Introduction

In this paper, I present a snapshot of Third Cinema’s rich, continuing presence and history in Tanzania. Third Cinema is, as Amil Shivji, a protagonist-of-sorts of this work, says, “a philosophy…a genre…a movement” (2024). Third Cinema, a cultural cog in the multifaceted, often fiery, tempestuous wheel of decolonisation, is a radical movement of cinema-otherwise. It is not quite counter-cinema if one considers counter-cinema to be that which “[conjures] up a prescriptive aesthetics: to do the opposite of what dominant cinema does” (Willemen 1994: 7). Counter-cinema implies a reliance on dominant cinema, in order to present itself as its opposite.[1] While Third Cinema has in common with counter-cinema its hostility to dominant cinema, their terms of engagement were not to be dictated by what dominant cinema presented. How else, then, might we define Third Cinema and its contribution to decolonisation, if we are to see it as a standalone anticolonial cinema movement?

Many words come to mind in defining Third Cinema—popular, democratic, conversational, experimental, documentary (in both a figurative and literal sense), iterative. Third Cinema began in earnest following a series of impassioned manifestos from Latin American filmmakers, and one of them, Fernando Solanas, is quoted defining it in the following way:

Generally speaking, Third Cinema gives an account of reality and history. It is also linked with national culture…It is the way the world is conceptualised and not the genre nor the explicitly political character of a film which makes it belong to Third Cinema…Third Cinema is an open category, unfinished, incomplete. It is a research category. It is a democratic, national, popular cinema. Third Cinema is also an experimental cinema, but it is not practised in the solitude of one’s home or in a laboratory because it conducts research into communication. (Quoted in Willemen 1994: 9)

 

In terms of singling out defining features of Third Cinema with greater degrees of specificity, these are difficult to pin down given the vast body of work definable as Third Cinema. Willemen once again provides us with something of a guide:

two characteristics must be singled out as especially useful and of lasting value. One is the insistence on its flexibility, its status as research and experimentation, a cinema forever in need of adaptation to the shifting dynamics at work in social struggles. Because it is part of constantly changing social processes, that cinema cannot but change with them, making an all-encompassing definition impossible and even undesirable. The second useful aspect follows from this fundamental flexibility: the only stable thing about Third Cinema is its attempt to speak a socially pertinent discourse which both the mainstream and the authorial cinemas exclude from their regimes of signification. (Willemen 1994: 10)

 

In this sense, Third Cinema turned on its head all the hallmarks of the colonial condition: humiliation via aesthetics made way for an unceasing struggle for dignity via aesthetics, the elitist made way for the popular, the rigid made way for the progressive, the closed made way for the open, market practices made way for decidedly socialist ones. It came to deconstruct and help reconstruct all that was left in disarray. Third Cinema was to prove vital even and especially when both the anticolonial filmmakers and everyday people became increasingly skeptical of the independent state. When the state took advantage of the Pan-Africanist movement to distract from its own failures and point to a vague outside as culprit, a Pan-African culture-as-dissent persisted and provided a critical outside vital for interrogating the terms of freedom. This cultural space was to be found in “radio airwaves, the pages of magazines, festival gatherings, and the intimate spaces of bedrooms” (Tolan-Szkilnik 2023, 3).

Political ideas can be found in many places, and in fact in many places more clearly than one might find them within art and popular culture—depending on what genre of clarity one requires. However, it is the singularity of art and popular culture as a medium or a site for political expression that is especially interesting.

