A global education revolution births African cinema

Third World Cinema in west and sub-Saharan Africa

Jun 23, 2025

African film students in the USSR played a significant role in the emergence and development of cinema across Africa and globally. Their influence stems from a historical lineage of self-determination within the African diaspora, alongside a wider global reckoning with war, modernity, and nationhood in the aftermath of the Second World War. The term ‘African’ here primarily refers to francophone West African and sub-Saharan postcolonial auteur cinema, whose practitioners have historically led this transnational cinematic exchange.

Between 1960 and 1991, a minority of African students—among the 43,500 African STEM scholars enrolled in Soviet universities—received scholarships to study in Soviet Russia (Katsakioris 2017, 260).

This essay contextualises their participation in global cinema through three interrelated axes: first, the dominance of Western scientific knowledge practices, including the organisation of matter and geology, and their role in enacting cultural hegemony and racialisation; second, the USSR’s ideological outreach to the Global South during the Cold War, which positioned cinema as a strategic cultural tool within Marxist-Leninist frameworks; and third, how African students navigated, adapted, and eventually extended this cinematic language into unique expressions of Black radical thought.

Grounding this context is a reflection on Western scientific classification and its role in racialising African people, historically resisted by the African diaspora. Yusoff (2018) links geology and colonial violence, contextualising the Anthropocene through the conquest of land and exploitation of mineral resources. She maps the colonial encounter as one of displacement, forced labour, and sexual violence: “This exchange is the directed colonial violence of forced eviction from land, enslavement on plantations, in rubber factories and mines, and the indirect violence of pathogens through forced contact and rape.” (Yusoff 2018, 20). Beginning with the plantation economies of 1452, Africans were rendered into property, commodified and categorised.

Resistance to this propertied relation emerged through alternate cosmologies, such as ‘maroonage’—the fugitive slave’s symbolic reconnection with the earth. This worldview unsettled colonial hierarchies. As Aime Césaire says:

Where are you going my maroon wife my restored one my cimarron it is so alive the stones are freezing and the filings and the pellets tremble their gift of sabotage in the waters and the seasons. (Césaire 1946)

Western subjugation is the dominant scientific knowledge practice that saw enslaved natives as scientifically inferior. This is a logical consequence of the categorisation and organisation of matter. In Black Metamorphosis, Sylvia Wynter demonstrates ‘how once European intellectuals "proved" Black (and Native) cultural inferiority, economic exploitation of Black labor on the encomiendas and plantations of the New World easily and logically followed’ (White 2010, 135). She highlights examples of black resistance throughout the 1700s such as Junkororo, the ring shout and Syncretic Black Christianity. These groups of resistance all worked to push back against the categorisation of matter imposed by the dominant hegemony of Christianity. Through these examples, we have introduced the dynamics of categorisation rooted in colonial subjugation. We have also acknowledged the beginnings of the rejection of this subjugation by the African people throughout this process.

This resistance persisted into the 1800s, when technological revolutions—like Watt’s steam engine—shifted systems of knowledge once again. Fossil-fuel-based industrial expansion brought new ecological consequences, reshaping categories like capital, labour, and atmosphere. C.L.R. James, in The Black Jacobins (1938), demonstrates how Haiti’s slave economy financed European revolutions, especially France’s. Toussaint Louverture’s leadership subverted European assumptions of Black political capacity, showing how technology, labour, and categorisation remained contested sites.

Arnold Toynbee, reflecting on postwar sovereignty, observed the unsustainability of fragmented global politics in an age of devastating weaponry, saying:

I believe that with such weapons as we have now let loose in the world, the world cannot go on very long in the condition in which politics have been in the West since the fall of the Roman Empire, a condition in which a great many local sovereign states are each going their own way and occasionally colliding with each other and fighting each other. (Toynbee 1987, 29).

The atomic bomb, a turning point in human and planetary history, forced a rethinking of human agency and responsibility, ushering in the Anthropocene. The USSR’s educational outreach to African colonies formed part of this global reckoning. After Stalin’s death, the Soviets intensified their ideological alignment with decolonising nations, endorsing events like the 1955 Bandung Conference. By 1961, the Patrice Lumumba University embodied Soviet solidarity with the Third World, aiming to produce pro-Soviet intelligentsia (Katsakioris 2017, 260). Indeed, there were other host countries for African students, but Russia quickly became a major player on the leaderboard.

