Dthaly thesis cna_niger

K3, School of Arts and Communication
Malmö University, Sweden
C I N E M A N U M É R I Q U E A M B U L A N T
A case study of the medium term impact on the audience
in Niger, West Africa.
Dominique Thaly
May 2007
Masters in Communication for Developpement
Supervisor: Florencia Enghel

REMERCIEMENTS
Ce projet n'a pu être possible que grâce à la collaboration et avec l'aide des équipes du
Cinéma Numérique ambulants de France, du Mali, du Bénin et du Niger. Leur engagement et
leur excellent travail ont fait que je n'ai eu aucun problème à accéder aux villages. Le CNA a
laissé un souvenir impérissable dans tous ces villages ce qui a beaucoup facilité ce projet. Je
voudrais tout particulièrement remercier Hadjara Thoguyéni, la directrice générale du CNA
Niger, pour m'avoir donné les documents relatifs à la première tournée du CNA au Niger ainsi
que les copies des films. Je voudrais aussi remercier Mariama Daouda, Issoufou Djinguiri
Thoguyéni et Moussa Ousmane pour m'avoir accompagnée lors du repérage.
Je voudrais aussi remercier les personnes suivantes sans qui ce projet n'aurait pas pu voir le
jour:
• Ado Saleh Mahamat, Halima Boubacar, Moussa Souleymane et Ousmane Infi pour leur
excellent travail d'enquête;
• M. Nouhou, le chef de village et toute sa famille pour leur chaleureux accueil et notre
hébergement;
• MM. Alberti et Petuelli, mes employeurs, pour leur patience et pour m'avoir donné le
temps libre nécessaire pour la finalisation de ce travail;
• Mes deux superviseurs, Florencia Enghel et Achille Kouawo, pour m'avoir aidée à éviter
bien des écueils;
• Et enfin tous les habitants et toutes les habitantes du village de Hondey Koira Tégui qui
ont bien voulu prendre le temps de répondre à nos questions parfois indiscrètes malgré
leur travail très prenant.
Ce mémoire est dédié à Mme Louise Hassane Rahinatou, comptable du CNA Niger, qui nous
a quittés en mai 2007. Paix à son âme.
A tous et toutes, merci.
NIAMEY, LE 20 MAI 2007

1
Contents
ABSTRACT............................................................................................................................................... 2
INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................................................... 3
The presentation of Niger ....................................................................................................................... 4
Cinema in Africa in general and in Niger in particular .......................................................................... 6
The project: The Cinéma Numérique ambulant...................................................................................... 9
OVERVIEW OF EXISTING RESEARCH AND THEORY.............................................................. 12
Existing research................................................................................................................................... 12
Discussion of theories........................................................................................................................... 16
The research question ........................................................................................................................... 23
METHODOLOGY AND FIELDWORK ............................................................................................. 23
Choosing the village ............................................................................................................................. 24
Getting ready for the field work............................................................................................................ 26
Carrying out the survey......................................................................................................................... 30
Focus groups ......................................................................................................................................... 31
Individual interviews ............................................................................................................................ 31
Limitations............................................................................................................................................ 32
FINDINGS AND RESULTS .................................................................................................................. 32
General information about the sample.................................................................................................. 32
Understanding and interpretation of the feature films .......................................................................... 36
Individual changes ................................................................................................................................ 38
Changes at the village level .................................................................................................................. 40
ANALYSIS .............................................................................................................................................. 42
Planned effects...................................................................................................................................... 43
Unplanned effects ................................................................................................................................. 44
CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................................... 45
LITERATURE ........................................................................................................................................ 50
APPENDIX.............................................................................................................................................. 54

2
ABSTRACT
Mobile cinema has a long tradition in Africa, and the Cinéma numérique Ambulant project in West
Africa is one of such latest attempt using this time modern and light technology to reach out to remote
rural communities in Africa. This French project exists since 2001 and it has national chapters in Benin,
Mali and Niger. Its primary objective is the screening of the African cinematographic patrimony in
African countries where there are almost no movie theaters anymore. It's secondary objective is the
screening of educational films. After now nearly 6 years of existence, it is time to take a look back to see
if and how the CNA has reached its objectives, especially on a medium to long term time span.
This research examines the impact in terms of planned and unplanned changes the Cinéma numérique
Ambulant has had in a particular village in Niger in order to know for the very first time in its young
history what it is the CNA project has reached, as compared to what it wants to reach. It is based on
different theories: audience theory, media effect theory, African film theory and communication for
development theory. As there seems to have been no research so far in this area, this work is also an
attempt to devise a theoretical framework for the analysis of the medium-term impact of mobile cinema.
The methodology used consisted of a case study based on a survey, focus groups and individual
interviews as well as informal conversations with resource persons. The results and analysis focus on
individual changes and changes at the village level as well as on the reached planned and unplanned
effects.
Of the 80% of the interviewees who had at least attended one screening of the CNA in this village,
86.2% said they learned something new through the CNA, 88.6% said that the films changed something
in their own life, and 91.8% said that they follow the pieces of advice given by the films. About 60% of
the respondents who saw at least one film said that they felt that there has been a positive change in their
village. Most of these changes are about changes in knowledge, attitude and behavior pertaining to the
topic dealt with in the educational films. Regarding African feature films, they seem to have been
principally highly appreciated for their entertainment value. There seems to have been little analysis of
them by the audience. Among the unplanned effects reached, the social effect of the gatherings around
the CNA events has, according to the respondents, contributed to a greater coherence within the village
and to collective action and forms of social change.
These results, although impressive, should be handled with care and should be crosschecked with other
similar case studies in order to get some generalizable results. Whereas the theoretical framework used
for this study seems to be adequate, the methodology used failed to yield conclusive results regarding
the awareness raising function of the audience through the African films: They might as well have had
little impact, but the methodology used could hardly allow for the drawing of such a conclusion.

