Paper short abstract:

Colonial films were not only racist but chauvinist in both imagery and dialogue. This paper examines closely the representation of African womanhood in two colonial films; Sanders of the River (1935) and King Solomon’s Mines (1937) and questions the implication of such representation.

Paper long abstract:

It is a well-established fact that Africa has suffered greatly from misrepresentation as well as underrepresentation in colonial films. Contemporary media played and continue to play significant roles in ensuring the perpetuation of these images. While contemporary Africa has historically gone beyond the images created in these colonial films, the images remain largely the mental picture of Africa around the world. Colonial films have predominantly been created from the lens of race providing a rich discourse of race, class and gender of the African colonial other. The implications of the dehumanization of black womanhood in colonial films are still largely unaccounted for. Gender analysis can help generate some understanding of these distortions as well as trace the history of the misrepresentational practices of black womanhood on screen. This paper attempts a content analysis of the characters Lilongo in Sanders of the River (1935) and Gagool in King Solomon’s Mines (1937). Both characters typify not only the ‘racialized gaze’ as argued by Franz Fanon but also the ‘de-womanizing’ of the African woman. They also exemplify some of the demeaning representations of black womanhood. I argue that the screen choice of creating flat stereotypical and static characterization for female characters in the films is no coincidence. It is a tool to enforce silence and subjugation of black women.