In her analysis of the redemptive aesthetics of British imperial cinema, Priya Jaikumar argues that British imperial film policies and aesthetics of the late colonial period were marked by “the divergent legitimacies granted to imperialism and nationalism” (2006, 11). British Empire Films attempted to rehabilitate the image of the colonial encounter and resolve the inconsistencies and contradictions inherent in Britain’s dual identity as colonizer and liberal nation-state.
Cinema, coming in the late 1890s, participated in the internal contradictions of a modernized language of empire. Liberalism’s impulse toward self-governance put pressure on imperialism’s essential unilateralism to define the internal form and formal contradictions of British film policy and commercial film style. (9)
Employing a redemptive rhetoric, late colonial British commercial films “rearticulat[ed] Britain’s’ identity as demonstrably liberal in relation to its imperium” (Jaikumar 2006, 25). Here, I want to suggest that The Boy Kumasenu, though the production of a state-funded colonial film unit in Africa, enacts a similar imperial redemptive aesthetics. Through the motif of the journey from the premodern to the modern, the feature works at erasing the contradictions inherent in Britain’s dual identity as liberal nation and colonial power by superimposing a narrative of national modernity onto the urban and rural landscapes and, therefore, constructing the modern as a spatiotemporal relation. In this way, it naturalizes what Timothy Mitchell calls “the time-space of European modernity” (2000, 16). For Mitchell, the time-space of the modern relies on the non-West to “play the role of outside, the otherness that creates the boundary of the space of modernity” (16). The African village, rendered through an ethnographic gaze, signifies “the place of timelessness, a space without duration, in relation to which the temporal break of modernity can be marked out” (16). The coastal city of Accra, ushered into modernity by British imperialism, stands as the imminent outcome of Africa’s evolution.
The Boy Kumasenu tells the story of Kumasenu, an orphan, who lives in a quiet fishing village with his Uncle Faiwoo, his aunt, and his older cousin Agboh. Kumasenu, enchanted by Agboh and his tales of the city, begs for permission to follow his cousin to Accra. Uncle Faiwoo refuses. He tells Kumasenu that he wants him to grow up and become a leader among the people. After a poor fish harvest, however, Faiwoo concludes that Kumasenu’s “restlessness” is frightening the fish and that it is best for the village if he be allowed to go and “to know what is beyond, to read and write, and find out why iron cars go as swift as the shark.”
Uncle Faiwoo finds Kumasenu his first paid employment in a small store on the city’s periphery. All goes well for Kumasenu, who is happy among the new people, music, manners, and languages he encounters there, until Agboh turns up, dressed like a gangster in a Hollywood movie and full of swagger. Kumasenu, desiring to please and impress Agboh, shows his cousin where the storekeeper hides his money. Agboh steals the money without Kumasenu’s knowledge, suddenly sending Kumasenu off to the city with a ten pound note, remaining behind so he can frame Kumasenu for his crime.
Kumasenu, alone and dressed only in the clothes he carried from his village, finds Accra foreign and inhospitable; he is frightened by its traffic, unfriendliness, and crowds. On his first day in Accra, he wanders the streets cautiously, and when night falls he has no place to sleep. He is rescued by a beautiful woman, Adobia, who speaks to Kumasenu in Ewe and invites him to stay with her. Adobia is a successful trader, and she hires Kumasenu to be her assistant. An economically and sexually independent woman, Adobia is involved with two men: the rich and powerful lawyer, Mr. Mensah, and his driver, Yeboah. Mr. Mensah, unaware of Adobia’s affair with Yeboah, is furious when he finds the two together. He assaults the couple, and, the next day, uses his position in the courts to have Adobia and Yeboah arrested for attacking him.
Kumasenu, having lost his guide and friend, finds himself alone and on the city streets again. Hungry and desperate, he attempts to steal a loaf of bread from a bread seller, but is arrested and taken to juvenile court before he can carry out the deed. The court sends him to Dr. Tamakloe for a physical examination before his trial. Moved by Kumasenu’s demeanor, the doctor and his wife, Grace, decide to adopt him. Under the couple’s care and support, Kumasenu is cleared of the charges against him and released into their custody. The doctor finds Kumasenu work as a member of a fishing crew that sails and maintains motorized boats, and his labor, like his subjectivity, is brought into the realm of the modern.
Historically, the film links directly to Grierson and the British documentary film movement. Basil Wright, one of Grierson’s “disciples” who is perhaps best known for his acclaimed documentary Song of Ceylon (1934), was the coproducer of the film, and Graham, who wrote the screenplay for the film and directed it, was Grierson’s student.22 Ideologically, the feature shares with the Griersonian documentary tradition a deep faith in the British Empire and an unquestioned belief in its evolutionary development. In her analysis of British documentary film, Jamie Sexton makes an observation about Song of Ceylon pertinent to The Boy Kumasenu: It “links nature and tradition to the process of modernization, all configured as part of a natural, evolving pattern” (Sexton 2002, 54). The Boy Kumasenu erases economic exploitation, violence, and colonial agents from its narrative of British imperialism, which is portrayed as a force for good in Africa, bringing civilization, justice, medicine, the rule of law, education, order, and, finally, national independence. The film presents modernity as the end result of an evolutionary narrative that unfolds naturally from colonialism. The opening montage visualizes the binary on which this chronology depends. It sets in opposition the natural landscape, portrayed as if untouched by modernization and industrialization, and the bustle and productivity of the modern West African city. The first sequence, composed of a combination of multiple shots from close, medium, and long focal distances, sees African men and women dressed in formal Western clothes in a dance hall where big band music plays and couples jitterbug. This shot dissolves into a fast-paced and dynamic sequence, assembled from several shots of the wide streets of Accra, along which cars, buses, and crowds of people move. The voice-over reads as follows:
This is the story of the old and the new where the changeless ways of uncounted centuries collide with the changing ways of our own. Here the city of Accra sprawls its growth on the west coast of equatorial Africa with no buffer between the new and the old.
The words “the old” signal a visual transition to the village. Rendered naturalistically in one static long take of a beach, bordered by a line of coconut trees and empty except for two people, a large fishing boat, and several small fishing shacks, the village landscape appears unmoving, unchanged, and unmarked by modernity.
In Kumasenu, the camera, in effect, works like a virtual time machine, reenacting for the spectator the movement from the primitive to the modern by positioning the spectator differently in each space. First, the spectator adopts the perspective of an outside observer, one far removed from the space and time of the village. Later, the spectator is aligned with the subject of sight in the city. Through variations in scale and spectator address, the film represents time as a spatial relation between the spectator and the world that unfolds on the screen, incorporating her into the spaces of village and city through different modes of realism. As the narrative migrates from village to city, an ethnographic mode of realism gives way to a narrative mode of realism, simulating cinematically the passage of time.23 In the village segments, the film deploys an ethnographic mode of realism in which an ethnographic chronotope organizes time and space. Long takes and slow pans produce visual space between the viewing subject and filmed object, creating a sense of spatial and temporal distance between the modern spectator, aligned with the narrator’s objectifying voice and gaze, and the traditional and exotic