SILVER SCREEN

READING MANTHIA DIAWARA: ON DISTANCE, MEDIATION, AND THE ETHICS OF ATTENTION

ÉTIENNE DECLERQ

February 19, 2026

This essay examines Manthia Diawara from a European vantage point, not as an act of interpretation but as a test of Europe’s own critical habits. Tracing the emergence of African cinema from decolonization through diaspora, it shows how Diawara dismantled the documentary, ethnographic, and moralizing frames through which Europe long approached African film. What emerges is an ethics of attention that refuses reassurance, recenters authorship and form, and exposes the limits of European reflexivity itself.

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Any European reading of Manthia Diawara is marked in advance by structure rather than intention. Europe enters the frame not as an observer but as an apparatus, a dense network of institutions, archives, festivals, universities, funding mechanisms, and interpretive conventions that have long governed the visibility and legibility of African cinema. Diawara was born in 1953 in Bamako, Mali, and is now based in New York, where he has lived and worked for several decades, which adds complexity to his practice.

African cinema as a recognizable field emerged in the late colonial and early post-independence period of the 1950s and 1960s. Its development was inseparable from the political project of decolonization. Early filmmakers often trained abroad and returned to newly independent states with a conviction that cinema could function as a tool of political education and cultural self-definition. From a European perspective, these films were initially received less as works of art than as documents. They were valued for what they revealed about social conditions rather than for their formal intelligence or aesthetic ambition.

Manthia Diawara

One of the earliest figures was Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, born in Benin in 1925 and educated in France. He studied at IDHEC in Paris, and in 1955 he codirected Afrique sur Seine, often cited as the first film made by Africans about African life, though it was shot in Paris rather than on the continent. This already indicates a structural condition of early African cinema: It was born in exile, or at least under displacement, shaped by European training and metropolitan access.

Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Afrique sur Seine, 1955

In Senegal, the central figure was Ousmane Sembène, born in 1923. After several years as a dockworker in Marseilles, he studied filmmaking in Moscow at the Gorky Film Studio in the early 1960s. His first major films, Borom Sarret (1963) and La Noire de . . . (1966), were made soon after Senegal’s independence in 1960. Sembène explicitly described cinema as a night school for the people. His films were conceived as instruments of political education, intended to reach audiences who could not read his earlier novels.

Ousmane Sembène, Le Noir de… (Black Girl), 1966

In Mali, Souleymane Cissé, born in 1940, represented the next generation. He studied film in Moscow in the late 1960s and returned to Mali to work within the state film service. His early films, such as Den Muso (1975), were shaped by the ideological climate of post-independence socialism and by censorship. They addressed gender, power, and generational conflict, often in direct confrontation with the state that employed him.

In Niger, Oumarou Ganda, born in 1935, made Cabascabo in 1969 after having acted in Jean Rouch’s films. Ganda’s work reflects the complex entanglement of African cinema with European ethnographic filmmaking. His films reclaim narrative authority from colonial anthropology while still operating in its shadow.

In Mauritania, Med Hondo, born in 1936, trained in France and worked primarily there. His films of the late 1960s and 1970s, including Soleil Ô (1970), directly addressed racism, migration, and colonial violence. Hondo’s cinema is inseparable from the experience of African diaspora in Europe, and from the militant political filmmaking then associated with the global left.

Med Hondo, Soleil Ô, 1970

Across these cases, a pattern becomes clear. Many early African filmmakers were trained abroad, most commonly in France or the Soviet Union, because no film schools existed in newly independent African states. They returned with technical skills, ideological frameworks, and a belief in cinema as a public instrument rather than a purely aesthetic one. Film was understood as a means of nation building, political consciousness raising, and historical correction.

From a European perspective at the time, these films were rarely treated as works of cinema in the full critical sense. They circulated primarily through festivals, cultural programs, and television slots, almost always framed by development discourse. European critics often read them as sociological documents, evidence of postcolonial conditions, or illustrations of political struggle. Formal decisions were frequently interpreted as limitations rather than strategies.

This is precisely the critical framework that Diawara challenged. By insisting on authorship, form, contradiction, and cinematic intention, he rejected the idea that African films should be valued primarily for what they show Europe about Africa. Instead, he argued that they must be read as interventions within global film history, shaped by decolonization but not confined to its explanatory limits.

Ousmane Sembène at the Cannes Film Festival in 1967

This framing was never innocent. European festivals, cultural ministries, broadcasters, and funding bodies played a decisive role in determining which African films were made visible, subtitled, and archived. African cinema entered global circulation under conditions of asymmetry. Filmmakers often depended on European support while simultaneously resisting European expectations. Diawara’s writing and occasional filmmaking intervened directly in this tension. He treated African cinema not as a delayed echo of European modernism, nor as an ethnographic supplement, but as a modern cinematic tradition shaped by colonial history yet not reducible to it.

From a European standpoint, one of Diawara’s most significant interventions has been his insistence that African filmmakers be read as authors rather than representatives. His writing on Sembène, for example, repositioned Sembène from a moral spokesperson into a foundational modernist. Where European criticism often emphasized message and pedagogy, Diawara emphasized narrative construction, montage, and the strategic use of form. This shift mattered. It relocated Sembène from the margins of European cinephilia to the center of twentieth-century film history without asking for European approval.

