If Europe conquered the world by the bible and the maxim gun; it was cinema and coca cola which won it for America; beaming images of it’s dream into billions of homes and hearts across the world was the soft edge of America’s might, and why the world is so familiar with it’s values, it’s people, it’s cities and it’s fears. People arriving in its cities, New York especially, are struck with the eerie feeling of visiting a place familiar, and wrapped up in the very fabric of their own dreams. There was a time when the means by which we escaped the world was a book; increasingly we understand the world through the visual image. Citizens of European empires pinned for the metropole that they knew of only through books and letters, and generations of settlers understood themselves as civilized only by their feelings of belonging to a greater, whiter whole that was the west from books – now that age is past and we live in an age of pictures; the iconic image of towers crumbling like Babel; the green haze of an ancient city under bombardment or a fading president memorialised in a biopic. In the 21st century cinema is king – in fact, its ascendancy began in the twentieth; for an Africa emerging from centuries of negative stereotyping, it promises the possibility of erasing all the constructed myths around our identity and replacing them with new ones. A banishing of the clichéd images of tarzan, safaris and famine for something new, thriving, aching cities; epic and dazzling history and tender, careworn people, falling in love, falling in grace, gaining in riches. At some point in my studies, reading African Literature a feeling impressed itself on me, that somehow the world of books, which had become so important to me and my understanding of myself had been superseded by a more powerful force. Cinema it seemed to me would be crucial in shaping the way the world perceived a culture, and in the way a culture perceived itself that anyone with the ambition of shaping ideas and the world would have to engage with it. I still love books, and still believe in the power of a book to change, and yes, sometimes save a life, but in making sense of the world, film I believe will become increasingly powerful as a medium. It’s because of this that I am excited about the London African Film Festival, organised this year by the Royal Africa Society, showing films in cinemas all across London. Everyone in the game of revamping Africa’s PR must begin to see culture in general, and film especially as just as powerful as the maxim gun in changing the way we are perceived. There is still a place for books in all this, for the writer’s mind has always been the well from which all stories are drawn. As for the power of the cinema, the London African Film Festival is a welcome start.
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