3
INTRODUCTION
As part of the final examination of the master course "Communication for development" at Malmö
University in Sweden, the students are required to do a project that gives them "an opportunity to apply
and develop the knowledge you have gained from previous modules of the course".1
This project should
deal with "one or more of the central themes of Communication for Development; that is culture, media,
ICT, globalization, and international development cooperation".
Since I've been stationed in Niger, West Africa, for the last five years, and in my spare time, I have been
working with a project of mobile cinema for development, I thought that this would be a good
opportunity to explore the impact of this project on its intended target group, the rural population in
Niger. Niger is, according to the UNDP's Human Development Index the least developed country in the
world.2
Many organizations, be they governmental or non-governmental, are present on its soil to work
with the population to find ways forward. This developmental work also includes communication for
development, especially since the adoption by the Nigerien government of the document of national
policy of communication for development in 2003, which makes communication a compulsory element
of any development project3
. Among the many media available, film is and has always been, since the
colonial time, one of the favorite media of both the developmental organizations and people. Since the
1920's, films shown through mobile structures in Africa have had the reputation of having a great impact
on the population. According to Bourgault,4
Niger went even further as it was "the first Black African
national to launch a project designed to give children complete instruction through television". 'Télé-
Niger' was launched in 1964, long before the actual national TV station started (in 1979). By 1972, when
the project was terminated, it was used in 800 schools. The 'Télé-Niger' project was terminated not
because it was not successful: quite the contrary, it was shown that the pupils learned French much
better than their counterparts in 'regular' schools and there were no dropouts. It was terminated for
question of durability (no more fundings available) and for questions of quality, especially regarding the
scientific curricula,5
There has always been many mobile cinema projects throughout Africa, at the
beginning with heavy technology, making it hard to carry along, then, with the advent of digital
technology, projects such as the Cinéma Numérique Ambulant (CNA) project came along. This project
1
Project work handbook.
2
Human Development report 2006. Niger. Retrieved January 3, 2006, from
http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/countries/data_sheets/cty_ds_NER.html.
3
FAO (2003). La situation de la communication pour le développement au Niger (Etat des lieux). Tome 1 et 2. Collection
Politiques et stratégies de communication pour le développement. Rome: FAO.
4
Bourgault, L. M. (1995). Mass media in Sub-Saharan Africa. Boomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. P.
128.
5
FAO (2003). P. 25.

4
was started in 2001, and since then, it has been all over Benin, Niger and Mali, showing African feature
films and educational films to millions of people.6
This project deals with culture, media and of course the Third-World developmental discourse. It is now
one of the media used in Niger by organization in their communication and education work. By
measuring the impacts this project has had on the rural population in Niger compared to its intended
impact, I would like to concretely show what the project has achieved, where it has succeeded, where it
has failed, and where and how it could improve. This has become necessary as there is a growing
pressure from the organizations that use it or from donor organization for the CNA to show results and
impact of the it's work. This study should also lay one of the first stepping stones of a body of
knowledge about results and impact of the CNA. It would be interesting to compare it with other future
studies of the CNA in other countries but also of similar projects.
In this work, I have chosen to explain the context, including an overall presentation of Niger (main
economic and social figures), a brief introduction about cinema in Africa in general and Niger in
particular, and of the Cinema numérique ambulant project (CNA), then to discover what other research
has already been conducted on this topic and to elucidate the theoretical backdrop of the Cinema
numérique ambulant. There is surprisingly little research in the area of mobile cinema in Africa or
impact of film on African audience. We'll also see that it is at the crossroad of many theoretical currents,
and, because of space constraints, I will discuss only the most relevant of them. For example, the
technological aspect of this project has not been taken into consideration. The theoretical section will be
followed by a description of my methodology and the methods used to gather information in the field as
well as a description of the fieldwork itself. My findings will then be analyzed on the basis of the criteria
derived from the aforementioned theories, especially the media effect theory. This analysis and the
conclusion are of course quite specific to the particular case study, and not everything will be
generalizable, but this work should give an initial insight into the medium-term impact of the CNA
project, which until now has never been done. It could also serve as a basis for further comparative
studies. Last but not least, it could help improve the work of this project.
THE PRESENTATION OF NIGER
Niger is a semi-Sahelian, semi-desertic landlocked country of 1,267,000 square kilometers located in
West Africa bordering Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Nigeria, Chad and Libya. It has a population
of about 12.9 million people as of 2006.7
Most of this population is concentrated in the Southern
Sahelian part of the country, and two-thirds of the country is the Saharan desert. The main economic
activity of the population is related to agriculture (in 2006, it made out 46.7% of the Gross Domestic
6
The CNA website advertise 3 million people (www.c-n-a.org).
7
Institut National de la Statistique (INS) et Macro International Inc. (2007). Enquête Démographique et de Santé et à
Indicateurs Multiples du Niger 2006. Calverton, Maryland: INS et Macro International Inc. p. 3.

5
Product – GDP, whereas the secondary sector made 13.7% and the tertiary 39.6% of the GDP).8
There
are nine ethnic groups in Niger, but four of them don't make out more than 1% of the whole population.
The main ethnic groups are Haussa (55.4%), Djerma (21%), Touareg (9.3%), Peul (8.5%) and Kanouri-
Manga (4.7%).9
According to the 2006 Human Development index, Niger is the lowest level of human
development in the world10
. Although French is the official language, very few people actually master
this language, and most people speak one of the five main local languages in their daily life (see
footnote nr. 23). According to the statistics of the United Organizations Program for Development
(UNDP) of 2003, only 17% of the population lives in urban areas and the population growth rate is
among the highest in the world (8.4%) with around 7 to 8 children per women. The people in the
country are mostly Muslim (about 99% of the population)11
and 36% of the women live in a polygamous
household (with a polygamy rate, that is the proportion of polygamous men compared to the total
number of married men, of 22%).12
Less than 2% of the rural population has access to electricity and
90% of the rural population still get water from wells.13
The main issues faced by the country are
chronic food shortage due to climatic conditions (in 2005 the country experienced a food crisis), the lack
of health services (in 2000, there was one medical doctor per 33 102 inhabitants), lack of access to
sanitary water, a weak educational system (the literacy rate among adults is 28.7%), and a high
unemployment level (there are no statistics in this area). Nevertheless, the political situation is quite
stable,14
with a multiparty system in place since 1990, a democratically elected government, a national
assembly since 1999, and a decentralization process under way since 2004, when 265 municipalities
elected their councils. Still, the country heavily depends on development aid for its survival (for
example, in 2000, on a budget of 217.6 billions FCFA, the public development aid amounted to 110
billions FCFA).
Regarding the mass media, the first medium in terms of number of people reached is by far the radio,
followed by television and newspapers. About 47% of rural households declare owning a radio set,
whereas only 0.5% declare owning a television set.15
64% of the rural population has no access to any
media whatsoever and 35.1 of the same population listen at least once a week to the radio. Officially,
8
Institut National de la Statistique (2007). Comptes Economiques de la nation. Rapides 2006. Provisoires 2005. Définitifs
2003-2004. Niamey: INS niger. p. 16.
9
CIA (2007). The World Factbook – Niger. Retrieved on May 18th, 2007 from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-
world-factbook/niger.htm.
10
Human Development report 2006. Niger. Retrieved January 3, 2006, from
http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/countries/data_sheets/cty_ds_NER.html.
11
Institut National de la Statistique (INS) et Macro International Inc. (2007). P. 3.
12
13
14
The last coup was in 1999, when President Ibrahim Maïnassara Baré was killed at the airport. After a short transitory
period with the military, a civil president, Mamadou Tandja, was elected in the same year, and has been reelected in 2004.
There was a Tuareg rebellion at the beginning of the 90's (1990-1995) that seems to be resurging now, at the beginning of
2007.
15

