The Cinematic Cowboy in Africa: Identities and the Western Genre

This article identifies instances in Africa in which the western genre and specifically the figure of the cowboy is appropriated and adapted to local circumstances. It opens with a brief excursion into the western’s influence on African cinema, focusing primarily on Bamako (2016). The article develops a brief discussion of the potentials and pitfalls of comparative research in relation to Africa and proposes that focusing on a specific genre such as the western, is a useful additional element in adopting modes of comparative research. The article focuses on examples drawn from different parts of the continent including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania and Southern Africa. Finally, it draws conclusions on the potential of future research focusing on the cinematic cowboy and his appropriation into the lives of African audiences.


Introduction
The film Bamako (2006), set in a courtyard in Bamako, the capital city of Mali, includes a short, mock, 'spaghetti' western within the film proper entitled Death in Timbuktu. At a screening and Q&A event held at the National Film Theatre in London in 2014, a member of the audience asked the filmmaker, Abderrahmane Sissako, why he had inserted this short film. His reply was that he had seen many westerns as a boy growing up in Africa and had always wanted to make one himself. Sissako performs within the short western credited as Dramane Bassaro, the name of the character he plays in his earlier film, La vie sur terre (Life on Earth, 1998). The celebrated actor, Danny Glover, whose production company, Louverture, produced the film, acts as the 'lone ranger' character. As well as TMG 23 (1/2) 2020 Jacqueline Maingard 2 being an opportunity for Sissako to make his own western and to perform the role of a cowboy himself, the short western, and its specific plot, plays an especially critical role. 1 The film as a whole is based on a fictitious court case, in which the people of Mali take the

