are veiled by the voice-over narration, which addresses the audience in British English. The narrator and extra-diegetic music speak for and silence the sounds of the village. The audience sees the mouths of characters moving but hears only the narrator’s summary and explication of their speech. This extra-diegetic interpreter addresses the spectator throughout the village sequence, translating Akan or Ewe into English, explaining customs and behaviors, and interpreting the actions and thoughts of characters. As Kumasenu moves toward the city, the soundtrack changes. The narrative voice-over yields to the voices of people speaking Akan and Pidgin English, a language the narrator describes as “a blend of the old and the new.” In the city, characters speak for themselves and the narrative voice-over, although still present, is no longer dominant. Its purpose becomes primarily pedagogical, highlighting significant moments in the plot, but no longer narrating them.

The colonial teleology that structures Kumasenu’s journey is underscored by the alignment of each space with a different construction of the family: the “traditional” family or kin network is located in the space/time of the village, and the modern nuclear or conjugal family is found in the modern city. In a historical context marked by conflicting discourses of marriage and family, the film asserts the primacy of the conjugal companionate model of marriage and family. A great deal of scholarship documents the dramatic shift in the meaning of marriage and family that occurred in Ghana as a result of missionary activity, colonialism, the imposition of a cash economy, the increase of private property ownership, and the expanding cocoa market.25 Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian, in “I Will Not Eat Stone”: A Women’s History of Colonial Asante (2000), argue convincingly that the dramatic changes initiated by British colonialism produced “nothing short of widespread gender chaos” (75), which intensified during the last decades of colonialism. In very general language, one can say that prior to the rupture brought about by colonialism, marriage among several Ghanaian ethnic groups, but most notably among the Asante, the largest ethnic group in present-day Ghana, was not understood as a static and monolithic state-of-being, but a process that varied considerably among families and kin networks and that afforded women a high degree of autonomy and independence. Marriage was “open to the interpretations of the parties involved at a particular moment in time,” and it was couples and their families, not the state, that “retained the power to define the status of any known conjugal relationship” (Allman and Tashjian 2000, 57).

During the colonial period, the British and the native courts sought to rein in and control what they regarded as perplexing and unwieldy “traditional” marriage forms by enforcing legislation “aimed at clearly defining and strengthening the marital bond in opposition to the lineage bond” (Vellenga 1983, 145). Colonial discourse, in effect, transformed flexible and heterogeneous marriage forms into the static and monolithic entity of the traditional or customary marriage. The texts of cultural producers, such as writers and filmmakers, enter into this ideological and discursive contest over family, marriage, and proper gender roles. In her study of Ghanaian popular fiction, Stephanie Newell argues that during the colonial period Ghanaian writers “seem to be conscious of their status as generators of narratives that will help to stabilize and codify a ‘modern’ marriage ideology” (2000, 61). Likewise, colonial film production in the Gold Coast, as exemplified by The Boy Kumasenu, sets out to normalize the conjugal family by defining it against the more “traditional” extended family form.

The film casts the nuclear family as the foundation of the nation, and Kumasenu’s journey to modernity is achieved when he enters its fold. While in the village, the narrator emphasizes that Kumasenu is “an orphan,” alone, without a mother, and left under the supervision of his uncle and aunt, who are portrayed as little more than figurines in the exotic village. Uncle Faiwoo, the audience is told, clings to the “old ways” and is fearful of the anger of the ancestors, and although he speaks directly to his nephew in the diegesis, the soundtrack includes only very faint traces of the sound of his voice. The narrator’s voice-over translation of Faiwoo’s words effectively enacts an aural erasure of Faiwoo. It seems more like an overdub of his speech than a commentary on or translation of it. Predictably, the narrator’s performance of Faiwoo’s lines, originally delivered in Ewe, adopts, in English, a broken syntax and crude diction, marking Faiwoo as an unintelligent and primitive African. Faiwoo’s wife, nameless and completely silent, appears only once in the film. In this scene, she visits the hut of the village fetish priest, whose counsel she seeks, the narrator derisively explains, because she, too, is worried about her nephew’s restlessness.

