Introduction
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar (1966) hereafter referred to as Fesman, Murphy (2016) edited a collective volume in which the contributors offer a critical assessment of this event and its continuations in other festivals, notably in Algiers (1969) and Lagos (1977). However, while the book brings together several contributions focused on the festival, the question of Negritude and modernism, as well as theatre, dance, and the visual arts, it does not give specific attention to African cinema. Yet, during Fesman, a group of filmmakers and audiovisual professionals gathered to discuss the present and future of African cinema.
More generally, the literature on Fesman has paid little attention to discussions on African cinema during the festival, even though it brought together thousands of guests and participants from around the world. In historiography, the Dakar event has been approached from various angles, such as the central role of Fesman as a vehicle for disseminating Negritude and music within the framework of new African diplomacy (Jann Pasler, 2021). However, a historiographical gap persists, namely, the absence of studies devoted to the resolutions adopted during Fesman concerning African cinema.
This article aims to contribute to historiographical debates by highlighting the importance of Fesman in shaping an agenda for African cinema that envisioned the creation of pan-African institutions intended to promote the film industry across the continent. Furthermore, this program included events and new festivals to showcase African cinema. In this way, the resolutions of the cinema group presented at a symposium held as part of the Dakar event were of crucial importance for the decolonization of African cinema.
The First World Festival of Black Arts
Fesman was a major cultural event held in Dakar from April 1 to 24, 1966. It was organized by Senegal and the Société africaine de culture, the body behind the Paris-based journal Présence Africaine, under the auspices of UNESCO. It had an interdisciplinary focus, with an extensive program of artistic events: dance, music, poetry, theatre, cinema, literature, crafts, and exhibitions of traditional and modern art.
According to Murphy (2016), Fesman was an unprecedented pan-African spectacle. Among the organizers’ objectives was to make Dakar an essential cultural hub for new inter-African relations, as well as for relations between Africa and African diasporas in Europe and the Americas. There was also an effort to promote tourism, as evidenced by a propaganda film produced by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1966), who was then head of Actualités sénégalaises
For the occasion, a new theatre and a new museum were built in Dakar. The city welcomed thousands of visitors from Africa, Europe, and the Americas. While the brand-new Dynamic Museum featured exhibitions of traditional African art as well as modern and contemporary art, the Daniel Sorano National Theater hosted folk dance performances, plays, jazz concerts, samba, and other musical styles. The Palais du Cinéma screened African films and films from countries culturally influenced by the African diaspora. In addition to artistic and cultural events, A series of scientific symposia and conferences was organized under the auspices of UNESCO. Cultural policy across various disciplines—museology, visual arts, music, dance, literature, theatre, and cinema—was also discussed.
Cinema at Fesman (1966)
The cinematography of postcolonial Africa has been widely studied from the period of independence to the present day. While North Africa already had an endogenous cinema from the first half of the twentieth century, with filmmakers such as the Tunisian Albert Samama-Chikli and the Egyptian Youssef Chahine, sub-Saharan Africa did not possess an authentically African cinema prior to decolonization. Following the first wave of African independence, demands for the decolonization of the arts in general, and of cinema in particular, quickly emerged. An agenda for a postcolonial African cinema was proposed during Fesman. It was the first international event at which African cinema was presented as a “Black art”. Films such as Lamb (1963) by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and La Noire de… (1966) by Ousmane Sembène were screened during the event. In addition to its award at the festival, Sembène’s debut feature film received the Jean Vigo Prize in France and the Tanit d’Or at the Carthage Film Festival that same year. According to Vansina (2010), the Senegalese filmmaker and writer was the founder of an “intellectualizing tradition” in African arts (p. 751).
Although Sembène was already recognized as an African writer in the mid-1960s, his early films were in line with an “auteur cinema” approach. For Fesman, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra succeeded in having two of his friend Sembène’s films accepted: Borom Sarret (1963) and Niaye (1964).
Sembène was in France in the spring of 1966 and therefore did not take part in the cinema group that gathered in Dakar during the symposium “Function and Significance of Black-African Art in the Life of the People and for the People”, held between late March and early April 1966. Alongside Sembène, other names make up this first generation of African filmmakers: Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Blaise Senghor, Timité Bassori, Thomas Coulibaly, Jean-Paul Ngassa, Ababacar Samb, and Moustapha Alassane. Among them, only Paulin Soumanou Vieyra held a formal degree in cinema.