6
there is one national radio which broadcast all over Niger, 16 private radios that focus mainly on rural
areas and about 66 community radios spread unevenly over the territory. There is one national television
with two channels and 4 private broadcasters. Due to the decaying of the transmitting facilities, only
people living in urban areas can actually get the television. Regarding the newspapers, there is only one
daily governmental newspaper, and about 10 private newspapers issued either weekly, bimonthly or
monthly. Except for one newspaper that is printed in Agadez,16
all others are printed in Niamey, and
only two or three make it out of Niamey to other main cities. Due to the high illiteracy rate, very few
people have access to the newspapers, and therefore they are hardly a means of mass communication:
the daily governmental newspaper is printed only in 1 000 copies for a population of over 11 millions.
To reach people, especially rural people is and remains a challenge for governmental and non-
governmental organizations, and they have to rely on proximity media such as group discussions, village
meetings, theater or video, using diverse supports like posters, leaflets, image boxes and so on. Film is
one such support, and it has a long history as an educational tool.
CINEMA IN AFRICA IN GENERAL AND IN NIGER IN PARTICULAR
The period when cinema was invented in 1895 coincides with the European colonial enterprise: Britain,
France, Portugal and Belgium had decided on their future engagement in Africa, agreeing both to end
slavery and facilitate free-market imperialism during the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. Very early,
the potential of cinema as a propaganda instrument was recognized: “Along with colonialist tendencies,
the original film […] became inextricably linked with ideology, thus promoting increased divergence
from reality” (Ukadike, 1994, p. 32). According to Thakway, “Bertholt Brecht was amongst the earliest
theoreticians to insist that the cinematic image was not an innocent photographic reproduction of reality,
but an ideological tool.”17
The propagandistic value of films in Europe as well as in Africa, especially in
the cause of colonialism, was particularly recognized by colonials: In 1897, Major A. Thys from
Belgium set up, together with important members of a pressure group for colonial matters, a society
called L’Optique Belge18
whose purpose was to use cinematography as a propaganda instrument for the
Belgian colonial cause: “En Europe, c’est probablement le milieu colonial qui introduisit le
cinémagographe dans la vaste gamme des moyens d’information et de propagande”19
(Convents, 1986,
p. 64).
16
This newspaper, 'Aïr Info' has just been banned at the beginning of May 2007 for supporting the resurging Tuareg
rebellion.
17
Thackway, M. (2003). Africa shoots back. Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Film. Oxford:
James Currey Ltd. Footnote nr. 5, p. 31.
18
Convents, G. (1986). Préhistoire du cinéma en Afrique. 1897-1918. A la recherché des images oubliées. Bruxelles:
Editions OCIC. P. 65.
19
“In Europe, colonialist were probably the ones who made cinematography one of the many propagandistic instruments.”
[my own translation).

7
Film screening in Africa started almost simultaneously with filmmaking in general: For example, “As
early as 1900, the Lumière brother’s L’Arroseur arrosé was […] first publicly screened in Dakar”.20
Missionaries seem to have also played in big part as they used films as part of their "conversion’ and
"civilizing" work (Ukadike, 1994, p. 31).
It seems that in Niger, cinema appeared relatively late: According to Aliou Ousseini, the audio-visual
director of the French-Nigerien Cultural Center in Niamey, silent cinema existed since 1930 and was
screened in schools in Niamey.21
The first movie theatre in Niger was built in 1939 in Zinder, the former
capital city of Niger, about 1,000 km east of Niamey, the current capital (Ousseini, 2000, p. 26).
Educational filmmaking also has a long tradition in Africa. In fact, as early as 1929, the first educational
film that was made on African soil was aimed at combating the plague and was produced in Nigeria
(Rouch, 1961, p. 112).22
Similarly, using mobile trucks as a way to show these films is even older;
According to Ukadike, “in 1905 mobile cinemas started showing animated cartoons in Dakar, Senegal,
and its suburbs” (Ukadike, 1994, p. 31). This tendency to use mobile cinema for an educational purpose
was used more often in English-speaking Africa than in French-speaking Africa:23
“In 1957, while the
Ivory Coast was economically comparable to its neighbor, Ghana, all it had to compare with the
20
Thackway, M. (2003). P. 7. The views differ here. In another source, it says: “The French African territories were
introduced to film activities as early as 1905, ten years after the invention of the Cinématographe, when L’arrivée d’un train
en gare de Ciotat and L’arroseur Arrosé by the Lumière Brothers were exhibited by a circus group in Dakar (Senegal).”
Diawara, M. (1992). African Cinema. Politics and culture. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. P. 104.
This opinion is confirmed in Ukadike, N. F. (1994). Black African Cinema. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press. P. 31.
21
Ousseini, A. (2000). La problématique de la distribution cinématographique au Niger. [electronic version]. Mémoire pour
l’obtention du diplôme du niveau supérieur de l’Institut de formation aux techniques de l’information et de la communication
(IFTIC). Not published. Niamey, Niger. P. 25.
22
Rouch, J. (1967). The situation and tendencies of the cinema in Africa. Part II [Electronic version]. Studies in the
Anthropology of visual communication, 112-121. Another source cited a film made by Dr. A. Paterson of the Kenya
Department of Medical and Sanitary Service who made Harley Street in the Bush, an educational film as part of a campaign
against the hookworm on the Kenya Coast. See Smyth, R. (1979). The Development of British Colonial Film Policy, 1927-
1939, with Special reference to East and Central Africa [electronic version]. The Journal of African History, 20 (3), 437-450.
P. 440.
23
The reference to “French speaking” Africa is very controversial. Taken literarily, it refers to African countries whose
official language or mother tongue is French. In the case of Africa, none of the countries have French as mother tongue. But
many adopted French, or the former colonial language as an official language in the course of the independence in the 1960s.
Therefore it is common to see in the literature references to Francophone, Lusophone or Anglophone African countries.
According to Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thingo’s (1986) cited by Thackway (2003, p. 2), it “demeans African languages and
encourages Africans to identify with the former colonial powers, reinforcing neo-colonial subordination.” It also gives the
wrong impression that in those countries, the former colonial language predominates, which is rarely the case. For example,
the official language in Niger is French, but according to Gordon (2005), only 6 000 people among the around 11 millions
inhabitants of Niger actually do master the French language. There are officially five vernacular (also called national)
languages in Niger: Haussa (five millions speakers), Zarma (2.1 millions), Fulbe (850,000), Tamajaq (720,000) and Kanuri
(410,000). (Gordon, R. G., Jr. (ed.), (2005). Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL
International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com/). In this particular paper however, the use of francophone Africa
or francophone African films is relevant in socio-cultural terms. As Thackway (2003, p. 2) writes, “References to
‘Francophone’ Africa […] reflect the real convergences in the region that arise from common linguistic ties, a shared legacy
of French colonization, and the inheritance of convergent political and economic structures and continuing (neo-colonial) ties
with France. The term ‘Francophone’ here reflects this common socio-political heritage, rather than suggesting the primacy
of France/French as a cultural reference in any form.”. Furthermore, as we will see later, in our case study, the choice of
features films is linked to the Agence Inter-gouvernementale de la Francophonie, which gives authority to our use of this
term.

