Mouramani, légende noire by Mamadou Touré

I have very often asked myself the following question: what is the first film made by a Black filmmaker from sub-Saharan Africa?
This seemingly simple question actually opens onto a fragmented, incomplete, sometimes even erased history. Before answering it, we need to distinguish the cinema of sub-Saharan Africa from that of North Africa and South Africa, whose development began much earlier. This difference is not trivial: it points to singular historical and political contexts that deeply shaped the emergence of cinema on the African continent.

Cinema developed rapidly in many regions of the world. Yet in Africa, and more particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, its appearance remained poorly documented for a long time. In a colonial context, the first images filmed of the continent were mostly produced by Western filmmakers. Africa then became an object of the gaze, a territory to be observed, classified and explained. Cinema unfolded there essentially in a documentary or anthropological form, carried by figures such as Jean Rouch, whose works contribute to a representation often marked by exoticism and a primitivist reading of African societies.

These films, however important they are historically, durably steer the way the continent is seen. Addressing a viewer who is often a novice, they help impose an outside vision of Africa, sometimes reduced to rites, bodies and landscapes, leaving little room for the complexity of its stories. Cinema thus took root as a tool of observation more than as a space of expression. Africans were long denied the possibility of reclaiming this medium to tell their own stories, myths and realities.

This context was not without consequence. In the middle of the 20th century it gave rise to a generation of young African filmmakers driven by a clear ambition: to take back the word through the image. For these filmmakers, it was no longer only about filming Africa, but about filming themselves, telling stories from the inside, drawing on both modern film techniques and local cultural heritage.

The first sub-Saharan African film made by an African is Rasalama Maritiora, a documentary about Rafaravavy Rasalama, the first Malagasy Christian martyr. But as far as French-speaking Black Africa is concerned, a decisive milestone was set in 1953. That year, a twenty-two-year-old Guinean, Mamadou Touré, made Mouramani, légende noire.

Inspired by a Mandinka tale, the film tells the story of a friendship between a young man, sometimes called Sinimory depending on the region, and a puppy. Behind the apparent simplicity of the story, however, a founding gesture emerges. Mouramani does not merely transpose a legend to the screen: it asserts the possibility of an African fiction cinema, carried by an African gaze, rooted in orality, myths and local traditions. Through this film, cinema finally becomes a space where Africa can speak for itself.

Yet Mouramani, légende noire is today impossible to find. No known copy survives, neither in Guinean archives nor in French collections. The film seems to have vanished entirely. This absence, even more than the film itself, is striking. It reveals the fragility of African film memory and raises an essential question: what do we do with the founding works of our cultural history?

The disappearance of Mouramani is not only the loss of a film. It marks the erasure of a key moment, the moment when French-speaking Black African cinema asserted itself as a space of autonomous creation. It recalls the urgency of preserving national archives and protecting African films, too often threatened by oblivion, lack of resources or institutional indifference. For to lose these images is also to lose the trace of the stories that Africa tried, from its very first steps in cinema, to reclaim.

References:

La légende de Sinimory (IPAM Collection)
Mouramani (Africultures)
UNESCO.Safeguarding African film heritage.
Ramanantsoa, Philippe (dir.).Rasalama Maritiora. Madagascar, 1947. (Documentary on Rafaravavy Rasalama)
Haffner, Pierre.Essai sur les fondements du cinéma africain. Présence Africaine, 1978.
Rouch, Jean.La religion et la magie songhay. Presses Universitaires de France, 1960.