The 1966 Dakar festival marked a turning point for African cinema. This concept should be understood in the sense that Giddens (2002, p. 108) attributes to certain phases in the history of societies, marked by key events. In this regard, the evolution of African cinema after Fesman allows us to understand, through hindsight, the importance of the symposium and the meeting of the cinema group during the festival in defining a future agenda for African cinema.
The lecture of Paulin Soumanou Vieyra
Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1925–1987) graduated from the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (Idhec) in Paris in 1955. He contributed as an art critic to the journal Présence Africaine and filmed the second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Rome in 1959. He was part of the African diaspora intelligentsia in Paris in the mid-twentieth century. When Senegal gained its independence in 1960, Vieyra chose to pursue his audiovisual career in Dakar. As a member of the official delegation of President Léopold Sédar Senghor, he visited several African countries. As director of Actualités sénégalaises, he held a leading position in the country’s audiovisual sector and became a key figure in opening new horizons for the emerging African film industry.
At the symposium entitled “Function and Significance of Black Art in the Life of the People and for the People”, organized during the Dakar festival between March 30 and April 8, 1966, Vieyra delivered a lecture titled The Cinematic Art in Search of Its African Expression. The archives of the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac preserve both a typed and a printed version of this lecture, both dated December 1965. According to Vieyra, cinema, as an art form, was still in search of its African expression. While sculpture, music, and dance had long possessed African forms of expression, the seventh art was still seeking the emergence of a truly African cinema.
FESMAN was a moment of transformation and considerable expectation for the African continent in the mid-1960s. The Dakar event took place in a climate of pan-African optimism, despite the military coups that shook Africa between 1965 and 1966. Faced with the new political context, in which ideological divisions were deepening, any pan-African project aimed at promoting a continental film industry had to take into account the idiosyncrasies of postcolonial Africa, without forgetting the regions still under colonial or neocolonial domination.
In his lecture, Vieyra emphasized that the film industry could not be separated from cinematic art. In this inseparable relationship between industry and art lay the challenge of creating a national cinema in Africa: “And as long as there is no industrial complex in this field in Africa, one cannot speak of a truly African cinema” (Vieyra, 1965, p. 2).
Another key point of his presentation was the functionalist view that assigned African cinema a pedagogical role, as an audiovisual resource in the service of education. Vieyra insisted on the fact that cinema, as an art form, depends on creativity. In this sense, if cinema was searching for its African expression, it could not be limited to a single function in Africa, however laudable that function might be. For Vieyra, African filmmakers must enjoy artistic and expressive freedom, something their governments did not always expect of them. His defense of auteur cinema was explicit in his lecture.
According to him, cinema first sparked curiosity, then entertainment, and aesthetic exploration emerged with technical development. By exploring the artistic aspect of cinema, filmmakers initiated different movements or trends. At the same time, criticism contributed to the training and education of the audience. By freeing itself from literary and theatrical traditions, cinema gradually developed its own artistic language.
However, Western cinema had spread to other parts of the world, carrying with it Western artistic and aesthetic conceptions. As a result, the first moving images of Africa were the product of a Western perspective, which portrayed the continent as nothing more than an exotic backdrop serving storylines unrelated to its realities. Moreover, Africa became a consumer of Western films, and the few African productions did little to change this situation. While the West had become a “visual culture”, Africa had not yet had the opportunity to make cinema its own reality. Cinema remained a foreign phenomenon on the continent, exclusively conveying Western humanism, Vieyra argued (1965, p. 5).
Another identified issue was the training of audiences for foreign cinema. According to him, Africans, in general, had few tools to fully appreciate foreign films. Film criticism had an important role to play in educating audiences about cinematic art; in this regard, he also highlighted the educational role of film clubs.
As a modern art form, cinema presupposed the modernization of Africa, a condition favorable to the development of an African cinema. Thus, the economic growth of an African country was expected to contribute to the rise of a national cinema, since the film industry depends on the number of theaters, films produced, and spectators etc.