The interest went both ways, as fascination with “ideology, the international policies, and the technological achievements of the USSR” was widespread among African youth (Ibid., 263). In his broad survey of African students in France, the Senegalese ethnographer Jean-Pierre N’Daya found that 25% admired the USSR, 20% China, 12.4% Israel, 12% Cuba, 8% France, and 3.3% the USA (Ibid., 263). This data reveals that many African students developed a strong connection to Soviet ideology—and more broadly, Communism—with Mao’s China also attracting significant admiration. They sought education not as passive recipients, but as active agents who believed it would enable their countries’ economic development and modernisation, much like the European revolutions.

In Russia, debates about the role of cinema and its ability to spread ideology started to flourish. Eisenstein’s Strike (1925) offered new ways of thinking. A Filmmaker, trained as an Engineer and Architect, now ‘regard[ed] cinema as a factor for exercising emotional influence over the masses’ (Eisenstein 1974, 74), popularising the montage of attraction as a more appropriate method of cinema to traditional linearity in continuity editing. With this opposition to a seamless flow of images, he started to question the authorship of the filmmaker, and instead to favour the self-determination of the spectator. Cinema could be understood to manufacture emotion using attraction which is ‘any demonstrable fact that is known and proven to exercise a definite effect on the attention and emotions of the audience and that combined with others possess the characteristics of concentrating the audience’s emotions in any direction dictated by the production’s purpose’ (Beller 2006, 96).

African Film students followed in the footsteps of Eisenstein, using their works to explore stories of revolt, political unrest, and encouraging active participation from viewers. In Bamako (2006) by Abderrahmane Sissako, a village is turned into a theatrical stage for the court proceedings against the World Bank. The community self-organise in pursuit of justice. There are key differences to Russian cinema worth considering here, where communist ideology is maintained throughout soviet works, foreign films remain indiscriminate, critiquing all sides. In Ceddo (1977), Sembene highlights the power struggle between African natives, Islam, and Christendom in a small village. By reflecting on the colonial impact, these works go beyond Eisenstein. Creating an alternative worldview that stood in contrast to the dominant competing hegemonies. In Waiting for Happiness (2002), Sissako balances the pros and cons of globalisation by looking at a small village in Mali. We lose touch with the native land, as the protagonist struggles to speak his old tongue.

Returning to Russian cinema for a moment as they continued to alter cinematic language. In 1929, Dziga Vertov released Man with Movie Camera - a film that focused on the workers around Moscow and unapologetically revealed the techniques traditionally hidden in film production. Vertov was a filmmaker and theorist who fundamentally opposed feature films and instead pushed for realism in cinema. “Man with Movie Camera expresses the material relations with a camera that is ‘an eye in matter,’ and that matter is in circulation” (Ibid., 54). Highlighting the importance of exploiting cinematic techniques like editing. His work also cherished real people working collectively. This changed the cinematic landscape globally, demanding ethnologic realism, influencing Italian Neorealism, French New Wave, and Third World Cinema, leading to contributions from filmmakers like Jean Rouch further blurring the lines between the observer and the observed. Though silent, Vertov’s cinema influenced African students who prioritised sound and music not as exotic elements, but as fundamental tools of storytelling. In contrast, African cinema used music to draw viewers into unfamiliar rituals, turning sonic rhythm into cinematic language. More on this later.

Indeed, African Film students in the USSR were well aware of these movements in Russian cinema. They screened the above alongside films like An African Tale (1963) by Igor Nikolayev and Leoni Ariso. This animation aligned with Marxist alienated labour, turning man into an animal. It showed the animal kingdom oppressing an African protagonist. Filmmakers like Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène; the Malian filmmakers Souleymane Cissé; Ethiopian filmmaker Michel Papatakis; and Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako would learn about these films and go on to launch Film industries in their home countries. They held veneration for their education. Souleymane Cissé reports “this love which [Boris Izrailovich Volchek] gave him during these years of study” (Chomentowski 2019, 193).

For reasons distracting from the point of this essay, Universities in Russia enrolled a majority of STEM-based students from Africa. Art and Humanities-based students were the minority. Because of this, the Art community remained tight and stable. Future intelligentsia enrolled or visited Soviet Russia, like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, the American poet Langston Hughes, and the pan-African civil rights activist WEB Du Bois. This continued to fuel the flames of freedom, creating a new language for African colonies to engage with their self-determination. Black Radicalism started to spread and variants like Negritude, African Socialism, African Anarchism, and Pan-Afrikanism created a new way to resist Western categorisation of matter. This was celebrated in pan-Afrikan arts festivals like Festac in Nigeria or the Dakar Festival of Negro Arts.

