Social Cinemas and Praxis in African Films

African film narratives drive identity.  More so the stories told by an outsider have a way of misrepresentation, underrepresentation and misplaced action. This has driven the modern African scholar’s voice to interpret a people and their systems for the western mind. Therefore scholars and in particular film scholars must reinvent the African cosmos that has been distorted beyond recognition through centuries of misrepresentation. Film has the mechanism of providing people with an appropriate code for deciphering stories that galvanize action when the principle and processes of presentation and conversion are faulty. Hence it is film rooted in true African stories and not a simple report of poverty, hunger, drought, and underdevelopment that can drive the African myth. But only through film can we realize and present the potentials of employment, wealth, growth inherent in Africa to enhance human capacity development. The stories of western films drive our people to cross deserts and oceans with a picture of freedom in the ‘west.’ It is therefore a necessity that film scholars reinvent the capacity to grow an indigenous world class identity which depends on how we explore the study of film narratives. Thus the focus of this paper is not a blame game or glamourizing grand theories but to create pictures through stories that have depth and can incline the right response for desired social praxis. This paper locates Karl Marx’s perspectives of historical materialism in the analysis of the historical locations of a people that manipulate ideas, identity and the over-play of contradictions that contain social engagement as well as the characteristics of the people.