Tropical Dream Palaces. Cinema in Colonial West Africa. By Odile Goerg

The emerging field of colonial film studies has become a crowded one the last few years. Yet Odile Goerg’s Tropical Dream Palaces: Cinema in Colonial West Africa stands out as a meticulously researched monograph—one that fills in many of the previously blank spaces in our understanding of Africa’s complex cinematic landscape. As Professor of Modern African History at CESSMA, Université Paris Diderot, Goerg set ambitious goals for a manuscript over a decade in the making. Whereas the existing literature was littered with studies examining mining recruitment films, colonial propaganda campaigns, and missionary-led projects, Goerg “was struck by the lack of research” into film as an African leisure activity (4). In fact, prominent studies exploring the extraordinary attraction of popular cinema have emerged over the last few years, including Birgit Meyer’s Sensational Movies (2015) and Laura Fair’s Reel Pleasures (2018), but these perceptive studies each limit their focus to one colony/country (Ghana and Tanzania, respectively). In contrast, Goerg has tackled virtually the entirety of West Africa, dominated at the time by British and French colonial administrations. Her research is informed by the latest developments in Film Studies, which has evolved from its earlier emphasis on film history and textual analysis to include as well the study of film-going as a social ritual.

A key strength of the book is Goerg’s tenacious research, which required pouring over seemingly unrelated documents and ephemera in colonial archives to follow various threads to conclusion. She notes the frustrating reality confronting all scholars working in the field: that one is unlikely to stumble upon a treasure trove of archival boxes in African repositories labeled “Cinema.” Instead, Goerg had to work through folders categorized under headings such as “Police and Security,” “General Administration” and so on, in order to reconstruct the formative, post World-War 1 years of cinema in West Africa .

Tropical Dream Palaces is divided into six chapters. The first begins with a brief excursus on some of the continent’s earliest film showings (relying on secondary literature), followed by a more detailed examination of West Africa—including the transition from early outdoor sites and multi-purpose venues such as clubs, hotels and cafes, to permanent theaters such as the Rex and Empire in the 1920-30s. One notable feature of the book is Goerg’s excellent discussion of entrepreneurship in relation to exhibition patterns, as well as her attention to detail when discussing the gender, racial and socio-economic status of audience members and their access to the new leisure pursuit of cinema-going.

The expansion of cinemas meant larger audiences—a phenomenon which Goerg shows in Chapter Two predictably led both to studies exploring the impact of the image on spectators (especially the colonized), and to calls for a regulatory and censorship apparatus in the colonies that would appropriately sanitize films to reduce the potential for subversion or social instability. Britain and France, though, each developed their own surveillance policies for their particular zones of influence based on a variety of political and economic factors.

Goerg moves both chronologically and thematically through the book, which inevitably leads to some digression and overlap in Chapter Three on mobile cinemas. “Travelling film shows were contemporary to the [early] spread of cinema,” she asserts, but presumably she felt their prominence from the turn of the century to about 1960 warranted a separate chapter (70). Beginning with well-known examples referenced by Jean Rouch and Hampâté Bâ in West Africa, she includes instances from across the continent highlighting travelling projectionists in both the private and public sectors. This discussion might have been strengthened by mention of the significant number of mobile vans deployed for recruiting purposes by the South African mining industry in the interwar period. Furthermore, while it is technically true that the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment ceased operations in 1937, Goerg, like other scholars, fails to appreciate that the travelling display units continued throughout 1938 as the “African Vernacular Cinema Experiment,” notable both for being staffed entirely by indigenous operators, and because the project served to institutionalize film-going as a social and cultural ritual in African communities—a critical theme of her book, as I note below.

Chapters Four and Five continue with the focal point of the book, specifically the opening of West African cinemas from roughly the 1930s through the independence era. In these chapters, Goerg provides significant data on theaters—including the number of seats per capita in various West African colonies—and explores the impact of global distribution patterns in colonized regions. Moreover, she notes, the increasing ubiquity of cinema houses “thus created new spaces and new forms of sociability” as film spectatorship in African communities became commonplace as a leisure pursuit at mid-century (125). She also dives into the difficult topic of African reception, affirming the findings of other scholars as to the variability and complexity of audience response.

Chapter Six, reflecting the dramatic continent-wide calls for independence in the 1950s, takes a significant turn toward film production and cinema-going as forms of resistance and as potential agents of political change. Cinema as escapist attraction continued, as Goerg’s research largely confirms the sustained popularity of the western, and the fact that African viewers generally identified with the heroic actions of the American cowboy. Distribution patterns were nevertheless undergoing a tectonic shift, with British, Indian and Arab films filtering into Africa in greater numbers by mid-century. With Nasser’s rise to power particularly, colonial officials rightly understood that film production in North Africa was increasing imbued with a volatile nationalist fervor. Odile Goerg has done a great service for the historical community. Tropical Dream Palaces is not just another African cinema book; rather, as a carefully researched examination of the evolution of the cinema in West Africa, it is destined to become a seminal work in the field, and a sine qua non for scholars studying the intersection of popular culture and colonial rule in the region.