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.
Revised October 23 2025 to include the Reels of Colour interview, included following the Forward.
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
In December 1996, a generation ago, I had a conversation with Mbye for my local TV series Reels of Colour, which I hosted and produced. We discussed a variety of themes explored in his books: Black Frames, Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema co-edited with Claire Andrade-Watkins (1988), Ex-iles, Essays on Caribbean Cinema (1992); African Experiences of Cinema co-edited with Imruh Bakari (1996). When I recall the many issues that we talked about, I realize how they continue to resonate in our present realities, that they persist in the cinemas of Africans, of Afro-descendant peoples of Europe, in the Caribbean and that we now find in North America, in the United States as well as Canada.
In Conversation with Mbye Cham by Beti Ellerson, host and producer of the Washington, D.C. series Reels of Colour, December, 1996
Welcome to Reels of Colour today we have with us Mybe Cham a film scholar and professor in the Department of African Studies at Howard University. He has edited three books on cinema, the first one focuses on black independent cinema, the second on Caribbean cinema and the most recent on Africa cinema.
Beti Ellerson: Mbye, your books together engage an inclusive discourse on filmmaking in Africa and its diasporas. I would like to start by discussing African and African diasporan film criticism and analysis as emerging discourses in cinema studies and then focus on each of your books. What are some of the themes and issues that are posed in African and African diasporan film criticism? What have been the topics in some of the debates within this criticism?
Mbye Cham: The themes tend to be very similar, if you look at what is being written about African cinema, African cinemas, Caribbean cinema, Black British cinema, cinemas of the Black Diaspora you tend to see a convergence of concerns and issues and they tend to fall along the same line or continuum, with perhaps more emphasis being put on a particular set of issues by those scholars and critics who are based in the academy and another set of issues being highlighted by those observers of these film practices working within the confines of let’s say journalism and popular magazines. But all in all, they tend to meet pretty much around the issues of approach, for example; what kinds of tools do we use to get a better handle, to study better, to understand better, to get more cogent explanations of what is going on in these black cinematic practices. Do we content ourselves with some of the received theories and critical practices that have been deployed in the West for example to look at Western cinema; are those tools appropriate for looking at Black cinematic practices, given the material conditions that Black cinematic practices have to contend with: lack of financing, difficulties with distribution—once you make the film, what happens to the film? And other kinds of material constraints. To what extent do these become part and parcel of the terrain, the material of criticism, how do these conditions themselves influence and shape the kinds of approaches that are developed, or that should be developed, to looking at the filmic developments of Blacks, both in Africa and outside of Africa. You also have issues dealing with the subject matter, themes, content that are treated in these films; stories in particular.
BE: Do they tend to be different from what you may find in the West, are they specific to Africa?
MC: Well, they tend to reflect the prevailing concerns of the environment in which these films are made. But again, in general you tend to see a lot of convergence in terms of the concerns of these filmmakers. All of them, trying to respond in one way or the other to some of the traditional images of Africans, of Black people in western cinema. Trying to present more humane…trying to assert the humanity of Black people around the world, trying to portray their lives in a much more realistic fashion. Looking at the broad range of issues and challenges faced by people who have been historically oppressed and who are undergoing certain processes of transformation in their lives. What are the implications of these struggles? Both on the level of the individual as well as the level of the societal collectivity.
BE: In the book Black Frames, Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema (1988), which you co-edited with Claire Andrade-Watkins, the essays encompass a wide range of issues within the world of black independent cinema. Two essays in the book discuss black independent filmmaking in Britain, here in the United States, there is less familiarity with this group. Could you talk about the film practices of the Black British?
MC: There are quite a few from the Caribbean and also from Africa. And there is also another segment. Also, in Britain it is very interesting, in the sense that even those of Asian descent, tend to identify themselves as Black, so the category Black is not strictly a racial categorization but in the British context, more in terms of a political designation. Very similar to perhaps what happens in South Africa, where people were rejecting on a conscious, political basis, these designations of apartheid—coloured, Bantu and so on, and going by the name African or Black in general. In Britain, again, because of the colonial relationships you have a very vibrant, settled community of Black people from all around the different parts of the former British empire and many of these individuals have lived there for a very, very long time and have developed families, some of whom were born and bred there, who actually do not know the Caribbean, do not know Africa in any great detail, who do not speak the languages. Born, bred, or raised in Britain, these third generation Black British, so to speak, have recently come out and begun to articulate their own identity as Black and British. In addition to some of those who were immigrants into Britain from Africa and from the Caribbean who still assert their distinct Caribbean identities. So, it is from these two groups that you had a lot of films emerging from the seventies into the eighties. It has abated a little bit in the nineties, but the eighties, was the period when the Black British film community was very active, very vibrant.
