When image meets text: dialogues between African literature and cinema

Chinua Achebe

In the recent history of African cinema, nothing comes from nothing: every shot, every voice-over, every ellipsis seems to respond to a sentence written long before the camera arrived on the continent. Between the page and the screen, a dense conversation has unfolded for decades, debating a simple and inexhaustible question: what can be shown and what can only be told?

The Griot, or Cinema Before Cinema

Before the first reel of film, in front of the darkened theaters, a man, sometimes a woman, stood in the center of the circle, facing the fire. They were called griots, but they could almost be called projectionists. Guardians of collective memory, they didn't simply recite: they modulated their voices, emphasized certain words, held certain silences, and sculpted the space with their gestures to evoke epics, lineages, and myths before the audience. Their entire bodies served as living screens.

The structure of their narratives did not represent a reassuring renunciation of the linearity favored by Western dramaturgy. It unfolded in a spiral, revisiting previously narrated events, anticipating future episodes, and intertwining time as if chronology were a mere imported convention. This elastic temporality is also found in the films of Djibril Diop Mambéty, where ellipses seem to open breaches in time, and in the work of Ousmane Sembène, whose thematic repetitions function as refrains. The voice-overs, frequent in many African films, are not simply a narrative device: they are vestiges of the voice that comments on, corrects, and interprets the action.

The griot, even then, practiced montage. He combined sound, gestural image, rhythm, and narrative into a total performance, which cinema has simply transposed to a different medium.

Chinua Achebe, or the art of resisting on screen

In 1958, Chinua Achebe's " Things Fall Apart" was published . The novel became one of the most widely read African texts in the world, translated into more than fifty languages, taught, debated, and analyzed. And yet, more than sixty years later, no film adaptation has managed to establish itself as the definitive cinematic version of the work. It's not for lack of trying.

What cinema strives to capture is not just the plot, nor even the political architecture of the novel, but its texture. Achebe writes in English while thinking in Igbo, weaving in each chapter a dense web of proverbs that function as invisible beacons for those familiar with the cosmology from which they spring. The novel is built upon these maxims, these condensed images that signify more than they explain, where the unspoken matters as much as the spoken. How do you film a proverb? How do you make visible, without flattening it, a metaphor that carries within it a world of shared references?

Attempts at adaptation often stumble at this point. Some soften the cultural complexity to appeal to an international audience, even at the cost of transforming the text's density into a relatively standard historical drama. Others succumb to exoticism, saturating the image with "African" symbols to the point of unintentionally reviving an ethnographic gaze that the novel itself deliberately avoided. Achebe's partial unadaptability is not a failure of cinema, but a diagnosis: certain depths cannot be translated; they must be read, reflected upon, and internalized.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: What the film shows, what the novel retains

In 2013, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel about the Biafran War, Half of a Yellow Sun , was adapted into a film. This time, the adaptation exists, is circulating, and is generating debate and comparisons. The question is no longer "Why does it persist?", but "What has changed?".

Here, cinema takes on what literature could only allude to: the materiality of war. Burning villages, roads teeming with refugees, bodies emaciated by hunger, explosions shattering the silence: all of this acquires an immediate presence on screen. Color, the texture of clothing, the sound of bombings, even the very texture of the image, combine to create a sensory experience that the page suggested but could not impose with such brutality.

In return, something is lost. Adichie's novel stands out for its portrayal of the inner lives of its characters, particularly Olanna, whose internal monologues explore how violence erodes identity, love, and loyalty. The film, by its very nature, prioritizes the visible: gestures, glances, actions. Intimate hesitations become silences, moral dilemmas are expressed in a frown or a prolonged shot. It is something entirely different, neither better nor worse.

The novel and the film do not compete: they present two versions of the same event, each highlighting what the other leaves in the shadows.

Ten thousand elephants : collage against the archive

Then came Ten Thousand Elephants , a work that refuses to choose between text, still image, and sequence. Published in 2022, this graphic novel by Pere Ortín, a Spanish journalist, and Ramón Esono Ebalé, an illustrator from Equatorial Guinea, directly confronts the colonial archive.

The starting point is a real expedition: in 1944, the Hermic Films company sent a team of Spanish filmmakers to Equatorial Guinea to document colonial life. The resulting images, both photographs and films, bear the patina of a supposed objectivity, the way in which the colonial gaze believes itself neutral even while staging its own domination. Ortín and Ebalé take these photographs and do not simply reproduce them: they place them in dialogue with contemporary drawings. Above all, they entrust the narration to Ngono Mbá, one of the African porters on the expedition, relegated to the background in the original images.

The device is simple yet formidable. The photographs show what the colonial camera deemed worthy of being seen: landscapes, scenes of work, portraits of "natives" framed as curiosities. The drawings, on the other hand, slip into the gaps, representing what was denied to the image: the behind-the-scenes moments, the arguments between porters, the weariness, the anger, the blind spots of the official narrative. The blue Bic pen, a common instrument of everyday writing, becomes here a tool of counter-archiving: a pen that traces historical images, not to erase them, but to reveal their omissions.

Between literature and film, Ten Thousand Elephants occupies a hybrid territory. The graphic novel offers the reader the opportunity to linger on an image, step back, compare text and drawing at their own pace, and practice a form of intimate montage that linear cinematic projection hinders. It is a visual meditation that classical cinema, trapped in the continuous flow of images, can rarely afford.

A conversation that never stops

In this landscape, image and text are never separate blocks. They respond to each other, correct each other, sometimes openly contradict each other, like two witnesses to the same scene who occupied different positions. Achebe reminds us that certain cultural mysteries are difficult to translate to the screen without being diminished. Adichie shows what cinema can offer by making tangible, almost physical, what the novel led us to imagine. Ten Thousand Elephants invents a third space, where the archive is challenged by the drawing, and where the voice of an anonymous bearer ultimately drowns out that of the explorers.

African cinema, in this ongoing dialogue, never completely abandons literature. It carries it with it, reinterprets it, comments on it, and contrasts it with other rhythms and other audiences. At the precise point where oral tradition and visual modernity intersect, an aesthetic of resistance is constructed: the refusal to choose between the story told at dusk and the intense glare of the projector.

In the next installment of this series “NOIR: From imposed shadow to chosen light”, developed within the framework of the Quibdó Africa Film Festival, we will be discussing very specific Afro-disruptive aesthetics: how to film black skin, how Kerry James Marshall paints blacks so dense that they seem to absorb the light, how darkness ceases to be a simple backdrop to become a narrative sanctuary.