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The present paper focuses on the conversations, narratives and counter-narratives that arise at the meeting point of colonial mission and missionary films and post-colonial sub-Saharan African films. Film has a preferred regime of social reproduction meaning that it has authenticity and truth claims about the reality it records. On the African continent, questions of reality, truth, authenticity and perception have been exacerbated by centuries of slavery, colonialism, the post-colonial situation together with images of these cataclysms. In these contexts, film has reflected and carried the claims of those who held the camera. In the colonial period, mission societies and missionaries used films both in the colonies and back home. They organized screenings as a way to attract and evangelize local populations; produced pictures promoting the work of the mission; sponsored and worked with educational reels for the locals. These cinematic initiatives resulted in educational films, fiction films with religious themes, ethnographic films and travelogues. By representing colonizers, missions and locals, missionaries played a significant part in the formation of ideas of difference, of Africa as the ultimate Other, of tradition and modernity. These constructions will be at the center stage in the later process of decolonization imaged in African films. Through a number of examples, I will look at how cinema and representations of colonies in mission- and missionary films have been contested, negated, or appropriated later on in African film. 

This thesis explores the ways in which African filmmakers have historically addressed Christianity and the Bible on the continent. It begins with the premise that on the African continent, marked political films (Mazierska) are embedded in transnational dynamics involving movements of economic and symbolic capital, ideas, discourses and multiple publics. Within these movements, questions of identity, and questions, of the cultural, political or religious are explored in conversation and encounter with Others. With this premise in mind, I ask how the films address Christianity and interpret the Bible; how they frame the religious in relation specific historical, cultural and political contexts; and what are the potential implications of the transnational dynamics and circulation of films. Although much research has focused on the representation of religions in African video and screen media especially in the 2000s, surprisingly little has been dedicated to earlier cinematic expressions and political cinema. To contribute to the history of the cinematic treatment of religion on the continent, four fictional films were chosen as case-studies: La Chapelle, (The Chapel, dir. Jean-Michel Tchissoukou, 1980, Republic of Congo), Au Nom du Christ (In the Name of Christ, dir. Roger Gnoan M’Bala, 1993, Côte d’Ivoire), La Génèse (Genesis, dir. Cheick Oumar Sissoko, 1999, Mali) and Son of Man (dir. Mark Dornford-May, 2006, South-Africa). The analyses reveal that filmmakers have portrayed and interpreted the presence of Christianity and the Bible in relation to legacies of colonialism and decolonisation. Their attitudes narrate the presence of Christianity and the Bible in terms of resistance, suspicion, negotiation, and appropriation. In doing so they oscillate between distancing from and rapprochement with developments in African Christianity and theology. The films’ narratives and aesthetics reflect tensions around the creation of discourses of African authenticity, but also around religious modernity. The political framing roots the contextualisation of biblical narratives in social and historical analyses that strive to provide responses to local instances of oppressions as well as a platform for a more universalist reading addressed to global publics. Finally, the films contribute to the construction of African religious realities and imageries and to the broader image of Africa.