The village uncle and aunt stand in sharp contrast to the articulate, urban, and modern man of science and his equally articulate and dutiful wife. Dr. and Mrs. Tamakloe exemplify the elite class of Ghanaians charged with running the country after the end of colonial rule and are portrayed as models of fatherhood, motherhood, and citizenship. The doctor is “a man trained to take his place in the complicated life of the city,” a gentleman, educated in science and art, and charitable, the benevolent patriarch of his nuclear household. His academic prowess is emphasized as the camera pauses at the sign posted at his front door listing his numerous university degrees. This shot, which functions like an intertitle, hails an audience literate in English, whose members, like the doctor himself, are able to decipher and appreciate the university degrees that verify his modernity and civility. When the audience first encounters the doctor in his home, he is sculpting an abstract human form. His wife enters his studio, explaining that she has been doing the monthly accounts and has noted a few discrepancies. Their affectionately playful exchange seems to be modeling the companionate marriage for audiences. She embraces her husband and gently scolds him for not charging his clients more money for his services, and he responds, earnestly, “If I turned them away because of their poverty, it would be on my conscience. If they don’t pay me when they can afford to, that’s on their conscience.”

Anne McClintock, among others, has written extensively on the gendered character of the nation-state, arguing that “nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference” (1997, 89). The conjugal family functions as the primary institution for naturalizing the historical and ideological configuration of the nation and reproducing gender difference. Significantly, it is Kumasenu, a boy who grows to be a man, whose emergent subjectivity allegorizes the emergent nationalism the film intends to produce. The film asserts this explicitly with the authority of the narrator’s voice. Since taking Kumasenu into his home, Dr. Tamakloe has struggled to sculpt the boy’s face. “As a sculptor, he saw in it the youth of his country, swiftly emerging from its ancient tranquility into the confusion of the present age. In Kumasenu he saw a boy on a bridge, uncertainly and unhappily making his way from one world to another.” Much as Tamakloe shapes wood into human form, the film shapes Kumasenu into a citizen.

Kumasenu’s journey into citizenship is defined not only by the spaces he crosses, moving from the village to the city, but by severing all ties to his extended family. Cousin Agboh signifies, most obviously, the corruption of the city, but he also represents the dangerous bonds that link Kumasenu to the village and his lineage. In every instance, Kumasenu’s blind admiration for Agboh leads him to break laws and act against the interests of the nation. While Kumasenu is living happily in the Tamakloe household, Agboh suddenly appears, flanked by a group of young thugs, and he convinces Kumasenu that the police have been hunting for him because they believe that he stole the storekeeper’s money. He threatens to turn Kumasenu over to the police if he does not unlock the door to the doctor’s examination room, where the doctor keeps the drugs which Agboh and his friends intend to steal. Kumasenu refuses and, for this, receives a brutal beating from Agboh and his gang. On a subsequent evening, when Mrs. Tamakloe is out of town and the doctor on a house call, Agboh and the gang of boys manage to break into the doctor’s surgery. The narrator solemnly proclaims, “At that moment, Kumasenu became of age. The child became a man.” Kumasenu alerts the police and, after a long chase and struggle, apprehends Agboh. The narrator concludes: “Kumasenu the hunted had become Kumasenu the hunter.” Within the logic of the film, the admiration of the young boy for his delinquent cousin must be displaced in order for the boy to enter manhood and become a member of the Tamakloe family. Only when he comes to know Agboh for what he is, the narrator surmises, “an enemy of all those who observe the simple laws that allow men to work and enjoy their lives without fear,” can he defeat his cousin in an act of physical violence that validates his manhood and his place in modern Ghana.

The mention of work merits consideration. Agboh is described as an enemy because he is an inherently transitional figure. Transitional between the village and the city, he himself represents a type of character that is improperly assimilated. He is a “monster” precisely because he is anomalous. He cannot work as a fisherman, nor does he work in the city. And yet his anomalousness, disclosed as it is in the form of criminal impulses, also speaks to an ethical domain. What Agboh represents for Kumasenu, then, is the claim of an improperly constituted ethical dimension, since Agboh is no Robin Hood, but merely a thug and a scoundrel. Thus with this disavowal, what Kumasenu displays is the capacity to transcend this improperly constituted ethical dimension and to embrace the modern.