One of the challenges facing emerging African cinema, according to Vieyra, was the production of feature films. He was also aware of the high production costs and financial difficulties of African cinema. Short films, meanwhile, faced another issue: they were neither exported nor widely consumed domestically, being overshadowed by the cheaper importation of feature films of questionable quality. The colonial period had encouraged the circulation of mediocre films from the United States, Europe, as well as Egypt and India. Popular taste had been shaped by these westerns and melodramas. Added to this was the poor condition of African movie theaters in terms of comfort, acoustics, and so on. According to Vieyra (1965, p. 12), beyond the poor conditions of the venues, there was also the noise of the audience itself, a feature of popular cinemas not only in Senegal but also in France and Brazil.
In light of this realistic assessment, Vieyra proposed ideas for organizing African cinema in a rational and profitable way. Regardless of the ideologies of African states, the ideal solution for him was to establish a private network operating alongside a state-run sector developing within each country: “The private sector would also partly support the public sector, which in turn would assist the private sector by organizing the film profession and industry” (Vieyra, 1965, p. 12).
In his views, it was urgent for African states to create a national film agency to foster the development of infrastructure for film production, distribution, and exhibition. Such an agency would have both an industrial and a commercial function, and its viability would depend on a significant cinephile audience, as was the case in Senegal. It was estimated that the two distributors operating in Senegal, which had a population of three million in 1966, shared an annual turnover of 520,000,000 CFA francs. According to Vieyra, a national body could obtain 10% of this amount-52,000,000 CFA francs-which could be reinvested in the national film industry. This figure would increase in line with production and revenues derived from commercialization and related services such as advertising.
In the case of Senegal, such an institution should be created quickly, although, according to Vieyra (1965, p. 14), it did not yet exist due to the political events of 1962. This statement is surprising, given that three years had already passed since that crisis. His defense of artistic creativity in the face of the job security of civil servants is also worth noting. According to Vieyra (1965, p. 14), artists should be paid based on the work produced and its quality. In his view, a creative artist who becomes a civil servant ultimately stifles his/her creativity. This blunt statement was likely also a form of self-criticism. As he declared in a 1978 interview:
“In reality, when I returned from Idhec, I found myself in a purely administrative job —that can also kill a vocation” (Vieyra, 2004b, p. 51).
In his lecture, Vieyra also addressed the remuneration of different professional categories within the emerging African film industry. He suggested minimum and maximum salaries to regulate the market. One of the positive effects of such regulation, he argued, would be to attract more foreign productions to Africa.
In a somewhat ambiguous way, Vieyra emphasized that cinema must serve its audience. National cinema should offer viewers what they appreciate, under the best possible conditions; at the same time, it should contribute to the development of a taste for what is beautiful, interesting and what can promote their social advancement through cultural enrichment.
One of his conclusions was as follows: if a cinema of Black-African expression did not yet exist, the fundamental reason was the absence of an industrial organization of the film industry in Black Africa (Vieyra, 1965, p. 15). At the end of his text, he emphasized the artisanal nature in which some African films were produced. Despite financial constraints, lack of equipment, and technical resources, some African filmmakers persevered, such as his friend Ousmane Sembène. According to Vieyra (1965, p. 17), a film like Niaye could only have been made by an African.
The lecturer asked himself: what do we mean by African cinema? His answer was:
“Cinema, as a modern art form, needs to revitalize itself from the sources of particular traditions, in order to establish its distinctiveness first and then to reach universality” (Vieyra, 1965, p. 18).
However, this originality raised the issue of language in African cinema. According to Vieyra, a solution might emerge in the near future through a linguistic organization of the continent, reducing the number of languages used for inter-African communication to just a few. His proposal was close to the model adopted by the newly established Organization of African Unity (OUA).
Another issue raised was the rise of television in Africa, which could become strong competition for African cinema, not only as a medium of knowledge and dissemination but also as a means of expression. He acknowledged television’s advantages in reaching households and enabling live broadcasting but saw its development as exclusively state driven.
Finally, he asserted that for cinema to become “Black-African”, it had to position itself within the cultural battlefield where Africa is fighting for its dignity. Fesman was, therefore, an ideal opportunity for fruitful exchanges between African and foreign filmmakers interested in the continent’s cultural, artistic, and educational challenges, and who were working toward enabling cinematic art to finally find its African expression. It should be noted that the first association of filmmakers was created shortly after Fesman. Pierre Haffner (1992, p. 193) highlights its crucial role, in that it served as a direct link between filmmakers and government authorities.
