Cinema and Highlife in the Gold Coast
The Boy Kumasenu(1952)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3613396 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Emma Sandon (Birkbeck, University of London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 39 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 496-519 |
| Publication date | 2013-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Dynamics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0253-3952 • E-ISSN: 1940-7874 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02533952.2013.852826 |
| OpenAlex | W2083339742 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 27 |
The Boy Kumasenu (Sean Graham, Gold Coast, 1952) produced by the Gold Coast Film Unit during the 1950s, before independence in Ghana, had a public impact and success with local Ghanaian audiences that other colonial films never achieved. About a boy, Kumasenu, who moves from a rural village to the city of Accra, the film attempts to represent an African experience of modern life, using a local cast. This article explores the film’s popular reception by drawing on advertisements, newspaper coverage, reviews, awards it received, as well as contemporary personal correspondence and retrospective interviews with the filmmakers. It proposes that the film’s appeals lay in its inclusion of highlife, its fashions, styles and music, popular in the Gold Coast, alongside cinematic conventions of documentary, drama-documentary, neorealist film styles and the Hollywood gangster genre, already familiar to urban Ghanaian audiences. Furthermore, its theme of urban youth and citizenship evoked the concept of the “African Personality,” an identity that Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party would link with highlife music at independence. By tapping into the popularity of cinema and highlife, the film promoted nascent nationalist sentiments, and became associated with anti-colonialism and social change in the newly emerging independent Ghana
Archaeology · Art · Art history · Gold coast · Movie theater · African history and culture studies · History
The Press and Political Culture in Ghana
From the Inside
Images of Empires on Shifting Sands
Projecting the Modern Colonial State
African Cinema
African Renaissance
The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah
Modernity and Danger
Changing the World
African Video Movies and Global Desires
The Development of British Colonial Film Policy, 1927–1939, with special reference to East and Central Africa
Playing cowboys and Africans
The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment and the Struggle for Hegemony in British East and Central Africa, 1935–1937
Quarterly Notes
The Post-War Career of the Colonial Film Unit in Africa
The Central African Film Unit's images of empire, 1948-1963
Flickering Shadows
The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah
Kwame Nkrumah
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |