When thinking about cinema and movies, Afrikan work often gets left out of the picture. Global conversations about film tend to orbit around the Western Hemisphere, while Afrikan cinema is dismissed on the margins and discussed only when convenient. This poor representation is a result of long-standing hierarchies that have shaped which stories receive value, are celebrated, and are remembered. To decolonize Afrikan film, we need to confront these hierarchies and reclaim the right to share our stories on our own terms.
For Sekera Mohamed Besta, a Tanzanian filmmaker, this process began with unlearning. “I didn’t think Afrikan cinema was the thing I was going to do,” she says, referring to her early ambitions in the field. Like many emerging creatives on the continent, Besta internalized the idea that, to succeed in the film industry, she would have to focus primarily on Western media, “I was like, nah, you know, Afrikan films don’t sell…you have to be thinking about money.”
That assumption began to fall away when she encountered Djibril Diop Mambety’s Touki Bouki. Through the story’s depiction of the human condition, Sekera was confronted with a burning desire to depict real Afrikan life as she’d seen it firsthand, rather than the watered-down ideas of African life that often get pushed in Western media. Her discovery of the worlds of Mambety, Safi Faye, Ousmane Sembène and later Mati Diop revealed an Afrikan cinematic tradition that was experimental and unabashedly rural—completely turned away from the colonial gaze. But it’s rarely ever positioned as such.
This absence, she argues, is a product of miseducation.
“People have just lost interest, hope, or [have been] brainwashed…You just don’t know that [there are] people before them who did this,” she said.
Western media dominance plays a crucial role as well; Afrikan audiences develop an attachment to Western media, having consumed it their entire lives, while Afrikan films are rarely screened in local cinemas. Another reason for the narrowed global perception of Afrikan cinema is the saturation of Nollywood.
While celebrated for its cultural resonance, she notes that the exaggerated aesthetics can unintentionally undermine film as a profession. “Someone will look at that and not even be interested in knowing who directed it…it’s just, ‘we watched this funny Nollywood movie, let’s move on.'”
Therefore, in order to decolonize Afrikan cinema, we need to fully reject the white gaze as a tool of service—the pressure to tell stories for a perceived Western audience or for Western approval.
“I’m not trying to spin a narrative for the Western gaze,” she explains. Communities themselves are often clear about this boundary when they invite storytellers in. While filming at a school in Dodoma, Tanzania, she recalls community members telling her: “Respect us…don’t portray us like we’re this poor place, because we hate that.”
Accurate representation often begins within an artist’s psyche; the moment one decides what the story they want to tell is. Everything else becomes secondary, but is still led by their subconscious decision to lead with dignity and accountability. Besta makes a point of highlighting films like The Last King of Scotland, directed by a white filmmaker, as emblematic of a larger issue: “If Black people directed Black events…there is such an amazing way we could tell stories.”
When Afrikan histories are told by outsiders, our vitality is lost and replaced by hollow forgeries used to drive box-office sales.
Accent, casting, and performance become political terrain as well (though some could argue they have always been). “They’ll say, ‘this guy is Ugandan,’ but he doesn’t sound anything [like a] Ugandan,” Besta says, analyzing the industry’s indifference toward inaccuracy in Afrikan stories. While Western actors are scrutinized for flawed accents, Afrikan characters are often reduced to a distorted amalgamation of accents across the continent.
It’s how you get films like Black Panther, set in East Africa but with leads drawing their accents from Southern and Western nations. This is when we can see some effort put in, though; otherwise, we get what Besta describes as the “stereotypical ‘Coming to America‘ Afrikan accent.”
Pushing out more films that follow this miseducated narrative reinforces the caricature Besta is conscious of avoiding. Decolonizing Afrikan cinema, to Sekera Besta, also means embracing ‘Afrikanacity’ without apology and reclaiming the Afrikan gaze.
This idea brings me back to the words of Senegalese filmmaker and author Sembène, “Europe is not my center. Why be a sunflower and turn towards the sun? I myself am the sun.” If Afrikan cinema were taken seriously on a global stage, we believe it could reshape global understanding of history and belonging.