Introduction

African filmmakers’ quest for autonomy in the 1980s is matched, notes Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, by ‘compelling experimentation’, which ‘enables us to appreciate African cinema as innovative and diverse’. Instead of directly denouncing the Westernisation and corruption of postcolonial African elites in realistically depicted stories of contemporary life, they choose instead to re-examine the roots of African culture and to draw inspiration from African oral story telling. Manthia Diawara has argued that there are three reasons for the this shift to a precolonial past: to avoid censorship, to search for precolonial African traditions that can contribute to the solution of contemporary problems, and to develop a new film language. In following this path, the new filmmakers also, and no doubt unexpectedly, created images of Africa that found instant success in the West, where their films won prizes at European festivals and received (comparatively) wide recognition and distribution.