From the proselytizing lantern slides of early Christian missionaries to contemporary films that look at Africa through an African lens, N. Frank Ukadike explores the development of black African cinema. He examines the impact of culture and history, and of technology and co-production, on filmmaking throughout Africa. Every aspect of African contact with and contribution to cinematic practices receives attention: British colonial cinema; the thematic and stylistic diversity of the pioneering "francophone" films; the effects of television on the motion picture industry; and patterns of television documentary filmmaking in "anglophone" regions. Ukadike gives special attention to the growth of independent production in Ghana and Nigeria, the unique Yoruba theater-film tradition, and the militant liberationist tendencies of "lusophone" filmmakers. He offers a lucid discussion of oral tradition as a creative matrix and the relationship between cinema and other forms of popular culture. And, by contrasting "new" African films with those based on the traditional paradigm, he explores the trends emerging from the eighties and nineties. Clearly written and accessible to specialist and general reader alike, Black African Cinema's analysis of key films and issues—the most comprehensive in English—is unique. The book's pan-Africanist vision heralds important new strategies for appraising a cinema that increasingly attracts the attention of film students and Africanists.

"The story of the cinema in Nigeria started in colonial times and has remained a catalogue of tense struggles against economic and bureaucratic forces originating from that period. It has been a long battle for survival through improvisation and entrepreneurship which have established the most unique funding pattern for film making on the African continent. The Cinema in Nigeria provides a situation account with details of the efforts by individuals who have propped up the Nigerian film industry and supported it with flights into folklore and mythology and occasional sorties into contemporary themes"--

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Cinematic Independence traces the emergence, demise, and rebirth of big-screen film exhibition in Nigeria. Film companies flocked to Nigeria in the years following independence, beginning a long history of interventions by Hollywood and corporate America. The 1980s and 1990s saw a shuttering of cinemas, which were almost entirely replaced by television and direct-to-video movies. However, after 1999, the exhibition sector was revitalized with the construction of multiplexes. Cinematic Independence is about the periods that straddle this disappearing act: the immediate decades bracketing independence in 1960, and the years after 1999. At stake is the Nigerian postcolony’s role in global debates about the future of the movie theater. That it was eventually resurrected in the flashy form of the multiplex is not simply an achievement of commercial real estate, but also a testament to cinema’s persistence—its capacity to stave off annihilation or, in this case, come back from the dead.

This collection of essays investigates the way Africa has been portrayed on the London stage from the 1950s to the present. It focuses on whether — and, if so, to what extent — the Africa that emerges from the London scene is subject to stereotype, and/or in which ways the reception of audiences and critics have contributed to an understanding of the continent and its arts. The collection, divided into two parts, brings together well-established academics and emerging scholars, as well as playwrights, directors and performers currently active in London. With a focus on Wole Soyinka, Athol Fugard, Bola Agbaje, Biyi Bandele, and Dipo Agboluaje, amongst others, the volume examines the work of key companies such as Tiata Fahodzi and Talawa, as well as newer companies Two Gents, Iroko Theatre and Spora Stories. Interviews with Rotimi Babatunde, Ade Solanke and Dipo Agboluaje on the contemporary London scene are also included.

This book is the first definitive publication on Tunde Kelani, and represents a mine of divergent scholarly approaches to understanding his authorial power. A collection of articles on the cinematic oeuvre of one of the important and finest filmmakers in Africa, it addresses diverse areas that are crucial to Kelani’s filmic corpus and African cinema. Contributors articulate Kelani’s visual crafts in detail, while providing explications on significant markers. The book offers an understanding of how Kelani’s works represent the African worldview, science, demonstrative law, politics, gender, popular culture, canonized culture and history.