The Resolutions of Cinema Professionals
During the symposium “Function and Significance of Black Art in the Life of the People and for the People”, organized in Dakar between March 30 and April 8, 1966, a working group was established bringing together African and Africanist filmmakers, as well as international experts and audiovisual technicians. This group discussed the necessary conditions and mechanisms for the development of an authentic African cinema.
During the meeting, two resolutions were unanimously adopted. The first resolution called for the creation of audiovisual archives of African culture. The working group urged the international and national authorities present at the Dakar festival to recognize as essential the provision of resources to establish visual and sound archives of traditional cultural expressions that were disappearing or undergoing transformation. The second resolution proposed measures to promote the development of African cinema. The symposium recommended the creation of an inter-African administrative body: the Inter-African Bureau of Cinematography. This new body had ten main responsibilities:
- To collect and disseminate all information related to African cinema (film catalogues, marketing statistics, inventories of technical resources, lists of technicians, etc.).
- To develop legislative proposals to be submitted to different states wishing to develop their national film industries.
- To encourage national film production in the following sectors: the state sector (information, education, research, television, …); the non-commercial sector (cultural films, film clubs, …); the commercial sector (private production, distribution, and marketing…). This mission also included promoting technical infrastructure (editing rooms, auditoriums, laboratories, studios, ….) in order to reduce the final costs of films across each of the mentioned sectors.
- To exercise effective control over commercial revenues across the entire African film market, both nationally and internationally.
- To promote the development of new commercialization and distribution circuits (opening new theaters, monitoring technical screening conditions, …).
- To establish programming regulations, including quotas in favor of African productions (both short and feature-length films).
- To create national film archives containing films produced within national territories by Africans, as well as “classic” works of world cinema. The film archive could also serve as a repository for copies of films available in the country.
- To encourage the training of African filmmakers, technicians, and actors, who would form the dynamic core of the future African film industry.
- To promote the creation of a distribution body for African cinema, facilitating its access to international markets, an essential condition for its development.
- To organize regular meetings enabling filmmakers, technicians, actors, and experts to exchange on their works and challenges, and to defend the freedom of expression of African cinemas.
It is worth noting that it is only at the end of the text that the plural form appears to address the conditions and modalities for the development of an “authentic African cinema”. This document and the two resolutions clearly reflect the pan-African orientations in favor of African cinema. At the same time, they reveal the fragile underdevelopment of cinema in dozens of newly independent African countries, while others were still under colonial domination in 1966.
Postcolonial or Neocolonial Africa?
When African and africanists filmmakers and other technicians and experts gathered during the symposium held in the first week of April 1966 as part of the Fesman, the political situation across the African continent was deeply uneven.
Following the military coup of November 25, 1965, the Congo became yet another piece in the domino effect of coups that marked Africa throughout the 1960s. This was neither the first coup in an independent African country, nor would it be the last. On the first day of 1966, a military coup took place in the Central African Republic. That same month, coups also occurred in the former Upper Volta Republic (now Burkina Faso) and in Nigeria. The following month, the president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, was overthrown. The Ghanaian president had previously hosted the All-African Peoples’ Conference in Accra in 1958. Two other conferences were held in 1959 and 1960. They all emphasized the need to establish a continent-wide common market.
At that time, certain African countries were pursuing political integration or African political unity. The pan-Africanist leader Kwame Nkrumah strongly advocated for African unity. He also accused neocolonialism of being “the biggest danger”, arguing that its primary tool was the balkanization of the continent (Nkrumah, 1963, p. 173).
While African institutions and organizations were created to promote a common market, military coups moved in the opposite direction of a political and even economic integration. The sociologist Pierre van den Berghe proposed a typology of armed forces for the study of contemporary Africa. In his classification, he differentiates the putschist group from arm forces. According to him, this group characterized itself by “a highly professionalized and politicized officer corps” (Van den Berghe, 1966, p. 112). In such contexts, the armed forces effectively become synonymous with government, and the military high command with the ruling elite.