Returning to this new language and the importance of music, Yeelen (1987) and Moolade (2006) by Soulayman Cissé and Ousmane Sembène, respectively, go beyond Vertov’s visual rhythm and use music as a tool to draw the viewer in, similar to how a zoom might focus on an object. In the opening scene of Yeelen, ritual, magic, and sound convey indigenous Malian cosmology - powers of the Kore people. In this scene, music sets the tone, and similar to Eisenstein, is used to manufacture the emotions of the spectator. Moolade, which deals with the longstanding tradition of female genital mutilation in Senegal, uses music in the same way. When Collé sets the protective force of the Moolade to shelter a group of girls from the evil of genital mutilation, music becomes the form through which our attention is commanded. Given the cultural proximity of home viewers to these movies, the alignment of culture to what is signified would not require music as a crutch, but for non-native viewers, this is not the case. In Ceddo (1977), Sembène decides to work exclusively with Manu Dibango to create an immersive soundtrack, underscoring his narrative tempo. Through this, we have acknowledged the role of music found in Third-World cinema, and its extensions on language found in Russian cinema.

Women further extend this cinematic language. In Bamako (2006), women repeatedly represent the voice of dissidence, airing out genuine problems that concern the village in once French Sudan, now Mali. Today, it is a city with millions seeking refuge, with overcrowding and strain on infrastructure describing a handful of their list of problems (See Laure Panerai 2019).

Sambizanga (1972) by Sarah Maldoror was the first feature film directed by a Black woman and centres a Black female protagonist. Set in 1970 Angola, Maria’s search for her husband exposes the intersections of gender, class, and anticolonial struggle in the country. Sarah presents a story of self-determination from the perspective of untold identities, highlighting the intersections present in Angola after Portuguese rule. In Sembène’s Xala (1975), an African Socialist is unable to consummate his celebratory marriage because of a native curse: Xala. He uses women in this film to symbolise attributes of self-determination. In particular, Rama the daughter of the protagonist, is seen wearing the traditional Wolof cloth, under the map of Africa, defiantly speaking the native Wolof tongue. Symbolism runs wild in her character. More interestingly though, Sembène is fearless in shining the light African nationalists, christianity, and islam. Judging African Socialism in an equal light to Colonial Europe. In this way, it is important to note that this cinematic language was not tied to governmental regimes, per se, unlike Soviet cinema.

These filmmakers understood their role as political agents. While trained in Moscow, they did not replicate Soviet propaganda but challenged both colonial and postcolonial regimes. Their critique was equal-opportunity—targeting imperialism, African socialism, and foreign ideologies alike.

Maldoror’s legacy inspired future directors like Safi Faye, whose work Mossane (1996) extends this practice by challenging the ethnographic gaze cast on Africa. Through her fictional story, presented as a legend – which stays true to native folkloric tradition - the protagonist, Mossane, possesses enough beauty to cause village conflict. In this way, the male gaze is called into question, casting a dual perspective on the sacred and sacrificial properties of beauty. Safi Faye, like Eisenstein debates freedom, but her questions focus on the perspective of women, subverting traditionally male-dominated concepts, “pushing [critics] to consider her work as cinema sensu stricto , i.e., the seventh art, in which imagination defies actuality, and where the link between the virtual and the real is not a question of mimesis - the reproduction of reality - but a disclosure of reality” (M. De Groof. 428). The evolution of Safi Faye is worth noting here too, training in ethnology to being cast by Jean Rouch after meeting at Dakar Festival of Negro Arts. Her position as an ethnographer turned actor turned filmmaker, positions her in opposition to the gaze of western exoticism.

African filmmakers have always aimed to represent mythology and legend. Safi Faye as an ethnologist recognised the importance of oral history through her research. “It is from the verbal expression of the storyteller that images create and re-create the imagination. Hence, African legends are wholly visualized in the mind of the spectator who partakes in the storytelling.” (Ellerson 251) Acknowledging, we can better understand how Faye’s work, similar to Sembene, aims to show how tradition and modernity confront African reality. Yandé Codou Sène: the griot voice of history narrates Mossane’s trials and tribulations, existing as an oracle guiding the spectator along this critical reflection. The west African storyteller or poet is called griot. Yandé Codou Sène was the griot of Leopold Sedar Senghor - president of Senegal and founder of Dakar Festival of Negro Arts. These filmmakers understood that politics was woven into the fabrics of their stories and moments about African history could be imagined to stimulate discussions on tensions between modernity and tradition.

