Tradition/Modernity and the Discourse of African Cinema

Abstract

Tradition/Modernity and the Discourse of African Cinema Jude Akudinobi (bio) Questions of identity and culture prevalent in contemporary African cinema are often mistaken as, essentially, a contest between "tradition" and "modernity." This is perhaps a consequence of attempts to devise a critical paradigm that would "explain" the complexities of contemporary African social experience and cinematic practice. However, the realities of contemporary African experience cannot be productively assessed without the revision or abandonment of the tradition/modernity schema. Interestingly, this schema has gained currency in academic and popular "understandings" of contemporary African cinema. Witness a few examples: for Manthia Diawara, it is the basis of social realist narratives; for Sheila Petty, it is a structuring principle; for Lizbeth Malkmus and Roy Armes, it is a conceptual space.1 The restrictive nature of the modernity/tradition schema is clearly illustrated by the assertion that: "In Africa, modernity and tradition seem so incompatible more than anywhere else."2 This statement marks Africa as aberrant and recalcitrant, and is deeply embedded in racist mythologies (in so far as it suggests that there is something intrinsically wrong or somehow problematic about African peoples/cultures). Equally important, the schema promotes the consignment of African institutions to a primordial cultural space and the bifurcation of very complex social experiences/expressions. Labyrinths Despite the developments that have occurred in African arts, popular culture, and cinema recently—cultural syncretism and a diversification of themes, styles, and genres—they must still contend with the fact that "western dichotomies of aesthetics and function, tradition and modernity have not facilitated understanding of indigenous concepts" and "realities."3 [End Page 358] Ideas of "modernity'' in dominant discourse are implicitly synonymous with western civilization. But, one "cannot easily separate modernity and tradition, from some specific tradition and some specific modernity … The modern comes to the traditional society as a particular culture with its own traditions."4 This specificity is especially important, since the structural opposition of the tradition/modernity formulation does not pit one tradition against another, but polarizes (African) tradition against an essentialist notion of modernity. As has been observed by A. E. Afigbo: In the rival mythologies of European imperialism and colonial nationalism, change was one of the many vital innovations which European rule introduced into what is usually described as traditional societies. If imperial apologists were to compile a dictionary of their own, in it the word change, as applied to colonial peoples, would be defined approvingly as progress, a dramatic and beneficial linear transition from a static and unproductive traditional culture to a dynamic and limitless modernism.5 The reigning scenario explicitly assigns "tradition" different roles and meanings in the West and Africa. In the West, "tradition" is endowed with a curatorial function—to the extent that it preserves a coherent, albeit idealized, notion of self and continuity; especially, since the "term tradition belongs to lexical fields that are emotionally charged and evaluative."6 It should, also, be noted that at the most elementary level, the opposite of "modern" is "ancient," not "tradition"; but positing African traditions as opposite of modernity recasts the terms of reference and allows for the surreptitious projection of a narcissistic western(ized) selfimage. As has been noted by Corinne Kratz, "notions of tradition are invariably implicated in the politics of identity, and domains central to representations of tradition bear on those politics."7 Roots The cinematic critique of "modernity" has a literary antecedent in the works of African novelists whose books were instrumental to the collapse of the mystique of colonial authority. In these works, the disruption of colonial authority, and especially its fixed sense of stability, secured a niche for the construction of an unfettered Africanness. These works also raised questions about the position of Africans within the colonial order (since the latter's discourse of progress, ventriloquially, is a discourse of power). Some examples include Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Weep not Child, Ousmane Sembène's God's Bits of Wood, Ferdinand Oyono's The Old Man and the Medal, and Mongo Beti's The Poor Christ of Bomba. Close parallels to these examples [End Page 359] abound in plays and poems. Consider, for example, the opening lines of Dennis Chukwude...