Within the narrative, Kumasenu’s attraction to the sexualized character Adobia, whom the narrator describes as “a friend to many men but faithful to none,” must also be sanctioned in order for him to become a son and citizen. Neither a mother nor a wife, she too is improperly assimilated into urban life, her independence equated with sexual promiscuity.26 The film coordinates a comparison between the two female figures, presented as polarities of the Mother Africa trope, the good mother and the bad prostitute (Stratton 1994). Kumasenu must leave one in order to find the other. Indeed, when Kumasenu meets the doctor and his wife, the narrator comments that he “found new friends to take the place of Adobia.” Grace Tamakloe epitomizes maternal affection and devotion to her husband, never appearing before the camera without the doctor, Kumasenu, or her daughter Ama at her side. Nor is she sexualized by the spectator’s gaze. Upon seeing Kumasenu when he first enters her home and hearing his story, “her heart ached.” She asks her husband, “If our Ama, at that boy’s age, were alone and friendless, and fell among thieves, and a man came by who could help her, what would you expect of that man?” It is her heartfelt, motherly appeal that convinces the doctor to assist the boy and guide him toward manhood. In Nationalisms and Sexualities, the authors suggest that the fraternity of the nation enacts an “idealization of motherhood” and “the exclusion of all non-reproductively oriented sexualities from the discourse of the nation” (Parker et al. 1992, 6). The narrative treatment of Grace and Adobia verifies this conclusion. The film suggests that the stability of the new nation depends on the stability of the family unit, and the security of the family, in turn, relies on a woman who fulfills her “natural” duty as mother, producing and caring for children, instead of seeking economic independence or sexual pleasure.

The film visualizes Adobia, from her first presentation, as an object of Kumasenu’s desire. Seen from Kumasenu’s point of view, she is an erotic spectacle on display. Theories of film spectacle, perhaps most commonly associated with Tom Gunning’s work on early cinema and its attractions (1995) and Laura Mulvey’s feminist film theory (1989), activate the idea of spectacle to describe those moments in cinema when the novelty, scale, or intensity of an onscreen image momentarily disrupts the spectator’s engagement with character psychology or narrative. Exhibitionist and soliciting “a highly conscious awareness of the film image engaging the spectator’s attention” (Gunning 1995, 121), the cinematic spectacle offers the pleasure of plentitude, of visually consuming an unconcealed and fascinating attraction. Mulvey deploys the language of spectacle to theorize the eroticized and fetishistic portrayal of woman, which, she argues, represents the primary spectacular investment of classic Hollywood cinema. An image “displayed,” the woman as erotic object functions as the focal point where “the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined” (Mulvey 1989, 19). It is the female form, then, that assures “the active power of the erotic look” (20). I want to suggest that in The Boy Kumasenu, the suturing of the film’s spectator to the African male subject through the spectacle of Adobia is intended to humanize Kumasenu and demonstrate his coming into subjectivity. The film asserts his agency through the active and erotic look he casts on Adobia, so this articulation of masculine desire and subjectivity produces, as Mulvey (1989) first explained, a gendered division of labor. Adobia remains the passive object whose purpose is to demonstrate Kumasenu’s agency.

The most pronounced enunciation of gendered spectacle occurs in the film’s one musical number. In this segment, Kumasenu tags along when Adobia goes to a local dance club to meet Yeboah. There, Kumasenu watches Adobia and Yeboah as they slow dance and she sings a love song. Adobia’s song, seemingly meant for Yeboah alone, flows beyond the confines of narrative, crossing over into extra-diegetic space. Foregrounded on the soundtrack, it silences the film’s voice-over narration and directly engages the film’s theatrical audience. It becomes like a musical performance, incorporating and modifying aspects of the 1930s Hollywood musical number, which loosely follows the standard arrangement of the musical attraction as described by Pierre-Emmanuel Jaques (2006):

The camera is on the spectator’s side or backstage, making the theatrical location of the singing and dancing number quite clear. Having made us aware of this special demarcation, the camera makes its way into the space of the number itself, literally breaking apart the diegetic universe. The number area is specially organized and built for the film spectators only. (282)

Filmed on location, not on a stage or in a studio, and in the midst of club patrons, The Boy Kumasenu alters the spatial arrangement of this format, integrating Adobia’s musical number more smoothly into the space of the film’s narrative. The camera’s movement, furthermore, does not penetrate the closed-off world of the diegesis. Shot/reverse shot editing and eyeline matching focalize the spectator through Kumasenu’s gaze, which remains fixed on Adobia. Only the soundtrack, as I described previously, and, significantly, the display of Adobia as object of desire, “break[s] apart the diegetic universe.” Positioned as spectacle, her image, and the musical performance it is set within, disturb the trajectory of the narrative and invite a different engagement from the spectator. She is a thing to be looked at. Captured in close-up, Adobia’s image functions as a projection of Kumasenu’s desire, and it is this visualization of his desire that documents the presence of an interiority that reveals him as a subject. She is the surface on which his interiority, his subjectivity, and the “active power” of his gaze (Mulvey 1989, 20) are inscribed.

