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Preview of the forthcoming book AFRICANS IN HARLEM: The Untold New York Story by Dr. Boukary Sawadogo. City College of New York. [email protected]

African Cinema and Arts in Harlem, New York

Reaction of the jazz icon Miles Davis on seeing Les Ballets Africains in New York City in 1959:

“I had gotten into the modal thing by watching the Ballet Africaine [sic] from Guinea. ...We went to this performance by the Ballet Africaine [sic] and it just fucked me up what they was doing, the steps and all them flying leaps and shit. And when I first heard them play the finger piano that night and sing this song with this other guy dancing, man, that was some powerful stuff. It was beautiful. And their rhythm! The rhythm of the dancers was something.”

Davis, Miles and Quincy Troupe. Miles: The Autobiography.

Several factors have contributed to the pivotal role that Harlem plays in the distribution of

African cultural productions. First, the move of the Maysles Documentary Center from midtown

Manhattan to Harlem in 2008 has facilitated the theatrical circulation of African screen media productions in Harlem because the venue, with its name recognition, provides an alternative distribution circuit for independent filmmakers and artists.

Second, the concentration of African immigrant communities in Harlem and the nearby

Bronx provides an audience for African film and photography exhibitions, drawing on a more diverse group than would be the case in, for instance, lower Manhattan.

Third, higher education institutions have developed initiatives for further exposure to black cinema, such as the “Blackness in French and Francophone Film” series by the Institute of

African Studies at Columbia University, which began in 2018.

The presence of West Africans in Harlem, and their cultural and economic transformation of the neighborhood, has sparked the production of visual media portraying immigrants’ attempts to

2 bridge the transatlantic divide between their home countries and their new space in Harlem in such films as Little Senegal, Restless City, and Mother of George, although the latter is set in

Brooklyn. In addition, cultural events such as “Congo in Harlem,” the New York African Film

Festival—held at the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem—and the “Uptown Flicks” series help anchor the immigrant experience. Literary works and stage performances also further establish the multiple African visual cultures, artistic, and literary connections to or within

Harlem.

In the 2001 film Little Senegal, by the Franco-Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb, the

Senegalese immigrant community in Harlem is presented through the spiritual journey and identity quest of the protagonist, Alloune Guire, who comes to New York City in search of descendants of his enslaved ancestors brought to the country centuries ago. The slave museum tour guide Alloune from Goree Island (Senegal) seeks to uncover the missing lineage of his ancestors. The movie title and setting draw on the Senegalese immigrant enclave located on

116th Street between Lenox Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard in West Harlem. The encounters between Africans and African Americans are explored in this film in a multi-layered approach, through work and intimacy, such as Alloune’s nephew Hassan working in an African

American-owned auto shop and the romantic relationship between the characters Karim and

Amaralis.

Restless City (2011), by Andrew Dosunmu, set in Harlem’s Morningside Heights area, is about a 21-year-old aspiring Senegalese musician, Djibril, who is looking to realize his

American dream but gets caught in the underworld of drugs and prostitution through his African

American love interest, Trini.

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As these two narrative films bring into focus the West African immigrant communities in

Harlem, they also spark conversations about the current relationships between African immigrants and African Americans in the neighborhood. The 1940s and 1960s were historic periods of sustained dialogue between Africans and African Americans as they fought systemic forms of oppression: colonialism, racism, and segregation.

However, neither Little Senegal nor Restless City makes an explicit reference to this backdrop against which the immigrant survival stories are unfolding. Instead, the films present a shift from arts, the politics of pan-Africanism, and militant discourse—the liberation of black people from oppression—to the personal and professional realms of daily interactions in the streets of Harlem.

These two films, set in the 2000s, focus primarily on the experiences of francophone West

African immigrants, who started moving to Harlem en masse beginning in the 1980s. The migration of activists, writers, and artists from anglophone African countries to Harlem in the

1960s and 1970s is not referenced, probably to better situate the fictionalized accounts of the immigrants’ stories in Harlem in the larger context of economic migration.

In this respect, Harlem, as a metaphor for struggle, hustle, and pride in blackness, functions as a location as well as a character in the films. The music score, with jazz as dissonant music that accompanies most of the outdoor scenes, contributes to the portrayal of the hectic life these immigrants and African Americans might share in today’s world. These immigrants chose to settle in Harlem not only because of its glorious past but primarily because a predominantly black neighborhood potentially offers a better cultural fit. For a large number of African immigrants, their first contact with African American culture prior to arriving in Harlem was their exposure to jazz music. And jazz has significantly shaped the image of Harlem globally. In

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African films such as Ousmane Sembène’s 1988 film Camp de Thiaroye, jazz is portrayed as the means that bridges the relations between Africans and African Americans, as is showcased in the interactions between the characters of chief sergeant Diatta and a black American soldier in. Set in Dakar (Senegal) in 1944, the movie is about the plight of African veterans of the second world war—known as tirailleurs—who are temporarily stationed outside of the city while waiting for their demobilization. It is in this situation of limbo that the first encounter between Diatta and the black GI occurred when Diatta was arrested by a military police patrol led by the black GI for hanging out in the white quarters of the city. Tensions run high between tirailleurs and the

French and American soldiers over Diatta over being beaten up and injured. Reconciliation between the two blacks is facilitated by listening and discussing jazz, which brought them physically and symbolically closer.

The African presence in these films is conveyed visually by shots of storefronts, particularly

African hair-braiding salons, and the African Square sign at the intersection of 115th Street and

7th Avenue. Visual evidence of African immigrants’ engagement with Harlem is rendered mostly though their going about their daily routines.

Dosunmu’s Restless City offers particularly compelling audiovisual storytelling in sequences that are seemingly juxtaposed with no smooth transitions between them. As a result, the image construction of the story could be likened to a collage, in which film and photography are enmeshed in a symbiotic relationship. This imagery helps render the constructed nature of the reality of West Africans in Harlem.

Films such as Little Senegal and Restless City give voice and visibility to the African presence in Harlem while also providing African immigrants with more relatable audiovisual stories.

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In the larger context of African American popular culture, many sports fans still remember the boxer Muhammad Ali defeating at the 8th round the world heavyweight champion George

Foreman on October 30, 1974, in Kinshasa, the capital city of the Congo. This fight, popularly known as “The Rumble in the Jungle,” cemented Muhammad Ali’s rise to fame and celebrity as one of the world’s greatest heavyweight boxing champions of all time.

The documentary about the fight, When We Were Kings (1996), shows the Congolese supporting Ali, with crowds in the streets and around the ring chanting, “Ali, boma ye,” meaning

“Ali, kill him [George Foreman].” Interestingly, Ali was able to win over the public of Kinshasa, which had initially supported his opponent, George Foreman. The latter was thought of as more

“African” because of his dark complexion, in contrast to the fair-complexioned Ali. Ali may have been fair-complexioned, but in the end, the public of Kinshasa claimed him as one of their own, their hero, despite the issues of colorism that still exist in the country and beyond today.

The novel J’irai danser sur la tombe de Senghor (2014) by the Canadian writer Blaise Ndala, originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, provides a fictionalized account of this fight in Kinshasa of the 1970s in times of economic prosperity of the Zaïre under president Mobutu

Sese Seko. By hosting the boxing fight, not only Zaïre garnered international attention, but also a way for Mobutu to entertain the country as he prepared to tighten his grip on power, which the following years would demonstrate the dictatorial turn of his regime. The rights to the novel were bought by the Franco-Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb who is reportedly working to adapt the story into a movie.

The increased interest in African screen media production results from the confluence of two phenomena: the black renaissance currently unfolding, …