This political aesthetic hinged on time. Modernity afterall was propertied by a shrinking in spacetime, as transportation opened up the global landscape, and digital networks, like emails travelled across great distances. In Waiting for Happiness (2002), Sissako captures villagers in limbo, awaiting departure for the West. The disrupted temporal flow mirrors geopolitical dependence. Time also animates Sembène’s Black Girl (1966), where past and present collide in a story of migration and alienation. In this way, African cinema appropriated the Deleuzian time-image—not simply to affect, but to archive, provoke, and radicalise. Through cinematic time, these filmmakers chronicled the uneven temporality of postcolonial life, forging a new language of self-determination and spectral resistance. By breaking the linearity of time found in classical cinema, these filmmakers were able to engage with Nationhood.

Indeed, this new language was not limited to sub-Saharan and West Africa. Throughout the Middle East, Latin America and Asia, filmmakers began to implement new understandings. A notable mention here is another filmmaker taught in Moscow, Kidlat Tahimik. His work Perfumed Nightmares (1977), provided reflections on the remnants of war left in the Philippines post-Japanese occupation. We bear witness to the metamorphised ‘vehicles of war’ to ‘vehicles of work’. He takes a film-essay approach to reflect on war and nationhood, giving the viewer a window into life in the Philippines after American occupation. In this way, the significance of this educational revolution should not be isolated to sub-Saharan Africa, it does connect to a wider shifts in cinema more globally.

In Deleuze’s theory of cinema, the end of the Great Wars created a shift away from the Movement-Image – a continuity-based series of images to create linearity in movement; to a Time-Image – a direct image of time through aesthetics and/or characters that engage with time through the plot. In this way, montage has changed its meaning, it takes on a new function: instead of being concerned with Movement-Images from which it extracts an indirect image of time, it is concerned with the Time-Image, and extracts from it the relations of time on which aberrant movement must now depend. In this way, cinema shifted to incite change and movement, it can encourage self-determination and ignite flames of action. Because of this, cinema was uprooted as an aesthetic art form, and revered for its ability to reflect consciousness on itself insofar as the viewer has an emotion manufactured by the plot of a film that accurately signifies cultural symbols that lead to some action regarding their past, current, or future existence.

Their cinematic language challenges us to rethink how moving images document time and memory. Whether through non-linear narratives, traditional music, or visual symbolism, African filmmakers question the notion of modernity as singular or Western, challenging education and monolithic production of knowledge. They assert, instead, multiple modernities—ones shaped by indigenous cosmologies, colonial rupture, and diasporic return. Faye places education as a tool for independence. Mossane’s fate being sealed by her forced early retirement from the system, her parents requiring a translator to read her suitor’s proposal letter. Or the student in Waiting for Happiness who slowly forgets his native tongue, preferring to speak french instead. These reconceptualisations offer rich material for film theory, especially as it intersects with postcolonial, feminist, and ecological critique.

We might consider their films as archival projects—repositories of affect, memory, and resistance. Where Soviet cinema instrumentalised montage for ideological synthesis, African cinema mobilised it for fragmentation and ambiguity, opening interpretive spaces that reject closure. Their soundtracks, too, resonate beyond entertainment, functioning as sonic geographies that map belonging and loss. The griot’s voice, the call to prayer, or the sound of water evoke layered histories, situating the viewer within a decolonial sensorium.

This legacy also demands a reconsideration of pedagogical models. African cinema’s emergence from Soviet tutelage illustrates how education is never neutral; it is a battleground of epistemologies. In foregrounding African perspectives, these filmmakers rejected Eurocentric hierarchies of knowledge, choosing instead to valorise embodied wisdom, oral tradition, and community storytelling. The classroom was thus extended into the village square, the marketplace, the protest site—spaces where politics unfold as performance.

To engage seriously with African film is to acknowledge its ongoing role in shaping geopolitical discourse. Recent films like Dahomey (2024), and historic ones like Touki Bouki (1973), and Black Girl (1966) continue to ask what it means to remember, to belong, and to resist. Their auteurs—Mati Diop, Djibril Diop Mambéty, and Sembène—bridge generations, drawing from the foundations laid in Moscow, Dakar, Bamako, and beyond.

In sum, the legacy of African film students in the USSR is one of radical hybridity. By metabolising Soviet cinematic theory into a distinctly African form, they expanded the possibilities of what film can do—and whom it can speak for. Their work remains a testament to the power of image and sound to transform not only how we see the world, but how we imagine its future. And as newer African auteurs continue to emerge, their films draw on this legacy while embracing a wider archive—including digital aesthetics, climate collapse, and Afro-futurist imagination. From Bamako to Dahomey to Moscow, cinema becomes a moving archive of African futurity, rich with ancestral voices and revolutionary dreams.

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