The imposed shadow: when black was fullness

Sembène Ousmane

In 1944, somewhere in Equatorial Guinea, the forest seemed determined to swallow everything whole, including the intentions of those who claimed to be crossing it to understand it. A team of Spanish photographers advanced at the heavy pace of cameras and crates, slicing through the canopy with flashes and the promise of future legends. In the procession, a porter, Ngono Mbá, bent under the weight and silently observed how the world was being packaged up to be shipped back to Europe. Decades later, he would be the one to recount the expedition, but without the legends, without the museum labels, without the reassuring voiceovers: in his own words, and in his own light.

This reversal, from the object being looked at to the subject looking, is at the heart of this first installment of a series dedicated to Blackness in African cinema, to this passage from imposed shadow to chosen light. Black as matter, black as cosmology, black as insult and as reconquest. Black, above all, as a visual battleground, where centuries of domination and the slow conquest of self-determination are played out.

The black before the violence

Before Europe began to measure, classify, and rank bodies and colors, black occupied a radically different place in many African cosmogonies. It was neither empty nor threatening, but rather density, power, and a potential beginning. In Yoruba traditions, Eshu-Elegba, the deity of crossroads and communication, is draped in black to signify a spiritual force that complicates any attempt at categorization. Mami Wata, the spirit of the waters, reigns over the dark depths of the ocean, where secrets, riches, and fears intertwine.

This intimacy with black is also evident in textiles. In Mali, bogolan, literally mud cloth, derives its deep blacks from patient fermentations, from worked mud that becomes a symbol of fertility and knowledge rather than dirt. In Ghana, kente incorporates black as the color of spiritual maturity, a mark of acquired wisdom rather than a latent threat. Night, in many cultures, is not simply a setting of anguish: it is the opportune time for the transmission of ancestral knowledge, when stories circulate by firelight and the invisible reveals itself as a presence.

In that world, black is not a hole in the light, but a fullness: depth, fertile mystery, a reservoir of meanings. Absence will come later.

When the shadow becomes an injunction

The shift occurs with administrative precision. The transatlantic slave trade tears millions of people from their lands, their languages, their worldviews, and piles them into the darkness of slave ship holds. In this night saturated with smells, chains, and cries, blackness slips into another register: it becomes synonymous with social death, to use the words of sociologist Orlando Patterson. To be Black is to be reduced to a commodity, a countable body, a silhouette on a property register.

Colonialism completes this semantic reconfiguration. Cinema, a new machine for manufacturing accepted truths, quickly becomes involved: from Tarzan TV series to “scientific” ethnographic documentaries, screens freeze Africans in an imagery of primitivism, infantilization, and inferiority. “Human zoos” and colonial exhibitions, for their part, display Black bodies as curiosities, objects of gaze, never subjects of observation. Colonial world-building relies as much on these images as on weapons: it slowly imposes a perverse equation on the world, where Blackness becomes synonymous with darkness, savagery, and the absence of civilization.

The shadow ceases to be a cosmological choice and becomes a political assignment. We no longer retreat to it to meditate: we are relegated to it.

Sembène Ousmane, or the first ray

1966, Dakar: on the docks, one still encounters dockworkers whose bodies, in their own way, tell the story of the violence of unequal exchanges. One of them, a former stevedore turned writer, decides to capture another kind of cargo: images. His name is Ousmane Sembène, and his first feature film, Black Girl, will have a lasting impact on the history of African cinema. The film tells the story of Diouana, a young Senegalese woman employed by a French couple who treat her like a servant, without rights, without a voice, almost without a face.

In the meticulously decorated white apartment, an African mask hangs on the wall like an exotic trophy. The scene where Diouana, humiliated and dispossessed, looks up at this mask and meets its fixed gaze remains one of the most powerful in world cinema. The mask looks back at her, and in this simple exchange of glances, something cracks: the colonizer's visual monopoly falters. The backdrop of domination this object reduced to a mere decorative symbol is suddenly reactivated as a silent subject, a witness to a history that decoration itself seeks to erase.

“I am the camera ,” Sembène declares. The phrase, as brief as a manifesto, signifies the reclaiming of control over the visual apparatus itself. From this point on, it is no longer simply a matter of placing Black bodies in front of a camera, but of placing the camera in their hands. Africans will no longer merely be observed: they will observe, tell stories, and decide how their images circulate.

Liberation through the lens

Sembène is not an isolated exception, but the visible tip of a broader movement. In the 1960s and 1970s, when African countries were gaining political independence that was often more proclaimed than guaranteed, filmmakers were demanding another form of independence: visual independence.

Med Hondo scrutinizes neocolonial violence and its continuities with the old order. Sarah Maldoror films liberation struggles, making the camera a guerrilla companion rather than a mere illustrative tool. Djibril Diop Mambéty, for his part, rejects Western narrative frameworks and offers a poetic, elliptical, joyfully subversive cinema, where one senses that the narrative itself is trying to escape. In 1975, the Manifesto of African Filmmakers, adopted by FEPACI, gave voice to this effervescence: African cinema must not be mere entertainment, but a tool for raising awareness.

The metaphors become harsher: we speak of a “camera-pen” when the image becomes writing, of a “camera-gun” when it becomes a weapon of mental decolonization. Each film then presents itself as an act of resistance, an affirmation of existence, a claim to dignity in a language that the dominated world knows all too well: the language of the image.

The cracks in the wall of shadow

The colonial shadow did not simply cover the world with a uniform veil: it was imposed with methodical violence, documented in archives, films, museums, and textbooks. Yet, as early as the 1960s, cracks began to appear in this imposed darkness. Light did not burst forth in a single heroic gesture; it filtered in, in fragments, through a multitude of works, actions, and voices.

African cinema, in all its diversity, is embarking on a long process of deconstructing colonial representations and, simultaneously, reconstructing a self-determined imagery. It is not simply a matter of correcting clichés, but of proposing other ways of seeing, other rhythms, other economies of attention. Night becomes once again a space for storytelling, black a texture and not a verdict.

This text is only the first step in a larger journey. The following articles will explore what this visual revolution owes to literature, how African filmmakers are inventing new aesthetics of Blackness, how they imagine their plural and contradictory futures, and how these creative gestures are transforming not only cinema, but our very way of knowing the world. The series “NOIR: From Imposed Shadow to Chosen Light,” developed within the framework of the Quibdó Africa Film Festival, invites us to extend this shift in perspective by discovering the films discussed here and those surrounding them, in theaters rather than in shop windows.