BE: So, do many of the issues reflected in their films focus on the themes around national identity, Black and British identities?
MC: Yes, issues of identities mostly, and deploying certain categories that were previously not brought into consideration when discussions of identity were taking place. For instance, you have the issue of gender which became quite prominent in the: discourses of these Black British filmmakers; issues of sexuality; issues of location, and so on. Again, these were all corralled, mobilized, mostly by these young Black British to talk about themselves, as third generation Black British, born and raised in Britain and what it means. At the same time, that they were asserting their blackness they were questioning the category of British. What is British, is it the traditional, nationalist definition of power and Margaret Thatcher…
BE: And Queen Elizabeth…
MC: Yes, Queen Elizabeth, or has Britishness become infused with other things, to make it something different than what it was originally, perhaps, conceived to be. So, these are issues that are very much present in the films that you encounter from the Black British. And they also talk a lot about the repression, racism and this hatred of Black people that resulted in all kinds of uprisings in many of the Black communities in Britain in the seventies and in the eighties. So, these issues are part and parcel of their film work. There is also the question of exile, immigrant communities in Britain and some of the challenges that they have to deal with and this is something that they share with some of the Black filmmakers that also operate in other parts of the European continent.
BE: Speaking of exiles, let’s talk about your next book titled Ex-iles, Essays on Caribbean Cinema (1992). The title Ex-iles appears to suggest something happening inside and outside. Does this title have a double meaning?
MC: It was a play on the term “iles”, which means island, and “ex” which means from, hence, ex-iles. The two put together and separated by a hyphen assumes multiple significance. On the one hand you can look at Caribbean cinema as a cinema of exiles because the experience of exile, as it is migrating from the Caribbean is one of the prominent markers of Caribbean life.
BE: So, most of the Caribbean filmmakers are not Caribbean based?
MC: Well, it is very fluid because you have people moving back and forth; but you also have those who are settled outside the Caribbean who are making films about Caribbean issues, inside and outside the Caribbean.
BE: Do you see differences between themes of Caribbean-based filmmakers and exiled filmmakers, in terms of their film practice?
MC: Yes, there are differences of course, and I think this should be expected because those who work, who operate outside of the Caribbean have a certain perspective that is informed by their experiences of location outside of the Caribbean; and those in the Caribbean tend to deploy a perspective that is shaped by their immediate environment.
BE: On the other hand, if one takes the example of Euzhan Palcy from Martinique who is based in France, one finds her themes very specific to the Caribbean.
MC: Yes, that is why I was saying that it is a very fluid category because the mobility is such that it is very difficult to locate an individual squarely in one place because they move back and forth so much, it is difficult to say this an out-of-island perspective as opposed to an in-island perspective.
In one of the sessions at the Image Caraïbe Festival, which is held every two years, focusing on films made inside and outside of the Caribbean, there was a Martinican critic complaining about the inclusion of films that he labeled as Negropolitain. Films made by Antillians born and bred in France…which in his view have nothing to do with the realities of the Martinicain people in the islands…
This is not limited to the Caribbean alone, you find it in Africa cinema, in discussions of African cinema. You have lots of African filmmakers who are based in France for example making films about the experience of blackness in France, you have a few African filmmakers in the United States who are making films about African diasporic experiences in the United States. Do these constitute part of African cinema? These are the same kinds of questions that have been asked of African writers. The same kinds of things and issues that have happened, that you see happening, elsewhere as well in the diaspora.
BE: Which brings us to the topic of your book African Experiences of Cinema (1996), which you co-edited with Imruh Bakari. It's just off the press. We're waiting impatiently for it to come out.
MC: Well, it’s part of this project that was underwritten by the British Film Institute in 1995 as part of this big arts festival that took place in Britain called Africa ‘95. There is another book that is in preparation that is based on a conference on African cinema, the Screen Griots: Art and Imagination of African Cinema. This book is part and parcel of that, and it gathers previously published articles and a few interviews by filmmakers and first-person testimonies by filmmakers, as well as documents and manifestos.
BE: Is there a connection between critics and filmmakers, are they on the same wave length? There are issues that film critics discuss or raise, and at the same time, there are African and African diaspora filmmakers in search of a film aesthetic that is specifically African, a film language that is African-based or derived. Is there some kind of consensus that takes place between these two groups?
MC: I think it's a very, very interesting issue, and one that is always very, very hotly debated whenever filmmakers and critics get together.
BE: Why is that? Does that happen in French cinema, in mainstream Western cinema?