The Belgian sociologist observed that military coups in Africa were generally led by young senior officers, and their political ideologies could range from rigid conservatism to “left-wing authoritarianism”. When they were conservative, military regimes tended to align themselves with the urban bourgeoisie rather than rural aristocracies. He also noted that the young coup putschist leaders often portrayed themselves as the agents of modernization.
The fight for independence continued in some parts of the continent, while others became arenas for military coups, most of which were embedded in neocolonial dynamics. Neocolonialism, so frequently criticized by pan-Africanist leaders such as Nkrumah (1963), was not only linked to the reactionary nature of certain coups. The few African countries that had not experienced coups had not achieved sufficient economic development either to prevent comparisons between the early years of independence and a new era sadly famous for neocolonialism.
Nevertheless, a strong sense of optimism animated African intellectuals such as Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. In a text first published in the journal Présence Africaine (1960–1961), and later republished in Le cinéma et l’Afrique (1969), he offered a nuanced analysis of the relationship between cinema and the African revolution. According to him, African cinema should serve as “an agent of progress” contributing to the well-being of peoples (Vieyra, 2004a, p. 81). This conception of a “functional cinema”, already articulated in 1959, is revisited and expanded upon in his later works, where he emphasized cinema’s responsibility in shaping an African national consciousness (Vieyra, 2004c).
African Cinema in Question
In 1966, some African filmmakers and audiovisual technicians dreamed of a national cinema. By “national cinema”, people meant film production that expressed a national identity or culture. One can sense the ideological undertone of that era, when young African nations were seeking to represent themselves. There was also a search for new forms of social cohesion to unify territories and populations that did not necessarily share a common history.
In the name of an idealized coherence or social cohesion, this emerging national cinema was often opposed to so-called tribalism. The unity and harmony of different ethnic groups became the dominant tone in the narrative of this emerging national cinema. Films such as Une nation est née (1961) and Lamb (1963) by Paulin Vieyra are two examples of this form of African national cinema.
According to Cunha (2021, p. 212), the national cinema approach tends to prioritize film production at the expense of audience preferences. This creates certain analytical difficulties, since the dynamics of the film market do not necessarily depend on the production of national films. In the case of Angola’s film market in the 1960s, the majority of films were foreign, and a small proportion was Portuguese. Thus, the most representative indicator for characterizing a country’s film culture seems to be the types of films shown in its theaters rather than its national production.
In the case of African cinema in the 1960s, the few films produced by African filmmakers faced numerous production and distribution challenges. Movie theaters primarily screened foreign films—westerns, comedies, melodramas. In newly independent countries such as Senegal, or in Angola, still a Portuguese overseas province, the cinematic culture of the 1960s was shaped far more by foreign films shown in theaters than by national or local production.
The first films produced in Angola and Mozambique were documentaries or colonial propaganda films, and a few fiction films constrained by censorship under the Estado Novo regime (Piçarra, 2015). In 1966, the Império cinema was inaugurated in Luanda, featuring a theater with nearly 1,500 seats and a screen capable of 70 mm projection. Other theaters were opened in the city in the following years. Despite the boom of theaters in Luanda, they were owned by three commercial groups seeking to control the market, particularly in distribution and exhibition (Cunha, 2021, pp. 219–222).
At the same time, there existed a film culture associated with film clubs, distinct from the commercial circuit of westerns, comedies, melodramas, and adventure films. In a letter dated October 10, 1960, Luandino Vieira informed Salim Miguel of his interest in cinema and of the fact that he was part of the committee responsible for reviewing the programming of the Luanda film club as well as the organization of film criticism in daily newspapers: “We could also initiate a dialogue between the Luanda film club and that of Florianópolis, as a first step toward cultural rapprochement between the film clubs of this land and those of Brazil”, Luando Vieira suggested to his Brazilian correspondent (Miguel, 2005, p. 33).
It is evident that the film culture of film clubs differed from that of the commercial circuit; their networks were also distinct, often clandestine in order to bypass colonial censorship. There was also a concern with educating the public’s eye, on promoting an understanding of cinema as an art form.
The resolutions unanimously adopted during Fesman revealed a pan-African project for a film industry “made in Africa”. However, the economic and political situation of independent African countries already demonstrated the extent to which the proposals of African filmmakers and other cinema professionals gathered at the 1966 Dakar festival were somewhat utopian.
