Paper long abstract:

Film came to Africa early in the twentieth century and by the 1920s and 1930s American and European movies were attracting large audiences of African film-goers across the continent. Westerns and gangster films grew in popularity through the 1940s and 1950s, making their cultural imprint in the ubiquitous popularity of cowboy and other "American" styles. As elsewhere, movie attendance declined in the 1960s as Kung Fu films replaced westerns and television slowly emerged as a competing visual medium. In the 1980s the availability of cheap VCRs and videos resulted in a dramatic revival of interest in film-going, even in small towns and market centers. This development merged in the 1990s with the rapid growth of a domestic video industry in South Africa, Ghana, and especially Nigeria. For the first time, mass African audiences were consuming films, with African settings and plots, made by African directors. This paper brings together original research on African movie going and a growing literature on African film and video to explore the consumption of media products. The paper has two key goals: To look at the history of film and video consumption from the perspective of the audience experience and to link the histories of film presentation to video spectatorship-topics that to date have been investigated in isolation.