ABSTRACT
For Africa as a whole, cinema ha's always been a powerful weapon deployed by the colonial nations to maintain their respective spheres of political and economic influence. History is distorted and a Western view of Africa continues to be transmitted back to the colonized. Apart from the obvious monetary returns for the production companies themselves, the values Western cinema imparts and the ideologies it legitimates are beneficial for Western cultural, financial, and political hegemony.l
Filmmakers to the north of South Africa have largely sought emancipation from the Hollywood-derived cultural dependency. These include radical film movements (Cinema Djidid, Tropicalist Cinema, Senegalese, etc.), the ethnographic and reconstructive documentary of Mozambique and the anthropological and war-related cinema of Angola. Distribution cooperatives have been established in a number of African countries to challenge the dominance of American, British and French majors with the prime aim of ensuring exposure for African-made films. Efforts are also being made in Zimbabwe and Botswana to reject colonial reflections in cinema through education, film workshops and the critical examination of genres and conventions.