8
Ghanaian fleet of 20 mobile trucks was one beat-up power wagon in almost unusable condition, and an
old 16mm projector belonging to the Cultural Center which was death to nay film projected through it.”
(Rouch, 1961, p. 114).
Not until after independence did filmmaking by Africans actually develop in French-speaking Africa.
The very first film made by an African on African soil (outside of North Africa, where the first full
length feature film was Ain el Ghezal (The Girl of Carthage), made in Tunisia in 1924 by Albert
Samana24
), was made in 1962 by Nigerien Moustapha Allasane and is called Aouré.25
Since then, many
names have reached international recognition, such as Sembène Ousmane (Senegal), Med Hondo
(Mauritania), Souleymane Cissé (Mali), Kwaw Ansah (Ghana), Idrissa Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso),
Gaston Kaboré (Burkina Faso), Safi Faye (Senegal), Djibril Diop Mambéty (Senegal), Henri Duparc
(Côte d’Ivoire), Dani Kouyaté (Burkina Faso), Abderrahmane Sissako (Mauritania), Cheick Oumar
Sissoko (Mali), Regina Fanta Nacro (Burkina Faso), or Jean-Marie Teno (Cameroon), to quote just a
few.
Niger has a special place in the history of African cinema, as the cinema there got a head start thanks to
Jean Rouch, a French engineer turned ethnographic filmmaker. Rouch and Serge Moati, a French
development expert, created a club called “Club culture et cinéma” in Niamey from which came the first
and to this day only big names of Nigerien cinema: Oumarou Ganda, Moustapha Alassane, Inoussa
Ousseini and Djingarey Maïga, the only Nigerien who is still trying to make 16mm films. Other names
like Moustapha Diop, Abdoua Kanta or Ramatou Keita can also be mentioned. Ramatou Keita is one of
the few Nigerien female filmmakers and she made a film in 2003 called Al’lèèssi : une actrice africaine
(Al’lèèssi: an African actress).
While there had been quite a few movie theaters in Niger in the 60s, 70s and 80s, in Niamey today only
one semi-functional commercial movie theater exists, the Jangorzo, which projects mostly videos from
Nigeria, Kung-Fu movies and, surprisingly, pornographic movies.26
The second place where one can
watch movies in Niamey and in Zinder (a city that is situated about 1,000 km East from Niamey) is the
French-Nigerien Cultural Center, where mostly French movies are screened and sometimes African
movies. But since it is the French cultural center, it attracts mostly expatriates or the elite in the Nigerien
society.
There have been a few, unfortunately not documented, attempts at using mobile cinema as a way to
show Nigerien feature and educational movies: Mustapha Alassane, one of most well-known
24
Vansina, J. (1998). Les Arts et la Société depuis 1935. In UNESCO, Histoire générale de l’Afrique. Vol. VIII. L’Afrique
depuis 1935. Edition abrégée. (pp. 366-394). Paris : Présence Africaine / Edicef / UNESCO. P. 389. Gugler, J. (2003).
African film. Re-Imagining a Continent. Oxford: James Currey Ltd. P. 2.
25
Ukadike, N. F. (1995). African films: A retrospective and a vision for the future. In FEPACI (Ed.), L’Afrique et le
Centenaire du Cinéma. Africa and the Centenary of Cinema. (pp. 47-68). Paris: Présence Africaine. P. 49.
26
Own observation from the posters hanging out at the Jangorzo movie theater in August 2006.

9
filmmakers27
, has gone throughout Niger to show movies with a truck28
. There seems also to have been
a mobile cinema truck at the Ministry of Information, probably financed thanks to the Japanese
cooperation, but it's now long gone.29
There are now two new phenomena since the 90's that competes
with movie theaters and has certainly led to their decay: the advent of video players and the nollywood
phenomenon. The video players are getting cheaper and cheaper, and the giant neighbour of Niger,
Nigiera, even manages to manufacture and sell video-CD players at even cheaper prices. In many
households, especially in the urban area, there is now a video player.30
In rural areas, there are more and
more video clubs operated by generators. They usually show pirated Karate and action movies, but also
Nigerian movies. Nigeria has become the third biggest movie producer in the world after Hollywood and
Bollywood, therefore this phenomenon is called Nollywood, Nigeria-Hollywod. Between 1992 and
2005, no less than 7 000 videos have been made in Nigeria.31
These videos are not of a good quality, but
there is a huge demand for them within Nigeria and also in neighboring country. Haussa video are very
appreciated in Niger, having contributed, according to some people, to behavior changes along Nigerian
ways of life.32
THE PROJECT: THE CINÉMA NUMÉRIQUE AMBULANT
The Cinéma Numérique Ambulant (CNA) project was set up by the French filmmaker Christian Lambert
and French film stage designer Laurence Vendroux from the suburbs of Paris. They had made a film in
Benin, and upon showing it there, they realized that there was a high demand for such screenings and so,
they started this project in 2001. Because more and more movie theatres are closing down in Africa, and
the new information technologies (lighter projectors, DVDs) offer solutions to the lack of movie
distribution infrastructure,33
the CNA project was set up with the objectives of distributing and diffusing
mainly African feature films in Africa, in areas where there are no infrastructure or organizations that
already accomplish this task. On its website, the CNA project (www.c-n-a.org) argues that it contributes
to the fight against poverty by giving everybody access to culture, creating a window to the world in a
festive atmosphere. Beside distributing these films, the CNA project takes part in informational and
educational campaigns together with governmental and non-governmental organizations on topics like
hygiene, health, HIV/AIDS prevention and malaria. As their website claims, "The CNA project is part of
27
An homage is being currently (May 2007) given to him at the French-Nigerien cultural center in Niamey, and he is a
special guest at the 60th
Cannes Festival(May 2007), where he is to receive the medal of the Legion of Honor.
28
Hennebelle, G. & C. Ruelle (2005). Mustapha Alassane. De la boîte en carton à l'ordinateur. In Ruelle, C. (ed.). Afriques
50. Singularités d'un cinéma pluriel. (pp. 193-196). Paris: l'Harmattan. P. 194.
29
Personal communication from Achille Kouawo, communicator and webmaster of the website clap-noir: www.clap-
noir.org.
30
Abdoulaye, I . D. (2005). Niger: les films nigérians au “banc des amoureux”. In P. Barrot (Ed.), Nollywood. Le phénomène
vidéo au Nigeria. (pp. 101-108). Paris : L’Harmattan.
31
Barrot, P. (Ed.), Nollywood. Le phénomène vidéo au Nigeria. Paris : L’Harmattan. P. 5.
32
Abdoulaye, I. D. (2005). P. 106.
33
Le CNA, une association, des objectifs (n.d.). Retrieved May 30, 2006, from http://www.c-n-a.org/cna.html

