African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen

Reading a range of South African and Francophone West African films inspired by African and non-African literature, including Gavin Hood's Tsotsi (2006) and Mickey Madoda Dube's A Walk in the Night (1998), Lindiwe Dovey identifies the trends and movements that suggest a collective African identity. Though she remains sensitive to different cinematic traditions and methods of production across Africa, Dovey pinpoints certain shared historical experiences, as well as a united vision of the future. She provides in-depth histories of the way in which the film medium was violently introduced and exploited by colonial powers in Africa. These histories provide a backdrop for her engagement with films and literary texts that conceptualize, visualize, and critique physical and psychological violence. More than being acutely concerned with the socio-cultural realities of life in Africa, these films engage with issues of colonialism and postcolonialism, "updating" both the history and the literature they adapt. Through this deliberate re-historicization of texts and realities, Dovey argues, African filmmakers critique past and present forms of violence and develop a method of filmmaking that is altogether distinct from European and American forms of adaptation.