MC: It happens everywhere.
BE: I see. So, it's not unique to African filmmakers.
MC: Yes. When filmmakers and critics get together, there is always this potential for debate. Heated debate. Very heated debate, too. In the case of African filmmakers, I think there's sometimes a feeling of frustration that their works are really not understood. That the context within which they are working and the conditions, the material conditions that they have to deal with in trying to produce work, a film, are not adequately taken into consideration or are totally ignored or dismissed or not justly understood by the critics, and there's this tendency also to see critics as people who live in ivory towers who just wait for the product to come out and then just jump on it.
BE: Which sometimes may take 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 years to complete.
MC: Exactly, exactly. So, I think there's a new kind of motion, a new kind of development taking place where you have some critics who are getting together with filmmakers to try and develop a new conception of what the whole critical enterprise should be. I mean you just don't wait for the product to come out but you actually participate in all phases of the production of that particular product, which means also being somewhat of an advocate for the changes that need to take place in terms of the material conditions of production of these products.
BE: Can film criticism or the film scholars in African film criticism play a role in helping to resolve the problems, from the financing of the film, to distribution, to exhibition?
MC: No doubt, no doubt about it.
BE: What ways do you see this happening?
MC: Well, you see, the part of the crisis that filmmaking is facing on the African continent in particular and perhaps in the Caribbean and maybe a little less in the United States, is the lack of a clearly articulated policy on the part of the countries involved, in Africa in particular, regarding filmmaking. I think those people who are interested in films, who have the ability to write about film in all of its dimensions, can constitute a very vocal and influential block in terms of militating, in terms of pushing for certain kinds of policy orientations, which would begin to alter the terrain as far as certain legislations are concerned, putting certain laws in the books that would aid and promote the enterprise of filmmaking.
BE: Well, the fact is that a large part of the films that are made by African filmmakers aren't seen by the African public. That it is the non-African public that sees these African films, and perhaps the same of critics, who for the most part reside outside of Africa, even the African critics. There aren't many African critics on the continent who have global visibility. What part does that play?
MC: It plays a very, very crucial part because as I said before, I mean, once you make the film, sometimes filmmakers take 10, 12 years. Some take a little bit longer. Some take a little bit shorter time, to make a film, and once you achieve that feat of making the film, what do you do with the film? And that is really the crucial question there, because if the film is not distributed, then the chances of it recouping its production costs are very, very minimal, and that's sadly, unfortunately, the situation that African filmmakers on the continent in particular have to face and I think critics for example can become again a voice in terms of sensitizing people across a broad spectrum in the society both on the level of policymaking as well as at the mass level of this particular situation and the need to do something about this situation, and I think once you get that sort of rearrangement in place, or at least the beginnings of the rearrangement in place, then perhaps you will begin to see a movement in terms of African films getting broader access to African theaters. And the other part of it is also to sensitize African entrepreneurs, people with money in Africa, because there are some, to invest in the various sectors of the film enterprise, especially in terms of buying up the theaters and investing in film productions and so on.
BE: We don't have a lot of time left, but just to continue this discussion of exhibition, we know that there--well maybe we don't know, maybe that's the situation--that a lot of the films that are shown in Africa are non-African films. There are a lot of Westerns, perhaps B-movie films that are shown, and that's a direct competition with African films. So can there be a sort of balance, where African films can take the place of some of the films that actually are colonizing the images of Africa.
MC: Well again that has to deal with the distributors as well as the exhibitors. There's almost somewhat of a conspiracy in trying to screen out African films from African screens. The films that come out of Hong Kong, the Hung Fu films that are very popular, the Indian romance spectacles and fantastic melodramas which are very, very popular. These films come to these countries very, very cheaply. Africa is almost like a dumping ground for some of these films. So a lot of people grow up on this diet of cinema. To change it, again, is going to require a concerted effort among many different sectors in the society.
BE: Some concluding points that you may make as a film scholar and also a professor of African cinema and Caribbean cinema. How do you teach your students to understand better the cinemas of Africa and of people of African descent?
MC: First of all, trying to contextualize the practice itself within the social, political, historical context in which it is taking place, and once you make people sensitized to those contexts there, then it becomes easier or more effective to talk about film itself in all of its dimensions, not just in terms of appreciating the finished product but also in terms of being well versed in what it takes to make that product, to bring that product to its final state, and I think any kind of film teacher should be oriented towards that kind of a holistic approach.
BE: Thank you, Mbye, for your engaging discussion, I hope we now have a better understanding of film criticism, film studies, as it relates to Africa and the African diaspora.