Having disavowed Agboh and Adobia and abandoned superstition and lineage ties, Kumasenu approaches the conclusion of his narrative, and the closing segment of the film returns to a pronouncement about work, emphasizing that work is as crucial to the modern nation as is absorption into the Westernized family. Kumasenu’s labor, to be legitimate, must be modernized, as demonstrated in the final scenes of the film. A shot of Kumasenu, lying on his back after his last tussle with Agboh, dissolves to a panoramic view of the village coast. A slow pan across the beach lands on a long shot of Faiwoo, sitting beneath a tree and mending a fishing-net. The narrator announces that “the story” of Agboh’s fate and his nephew’s role in it had “traveled far up the coast.” Thinking about his nephew’s future as a fisherman on a new boat called the Lydia, the narrator says that Faiwoo, who at that moment casts his glance out toward the sea, “spoke quietly to himself, making of his words a prayer.” The “prayer” is worth quoting in full:

Oh Father of the winds and seas, if it be thy wish that these new things come to pass, then let thy hand fall lightly on [those] on whom the dangerous burden of change must fall. Let them find strong hands among their people to help and guide them. Give them strength and fortitude, for their way into the new world is set about with snares and pitfalls, which can cause great, great suffering if they stray too far from the old ways, if they stray too far, too soon.

Faiwoo’s ventriloquized prayer erases the authoritative and exploitative hand of British colonialism, which is rewritten as change, inevitable and natural. An image of Kumasenu, sitting among a fishing crew on a motorized fishing boat, spools over Faiwoo’s prayer. Smiling broadly, his hand on the engine, Kumasenu waves to Dr. and Mrs. Tamakloe, who watch from the pier. “Thus the past uttered its wisdom and spoke to the future,” concludes the narrator, as on the image track, Kumasenu’s motorboat overtakes a group of traditional fishing boats, powered by groups of rowing men. This image narrates not only the passage of the old into the new, but the assimilation of the old and what is presented as modernized and new. This work as a fisherman, unlike the job he performed miserably in the store, guarantees Kumasenu’s modernity and declares that as a worker and a man, the modern city, a metonym for the liberal nation, has a place for him. The film ends by offering a paternalistic warning to the soon-to-be independent nation of Ghana and its guardians: “Sail boldly into the new, but let the wake of your craft be gentle. Let your past remain upright and proud until we build our ships of the same timber.” The only trace of Kumasenu’s village life allowed entry into the modern city is the work he has been assigned to do.

The Ghana Film Industry Corporation and the Challenges of Film Production in Ghana

At independence in 1957, film production was nationalized in Ghana. As Anne Mette Jørgensen notes, Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, “was highly aware of the potential role of the mass media in Nation building” (2001, 122). Nkrumah upgraded the country’s radio infrastructure, inaugurated, in 1965, the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), a noncommercial, state-controlled television station, and erected new facilities for the national film company. The state, understood as the protector of Ghanaian values and culture, exercised a great deal of control over film production. GFIC owned the filmmaking equipment and controlled the importation of film stock. It trained and employed many of the filmmakers working in the country and played a central role in the inauguration and staffing of the National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI), a film and video training institute, founded in 1979. GFIC selected and supported those among its employees who would study at NAFTI or travel to the British Film Institute or the Film and Television Institute of India for training. It also censored all films exhibited in the country, and after purchasing West African Pictures in 1956, had significant control over film exhibition in Ghana.27 GFIC owned and operated six cinemas in Accra: the Rex, Royal, Regal, Roxy, Plaza, and the Film Theatre, located on the grounds of the film company. It also owned the Rex at Asamankese and the Dam at Akosombo.

