“A Film Is Banned If the Ladies Say So”

This chapter examines women film censurers to make the point that they controlled leisure by banning films that they considered harmful to Africans, an impressionable category of film audience that the altruistic ladies volunteered to protect. Banning films did not always go as envisioned, as non-African film consumers—mostly white and Asian men—suffered the unintended consequences of censorship. As censurers, women played a critical role in nurturing the colonizer’s idealized notion of “acceptable” morals and values for Africans, a notion deeply rooted in the racial trope insinuating that African film consumers were gullible. The chapter taps into the women’s active role as the gatekeepers of moral production to construct a mosaic that deepens our understanding of how cinema, a form of art that James M. Burns calls “flickering shadows,” unmasked the colonial anxiety about Africans

Art · African history and culture studies · Cinema and Media Studies · South Asian Cinema and Culture

• Film Censorship and Identity in Kenya

  Samson Kaunga Ndanyi•Ufahamu A Journal of African…•2021

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