Some representatives of this first generation of African filmmakers adopted a more pragmatic stance. In 1966, Le retour d’un aventurier by Moustapha Alassane, an African western, was released in theaters. In this comedy, critique and irony surrounding cinematic culture in Africa challenged audiences to reflect on the power of images to either alienate or liberate individuals. The film also showed that contingency is an intrinsic element of history and that certain dreams can turn into nightmares. La Noire de… (1966) by Ousmane Sembène and Le retour d’un aventurier (1966) by Moustapha Alassane illustrated, in the same year, two approaches through which emerging African cinema engaged with dramaturgy, whether tragedy or comedy.
Paulin Soumanou Vieyra was deeply committed to African cinema, both as an art and as an industry. For him, intelligent comedy represented a promising path for the development of African cinema. He believed that an appropriate cultural policy could foster transformative change within African film culture. This cultural policy would aim to replace images of alienation with those of liberation. In this regard, nationalist and pan-Africanist discourse framed the process of emancipation within a socialist perspective. At the same time, Vieyra assigned to newly independent African states the responsibility of organizing the film industry. In some countries, cinema was even seen as a mediator between government and the masses. For example, the High Commissioner for Youth and Sports of the Republic of Mali invited Ousmane Sembène to participate in the fifth “Youth Week” held during the first week of July 1966. The Malian government covered the filmmaker’s travel expenses from Paris, where he was based, as well as his stay in Bamako. It is possible that Modibo Keïta’s government saw in this Senegalese filmmaker a figure close to the youth, at a time when African cinema represented a new artistic form.
In the early 1960s, some African countries aligned themselves within the Casablanca Group, while others formed the Monrovia Group. Although both blocs advocated for greater African unity, no common ground could bring them together. Their divergent positions on Algeria and the Congo did not help advance pan-Africanism, as each group defended a different conception of it. Nevertheless, in 1963, they eventually joined the newly created OAU. Among the objectives of this international organization was the coordination of member states’ policies in economic, political, diplomatic, educational, cultural, scientific, health, and military spheres. OAU even organized the first Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969.
However, most of OAU’s budget came from partners outside the continent. Even today, its successor, the African Union (AU), remains largely dependent on external contributions. Without external funding, African countries struggle to mobilize sufficient resources to sustain an international African organization. The failure of pan-Africanism in the 1960s could be told as a comedy, a tragedy, a novel, or a satire, with the main protagonists being the African leaders of the time.
Nevertheless, certain organizations, such as UNESCO, supported projects aimed at developing African cinema. In December 1967, the second International Congress of Africanists took place. During this major gathering, organized under UNESCO’s auspices, several recommendations and resolutions were adopted. In the field of cinema, it was suggested to encourage the exchange of short films depicting both traditional and modern artistic life. In order to promote a better understanding of Africa by Africans themselves at all levels, UNESCO and governments were alerted to the challenges faced by the young African cinema. This initiative illustrated the support of certain international organizations for the promotion of the arts; however, the participation of African governments remained essential for the successful implementation of artistic and cultural projects.
UNESCO organized numerous scientific and artistic events in both Europe and Africa in the fields of archives, museology, tangible heritage, and history. One notable example is the ambitious eight-volume General History of Africa project. Despite the scale of the international team involved in this collection, the chapter on African art in the seventh volume (the second to last one) contained nothing on African cinema. In it, Soyinka (2010) focused on African architecture, sculpture, music, theater, and especially literature. In the final volume, Vansina (2010) addressed the arts in African societies after 1935. Regarding African cinema, the Belgian historian emphasized its late emergence, caused by two main factors: on the one hand, the reluctance of colonial governments to allow film production by Africans, for fear of political motivations; and on the other hand, major financial constraints, as film production requires “a significant initial investment for production itself, as well as the creation of a distribution network and the construction, or at least adaptation, of screening facilities” (Vansina, 2010, p. 748). Until the 1970s, only Egypt had succeeded in developing an efficient and self-financed film industry. For other African countries, the alternative lay in state-guaranteed initial funding for its film industry, followed by the establishment of solid financial foundations to ensure its sustainability.
According to Vansina, Nigeria and Morocco were then in a position to support a modest film industry, while Senegal appeared, as early as 1969, to be developing a distribution network, new theaters, and perhaps a circular economy within its national film ecosystem.
