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AFRICAN FILMMAKINGkinship makes him eligible, because ‘the isolated are vulnerable’. 75 In the Arabworld, Khuri argues, ‘the strategy is to act in groups’. 76There are clear differences in emphasis between Khuri’s arguments aboutacquiring power and those of Solanke about achieving social inclusion. Butwhat is crucial is that Africans – whether Muslims or not – do not define themselvesas notionally free individuals responsible ultimately only to themselves,which is the way that Westerners have operated for centuries. This is reflectedin the narrative structures and the shaping of protagonists of African cinema,as it is in much African literature. As Tunisian film theorist Tahar Cheriaa hasnoted, in African films ‘the individual is always pushed into the background,and the hero – African films are rich in characters in the classic sense – neveroccupies the foreground. The principal character in African films is always thegroup, the collectivity, and that is the essential thing’. 77Notes1. Émile Mworoha and Bernard Nantet, ‘Des raisons d’espérer’, in Rémy Bazenguissaand Bernard Nantet (eds), L’Afrique: Mythes et réalités d’un continent (Paris: LeCherche Midi Éditeur, 1995), p. 193.2. Shatto Arthur Gakwandi, The Novel and Contemporary Experience in Africa(London, Lusaka, Ibadan and Nairobi: Heinemann, 1977), p. 1.3. Roland Oliver, The African Experience (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999),p. 259.4. Ibid.5. Richard W. Hull, Modern Africa: Change and Continuity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:Prentice-Hall, 1980), p. 243.6. Ibid., p. 189.7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spreadof Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991, revised edition), pp. 6–7.8. Ibid., p. 7.9. Donal B. Cruise O’Brien and Richard Rathbone, ‘Introduction’, in Donal B. CruiseO’Brien, John Dunn and Richard Rathbone (eds), Contemporary West AfricanStates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 2.10. Basil Davidson, The Search for Africa (London: James Currey, 1994), p. 254.11. Ibid.12. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967),pp. 166–99.13. I have discussed ‘national culture’ in Roy Armes, Third World Filmmaking and theWest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 24–8.14. Oliver, The African Experience, p. 277.15. Ibid.16. Ibid., p. 278.17. Ibid.18. Hull, Modern Africa, p. 192.19. Oliver, The African Experience, p. 302.20. Cited in John Reader, Africa: A Biography of the Continent (Harmondsworth:Penguin Books, 1998), p. 627.21. Reader, Africa, p. 627.22. Ibid.16