African women are sidelined from film making, the result of pervasive patriarchal biases that exist in both the film industry and African society.

The year is 1969. The place is Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso where the Pan-African Federation of African Filmmakers (FEPACI) is founded, masterminded by Beninese/Senegalese film director and historian, Paulin Vieyra. The people who drove the initiative have come to be known as the “Fathers of African cinema”, a name attributed despite two women being involved in the founding of the African Film Week, which will be held the following year, in 1970 – it will then change its name to Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (Fespaco) and would become a biennial festival, which has now grown into the biggest and most prestigious film event on the African continent.

At Fespaco, African filmmakers compete for the Golden Stallion of Yennenga, which is awarded to a film that best shows African realities. Fespaco 2019 provided a traditional spectacle at its opening – a parade of horse-riding women, a reference to Yennenga, the 12th century legendary princess. She was also a fearless warrior, an expert horse rider and commander of her own battalion, whose father praised her prowess so much that he did not allow her to marry. But Yennenga escaped into the forest on a stallion where she met a man and married him.

The Golden Stallion of Yennenga has been awarded 27 times; yet, no woman director has ever won the prize, in spite of African women having helped birth the festival back in 1969.

This reality, that only African men and no African women, have won the Golden Stallion at Fespaco, is the result of pervasive patriarchal biases, patriarchal biases that exist in both the film industry and African society.

As far back as 1970, British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey famously described how the world of film recreates in its narratives the same gender patterns as are present in society. Thus, film stories function to depict women as powerlessness beings, just as systems have been built up in society to keep women subordinate. As in society, film traditionally positions women as objects that fulfil male desire. Women in film, paralleling society, are not constructed as acting, achieving, power-wielding subjects, an on-screen reality that still harshly reflects the realities of the filmmaking industry where women make up less than 10% of film directors and less than 15% of screenwriters.

Other social systems by which people are excluded or included are also represented in film. Race, class, age, nationality and political affiliation are examples of other categories of difference.

Where competence is held equal, a man is more likely than a woman to access the means to be a filmmaker; a white woman is more likely to do so than a black woman; a younger woman is more likely than an older woman; a woman affiliated to some political power in some way is more likely than a woman who is not affiliated to political power. For African women filmmakers, this political power might be the ruling party in power, or it might simply be international community powers. Whichever it is, the intersections of multiple exclusions are particularly toxic to African women filmmakers.

In fact, African women, especially sub-Saharan African women, lag far behind other categories of women when it comes to representing themselves and their points of view in films. A survey carried out by the International Images Film Festival for Women (IIFF), an annual Harare-based, women-centred, film festival which screens films that feature a female protagonist, revealed that in the period from 2013 to 2017, only 17% of documentaries with a running time of 45 minutes or longer were made by African women. Only 14% of fiction films with a running time of 45 minutes or longer that were screened in the same period were made by African women.

While many have pointed to the rise of African women filmmakers, these are generally women with elementary or informal training who make short films and short documentaries. The numbers of practising women filmmakers decrease as one ascends the industrial ladder to the more rewarding ranks where careers are consolidated and sustained. African women filmmakers are by and large relegated to the levels of informal film practise, but excluded from the level of a sustainable industry.

Within Africa, nationality plays a large role in determining whether an African woman can access the resources necessary for filmmaking. North African women filmmakers have higher chances of accessing the resources they need than do other African women. Many North African countries have flourishing industries: the cinema of Egypt is one of the oldest in the world; in sub-Saharan Africa, women making films in Francophone countries are able to tap into Francophone resources designed to support the use of the French language on the planet. Anglophone female African filmmakers are best placed if they are resident in South Africa, Nigeria or Kenya, countries where governments have committed to including the film industry in national development planning.

The involvement of governments points to the aligning of film to political power. This is to be expected since, as a means of representing the world to people, film is itself a location of power. Those who own the means of filmmaking are thus invested in using film to show their particular perspective of the world in order to maintain their grip on power.