In 1969, the first African film festival took place in Ouagadougou. In the following years, the event became known as the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (Fespaco). The objectives of the festival were to promote the distribution of African films, foster exchanges between professionals and enthusiasts of cinema and audiovisual media and enhance the value of African cinema through awards and other activities celebrating an emerging film industry.
The fight for an African Cinema
Another Pan-African festival took place in Algiers in 1969, bringing together a large number of filmmakers and audiovisual professionals. The event in Algiers was more politicized, as the Algerian government supported various revolutionary groups and even granted political asylum to committed men and women from the “Third World”. In terms of cinematic art, however, there was a passing of the torch in the quest for a cinema of African expression. In this sense, the Pan-African Festival of Algiers was indeed a continuation of Fesman, as evidenced by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra:
The remarkable work undertaken and carried out by the Algerian Cinematheque […] was nevertheless a success, both in terms of the number of films screened, the quality of participation, and the conclusions reached. It marked the progress made since the First World Festival of Black Arts in April 1966. (Vieyra, 1969a, p. 191)
During the Pan-African Festival of Algiers, a symposium on African cinema was organized, along with screenings followed by debates and several roundtables. Discussions also addressed the preparation of the future Addis Ababa meeting, with a view to establish the Pan-African Union of Cinema (Upac) (Vieyra, 1969a, p. 193). The creation of a new Pan-African body depended on the establishment of national associations within member countries of OAU. The organization of African film festivals was also discussed during the festival.
At the Carthage Film Days, Upac was renamed the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (Fepaci). This new entity played a major role in African cinema (Niang, 2014). Some of its objectives included defending the rights of African filmmakers, the promotion of a “decolonized” cinema, the creation of funding mechanisms to support an autonomous film industry, as well as support for the promotion and distribution of African films in international markets.
A different system existed in countries such as Algeria, Tunisia, Mali, and present-day Burkina Faso (then Upper Volta). In these contexts, “governments commissioned propaganda and educational films, except for feature films”. One advantage of this system was the development of “local expertise, allowing certain production studios and early filmmakers in these countries to benefit from such conditions” (Vansina, 2010, p. 748).
While Vieyra and his peers viewed the promotion and organization of a film industry as essential to the development of African cinema, African governments did not show the same interest in supporting a Pan-African cinema. According to Vansina (2010, p. 749), “most governments hesitated to invest heavily in this sector because, contrary to what one might think, cinema is not a mass communication medium”, unlike radio and television.
Some examples of promoting national cinema even proved detrimental to the development of the seventh art, for reasons outlined by Vieyra in his lecture. Among these was the end of creativity—and thus of art itself—when films produced at the initiative of the state served only propagandistic purposes, whether for a government or for African nationalism. Moreover, “decolonization” did not lead to a profound break with cinematic culture: national productions and the control exercised by certain regimes did not alter the popular cinematic habits that had already been established during the final decades of colonialism.
At the Algiers festival in 1969, Vieyra also lamented the quality of certain films screened, arguing that “the lack of ideological training of their directors” turned them into “aimless works, lacking conviction” (1969a, p. 197). Furthermore, the intellectual criticized the radicalism of the audience at the Algerian Cinematheque:
I would nevertheless criticize the audience of the Algerian Cinematheque, which does not know how to listen, does not sufficiently reflect on what filmmakers say, does not always have an adequate understanding of the history of cinema and film technique—which one would expect from cinephiles—and who unnecessarily politicizes debates that were intended as cultural exchanges, thus going beyond the ideological positions of states. (Vieyra, 1969a, p. 198)
While the Algiers event can be seen as a passing of the torch in the implementation of a Pan-African project for a film industry, cinema was still searching for its African expression. Ultimately, the films shown at the Algerian Cinematheque revealed certain shortcomings, according to Vieyra (1969a):
Grammar and writing rarely lived up to the themes explored and the authors’ ambitions. We start from the premise that any subjects can be interesting, provided it is well presented, well narrated, and succeed in bringing forth within the film an existential philosophy—one that leads to awareness. (p. 199)
For African filmmakers, the creation of festivals was far more than an opportunity to screen their films. It was a space to share experiences and to engage in the search for a cinema of African expression. Another point of consensus among filmmakers participating in the roundtables at the Algiers festival concerned film distribution. For many members of the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (Fepaci), distribution should have been the responsibility of the state: “This is an objectively sound option, because distribution determines production—that is, ultimately, the possibility for African filmmakers to make films” (Vieyra, 1969a, p. 200).
