'You don't tell a story for revenge'

Notions of vengeance are a cinematic staple in every continent except one. Mark Cousins unpicks the artistic tradition of African cinema, a culture where bearing witness is more important than retribution
Bamako:putting colonialism in the dock PR

Where would movies be without revenge? It's the driving force in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill and Death Proof. Reprisal is a dish served cold in Korean director Park Chan-wook's trilogy Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Gladiator kicked off the new millennium with Old Testament revenge. And it was the same further back. A 60s western like Once Upon a Time in the West is a retaliation opera. The Godfather trilogy is a rembrandtesque study in vengeance. The films of Don Siegel, Jean-Pierre Melville and Robert Siodmak are cratered with revenge.

The first commandment of martial arts, horror and gangster films is an eye for en eye. The desire to hurt someone who has hurt you is a primitive impulse - its moderation or otherwise is the stuff of the great religions - but in cinema, revenge has a movie shape. A false imprisonment or the murder of a relative sparks a quest for retribution that is full of suspense because its conclusion will be violent.

So how do we explain the fact that the continent of Africa - which, with all the iniquities of colonalism, has more reason to be vengeful than the Anglophone world - has hardly produced any films about getting its own back? Many wonderful movies have been made in Africa since the 1960s, yet its great movie makers aren't excited by the idea of filming people hunting down and hurting those who have hurt them. You'd expect centuries of oppression, humiliation and exploitation to have a caused a continent-wide psychological need for catharsis.

Take Daratt, the film made in Chad by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun in 2006 and released in the UK last summer. In it, a 16-year-old youth sets off to find and murder the man who killed his father. He takes a job in a bakery owned by the murderer and watches him every day, choosing his moment - a classic revenge situation. The film broods with suspense, but in the end the son only pretends to kill the assassin. Daratt is actually about the dissolution of the impulse to avenge. It looks at retaliation through a fresher lens than bravura western directors like Quentin Tarantino - for whom, in films like Kill Bill and Death Proof, revenge is the driving force.

But what, then, of Bamako, released in the UK in February, in which a trial is held in a courtyard in Mali's capital city? In it, African society is the plaintiff, while the world's financial institutions - and with them, the legacy of colonialism - are in the dock. Again, the stage is set for a revenge story - the film stares the evils of colonialism in the eye. But what unfolds is not vengeance, but witness bearing.

Further back in the 20th-century, the wounds of colonialism were still raw, and so cinematic retaliation might be both more expected, and more excusable. Yet revenge seldom appears. Even those films that seem to be about vengeance - or look as if they will depict it - aren't quite, and don't. Med Hondo's Sarraounia is one of the continent's angriest movies. Made in Burkina Faso and Mauritania in 1986, it is set in 1899 in the Sudan, amidst atrocities committed by French colonial soldiers against local tribes. But its story shows those tribes resisting the French attempts at domination, rather than avenging the onslaught.

The plot of the late Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene's masterpiece, Ceddo (1977) also looks like a springboard for retribution. In it, the Ceddo tribe is threatened both by physical slavery, and by the spiritual colonisation of Arab-Islam and Euro-Christianity. They must choose between insurrection or integration. But Sembene is too busy charting the implications of this choice to look at belated bloodletting.

Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's state-of-the-nation film The Sparrow (1972) climaxes with President Nasser's shock announcement of the loss of the Sinai peninsula during the Six Day War. The film's matriarch, Bahiyya, runs into the streets, yelling "We won't accept defeat!" Chahine's tracking shots of her are among the greatest moments in world cinema - passionately melodramatic and moving - yet his film stops short of vengeance.

I could go on, but the point is surely clear. So why is this ? As many of the great African films are co-funded by the French government, it's tempting to think that the former oppressors have baulked at financing films in which wrongdoing is avenged. Even if this were true, it would only be a partial explanation. More relevant is the fact that, with the exception of Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa, the continent's movies have been closer to what we in Europe think of as art cinema, and so have not been an expression of populist rage and resentment.

This is not to say that there's no fury in African movies - just that they aren't, on the whole, populist. Few film-makers in the world were more militant than Sembene and his brilliant Senegalese compatriot, Djibril Diop Mambety. But instead of that fury being embodied by lone avengers like Clint Eastwood or Jimmy Cagney, their angry people are likely to be women, in the case of Sembene; or the tone of their movies is likely to be wildly satirical, like Mambety's Touki Bouki (1973) or Hyenas (1992), or Sembene's hilarious Xala (1975). Women are just as capable of revenge as men, of course, but, in African cinema, the target of their ire is as likely to be obdurate black men as domineering white states. And the influence of griots - storytellers - on African film also stops them being clean-cut eye-for-an-eye movies . Since the mid 1970s, such griots have woven their way through African cinema, literally wandering on screen, interpreting events and turning fact into fable. This has the effect of taking out some of the plots' raw anger.

"You don't tell a story for revenge," Sembene once said, "but rather to understand your place in the world." African cinema is angry, but it is too busy working out how Africans should live with other Africans to deal with the matter of revenge. Vengeance is for people with time on their hands. African movies of the 1970s looked around at the rubble left by colonialism and said, OK, now that we've shaken them off, where do we go from here? In the 1980s, they turned the clock back and told stories of pre-colonial times, to ask, Where were we before they came? Can we pick up a thread from those times? With questions like these, vengeance just looks like a story for wusses.