10
the communication for behavior change paradigm, aiming at development through a program of
animation and African educational and feature film screening toward rural people.”34
Among its strategies, the CNA project intends to: install screening units in Mali, Benin, and Niger; set
up working relationships with local ministries, donor organizations, NGOs, and private partners in order
to make the CNA units a permanent structure in each country; participate in poverty alleviation and rural
exodus by combating boredom and the lack of entertainment and information.35
As of December 2006, the CNA project has three chapters: one in Benin, with two units, one in Niger
(two units) and one in Mali (three units). All chapters have become non-profit associations under their
respective national laws and they are autonomous in their management. A unit is a completely equipped
car with a staff that can show movies all over the country autonomously. Each unit is composed of a
four-wheel-drive car, a projector, a DVD and VHS player, a silent generator, a 4x3 meter screen and a
sound system. Each unit has also a complete set of African feature and educational movies, either on
DVD or on VHS. The team consists of a female animator (she translates the films and she facilitates the
dialogue on educational topics) who is also the leader of the team, a driver, and a technician
projectionist. Each member of the team is trained so that he/she can take over anybody else's task.
Decisions are made collectively, but the female animator is the main person responsible, who, among
other duties, manages the money, supervises the organization, writes up projects and the project reports,
and meets with the authorities). The whole team has been thoroughly trained in the handling and
maintenance of the material, in the whole concept of the CNA project, as well as in the topics discussed
during the educational part. Each unit is located in a mid-size city that allows it to work around this city
and to have a place to store the material and the car. In Niger, both units are based in the capital city,
Niamey.
On the premise that most villages that receive the CNA project have never seen a movie, the CNA has
chosen to go to villages not just one time but ten times, in order for the inhabitants to get used to it and
to go beyond the novelty effect of this new technology. So it chooses ten villages in a 50 km perimeter
and visits each village ten times over a period of five months. The coming of the CNA truck becomes a
regular event and people from nearby villages have also the opportunity to come and watch the movies.
A CNA evening
A typical CNA evening has roughly four to five parts, depending on whether the CNA is working on its
own or on behalf of an organization:
34
[my own translation]. Le CNA, une association, des objectifs (n.d.). Retrieved May 30, 2006, from http://www.c-n-
a.org/cna.html
35
Le CNA, une association, des objectifs (n.d.). Retrieved May 30, 2006, from http://www.c-n-a.org/cna.html.

11
1st
part: After having installed everything, the shows starts at around 6:30 p.m. (depending on the time of
the year) with African music video clips in order for the people in the village to know that the CNA is
there.
2nd
part: Slapstick comedies like the films made by Buster Keaton are shown. This is a way to wait for
other people to arrive after the last prayer (usually 8 o’clock).
3rd
part: Screening of the educational short film(s). This part can take up to an hour, depending on how
many short films are shown.
4th
part (optional): The debate. During this time, people in the audience have the opportunity to speak
up, either by asking or answering a question or to make comments. Sometimes, a first educational film
is screened, then there is time for a debate, then a second one is screened, also followed by a debate.
This part can take between 30 and 60 minutes.
5th
part: Screening of the African feature film. A CNA evening ends at around 11 p.m. or midnight.
Finances
When the CNA project started, it received a subvention from the European Commission that enabled it
to install two units in Benin, one in Niger and one in Mali. With this subvention, the CNA Niger, which
actually started in July 2003, managed to function for a year. After that, it had to look for its own
financial resources. The CNA Niger doesn’t have any subvention whatsoever, so it sells its services to
national and international organizations and with the money saved from these projects, it continues to
function until the next project. Concretely, it carries out projects in the name of organizations like
UNICEF, UNFPA, Plan International, the National Program for the Fight against HIV/AIDS, the Comité
des Jeux de la Francophonie, the GTZ and so on. It charges those organizations for its services, and
when it doesn’t have a contract with one of them, it does its "regular" work running about 100-screening
campaigns in ten villages. By selling its services, the CNA project still tries to respect the most
fundamental objective, namely the showing of African movies. But some of its principles might not be
respected depending on the demand set by the donor organization. Sometimes, the CNA does shows in
urban settings and it rarely goes back ten times to the same village. But for the time being, it is the only
way the CNA has been able to survive, even to expand. Since it is a non-profit association, all the
earnings pay for the costs of operation or are put aside as a reserve for when the CNA works without any
contract. This strategy has so far paid off, as the CNA Niger was able to set up a second unit at the end
of 2005 and a third unit will be created by mid-July 2007. As of the end of 2006, it has made 3 whole
100-screening campaigns around Niamey and has done numerous shows for other organizations all over
Niger. As a whole, by the end of December 2006, the CNA Niger had done 723 screenings over 239
different sites and had entertained 1,017,790 spectators.

12
My role in the CNA Niger project
I got acquainted with this project when it was launched in 2003 in Niger. I was then working as the
coordinator of a theatre-for-development association. In July 2004, Jean-François Meyer, who was
managing the CNA Niger project for CNA France, asked me personally to take over, as he had to go
back to France. Since I was very interested in this project, I accepted to manage it on a voluntary basis
without getting paid for it. So I managed it directly as the representative of the CNA in Niger between
July 2004 and December 2005, succeeding in setting up a second unit in Niger. The work was becoming
too much for me, so I decided by January 2006 to withdraw from direct management, becoming a
technical adviser. Since then, I’ve been helping the teams raise funds, writing up projects, and visiting
potential partners. The local teams manage the day-to-day work and the money, and they carry out the
projects. My name appears nowhere anymore on any CNA document. I believe that I can quite
objectively do the present research on the CNA Niger, since I now have enough distance from it and I
have a sincere interest in better understanding its impact and offering a more accurate presentation of the
CNA to other partners.
OVERVIEW OF EXISTING RESEARCH AND THEORY
EXISTING RESEARCH
Film literacy
Surprisingly, there is little recent research on the impact of films on rural audiences in Africa in general.
It seems that during the colonial time, while films were purposefully used as propaganda instruments,
there were some attempts to study their impact. James McDonald Burns wrote a thesis on “Cinema and
Empire in colonial Zimbabwe” in 1998 that analyses the history of cinema in British Colonial Africa,
especially in Zimbabwe.36
According to Burns the British Empire started to study the influence of the
cinema on African audiences in the 1930s (Burns, 1998, p. 58). They wanted to “measure the abilities of
Africans to make sense of motion pictures” (Burns, 1998, p. 58), introducing the notion of film literacy.
By the Second World War, they came to the conclusion that the African audience was slower to
recognize and comprehend the cinematic image.37
Later, in 1951, a study of the impact of cinema on
36
Burns, J.M. (1998). Cinema and Empire in Colonial Zimbabwe. Diss. University of California, Santa Barbara: UMI
database.
37
Dr. William Sellers, a prominent colonial filmmaker who was one of the first filmmakers to make an educational film for
Africans in 1929 in Nigeria, had even elaborated a set of rules that would define the protocols of colonial films for the next
two decades. Parson37
calls the four rules: the chicken rule (“Africans do not see the whole screen, but notice a chicken in one
corner which distracts them from the main plot”); the mosquito rule (“Africans are confused by camera tricks and flashbacks,
thinking the close-up mosquito is a monster”); the familiarity rule (“Africans grasp only what is familiar to them, and are
confused by the unfamiliar because they cannot imagine any context not previously known to them”); and the laughter rule
(“African laugh at inappropriate moments if the films are not made by ‘experts’ who understand 'native psychology'”).

