Violence in Postcolonial African Film

Different forms of violence surround Africans. These forms of violence go by different names, but all are built into and sustained by the fabric of everyday life. Contemporary African film delves into the subject of violence in a variety of ways. Some films show violence in its Fanonian sense, as liberatory and creative; others treat violence as a perpetually destructive force; and others still are ambivalent about the meaning of violence. Ultimately, the issue appears to rest on the matter of which specific violence one is talking about. This article looks at the representation of violence in Bamako (2006), a film by Mauritanian film-maker Abderrahmane Sissako. The author argues that in Bamako, violence is often invisible to the naked eye and is easily missed if one is looking for stereotypes of violence such as rape, killings and beatings. Rather, violence is endemic to our socio-economic order and overt instances of violence may be regarded as mere symptoms and flare-ups of a more sinister, quiet violence that goes by other names. The author further argues that the way we read representations of violence needs to be constantly subjected to rigorous contextualising and historicising, and that analytical frameworks should allow for more questions than certainties.