Whenever I reference the “the damage is done” statement from the 1979 manifesto “What is Cinema For Us?” by Med Hondo, regarding Western cinema’s dominance and its impact on African visual culture, I’m often (though certainly not always) met with a mix of confusion, curiosity, and sometimes pushback. The statement typically surfaces in conversations about authenticity in African storytelling – discussions that invariably prompt questions like, “What does authenticity even mean?” or “What makes a story authentically African?”
These questions reveal how complex the notion of authenticity becomes in a post-colonial context. People often ask what “damage” I’m referring to, or suggest that maybe it’s time to move past this perspective and focus on the future instead, whatever that means. Some dismiss it as overly pessimistic, while others simply don’t understand the context or implications of Hondo’s observation.
In a November Akoroko premium newsletter to subscribers, I critically unpacked Hondo’s statement, framing it as a call for African filmmakers to actively engage with and reshape these paradigms, rather than rejecting or passively accepting them, in the pursuit of creating “authentically” African cinematic languages.
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