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      writes of the double sense of the term “spectacle” when thinking through the effect of art forms, within the context of Garveyism. She writes about how Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association’s (UNIA) showcasing of literary talent had both the aim of showing that “artistic genius could be found among the masses” and securing “self-representation of the masses” (Getachew 2021: 3). The “performative and theatrical staging of the [UNIA] convention”, where through theatrical acts, “members of the Negro race would come to see themselves as the Universal Negro, a collective, transnational, and empowered political agent”, effectively “seeing through one common spectacle”, was another form of self-representation (2021: 3–4). This is where the double sense of “spectacle” rises in a way that can be applied to art forms and popular culture more broadly:

…the spectacle indicates both an instrument, a prosthetic eye, employed to aid or supplement a limited capacity for perception—and also a striking public display that generates “curiosity, or contempt, marvel or admiration”. The UNIA’s founding politics sought to overcome the limitations of sight that prevented the race from recognizing itself as a new political subject by enacting a spectacular performance of the Universal Negro. That is, the visual spectacle of the convention corrected and enhanced the lens through which Black people perceived themselves. The production of a common spectacle worked against the ever-present ideology of white supremacy, which justified racial and colonial domination as inevitable and natural. (Getachew 2021: 4)

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There are ways in which art forms enable us to see what may otherwise not be readily seen, in a sense paradoxically because of both their loudness (allowing for spectacle or the spectacular) and silences (allowing for reflection). This is similar to what Jean-Godefroy Bidima, albeit in a different context, refers to as the orality of silence (Bidima 2004). Art and popular culture often speak precisely by not speaking and have an uncanny capacity for expressing the otherwise inexpressible, precisely by not overtly expressing it. Indeed, many of the key thinkers behind the movement insisted that one must not force any particular reading of a work: stating “their opposition to a sloganized cinema of emotional manipulation” (Willemen 1994: 6). They argued that “a cinema that invites belief and adherence rather than promoting a critical understanding of social dynamics is regarded as worse than useless” (Willemen 1994: 6). Via Third Cinema, unlike via many other more typical means of ‘doing politics’, everyday people, literate and illiterate, the educated and uneducated, were welcomed to communally consider their circumstances.

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Even so, much of this literature on Third Cinema has focussed, for good reason, on the extensive productions of this genre of film coming from West and North Africa, especially in French. One knows the main characters; the Sembenes, the Getinos. However, it is important to take seriously what some have called the ‘national’ character of Third Cinema. As Willemen wrote: “…the national question itself has a different weight in various parts of the globe, but the forced as well as the elective internationalism of cinema—especially of a cinema with inadequately developed industrial infrastructures—tends to bracket national-cultural issues too quickly. And yet if any cinema is determinedly ‘national’, even ‘regional’, in its address and aspirations, it is Third Cinema” (Willemen 1994, 17). I, therefore, bring the analysis of Third Cinema down to a context one does not often find in the literature:  Third Cinema in Tanzania.

Third Cinema in Tanzania

What one might call a watermark of sorts in Tanzanian Third Cinema are the undertones of the rich histories of Tanzania’s socioeconomic struggles, particularly the echoes of Ujamaa, the Zanzibar Revolution, and the questions of (African) socialism made East African. In this section, I take from interviews I have had with two of Tanzania’s foremost filmmakers, both asserting that their work is in the tradition of Third Cinema, one a pioneer, the other a present-day trailblazer—Martin Mhando and Amil Shivji, respectively—to present a snapshot of the character of Third Cinema in Tanzania. The interviews were semi-structured, lasting about an hour and a half at a time, in a mix of Swahili and English.