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Jacqueline Maingard 3 wide-brimmed hat, long overcoat, bullets strung across his chest, alongside his horse at the foot of a sandy dune beside a lake. Four cowboys, on horses and dressed in typical cowboy attire, enter Timbuktu, where the remainder of the short is filmed. In a gun-toting shooting scene where local people are the target, one of the cowboys (Zeka Laplaine) boasts of killing two women with one bullet rather than simply one, over-extending his self-congratulatory laughter shown in increasingly close shots. The lone ranger shoots and kills him from a viewpoint above the streets.
The short film's insertion into the wider film is both framed and interrupted by images of the television audience in the courtyard where the court case takes place by day and where the television is positioned in the evening after the day's proceedings. Initially there are technical problems with the service, for which the anchor woman apologises, giving a nod to real-life hitches that audiences might expect. At the point where Laplaine laughs with his fellow cowboys about killing two women with one bullet, the image cuts away to the audience and a close-up view of a boy enraptured. A short while later, with Laplaine's laughter still dominating, there is a further cutaway to the audience and a young girl laughing. Glover then takes up his position to shoot Laplaine and executes his shot. The effect of this is twofold, on the one hand Sissako points to the question of audience identification with the figure of the cowboy and at the same time he clearly delineates between the good cowboy, in the form of the lone ranger, and the bad cowboy, Laplaine, who randomly shoots to kill. The short film is clearly on the side of the lone ranger, taking up the cause of justice, and thus acts as a form of allegory for the wider film's critique of the IMF and the World Bank's policies. But how the courtyard audience of Death in Timbuktu 'reads' the short film and the extent to which the overt reading is one of complicity in its own demise remains an open question. 3 Just over 100 years before Sissako's production of Bamako and Death in Timbuktu, the image of Buffalo Bill was already introducing the figure of the cowboy to Africa. In South Africa for example, the first 'showing' of 'moving pictures' in South Africa courtesy of an Edison kinetoscope in 1895 included 'Buffalo Bill in one of his quick-firing exhibitions.' 4 This was to a small select group of 'literary and scientific gentlemen,' 5 but two weeks later it was opened to the public in Henwood's Arcade in Johannesburg. The same image of Buffalo Bill, who the South African film historian Thelma Gutsche describes as 'Colonel Cody -the first real movie star,' could be seen 'galloping jerkily about firing at a glass ball with a Colt repeating rifle.' 6 In all likelihood the audiences for these exhibitions were white, although one can speculate as to the street audiences that might have seen the city centre exhibition in a shop window. represents an interest in a single genre, the western. 7 It therefore incorporates an additional, defining, element by focusing specifically on a genre of films rather than films in general. Two issues are important to comment upon.
First, the matter of space, since in this article I purposely roam across different places and spaces, considering scholarship from any part of Africa. This continental focus is in part the result of recent scholarly publications from different parts of Africa. More broadly, it emanates from the need to excavate findings specifically about Africa. This continent of over fifty countries is largely absent from scholarly histories of cinema, although there has been pioneering scholarship on some regions and there is a growing body of continuing research.
Second, the wide-ranging excavation I have accomplished for this article, including anecdotal instances as well as in-depth studies, focuses specifically on the western genre. My interest in doing so first arose in my research on cinema-going in District Six, Cape Town, where I had access to life histories of former residents, in which more than seventy percent of residents referred to the cinema or cinema-going experiences. Some of these oral histories make reference to westerns or gangster films and their assimilation into everyday life in District Six. 8 The western (and gangster) genre has struck me as a fertile space for ongoing research into cinema-going and its cultural effects, evident in cinema-goers' emulation of cinema-inspired clothing styles and fashions, as well as behaviours, and moreover to understand these within the wider historical and socio-political contexts of South Africa.
The research for this article exposed more evidence of the effects of westerns and gangsters than I had expected and perforce I chose to focus on westerns, in part because the western genre predates the gangster genre. This was a wise choice as the segue from western-inspired styles and behaviours to those emulating gangster films is blurred in many instances. While western-inspired dress codes for example are the explicit or implicit shared fashion style of a group, its behaviours TMG 23 (1/2) 2020 Jacqueline Maingard 5 might emulate the gangland predilections for power and authority outside of the law. The 'outlaw' figure first produced in the western, is later also produced in the gangster film, a figure that has been a key influence on African audiences under colonialism and apartheid. 9 The choice of a genre for historical research, and particularly the western, could provide a solution to some of the problems that comparative research raises, especially where there is not yet enough research on a specific region. Much depends on available archival resources as well as options for innovative research methods, including oral histories or extant life histories that might reveal references to the cinema or cinema-going. Burns elaborates some of the problems with the potential for comparing the British West Indies with other regions (in this issue) and concludes that more research 'will need to be done before it can be usefully compared to other regions.' He does however offer some ways in which comparisons could be made between the British West Indies and South Africa. Daniela Treveri Gennari, Lies Van de Vijver and Pierluigi Ercole discuss the challenges of 'cross-national research' (in this issue), which are pertinent also to research ventures in Africa.
Matched equivalences of data will not be available to researchers of African audiences without bespoke, funded research projects such as those developed in Europe. This does not have to mean however, that no comparisons can be made.
In the next section I identify some recent scholarship as well as some earlier examples that expose how films in the western genre have shaped social and cultural identities in different parts of Africa. historically the popularity of this 'properly mythic cowboy-frontiersman hero' was driven less through his exploits on the frontier and more so through his stage acts that included re-enactments of his screen persona. 14 Cody took these acts all over the USA and Europe before his death in 1917. His ability to blur reality with fiction -'Cody the man, Buffalo Bill the hero' -was apparently key to his legendary status and his embodiment of masculinity. 15 The missionaries who were 'ubiquitous' in Kinshasa, would themselves have witnessed the Buffalo Bill shows and films in their early years in Belgium. 16  Moorman cites the comments of her Angolan interlocutor, de Andrade, whose political standing might otherwise suggest that he would not identify with the cowboy figure, thus revealing the complexity of audience identifications not only with the western genre but also more generally with 'American cinema'. He comments, for example, on how he looked up to his brother and cousins and The initial forays this article makes into researching the influence of the cinematic cowboy on African audiences suggest that this focus has the potential to create new histories that can extend comparative, interdisciplinary approaches to show how African audiences appropriated cinematic identities based on the western genre to their own ends. What those ends were or became is the stuff that future research, comparative or otherwise, will hopefully elaborate.

Scholarship on cowboys in Africa
With grateful thanks to Thunnis van Oort and Jessica Whitehead. Special thanks to Emma Sandon.

1
The four cowboys, apart from Glover, are played by filmmakers Elia Suleiman and Zeka Laplaine; Jean-Henri Roger, professor, director and actor who died in 2012; and Ferdinand Batsimba, theatre and film writer and director. Batsimba directed a short film entitled African Western (1992). For a further discussion of Death in Timbuktu, see Dayna Oscherwitz, "In the Crossfire: Africa, Cinema, and Violence in