Kenneth Harrow's new edited volume on African filmmaking is a collection of essays that in a sense functions in a fluid and manifestly effective way. To start with, the volume's editor makes clear to us that we should not expect the essays contained in the book to provide a complete presentation of cinema throughout the African continent, as such would obviously be difficult to achieve in any single volume. Instead, each one of the five extensive chapters seeks to provide an introduction to and overview of the historical trajectory of five ostensibly regional cinematic traditions which, as Harrow explains, “coalesce around key features of geography and language” (p. ix).
The book moves from an essay on Francophone cinema, more or less entirely from West Africa, to a study of Anglophone West African films in Nigeria and Ghana and on to an exploration of the lengthy history of filmmaking in Egypt....