In Guinea under Sékou Touré, in Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah, or in Upper Volta under Lamizana, some initiatives were launched to nationalize cinema circuits and theaters or to support film production. But the new films were largely beyond the control of African regimes. Even in newly independent nations, the subversive power of moving images worried states, just as it had concerned colonial authorities (Goerg, 2015, p. 233).
Beyond production and distribution, some African states officially supported film festivals. In 1972, Fespaco was formally recognized as an institution by government decree in Upper Volta, then led by Lieutenant-Colonel Sangoulé Lamizana (overthrown in a coup in 1980). During the first five editions of Fespaco, African filmmakers gathered in the Voltaic capital under the Lamizana regime. The country was renamed Burkina Faso in 1984, following another coup that brought former Prime Minister Thomas Sankara to the presidency of the National Council of the Revolution.
After independence, Young African cinema experienced renewed momentum, thanks in part to the considerable efforts of a small number of filmmakers and technicians willing to work under difficult conditions. This momentum was also supported by the circulation of early African films in international festivals. At that time, film production marked by stereotypical representations of Africa and its peoples began to be challenged by the African intellectual elite, as well as by the dominance of foreign distribution networks (Goerg, 2015, p. 232). In response to colonial cinema and purely commercial production, the first generation of African filmmakers sought to create films based on their own interpretations of the continent. However, the future of African cinema depended largely on the policies implemented by postcolonial states. This was at least the view of Vieyra, who hoped that the resolutions submitted to OAU in 1969 would be taken into account by African heads of state, so that “cinema may become a powerful tool for the social and human advancement of Africans and one of the means of effectively combating the continent’s economic and cultural underdevelopment” (1969a, p. 201).
Vieyra was aware that the future of African cinema depended, to some extent, on its democratization. As Vincent Bouchard (2024, p. 210) has shown, Paulin S. Vieyra and Ousmane Sembène sought to make the postcolonial world intelligible and accessible to African audiences, as well as more broadly to all those who identified with the Pan-African project to which they both devoted their efforts.
Final Considerations
Fesman in Dakar was a decisive event for various artistic expressions from Africa and the African diaspora. Among modern arts, cinema stood out in particular. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra was then one of the most experienced figures in sub-Saharan Africa, a graduate of Idhec in Paris with professional experience as a director of the Actualités sénégalaises. In his view, cinematic art was still in search of its African expression. He believed that the future of cinema in postcolonial Africa depended on a Pan-African project that would lay the foundations for a film industry on the African continent.
The symposium held in Dakar in April 1966, as part of the first World Festival of Black Arts, brought together African filmmakers and Africanists, as well as international experts in audiovisual technology–it defined the conditions and modalities for the development of an authentic African cinema. For African cinema, Fesman thus constituted a “turning point”, to use a concept from Anthony Giddens (2002).
The second Fepaci Congress in Algiers in 1975 continued the agenda for African cinema established during the Dakar festival in 1966. Vieyra (1975) once again renewed his call to African states to support Fepaci, a Pan-African body dedicated to “informing and educating the masses, with a view to the overall and collective development of African countries” (p. 166). However, the same African intellectual offered a pessimistic assessment in 1977, stating that at the tenth anniversary of the Carthage festival, there were not as many new films to present: “Production is stagnant due to the lack of a comprehensive cultural policy, while distribution remains in the hands of foreign monopolies” (Vieyra, 1977, p. 234).
According to Vieyra (2004b), beyond a film’s genre, a cultural policy can promote transformative action within African film culture. Such a cultural policy would enable a shift from images of alienation to those of liberation. In this sense, nationalist and Pan-Africanist discourse framed the process of emancipation within progressive perspectives. At the same time, he entrusted the new African states with the responsibility of organizing the film industry.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the National Institute of Art History (INHA) in Paris for hosting me as a visiting scholar (Winter Fellowship) during a research stay in France in 2025.