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Martin Mhando is perhaps one of the earliest filmmakers in Tanzania to work in the Third Cinema tradition. He worked under the aegis of the Tanzania Film Company, a state-sponsored filmmaking body in the 1970s, and was, for a long time, the director of the renowned Zanzibar International Film Festival. He stresses that at each of these points in his life, despite various regrets, he has always tried to be guided by the principles of Third Cinema. His films were critical in the exposition and critique of Ujamaa. While he worked under government sponsorship, he tried to present a lucid (Guneratne 2003)[2] engagement with Ujamaa via film. If what is at stake in Third Cinema is the “yoking together of the cognitive and the emotive aspects of the cinema” (Willemen 1994: 6), Mhando tried to present an honest, rather than “[smothering]” analysis of Ujamaa by way of reflective, relatable, even humorous storylines. To this end, guided by the changing circumstances in Tanzania, he directed Yombayomba, the rousing sequel to Fimbo ya Mnyonge (1972), which had been “the first Tanzanian-produced feature film”, and which had presented Ujamaa in a broadly salutary light. While still under the constraints of what was essentially a propagandist government film apparatus, Mhando deftly negotiated changes in the plot that would make discernible bubbling disquiet regarding Ujamaa. This was how, rather surprisingly, still under the aegis of the Tanzania Film Company, Mhando made this film which he describes as “covertly critical” (2024) of Ujamaa. He invited a conversation, trusting the intelligence of his interlocutors. He laments that not many other people outside of Tanzania in the movement engaged with his film—“the subject, Ujamaa, was…a hard sell globally.” Here, we begin to see what is lost in the tendencies of homogenising works in the tradition, or even the conflation between Third Cinema and Third World Cinema; in how these generalisations can obscure more than they reveal (Shohat and Stam 2014). Unless people are invested in understanding the socioeconomic and historical circumstances from which these films emerge, the cognitive processes that make Third Cinema Third Cinema may not be realised. To this day, Mhando works on bringing film especially to marginalised Tanzanian communities, even using DJs to present the films in ‘vibanda umiza’—small stalls in which Tanzanians gather to watch things, including film. The name roughly translates to ‘hurt-sheds’—sheds so small that people have to crowd into them; uncomfortable spaces, but necessary spaces—spaces for film. He wants to have the conversations where the people are at. 

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Amil Shivji, on the other hand, is a 34-year-old filmmaker whose first inspirations within Tanzanian film were Mhando’s works. His Vuta n’Kuvute, on the Zanzibari Revolution, was Tanzania’s submission to the Oscars in 2023. He is categorical about his works also being within the tradition of Third Cinema. Being part of this movement, undergirded by this philosophy, means that the work:

…has to be community-oriented; it has to…[serve] a community and a goal of the marginalised. In and of itself it is a critique… the critique is not coming from this individual as a filmmaker; it’s in conversation with the community that you’re talking about…I’m making a critique of our society from the perspective of the marginalised. Now, of course, I’m not part of many marginalized groups in Tanzania, so then what does my role become? It’s not simply just a purveyor of…the microphone…that’s the NGO approach. They say: ‘say what you want’, but then [after that] they [repackage what you said in] their own language. But when [I’m] working with a community…and I have an idea that I like...rooted in something that I’ve read in a journalistic piece or something that has moved me in life, then I spend time in those communities to hone in on that idea…So the writing stage happens when I’m in those communities… [I] write with the community. When you’re making the film you’re working with the community…You’re not working with “non-professional actors” [in the way academics may frame it]; you’re working with community members….All of this…is how Third Cinema has influenced [my style]. When I started [making films], I saw other filmmakers doing similar things—not many, quite few, in the [East African] region, maybe 4 or 5 using this similar style but [they] weren’t talking about Third Cinema. But it came from a very dire need…to…tell your stories, to want to be honest with the communities you’re working with…to be critical of what you’re seeing in mainstream media. Other filmmakers weren’t necessarily using the words Third Cinema or anticolonialism or revolutionary…but they were the same aesthetics. There [was] this revival or extension of the movement that is happening and I really, really have faith in that. That’s what I’ve seen in the last 10 years.(Shivji 2024)

 

To tell the story with/alongside the marginalised is, necessary for Amil, to engage the sociopolitical context from a class perspective. “Those who talked about Africa rising were often of a particular class, and so of course Africa was rising for them. ‘Africa’s rising,’ but rising on whose backs?” He asks.  It means telling that story. It is also to meaningfully involve the community, to not see them as a mere ‘audience’. He speaks about how difficult it had always been for him to answer the question of who his audience was: the question implies that one is talking to rather than with a person:

