Documentary film has been known for its capacity to interrogate issues of social, economic, cultural and political significance, but this interrogation has been at headlocks with African governments who use the documentary genre as showcasing and praising tool. This article examines the utilization of documentary films in Africa by African governments such as Tanzania, and by independent African filmmakers such as Jean Marie Teno. Jean Marie Teno’s film “Afrique, je te Plumerai” is examined and its role in the struggle for social, political, economic, and cultural emancipation of the Cameroonian, thus African people is revealed. Through the use of distinct mixed modes of cinematic address, Teno has created a hybrid documentary genre that invites and calls for a diversified filmic style that allows for self-expression, new images, and voices. Teno has created an African documentary film that juxtaposes two distinctive traditions; African oral narrative tradition and Western filmic technique to shake the African people to action. By artfully combining contemporary images with archival film footage, discontinuity narrative structure and fictionalized images the film challenges perspectives and offers viewers a far greater understanding of both history and present condition of misuse of political powers. Teno has pushed the envelope of documentary genre further and African documentary furthest.

No abstract

Through a national cinema theoretical framework, this article interrogates how cinema aided the Tanzanian government in the invention of a national culture identity during the country’s nation-building phase of the 1960s and 1970s. It is argued that in its initial stage of nation formation after Independence, the government used cinema as an apparatus to construct a national identity that confirmed and adhered to the ruling class’s interests and idea of a nation. Thus by controlling how cinema was produced, distributed, and exhibited to the masses through the 1960s and 1970s, the government did not bring about unification of the people; rather it helped in solidifying the primacy of the government. The cinema produced by the government was a cheer leading cinema which provided no space for analysis of issues; further, it was a cinema that denied freedom of expression to its filmmakers and to its audiences.