At its founding, the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC) was charged with using film to educate and modernize the masses, to define and celebrate traditional values, to develop a unifying national consciousness, and to counter stereotypical representations of Africa and Africans abroad.28 GFIC was a node on a network of artistic, media, and cultural institutions founded or enhanced by Nkrumah “to meet the demands of the new state of Ghana” (Agovi 1992, 4). Among these were the Institute of African Studies and the School of Music and Drama at the University of Ghana, and the film company worked collaboratively with both academic units in its formative years. It is worth emphasizing, too, that the first generation of Ghanaian filmmakers were, like the first African writers, “products of the institutions that colonialism had introduced and developed” (Gikandi 2004, 379). Among the first filmmakers and managing directors at GFIC were many former students of the Gold Coast Film Unit, including Sam Aryeetey. Others, such as Ernest Abbeyquaye and Bernard Odjidja, received instruction in filmmaking at the British Film Institute. Sean Graham remained at GFIC as managing director until 1965, when the Ghanaian novelist, Kofi Awoonor was appointed to administer the company from 1965 to 1967. No women were included among this group of filmmakers. GFIC’s output, although extremely limited and generally inconsistent, was in every instance informed by the ideologies of anticolonialism and cultural nationalism. As Chris Hesse explained, the company’s aim was to educate and “boost our cultural heritage” (personal communication). Simon Gikandi’s claim about “the key motivations” for the creation of a modern African literature applies with equal validity to the genesis of film production in Ghana. Its driving force was the restoration of “the moral integrity and cultural authority of the African in the age of decolonization” (Gikandi 2004, 381). Likewise, the central paradox confronted by this first generation of African writers, intellectuals, and filmmakers was that in order to oppose colonial domination and assert the rights of Africans they had to “turn to a recently discovered European language of tradition, nation, and race” (382).

Incorporating codes and conventions affiliated with West African oral traditions, the earliest features produced by GFIC represent attempts to Africanize film. The company aspired to the articulation of a distinctly Ghanaian national cinema. To again borrow a particularly apt phrase from Phil Rosen, GFIC mobilized “a culturally rooted stylization” of narrative and address in order to “collectivize” its Ghanaian audience (2001, 297). This objective is perhaps most pronounced in the first production of the newly independent company, No Tears for Ananse (1965). Based on the play Ananse and the Gum Man (1965) by Ghanaian playwright Joe de Graft, who from 1961 to 1969 served as head of the drama division of the School of Music and Drama at the University of Ghana, and written and directed by Sam Aryeetey, the film re-creates the performance of an Anansesem, or a tale of the trickster Ananse. It intends to celebrate the richness of Akan oral tradition and, like the first modern African literary texts, to illustrate in the famous words of Chinua Achebe that “African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans” (Achebe 1975, 8).

As much as Aryeetey’s film taps into a reservoir of cultural knowledge in its incorporation of oral tradition, it also exploits the narrative and theatrical capacities of cinema to produce a sense of national identity based in the articulation of a shared culture and the organization of a national space. Ravi S. Vasudevan (2001) has described the new and emergent forms of subjectivity constituted in Hindi commercial cinema during the first decade after Indian independence, suggesting that the mixed modes of address and systems of narration that structure these films outline new forms of subjectivity and national identity. No Tears for Ananse, like several of the Indian films Vasudevan examines, incorporates a mixed address. In this case, it combines the “character-driven codes” (Vasudevan 2001, 149) associated with Hollywood and codes and conventions affiliated with African storytelling. Most notable among these techniques is the use of audience direct address. Direct address refers to the sequences where the film overtly addresses the spectator and ruptures the closed-off world of the narrative space, or the diegesis. The first instance of direct address in No Tears for Ananse occurs in the film’s opening as the introductory text quoted below scrolls down the screen:

Story-telling is a form of entertainment very popular among Ghanaians. Of the many stories that one may hear, there is a particular cycle that has come to be identified with the fictitious character Ananse, the spider-man or man-spider. These are the stories known as Anansesem, the stories of Ananse. Kweku Ananse symbolizes shrewdness and cunning. In Akan mythology, he is the younger brother of Nyankopon, the great god of the sky. Unlike his brother, however, Kwaku Ananse is more earthy. His greed knows no end. A figure of fun, he seems at his best when engaged in some mischief. But like all mischief makers, he often ends up in trouble and disgrace, thus earning the laughter and scorn of mankind.

Although identifying Ananse as an important character in Akan mythology, the intertitle claims Ananse as an important national figure, suppressing other ethnic identities, languages, oral discourses, and mythologies while claiming a shared national culture and oral literature. The reference to “Ghanaians” has a double function here. It is, to borrow a phrase from Homi Bhabha (1994), pedagogical and performative, asserting an ethnographic “truth” about Ghanaians and, in that, producing “Ghanaian” as a national identity. Ghanaians are doubly inscribed; described and addressed, their national identity is the subject and product of the enunciation.

