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version of the colonial civilizing mission. Nonetheless, the annual radio competition also facilitated a creative explosion in African writing for the stage, receiving multiple submissions annually and helping to launch the careers of a new generation of playwrights from throughout the continent. Authors like Labou Tansi, who took first prize in 1977 with his play Je soussigné cardiaque, were able to use the distinctive format of the radio play to experiment with theatrical form, and also to examine the political and social realities of life within the rising dictatorships then taking hold in some African countries.

The case of the Concours théâtral interafricain illustrates how African authors may use the framework of French cultural and linguistic influence to explore with form in works that, though indeed Francophone in their indebtedness to the métropole for distribution, nonetheless offer something decidedly new. Theater proves a fruitful avenue of creative research for writers and directors who write in French but use the stage to revise European notions of performance, theater, and ritual. Particularly illuminating in this regard is the work of Cameroonian playwright and author Werewere Liking, whose stage work cannot be described as works of drama in the conventional sense but rather as scripted stagings that blur the boundary between theater and ritual. In her play La Puissance de Um (The Power of Um, 1979), Liking places on stage a funerary rite of her native Bassa culture, writing direct audience participation into what is designed to serve as an effective, transformative experience for performers and spectators. This approach is the fruit of a Francophone collaboration of a different kind, since Liking developed her technique in collaboration with French researcher Marie‐José Hourantier, who had published scholarly work on the practice of what she called ritual‐theater (Hourantier 1984). Following their collaboration, Liking created, in 1985, a cultural center in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, called the Ki‐Yi M’Bock village. Her example posits a fruitful counter‐model to the French cultural centers found throughout Africa, while also remaining open to collaboration with French cultural influence as a ground from which to construct something new.

Cinema and African Postmodernisms

Just as African literature has frequently had to contend with questions of authenticity, African cinema has sparked rich discussions of what it means to work as an African filmmaker in an industry dominated by Europe and the West. African filmmakers have generated discussion around their work through innovations of content and form, making statements that are simultaneously aesthetic and political. Associated since its birth with notions of modernity and progress, cinema has provided a fruitful terrain for exploring the continent’s place within that modernity. The medium comes necessarily with its own demands and restrictions, especially given the budgetary requirements involved in shooting and distributing a film. The prohibitive costs of mounting a shoot, along with the shifting tastes of audiences, have been a persistent hindrance to aspiring African filmmakers of recent decades. In his writing on Cameroonian cinema, Alexie Tcheuyap explores some of the reasons why African cinema, defined as films made by directors from the continent, and not films made on the continent by western filmmakers, cannot be considered a “popular” art in the same way popular literature exists in African languages and for a local readership.⁶ The market of African filmgoers is insufficient to sustain a local art‐house cinema industry, a fact that has frustrated many filmmakers seeking to reach a local audience but limited to international festival circuits and small‐scale distributions abroad. Moreover, Tcheuyap points out how state control over artistic production has frequently stifled creative liberties to speak freely about local politics and power dynamics. State governments may no longer exercise the sweeping nationalist cultural policies once common in the period immediately following widespread African independence. However, even in the absence of such governmental policy, censorship remains a useful tool at the state’s disposal, as in the case of Jean‐Pierre Bekolo’s film Le Président (2013), which was banned for offering a commentary on the trend of African patriarchal heads of state holding on to power, transforming democracies into de facto dictatorships.

Yet, an agonistic relationship with state governments is not the only, or even the primary factor characterizing African cinema of recent decades. As Tcheuyap points out, filmmakers such as the Cameroonian Bekolo also engage in deeper interrogations of the form itself, negotiating influences from an earlier generation of politically engaged African cinema with global cinematic reference points. In his first feature film, Quartier Mozart (1992), Bekolo employs a style more reminiscent of an American urban narrative, with clear influences from Spike Lee and a certain MTV‐like approach to editing that highlights the importance of American hip‐hop culture and the global appropriations thereof. Full of scenes that show young characters hanging out and engaged in lively conversation about everyday topics, mostly the opposite sex, Bekolo’s film depicts a vibrant urban life far removed from the stereotypical images of a chaotic, war‐torn African continent. Quartier Mozart instead uses a touch of magical realism to explore gender relations among Cameroonian youth, as the film’s protagonist, a beautiful young woman named Samedi (Saturday), is transformed by her grandmother into a young Casanova named Montype (Myguy) so that she may experience the game of seduction from the other side of the gender divide. Full of playful moments of discovery and mischief, including the male incarnation of the grandmother, whose mystical powers allow her/him to shrink men’s penises simply by shaking their hands, the film also contains a clear‐eyed critique of the male authoritative figure in the character of a despotic chief of police, named Chien Méchant (Mean Dog).

      Bekolo departs even further from typical approaches to politically engaged African cinema in Le Complot d’Aristote (Aristotle’s Plot, 1996), a film commissioned by the British Film Institute as part of an initiative commemorating the centenary of the birth of cinema alongside contributions by such household names as Martin Scorsese, Stephen Frears, and Jean‐Luc Godard. Bekolo responded to the commission by creating a dream‐like allegory interrogating African filmmakers’ often troubled relationship with film criticism in general, but also, and above all, with their African audiences. His hero‐protagonist, “Cineaste,” reflects the figure of the intellectual, politically engaged filmmaker of earlier generations of African cinema and walks in the shadow of such tall figures as Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty. The foil to this is the character of “Cinema,” whose motley gang feeds on low‐brow Hollywood action fodder, curses African cinema as “shit,” and mocks Cineaste throughout the film, calling him “Silly‐ass.” Meanwhile, a voice‐over narrative, that of Bekolo himself, threads its way throughout the film, offering a reflection on the classical structure of dramatic plot laid out in Aristotle’s Poetics, which focuses on the importance of having a beginning, middle, and end, and on the characteristics of action, empathy, and catharsis. Drawing an analogy with African ritual, Bekolo posits, toward the end of the film, that the medium is in fact an inherently African one: “My grandfather’s words started to fill my mind: what is an initiation ceremony? Crisis, confrontation, climax, and resolution; sound, stories, images, narration. Is there anything in this, in cinema, that is not African?”

      Bekolo’s film highlights the alienation African filmmakers experience from the very audiences they wish to reach. In fact, his approach contributes to this same gap by refusing to serve up the shoot‐’em‐up action today’s audiences seem to crave. Similar themes are addressed in the documentary work of Bekolo’s compatriot, Jean‐Marie Teno, a filmmaker whose best known work, Afrique, je te plumerai (Africa, I Will Fleece You, 1992), begins from the standpoint of the present day to reflect on the longstanding and troubled relationship between Cameroonian culture and a colonial heritage of usurpation and violence that is often hidden. In Lieux Saints (Sacred Places, 2009), a poetic essay film shot in Ouagadougou, the site of FESPACO, West Africa’s premiere international film festival, Teno documents the affairs of a local cinéclub located in the backyard of the renowned film festival but light‐years away from its high‐culture vision of art‐house African cinema. Teno remarks on his subjects’ fascination with the action films of Hollywood or Hong Kong, but also notes the movie club manager’s difficulty in obtaining DVDs of African films to screen for his audience. Like Bekolo, Teno marks, through another’s voice, the notion that cinema is in itself a profoundly

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