His work on the Senegalese film director and actor Djibril Diop Mambéty performed a similar recalibration. Mambéty had often been admired in Europe while remaining oddly external to its canon. Diawara insisted that fragmentation, surrealism, and refusal of narrative resolution were not failures of clarity but deliberate formal strategies. In doing so, he aligned Mambéty with the avant-garde while refusing to subordinate him to European models of experimentation.

Djibril Diop Mambéty, Hyènes (Hyenas), 1992

Diawara also wrote about Souleymane Cissé, particularly around questions of tradition, power, and contradiction. European readings frequently framed Cissé as a bearer of African identity. Diawara rejected this flattening. He emphasized tension rather than essence, conflict rather than representation. This allowed Cissé’s work to circulate internationally without being reduced to cultural symbolism.

A European reading of African cinema must also account for the profound differences between national contexts. Senegalese cinema developed early and self-consciously as a national cinema closely linked to literature, Marxist thought, and post-independence cultural policy. Films were often made in local languages and addressed domestic audiences directly, even when they circulated internationally. Nigeria presents a radically different case. Nigerian cinema, particularly since the emergence of Nollywood in the 1990s, developed largely outside European institutional frameworks. It was driven by speed, market logic, and mass domestic consumption rather than festival validation. European critics often dismissed it as technically crude. Diawara treated Nollywood instead as a modern media system whose narrative excess and moral urgency responded directly to Nigerian social realities.

Souleymane Cissé, Baara (Work), 1978

South African cinema occupies yet another position. Shaped by apartheid and its aftermath, it developed under conditions of extreme racial segregation and censorship. After 1994, South African films entered global circulation rapidly, often through European coproduction. They were frequently read in Europe through a moral lens that valued them for addressing historical trauma. Diawara’s broader framework allowed these films to be read not only as testimony, but as complex engagements with memory, reconciliation, and global visibility.

Diawara was not alone in shaping African film criticism. Other important figures include Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, whose scholarship provided academic grounding for African and diasporic cinema, and Férid Boughedir, whose dual role as critic and filmmaker helped promote African cinema through festivals and writing. Olivier Barlet also played a significant role in European discourse on African film, though often from within European institutional frameworks. Diawara’s distinction lies in his ability to move between criticism, theory, and institutional practice without collapsing one into the other.

Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Questioning African Cinema, 2002

From a European perspective, Diawara’s long residence in New York raises persistent questions about distance and authority. His career in the United States could be read as exile or detachment. In practice, New York functioned as a nodal point rather than a departure. From there, Diawara engaged Africa not as a nostalgic origin but as a living and contested reality. His position allowed him to operate within global circuits of knowledge while remaining attentive to African histories.

At New York University, where he taught for many years, Diawara helped build an intellectual space linking Africa, the African diaspora, and Black American culture. This institutional work matters from a European point of view because it challenges the assumption that cultural legitimacy flows outward from Europe. Diawara used US academic infrastructure to construct alternative genealogies, placing African cinema within broader histories of modernity, migration, and political struggle.

He also wrote about Western cinema, particularly Black US filmmakers such as Spike Lee, situating their work within a transatlantic history rather than a national one. Instead of reading African cinema through European or US frameworks, he read Western cinema through postcolonial and diasporic experience. For European readers, this reversal is quietly destabilizing because it undermines the assumption that theory naturally originates in Europe and travels outward.

What distinguishes Diawara’s work, especially when read from Europe, is its refusal to provide moral reassurance. It does not flatter European self-critique, nor does it offer redemption through acknowledgement. Its tone is neither accusatory nor conciliatory. It assumes a reader capable of sustained attention without comfort. European criticism often prides itself on reflexivity. Diawara’s work tests whether that reflexivity can survive the loss of centrality.

His continued presence in New York does not signify a weakening of his connection to Africa. It reflects the realities of contemporary intellectual life, where influence circulates through diasporic networks rather than national borders. From a European standpoint, this position may be harder to locate and therefore harder to contain.

To read Manthia Diawara from Europe is to confront the limits of European frameworks without imagining that those limits can be overcome through awareness alone. His work does not ask Europe to step aside. It asks it to read differently, to recognize African cinema as a constituent part of modern film history, and to accept that European criticism must reckon with its own historical position if it wishes to remain intellectually credible.

Diawara’s legacy is not that he introduced African cinema to the world. It is that he made it intellectually impossible to continue pretending that the world had been waiting for an introduction.

Étienne Declerq (born 1975 in Leuven) is a Belgian film critic and cinema programmer whose work focuses on postcolonial cinema, institutional history, and the ethics of criticism. He studied film at New York University, where he was a student of Manthia Diawara. In the early 2000s he cofounded a short-lived film festival in Brazzaville dedicated to African, diasporic, and nonaligned cinemas. He now lives in Dakar, where he runs the Rialto cinema.

Cover image: Paulin Soumanou Vieyra: The Man with the African Camera