African Cinema and Nollywood
From Sembène to the second-largest film industry on Earth.
Full detail, evidence and debate
Ousmane Sembène called film 'evening school' for the continent. Sixty years later Nigeria's Nollywood releases well over a thousand films a year, African animation is finding global platforms, and financing remains the binding constraint.
- First feature
- La Noire de… (Sembène, Senegal, 1966)
- FESPACO
- Pan-African film festival, Ouagadougou, since 1969
- Nollywood output
- Roughly 2,000+ titles a year
- Employment
- Among Nigeria's largest private employers after agriculture
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The colonial camera
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
African cinema begins under a prohibition. The 1934 Laval Decree required French colonial authorisation for any filming in French African territories, and the effect — intended or not — was that Africans could be filmed but could not film. British colonial film units produced instructional pictures about hygiene and taxation for African audiences, made by Europeans, in a visual grammar designed to instruct rather than to represent. When Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and his colleagues shot Afrique-sur-Seine in Paris in 1955, they did so in France because they were not permitted to do it at home. Understanding that origin explains why the first generation of African directors treated the camera as a political instrument rather than an entertainment tool.
Cinema as argument
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
Ousmane Sembène turned to film because, as he put it, the novel reached only those who could read French. La Noire de… (1966), about a Senegalese woman working for a French family on the Riviera, is usually counted as the first feature by a sub-Saharan African director; Mandabi (1968) followed in Wolof, insisting that African audiences hear themselves. Djibril Diop Mambéty's Touki Bouki (1973) refused realism entirely for a jagged, elliptical style that critics still mine. Med Hondo, Souleymane Cissé, Ababacar Samb-Makharam and Safi Faye — the first Black African woman to direct a commercially distributed feature — made films about class, migration, religion and land, funded largely by French cultural money whose contradictions they were explicit about.
FESPACO and the pan-African screen
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
The Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou, founded in 1969, and the federation FEPACI gave African filmmakers something distribution never did: an audience of their peers and a critical apparatus of their own. The 1975 Algiers Charter committed African cinema to decolonisation and social responsibility. Burkina Faso under Thomas Sankara nationalised cinemas and made the festival a state priority, and the Étalon de Yennenga remains the continent's most significant film prize. What FESPACO could not fix was screens: colonial-era distribution chains were foreign-owned, and by the 1990s most African cinema halls had closed altogether.
North African cinema
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
Egypt built the Arab world's studio system from the 1930s, with Cairo's Studio Misr producing hundreds of features and stars — Faten Hamama, Omar Sharif — known from Casablanca to Baghdad, and directors such as Youssef Chahine working across five decades of political change. Algerian cinema after independence produced The Battle of Algiers (an Italian-Algerian co-production still taught in military academies and film schools alike) and Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina's Palme d'Or. Tunisian and Moroccan cinema have since become both auteur traditions and service industries for foreign productions shooting in Ouarzazate.
The Nollywood model
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
Nollywood did not emerge from film schools or state funding. In 1992 Kenneth Nnebue, an electronics trader in Lagos with unsold VHS stock, financed Living in Bondage and sold it in markets. It sold in the hundreds of thousands. What followed was a full industry built on cheap video cameras, shooting schedules of a fortnight, direct-to-market cassette and later disc distribution through Idumota and Alaba traders, and stories — melodrama, moral tale, comedy, horror — that Nigerian audiences recognised. By output it became the world's second-largest film industry by volume. It also proved a point that no policy paper had managed: African audiences would pay for African stories, in African settings, in English, Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa.
New Nollywood and the platforms
The broad outline is accepted but dates, numbers or details are actively argued by specialists.
From around 2010 the industry professionalised. Cinema chains reopened in Lagos, Abuja and Accra, budgets rose, and films such as The Wedding Party and Kunle Afolayan's work took serious box office. Netflix and Prime Video commissioned African originals, and Showmax built a regional alternative. Streaming brought money, contracts and quality control; it also brought dependence, and the retrenchments and commissioning pauses of the mid-2020s showed how quickly foreign capital can withdraw. Kenya's Riverwood, Ghana's industry and the Kannywood Hausa-language sector in Kano operate on similar logic with different censorship and market conditions.
New wave and animation
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
Mati Diop's Atlantics won the Cannes Grand Prix in 2019; Wanuri Kahiu's Rafiki was banned in Kenya and screened at Cannes the same year; Ramata-Toulaye Sy, Mo Abudu's production house and Alain Gomis have kept African auteur cinema in competition. Animation is the fastest-growing segment: Kugali in Lagos partnered with Disney on Iwájú, Triggerfish in Cape Town produces for international broadcasters, and studios in Nairobi, Kampala and Abidjan are training a generation on work-for-hire before making their own IP. The constraint is unchanged from 1966 — who pays, and what they ask for in return.
Sources
- General History of Africa, Volumes IX–XI (ongoing)African source
UNESCO · 2013–
https://www.unesco.org/en/general-history-africa - African Economic OutlookAfrican source
African Development Bank
https://www.afdb.org/en/knowledge
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Afrobeats
Lagos to the world, on Lagos's terms.
A Nigerian- and Ghanaian-led pop movement — distinct from Fela Kuti's Afrobeat — that became one of the fastest-growing categories in global streaming, exporting language, slang, dance and production style with it. Its rise was built on local radio, street distribution, cheap mobile data and a generation of producers who never waited for a Western label's permission.
West AfricaAfrican Literature
Oral epic, Ajami script, the novel, and the language question.
Africa's literary record includes Ge'ez manuscripts, Timbuktu scholarship, Swahili and Hausa poetry in Arabic script, the oral epic, and a modern novel tradition that carries multiple Nobel laureates and an unresolved argument about which language it should be written in.
ContinentalLagos
One of the fastest-growing megacities on Earth.
A metropolitan population in the tens of millions, an economy larger than several African countries put together, and a cultural output — film, music, fashion, software — with global reach. Lagos is also a low-lying coastal city built on lagoons and sandbars, growing faster than any authority can plan for, and it has become the place where the arguments about Africa's urban century are settled in practice rather than in theory.
Nigeria