Violence In African Cinema

African Cinema is broad; it totalizes the African culture by standing for various continental African identities. The film industries in Africa try to present themselves by displaying realities on the screen, but by the influence of the Western world, there seem to be different views on how films educate the audience. Realism paints things in a monolithic way; sometimes, what you see is not what the truth is.

FESPACO, the largest running African film festival in the world creates the sensation that African Cinema is not simply an imagined body of films, but a glimpse of the African cultural production. A concentration within African Cinema would be films of South Africa that portray to show what and how the government controls a nation through history.

Lindiwe Dovey highlights the problems and possibilities in African Film and Literature, as she introduces the theories within adapting violence to the screen. For example, the context as in adaptations of film that show the vivid violence towards the South African citizens by the Apartheid system based on the Fanon’s theory of Mimicry and Violence in African screen presentation. Frantz Fanon believed that exposure of violence through the films was the most effective way to show the audience what happened in history. He wanted the film directors and writers to project on the screen the reality of violence. For example, the film "De Voortrekkers" that showed the mimicry of colonial violence in the Battle of Blood River, this film shows the reproduction of the violence that occurred within that period. However, the movie portrayed an inaccurate portrayal of the