Why was it so difficult for me to answer this question? Immediately, you want to say it’s the Tanzanian people. But wait, I don’t need to tell the Tanzanian people [about themselves]. You don’t ever need to tell an oppressed person they’re being oppressed…You want to make films or tell stories about oppression, but you don’t need to tell someone ‘hey, you’re being oppressed, and this is the ABCD of what you have to do’—that’s very much the NGO approach. That’s the kind of content creation they want—very didactic…[it’s about] lecturing down. I’ve never taken that approach…I look at how I’ve been making films and how many people have been making films on the continent from the [19]60s onwards; you’re making the film with the community; you’re casting from the community; you’re crewing from the community; you’re training in that space; you’re working with equipment, you’re setting up this infrastructure that the community is working with; the daily conversations that you’re having with people around you…very few people are brought from outside. On Vuta n’Kuvute we had a 150-person crew and 2 foreigners…if there’s something we’re unsure of in the design, or [historicity] etc…we’d just ask someone on the street, and they’d ask somebody else, and we’d get 5,6,7 opinions on…a small technical issue, but the answer is coming from the community. (Shivji 2024)

 

In this way, Shivji says, the community claims the film—calling it “filamu yetu”; not “filamu yako”; our film, not your film. He speaks of how everyday people in these communities would shy away from watching these films in cinemas in big malls, thinking that’s not the kind of place folk “like them” go, and how he brings the films to them, via community screenings, in a radically humanising act that is both as simple and as profound as “you, all of you, deserve film”. In such contexts, where one bears the burden of telling stories that often carry with them immeasurable pain, one must also be careful about epistemic deference (Táíwò 2021). As Willemen writes:

Third Cinema is most emphatically not simply concerned with ‘letting the oppressed speak with their own voices’: that would be a one-sided and therefore an untrustworthy position. Those voices will only speak the experience of oppression, including the debilitating aspects of that condition. Third Cinema does not seek to induce guilt in or to solicit sympathy from its interlocutors. […] Because of the realisation of the social nature of discourse, the Third Cinema project summons to the place of the viewer social-historical knowledges, rather than art-historical, narrowly aesthetic ones. These latter knowledges would be relevant only in so far as they form part of the particular nexus of socio-historical processes addressed. (1994: 28)

 

The burden of the Tanzanian Third Cinema artist is to engage with communities to whom one owes so much, who are navigating the complexes of post-revolutionary mainland-island ‘unity’, Ujamaa, racial tensions, Maasaiphobia (Manji 2022; Singo 2022), socialism-turned-something-else, but to also stand apart from them where necessary, in order to engender what would be as fully “lucid” a conversation as possible (Guneratne 2003). Nonetheless, this is not to be a hagiography of either filmmaker at all, but to highlight the possibilities of decolonial praxis immanent in film-as-critical conversation. “Film is like a mirror, once you see yourself in the mirror you may try to beautify yourself a little bit more; and you may want to fill cracks, etc.,” Shivji says. One needs to be careful about what one does with the ugliness one sees.

Conclusion

The history and the future of the state and decolonisation in Africa, in my opinion, must at least partially invoke the history of popular culture, including movements of popular cinema and their effect. When we ask what it is our people want, we must listen to all the sites from which they speak. In this paper, I have offered a snapshot of what Third Cinema has meant for Tanzania, in order to emphatically say that yes, the movie matters, and also to hopefully both highlight the sheer possibility still latent in the Third Cinema movement and encourage the revisiting and support of it wherever its fires still smoulder. Film, as a decolonial practice, and as it has regularly been practised in Tanzania, including by these filmmakers, has privileged debate on social dynamics and material realities, it has trusted the intelligence of the interlocutor, leaving no stone unturned in the search for a restorative world. It has shirked the gaze of the coloniser and privileged the community and its priorities. If we think about the kinds of coloniality thinkers like Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni are interested in, also discussed elsewhere in this volume—coloniality of knowledge, coloniality of power, and coloniality of being (2013), this mode of filmmaking confronts, albeit to varying degrees, each genre of coloniality. It has decentred the filmmaker and made the film a decidedly popular vessel—the film is not dictum but invitation—an invitation to settling the terms on which we, as the formerly colonised, can live with dignity.​

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