Remembering Mbye Cham (1947-2025), avid champion of African Women in Cinema, reflections by Beti Ellerson

Remembering Mbye Cham (1947-2025),

avid champion of African Women in Cinema,

 reflections by Beti Ellerson

Mbye Cham has joined the ancestors, with whom he will meet again, the pioneers of African cinema who have left before him. Among them he was the critic, theorist, scholar who made an important contribution to the research and study of African cinemas in the United States in particular, on the continent, and in the world of cinema in general. For me in particular, his support and recognition of African women of the moving image was the catalyst for what has become my career-defining research. It all began at the Center for the Study of Culture and Development in Africa (1994-1997), housed in the African Studies Department at Howard University, with Mbye Cham at its helm. He supported my interest in researching African women in cinema from the conception of the idea that I proposed for the project. As a recipient of a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, administered by the Center, I was able to realize a significant part of the project during the 1996-97 fellowship year, which culminated in the Sisters of the Screen book (2000) published by Africa World Press and the film (2002) distributed by Women Make Movies. 

It is for this reason that I asked Mbye if he would write the Foreword to the book, which he graciously accepted. The foreword reprinted below reveals the depth of his knowledge about the complexities of African cinemas as it relates to gender, and the role that women have played in its evolution and history. During the book signing at the Howard University Bookstore in 2000, and again during the special screening for International Women’s Day on March 8 after the completion of the film in 2002, also at Howard University, at the Blackburn Center, I expressed my sincere gratitude for his support. And I would like to do so again as my tribute to him. 

The image above is a screen capture of a televised interview with Mbye Cham in 1997 during the series Reels of Colour which I produced and hosted at the public access channel DCTV. 

FOREWORD

The publication of this book is a most welcome development in the short history of studies on African cinema and screen practices. To date, scholarship, criticism and general commentaries on African cinema and video have focussed disproportionately on the films made by men and, among other topics, the various roles, images and portraitures of women in these works. Reasons advanced for this slant include the perennial lament about the general absence of women filmmakers and films by women in Africa, with the exception of pioneers like Safi Faye and Thérèse Sita Bella. Few, however, have bothered to probe beneath the surface of this absence to explore, explain and interrogate the complex of reasons and factors which account for this absence. Even fewer have actually made it a task and a priority to look for these female filmmakers and videographers, as well as other modes of female presence and practice in the arena of Africa cinema and visual media. Sisters of the Screen accomplishes these two seminal tasks. Enough of the cry and whining about absence.

Presence, albeit emergent, however, does not spell absence or disappearance of the structures, practices and factors that are responsible for the continuing imbalance between male and female screen practitioners in Africa. The responses and commentaries that Beti Ellerson’s questions and queries elicit from the female filmmakers, videographers, actresses, producers, writers, and film scholars whom she sought out and followed in numerous places in three continents over time, testify to the staying power of these structures and practices. More significantly, they reveal African female will and agency, for they speak to the challenges and need to dismantle those structures and practices that want to inhibit or retard a more forceful and equitable presence of women in all aspects of African cinema, media and society, in general.

Sisters of the Screen is a statement about the creative process for women screen artists in Africa, as well as the Diaspora. How and why African women screen artists create and work, their challenges, difficulties, traditional restrictions, their background, their aspirations and numerous other factors covering a wide spectrum of women’s experiences in domains – artistic as well as social – usually figured as male - these constitute the thread that runs through the conversations Ellerson assembles in this ground-breaking anthology. Equally pronounced in this anthology is the range of subject matter and concerns of the work of African female screen artists and practitioners, their conflation of the personal and the public, and the place of their work in African cinema and media, in general.

The women presented in Sisters of the Screen illustrate the range and variety of female involvement and practices in African cinema and visual media. The anthology is a bold assertion of presence and significance in the midst of laments of absence. Sisters of the Screen is a significant contribution to more wholesome and better descriptions and understandings of African screen practices.

Mbye Cham

Washington, DC

June 2, 1999