13
rural audiences was conducted by the British anthropologist P. Morton Williams in Nigeria.38
Burns
writes that Williams' "report refuted much of the prevailing orthodoxy of colonial cinema and provided a
stunning indictment of the Sellers’ method" (Burns, 2000, p. 206).
It rejected the idea that an illiterate audience could not properly see the image on screen and concluded
that the audience understood the language of cinema quite quickly, even the sophisticated techniques.39
Unfortunately, I could not get hold of this study or excerpts of this study.
African film audience in a colonial setting
Another anthropologist made a systematic survey of African audiences watching movies in a colonized
society. Hortense Powdermaker went to former Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia), to the Copperbelt,
an industrial area in the North of the country engaged in the mining, smelting and refining of copper.
She was there from September 1953 until June 195440
to study leisure activities as an index of social
change in the mining community. She studied the reaction of the audience to radio, movies, and
newspapers. For her audience research she used questionnaires, she had her assistants “move about in
the audience and recorded what people were saying” and she herself observed the reaction of the
moviegoers (Powdermaker, 1962, p. xx). Her conclusions about the reactions of the audience focus on
three issues: movie going as an individual or social experience; distinguishing between reality and
fiction; and the question of wrong interpretation of images due to the foreignness of the content. For
Powdermaker, the movie going experience was both individual and social:
The experience was individual through identification with the cowboy hero and in the expression of strong emotions,
particularly during the fighting when men (and women, too) flexed their muscles and shouted. […] The individual’s
enjoyment was heightened by the sharing of his feeling with a thousand or more others, who were shouting their
reactions. (Powdermaker, 1962, p. 260)
The audience believed in what the films showed, and if a character who had died in a previous film
reappeared in a later one, they felt cheated: “Yet, the concept of acting was slowly making its way. [...]
There were others who knew and sensed that films were ‘pretend’. [...] But for many in the movie
audience the film was either real or 'cheating'; in the latter case the European who made the film were
‘liars’.” (Powdermaker, 1962, p. 264)
Her study does not discuss the impact of films on the audience, besides measuring which kind of films
the audience liked best. Her survey showed that most of the audience (56%) liked action films like
cowboy and superhero films as well as cartoons better. The British news was liked by 9% of the
38
Williams, P. M. (1953). Cinema in Rural Nigeria: A Field Study of the Impact of Fundamental-Education Films on Rural
Audiences in Nigeria. Ibadan. Cited in Burns (1998). Pp. 80.
39
Williams, P.M. (1953), p. 81.
40
Powdermaker, H. (1962). Copper Town: Changing Africa. The human situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt. New York
and Evanston: Harper & Row, publishers. P. xiii.

14
audience. Unfortunately, she does not distinguish between the African Mirror and Northern Spotlight41
,
saying that as a whole 4% of the audience liked them (Powdermaker, 1962, p. 338), although from the
audience comments, we can detect a certain pride when they see pictures of people from other villages
or old traditions (Powdermaker, 1962, p. 256), whereas pictures of colonials provoke more disinterested
if not downright hateful comments: “Look, that short white man speaking to many white men? If you
see Europeans talking like that, they are talking about Federation. But they talk to themselves. No
Africans are there. We do not want Federation. Yes, you people there (shouting to those in the film) stop
talking about it. This is our country.” (Powdermaker, 1962, p. 270)
Westerns were also, according to Burns, a favorite of African audience: “Over the course of the 1930s
and 1940s Westerns had become the favorite films of audience throughout the region, becoming
synonymous with motion pictures for most African film-goers” (Burns, 1998, p. 196). Whereas so-
called African films, namely films made by Europeans for the colonial audience, were rejected:
African audiences on occasion objected vigorously and vocally to the representations of themselves and their culture or
to attempts by the government to promote unpopular policies through film. Their reaction, however, were frequently
subtle, and often characterized by discrete acts such as ironic comment, by laughing at ‘inappropriate’ moments, or
simply refusing to attend government shows. (Burns, 1998, p. 138)
A first CNA study
A recent and very interesting empirical study about the impact of mobile cinema on rural audiences in
Africa, focusing in particular on the Cinéma numérique ambulant project in Mali was written in 2005 by
a student in political sciences.42
In her unpublished thesis, Justine Berthau distinguishes between short
term and long term impacts. The long term impacts are, according to Berthau, “access to culture,
education, information, entertainment and public awareness campaign”; the short term impacts are the
“creation of an economic sector and assertion of a cultural identity at a national and international level”
(Berthau, 2005, p. 4). Through interviews, discussions, and observation, but also through letters written
by spectators and listening to debates, Justin Berthau drew conclusions about the impact of the CNA
project in Mali during a screening campaign.
Like Powdermaker, Berthau named the presence of the CNA as a social experience as one of the short
term impacts. CNA allows people to gather in a festive atmosphere, taking over the function story telling
at evening gatherings used to have: “Under such circumstances, cinema can be seen as a way to keep the
story telling tradition alive, and this for two reasons: first of all, it plays a similar social function and
second, at least regarding certain types of African films, it takes the same form and immortalizes their
41
The African Mirror was a African news in form of 'incidents of African life' and the Northern Spotlight was the Northern
Rhodesia News. The African Mirror was the only section that showed Africans…
42
Bertheau, J. (2005). Cinéma et développement. Le cas de la diffusion du cinema au Mali à travers l’exemple du Cinéma
Numérique Ambulant. [electronic version]. Mémoire pour l’obtention du DESS de développement, cooperation, action
humanitaire, Sorbonne, Paris. Not published.