In No Tears for Ananse it is the direct address of a traditional storyteller, played by Ernest Abbeyquaye, that frames the Ananse story and invites the film audience into “a familiar community of meaning” (Vasudevan 2001, 149). The architecture of these opening and closing segments theatricalizes space to reenact a storytelling event for two audiences: the diegetic audience (the audience within the world of the film) seated around the storyteller and the film audience located in the film theater. Placed in a position external to the Ananse story he will tell, centered frontally, and standing among a large group of rapt listeners, the storyteller looks directly into the camera when he introduces his tale. An ensemble of traditional drummers and dancers, located behind him and to the side, punctuates his address. The camera, tilted slightly upward, places the film audience among the crowd of listeners, who appear in a brief cutaway sequence. Here the camera pans across the faces of the listeners as they laugh, nod, and smile, representing the audience as the nation, heterogeneous, including the old and young, men and women, and happily unified around this cultural performance. The film’s creation of a storytelling event, a culturally familiar and culturally coded arena of meaning, opens a national space, shared by Ghanaians within and external to the film, that, significantly, affirms the idea of community found in the Ananse narrative.

The mode of spectatorial address shifts with the actual telling of the Anansesem. Rendered through Hollywood-style narration that uses continuity editing to invoke the grammar of realism, the narrative of the Ananse story positions the spectator fully within the story’s “real” world. Set in an unspecified past, the narrative moves between the perspectives of Ananse and his son Kwaku Tsin. It chronicles the avaricious Ananse’s ploy to trick his wife Okonnor, his son, and their village into believing that he is dead so that he can harvest and eat all of the food grown on the family farm. Ananse, feigning sudden sickness, asks his wife, upon what he claims is his approaching death, to grant him a last wish: “When I die, don’t bury me in a grave. Lie me on a pyre on the farm and build a hut around my body.” Ananse dies in Okonnor’s arms, and in the following days, the entire village mourns and partakes in the funeral rites and festivities. Taken to his farm on the pyre and left to meet his ancestors, Ananse, very much among the living, sneaks out of his hut each evening to pick ripe tomatoes, ground eggs, and cassava and prepare for himself a plentiful feast. While enjoying a large bowl of soup, he remarks, “How I pity all family men who have to share their food and never get the chance to put on a bit of fat.” When Okonnor and Tsin return to the farm several weeks later, they find their plants picked clean. Furious, Tsin vows to find the “scoundrel” who has been “feeding fat” on his father’s farm and devises an elaborate ploy to capture the thief. Kwaku Tsin carves a human figure from a large piece of wood, paints the statue with a thick and sticky sap, and places it on the farm, where he is certain the thief will find it. The foolish Ananse sees the figure and, mistaking it for a man, attempts to slap and kick it. When he makes contact with the sappy glue, of course, he sticks. Unable to free himself from the figure, he is captured by Tsin, who returns the next morning with his mother to check the trap he has set.

After Tsin captures the thief, he immediately informs the entire village, whose members run to the farm to find Ananse caught in his own son’s trap. Point-of-view editing again aligns the camera with the crowd whose members heckle Ananse, and in the final scene, when the storyteller returns to impart the story’s lesson to his listeners, Ananse’s exposure and his shame, and therefore the story’s moral, are linked to Ananse’s “suffer[ing] in the eyes of his own wife and child,” and, importantly to the disapproval and sanction of the community. The storyteller, looking into the camera, imparts the film’s lesson: “Thus, Kwaku Ananse was exposed. And his greed brought upon him greater shame than any other man ever suffered in the eyes of his own wife and child. Take heed then to all who will listen.” The architecture of the film aligns, in censure, the gazes of the Ananse’s family, his community, the storyteller and his audience, and, significantly, the film spectators in the dark film theater. In this way, it organizes “a circuit of imaginary communication, indeed, a making of audience into imaginary community” (Vasudevan 2001, 149). The mixed modes of narration deployed in the film position the spectator “both inside and outside the story, tied at one moment to the seamless flow of a character-based narration from within, in the next attuned to a culturally familiar stance from without” (150).

