Documenting Africa on Film and Nkrumah’s Legacy in Pan-Africanist Africa

Abstract

Following Ghana’s attainment of political independence, the new nation’s leader, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, made efforts to lead Africa’s decolonisation process. He used film as a medium of achieving this Pan-African agenda. Nkrumah restructured and renamed the Gold Coast Film Unit (GCFU), which the British colonial administration had established, as the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC) and placed it at the forefront of documenting and propagating his version of the Pan-African narrative. From neighbouring Togo and Burkina-Faso, to distant Kenya and the Congo, GFIC cameras captured historical moments relevant to Nkrumah’s ideas. Whereas Nkrumah’s political legacy and diplomatic rhetoric are largely known, his use of cinema to execute his agenda remains unexplored. This article draws attention to the role documentary films of the GFIC played in the African decolonisation process. Drawing on information gathered about these films from interviews with key actors within the defunct GFIC, and from personal archives of these actors, it is argued that, although the functional use of documentary films in Nkrumah government appears similar to how film functioned in the colonial regime, GFIC films traversed national education and propaganda to become media of continental African integration and stimuli for post-colonial self- motivation and independence.