The Postcolonial Situation

Filmmaking in Africa by Africans is fundamentally a postcolonial activity and experience, and nowhere is this more the case than in the two contiguous but variously colonised geographical areas dealt with in this book. The first area comprises the North African countries forming the Maghreb: Tunisia and Morocco, which both became independent in 1956, and Algeria, whose independence was achieved only after a long and bloody war of liberation in 1962. The second area comprises the states formed south of the Sahara from the two giant colonies of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, which were divided at independence into the twelve separate countries now known as Benin (formerly Dahomey), Ivory Coast, Guinea, Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta), Chad, Central African Republic, Gabon and Congo. To this list we may add the two West African states which were formerly German colonies but had become French protectorates after the First World War: Togo and Cameroon. These two were granted their independence in 1960, along with all the other West African States apart from Guinea, which had proclaimed its independence in 1958. The two contiguous areas north and south of the Sahara together provide a continuous unbroken land mass of just under 11 million square kilometres (about 16.5 per cent larger than the United States).