The same year, the Ghana Film Industry Corporation released Hamile the Tongo Hamlet (1964), a Ghanaian retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Set in the village of Tongo in northern Ghana among the Gurunsi, the film, made in English, adheres closely to the original text. Only the location and characters’ names have been changed: Hamlet has become Hamile, played by Kofi Middleton-Mends; Ophelia is Habiba, played by Mary Yirenkyi, and Polonius is called Ibrahim and acted by Ernest Abbequaye. The film features performers from the University of Ghana School of Music and Drama, many of whom appeared in No Tears for Ananse and other GFIC releases. Its screenplay was written by Terry Bishop, an English national who was a close friend of Sean Graham’s, and the film was produced by the Ghanaian writer Joe de Graft, who throughout the course of his career directed many Shakespearean plays.

Based on a stage performance premiered earlier in the year, Hamile was made for inclusion in the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival in London and was de Graft’s first attempt at adapting one of Shakespeare’s major plays to a Ghanaian context (Agovi 1992, 5). As explained by Kofi Ermeleh Agovi, “De Graft was attempting to extend the dimensions of the Ghanaian theater to accommodate a universal experience in a distinctly Ghanaian setting” (5). Like similar assimilations of Shakespeare produced by first generation Africa writers in many former British colonies, the Africanizing of Shakespeare by well-educated members of the African elite was meant to demonstrate Africa’s civility and humanity (Johnson 1998; Gikandi 2004). It grew out of and reproduced the colonial idea that British literary culture represented a shared humanity. The re-creation of Shakespeare in Ghana, as in other parts of British colonial Africa, was bound up with the assertion of a national identity and culture. Gikandi explains: “To the extent that African nationalism justified its political claims through the invocation of the essential humanity of the colonized, the production of a literary culture was conceived as an important step in sanctioning the case for African rights and freedoms” (2004, 387). The film received a tepid response from the local press and local audiences. The Weekly Spectator, for example, described the film as “a bit high-browed” and criticized it for being unlike The Boy Kumasenu, which is reported to have “gone down well with the public” (June 4, 1966).

With little revenue, diminishing resources, and no prospect of new government investment, the beleaguered film company was unable to sustain the promise offered by these first films. It was not until 1970 that the next feature appeared, I Told You So (1970) directed by Egbert Adjeso. Like No Tears for Ananse, Adjeso’s production combines the codes of narrative cinema with a Ghanaian performance tradition, in this case, the concert party. Adapted from a stage play by concert party artist Bob Cole, I Told You So tells the story of a poor girl whose mother pressures her to marry a rich stranger, who, in the end, is revealed to be a diamond smuggler. The film’s close affiliation with the popular concert party theater and its incorporation of highlife music and performances by Bob Cole and the African Brothers Band undoubtedly accounted for its wide appeal. Music figures even more prominently in Bernard Odjidja’s Doing Their Thing (1972). The first color film made in Ghana, Doing Their Thing features The El Pollos and Kwanyako Brass Bands, two popular highlife bands that performed widely in the 1970s. In 1975, Aryeetey embarked on several unsuccessful coproductions, including Contact: The African Deal (1973), which was directed by Giorgio Bontempi and produced with Ital Victoria, and The Visitor (1979), a musical tour coproduced among GFIC, the Musicians Union of Ghana, Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac, and Micky Shapiro. The films were, by every measure, unsuccessful, and Aryeetey was widely criticized for his decision to look abroad for coproducers and directors (Diawara 1992; Ukadike 1994).

The production of two family dramas, Genesis Chapter X (1979) and Aya Minnow (1987), indicated a shift in the form and content of the national film company’s productions. These films rely exclusively on the conventions of Hollywood narrative cinema and move away from the incorporation of indigenous performance forms and the mixed modes of spectator engagement described previously.29 Here the narratives are focalized through individual characters and plots driven by private, family conflicts. Each of these films constructs closed story-worlds and, through the use of continuity editing, place spectators within this “hermetic universe on-screen” (Vasudevan 2001, 151). Both explore broken or failed nuclear families and detail the negative repercussions those failures have on children. In Genesis, Zaria Garba, who works as a doctor in England, travels back home to Ghana to find the mother he was taken from as a child. As the plot unravels, Zaria uncovers the truth of his past, that his mother, Hawa, had an adulterous affair with her current husband, Adamu, while she was married to Garba’s father. The affair lead to the murder of Zaria’s father, for which Hama was put in jail, and her then very young son, Zaria, was taken away. In the second feature, the death of Aya Minnow’s mother during her birth casts a long shadow on Aya’s life as portrayed in Aya Minnow. Controlled by an overprotective father, Aya fights to find love without her father’s interference, and only after he dies does she seem to have real hope for a happy life with Kobi.