15
content” (Berthau, 2005, p. 29).43
Another short term impact is giving people access to culture, with the
different functions this access carries along with it: it grants access to the outer world; it keeps old
traditions alive or even reminds people of forgotten ones; it gives an alternative, specifically African,
perspective on history; it valorizes the spectator’s own culture as it shows them how people in a similar
culture tackle their problems; and it fulfils the moral function stories used to have:
The filmed daily reality of the audience valorizes their culture, their social organizations and their norms. This has also
an important poverty alleviation function, as it gives the people the power to believe in their capacities to solve problems
and to keep their dignity. As the narrative mode corresponds to the psychological structure of the audience, it makes the
stories more understandable and contributes to the building of self-confidence. (Berthau, 2005, p. 37)
This access to culture and its corollaries of conscientization is particularly interesting, since this goes
beyond what previous projects used to do. Earlier projects indeed saw the necessity to make films with
local settings for the audience to better understand the films. But the intentions of the films were not
empowerment and conscientization but rather propaganda and the diffusion of colonial ideas. The third
short term impact of the CNA is, according to Berthau, the access to information and education. The
audience seems to appreciate getting information on different topics such as HIV/AIDS, child labour /
traffic, or education for girls — all topics of high relevance for the audience members. Speaking about
how much a village liked a short film about child labour, Berthau writes: “The reason why people were
so sensitive about this topic was because it was dealing with one of the major issues the village of
Woroni, which is located nearby the border to Ivory Coast, is facing.” Audiences also derive useful
information from feature films; audiences often respond by saying something like, “we like this movie
because it gave us a good piece of advice about…”
According to Berthau, the long term impacts of the project include the economic benefits of the
developmental potential of a cinema industry, but Berthau fails to show the link between the work of the
CNA and the potential of a profitable cinema industry. The second long term impact is, according to
Berthau, the affirmation of a cultural identity and of a collective memory. The fact that African countries
receive more images about other cultures and societies than about their own leads to a devalorization of
their own culture with concrete behaviors like the phenomenon of skin bleaching or identification with
white heroes (Berthau, 2005, p. 47). The third long term effect will be in the cinema and television
industry, since the project will encourage more diversity in TV and cinema, giving alternative
perspectives to the Western one, especially on the political level, as African filmmakers offer alternative
views on social, economic and cultural development. Again, Berthau fails to show the link between the
CNA and this impact.
43
All quotations from Berthau have been translated by myself.

16
DISCUSSION OF THEORIES
This project is about what the people who attend the CNA screenings derive from that experience. So,
what needs to be looked at is who these people are (the audience concept), how they experience the
shows and what they get out of them (audience theory and audience research) and what effects the films
are intended to have (African film theory and development theory) and what effect they actually have
(media effect theory).
The audience concept
The central actor of this study is the audience. The concept of audience, even if it seems quite simple at
first glance, is actually quite a complex term. Basically, audience is “the collective term for the
‘receivers’ in the simple sequential model of mass communication process (source, channel, message,
receiver, effect)” (McQuail, 2005, p. 396). But in fact, the concept of audience can be quite abstract like
for example the audience of television or radio. If one is to follow Nightingale’s typology of the
audience (audience as the people assembled, audience as the people addressed, audience as happening
and audience as hearing or audition), the closest type to the CNA experience will be the audience as the
people assembled, that is, the spectators.44
This type of audience is actually very close to the origins of
the audience concept as defined by McQuails as the Graeco-Roman audience, namely a public at a
theatrical or musical performance (McQuail, 2005, p. 397). Since the audience in this case is made of
inhabitants of a specific community made of one or several villages, this does reinforce the notion of
public, that is of a social group with at least one shared identifying characteristic, the shared space
(McQuail, 2005, p. 408).
The cinematic audience study has long been limited to Europe and North America where the cinematic
experience is very different from the African one. The cinema experience in Europe is lived in a
confined, dark, seated place, where each individual takes his pleasure without communicating with
anybody else in the theater. Cinema spectatorship traditionally makes use of psychoanalytic theories of
subjectivities and semiotics with the three processes identified by Christian Metz: identification,
voyeurism, and fetishism.45
But the African experience, or at least the Cinema numérique ambulant
experience of watching African films is completely different. It is a collective event, it operates in a
360° dimension (people can watch the movie from the back of the screen), many don’t sit down, people
talk during the films, looking at the picture without necessarily listening to the sound, and they
participate with the movie. While the Western spectator is in a “dream state, [a situation] underscored by
the darkened movie theatre, which makes acknowledgement of audience members, and discussion with
44
Nightingale, V. (2003). The cultural revolution in audience research in Valdivia A.N. (ed.). A Companion to Media
Studies. (pp. 360-81). Oxford: Blackwell. Cited in McQuail, D. (2005). McQuail’s Mass communication theory. 5th
Edition.
London: Sage Publications. P. 397.
45
Bignell, J. (1997). Media Semiotics: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press.P. 180.

17
them, difficult,”46
moviewatching in African countries is, as both Powdermaker and Berthau stressed
out, a social experience.
Recently, another kind of cinematic experience has been studied. Lakshmi Srinivas describes the active
audience in cinemas in India47
, which is closer to the African experience than the European experience.
Srinivas investigated cinematic reception in public settings using ethnographic methods of participant
observation and interviews in Bagalore in South India between 1996 and 1998. Her conclusions are
quite interesting, as she found that the audience was quite active in the reception of films, taking over
scenes of the film and reconstructing its meaning and impact. (Srinivas, 2002, p. 170):
Socializing in the theatre with friends and family takes priority over seeing the film. Rather than the attentive stillness of
audiences in the USA, in cinema theatres in India there is a continuous buzz of conversation and sounds of children
laughing or crying.[…] Active spectating constructs a particular relationship with the film – for instance, the film is not
accepted as an entirety or finished product. Four such practices adopted by audience members are identifiable as:
‘selective viewing’, ‘participatory’, and ‘performative viewing’, and what those in the film industry refer to as ‘repeat
viewing’.” (Srinivas, 2002, pp. 164-165)
But still, this Indian experience shows only the reaction of audience to films that the audience has
chosen to go to: it’s an audience who has the possibility of going to any movie theater and choosing any
movie it wants, and it’s mostly about entertaining movies. Although closer to the cinema numérique
ambulant experience, it lacks the 'community' aspect: The CNA shows are really public screenings for a
whole village or community whereas the type of screenings described by Srinivas remains a 'private'
venture, as the audience is made of individuals (clustered in friends and family members) who go to a
closed room to watch a specific movies.
Audience theory and audience research
This study of the CNA audience touches on the alternative tradition of audience theory and research, as
defined by McQuail. While traditional audience research has emphasized the media and was dominated
by the media industry, the alternative and critical perspective takes the side of the audience (McQuail,
2005, p. 402). In these alternative traditions of research, McQuail distinguishes between three
approaches. First is the structural tradition of audience measurement, which is still very much led by
the media industry and that is about obtaining reliable estimates about the size and the social-cultural
composition of the audience. Data gathered in this type of audience research are of a quantitative nature.
This type of data has been more or less systematically gathered by the CNA teams in order to show
results of their activities, including the number of spectators, their sex and their age group (children,
youths and adults men/women).
Second, the behaviourist tradition encompasses media effects and media uses. The media effects
model is about studying what effect an estimated powerful medium is having on a more or less passive
46
Press, A.L. (2001). Audiences [electronic version]. In International Encyclopaedia of the Social and Behavorial Sciences.
926-931. P. 929.
47
Srinivas, L. (2002). The active audience: spectatorship, social relations and the experience of cinema in India. In Media,
Culture & Society, ( 24), 155-173. London: Sage Publications.