The relationship between film and power is particularly significant for Africa. The technology of celluloid-based filmmaking was discovered at the end of the 19th century, little more than ten years after the Scramble for Africa – in which European nations divided Africa up between them – took place in Berlin in 1884. While England and France, the two biggest imperial nations at the time, administered film practice in Africa differently, the outcome was the same: exclusion of Africans from representing themselves in film, coupled with portrayal of the colonial world and the colonial imagery viewed from a colonial perspective.

Filmmaking by indigenous Africans took off after African countries obtained independence. Reflecting the patriarchal nature of post-colonial African society, this gave rise to a male-dominated film sector. Continuing in this patriarchal tradition, African moving images in popular culture have become one of the critical sites of oppression and violence against women on the continent. It has been claimed that many male African filmmakers, especially those of the older generation, are “feminist” in that as opposed to sexualised images of African women, they have portrayed indomitable female African characters. However, a crucial effect of this appropriation of African women’s voices and expressions is that it directs resource streams to male and not female filmmakers, and stops African women from speaking for and expressing themselves.

In February this year, at the Africa Hub of the Berlinale, African women delegates called on African Governments, the African Union, the African Audiovisual and Cinema Commission of the African Union, all national and regional African filmmaking organisations and all national, regional and supranational public and private entities globally that support filmmaking on the African continent, to work in good faith and with tangible results towards ensuring that 50% of all funding for purposes of filmmaking and film-related activities on the continent be made available to African women filmmakers and their organisations. It remains to be seen which governments, institutions and entities, public and private, will heed this call.

The Berlin call comes after African women filmmakers and industry practitioners have laboured for decades to stake their claim to the territory of narrative film: Early pioneers such as Sita Bella (Cameroon), Sarah Maldoror (Angola) and Safi Faye (Senegal), provided a legacy for other African women filmmakers to follow. Organisations that promote African women in film run by African women such as DocuBox founded by Kenyan Judy Kibinge, in South Africa Sisters Working in Film and Television lead by Sara Blecher, Maisha Film Lab in Uganda, founded by Mira Nair, Women in Film and Television Nigeria, whose president is Muna Iyanam, as well as my own organisations, have for decades engaged to capacitate and resource African women filmmakers against the demographic odds, with a special focus on countries such as Uganda and Zimbabwe, where work is particularly marginalised.

Capacitating and resourcing African women makes economic and social sense. The nature of work is changing and automation is resulting in more leisure time that needs to be filled with meaningful activity. Digital technology has resulted in increased consumption of moving images narrative both in the workplace and as a leisure activity. Excluding women, and particularly African women from the sector, is to exclude such women from increasingly significant economic activity. This ushers in all the social ills and social decay that result from women being excluded from meaningful economic activity. In addition, as the African Women Filmmakers’ Hub members noted at their inaugural meeting in Harare, enabling African women to participate in and represent themselves through filmmaking is a fundamental component and expression of democracy.

The great opportunity for African women filmmakers is to put their differences aside, to refuse to be co-opted into systems that dangle production carrots in front of a few sisters, in order to work together to ensure systemic change of the film-production ecosystem on the continent to provide equitable access at every level of industry for African women filmmakers, so that Africa women’s stories may be told from the point of view of African women.

Speaking at Fespaco in Ouagadougou this year, South African actress Xolile Tshabalala, who featured in the prize-winning production “Miraculous Weapons”, directed by Cameroonian Jean-Pierre Bekolo, asked, “Can it be that in 50 years, there hasn’t been a single woman capable of telling a great story to win the Fespaco?”

Capable and talented African women filmmakers need to make sure the world knows they are indeed capable and talented. In the words of Viola Davis, the only difference between such African women and anyone else is opportunity. ML

Tsitsi Dangarembga is the Founding Director of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA) Trust (incorporating Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe and Nyerai Films) and African Women Filmmakers Hub (AWFH), and the Founder of the International Images Film Festival for Women (IIFF)