18
audience who is exposed "to influence or impact, whether of a persuasive, learning or behavioural kind.”
(McQuail, 2005, p. 403). This model will be treated in the section on media effect theory. The media use
model is concerned with the audience’s choice of media and media content, and the audience is
considered to be more active. It is in this tradition that the use and gratification approach has been
developed. This model looks at how the audience will use a specific medium according to “perceived
satisfactions, needs, wishes or motives” (McQuail, 2005, p. 423). McQuail has developed a “scheme of
media-person interaction,” and he proposes four types of interactions (McQuail, 2005, p. 425): diversion
(escape from routine or problems, emotional release); personal relationships (companionship, social
utility); personal identity (self-reference, reality exploration, value reinforcement); and surveillance
(forms of information seeking). In the present case study, the audience might use the mobile cinema
media out of lack of alternatives to it, as media exposure in rural communities in Niger is low. So it will
be hard to draw a conclusion about whether people like cinema more than other media. They also have a
limited influence on media content. But this model might give clues about what they get out of it.
The third approach, the cultural tradition and reception analysis, which is also particularly relevant
for the issues raised by this case study. This approach “emphasizes media use as a reflection of a
particular social-cultural context and as a process of giving meaning to cultural products and experiences
in everyday life.” (McQuail, 2005, p. 403). It introduces the notion of media ethnography that,
according to the definition of Thomas Tufte, “uses ethnography to identify the role of the media –
whether as genre, flow or cultural form and expression – in everyday life.”48
Also, still in this tradition,
the notion of encoding and decoding the filmic text is particularly relevant. This introduces the role of
the receivers in the construction of meaning of the media received. Stuart Hall49
has developed a model
whereby there can be three hypothetical interpretative codes or positions for the reader of a text: 1) the
dominant or hegemonic reading of the text, in which the reader understands and accepts the text as
encoded by the authors (a preferred reading); 2) the negotiated reading whereby "the reader partly shares
the text's code and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but sometimes resists and modifies it in a way
which reflects their own position, experiences and interests" (Chandler, 2002, p. 192); and 3) the
oppositional or counter-hegemonic reading, in which the reader does understand the preferred reading,
but rejects it favoring an alternative frame of reference. For example, Liebes and Katz studied the way
members of different ethnic and religious groups interpreted the same episode of the American soap
opera Dallas and found significant differences in their respective readings: "For example, Israeli Arabs
and Russian immigrants were defensive about the US way of life pictured in the show, and attempted to
48
Tufte, T. (2000). Living with the rubbish queen. Telenovelas, Culture and Modernity in Brazil. Luton: University of Luton
Press. P. 26.
49
Cited in Chandler, D. (2002). Semiotics: The Basics. London: Routlege. P. 192.

19
shield their children from it, while others in cultures closer to that pictured in the show read it more as
nonthreatening, simple entertainment."50
Media effects
Media effects are “the consequences of what the mass media do, whether intended or not.” (McQuail,
2005, p. 465). In the area of media effect studies in general, the magic-bullet theory where the mass-
media was supposed to have a powerful influence on the audience, was superceded by the two-step flow
model, whereby opinion leaders become the target of the mass-media as they influence in their turn
other members of the audience more strongly than the media itself. Then this gave way to the limited
effect model, which “does not necessarily argue that mass media have no impact, this body of research
generally asserts that its effect is primarily to reinforce existing opinions.”51
The changes induced by
media can intended, unintended or minor. Change can be facilitated, what exists can be reinforced or
change can even be prevented (McQuail, 2005, p. 466). Media effects can be defined, according to
McQuail, along two dimensions: intentionality (planned effects versus unplanned effects) and the
dimension of time (short term versus long term effect). Since the CNA project is acting in the context of
development, and the research took three years after the passage of the CNA in the village, it will be
necessary to look at all types of effects, since the three years constitute a medium-length term. So short
term effects like propaganda, individual responses, media campaigns,52
news learning, framing,53
agenda setting, and long term effects like development diffusion, news diffusion, diffusion of
innovations and distribution of knowledge are among the planned effects that can be studied.
Short term effects like individual reaction, collective reaction, and policy effects as well as long
term effects like social control, socialization, event outcomes,54
reality defining and construction of
meaning, institutional change, displacement,55
cultural, and social change, and social integration
are the possible unplanned effects (McQuail, 2005, p. 469).
Since media effect is about measuring intended and non-intended effects, it is important to know what
the intention of the films shown by the CNA project are. The educational films shown by the CNA
50
Press, 2001, p. 928.
51
Press, 2001, p. 927.
52
The media campaign is "the situation in which a number of media are used in an organized way, to achieve a persuasive or
informational purpose with a chosen population" (McQuail, 2005, p. 467). In this case, it does not apply, since the CNA used
only one media, film, and this was not part of an organized campaign.
53
Framing refers, according to McQuail (2005, p. 467), "to the adoption by the audience of the same interpretative
frameworks and 'spin' used to contextualize news reports and event accounts." This probably won't be relevant in the present
case.
54
According to McQuail (p. 469), event outcomes refer “to the part played by media in conjunction with institutional forces
in the course and resolution of major ‘critical’ events. […] Examples could include revolution, major domestic political
upheavals and matters of war and peace. Less significant events, such as elections, could also figure there”. This is unlikely
to be the case here but it must be borne in mind as a possible effect.
55
Displacement refers to the consequences of allocating time to media use away from other pursuits, including social
participation. In the case of CNA, it should not appear as an impact, since the CNA was not in the village any more. What
could be there though is a greater interest in movies and maybe a growing pressure to have video clubs operated with a
generator.

20
project are embedded in the communication
for development paradigm, whereas a special
theory has been developed for African films.
Communication for development theory
The diffusion model of communication was the
first model to be developed by international
organizations in development projects.
According to Everett Rogers, one of the main
proponents of this model, “the role of
communication was (1) to transfer
technological innovations from development
agencies to their clients, and (2) to create an appetite for change though raising a ‘climate for
modernization’ among the members of the public.”56
Therefore, it focuses on knowledge transfer
leading to behaviour change.57
A mix of media is used, with mass media used for the diffusion of
information and inter-personal communication used to effect behaviour change. The expected outcome
is an effected change in knowledge, attitudes, and practices. Morris identifies two main practices of this
model: social marketing and entertainment education.
The participatory model of communication “stresses the importance of cultural identity of local
communities and of democratization and participation at all levels.” (Servaes, J. & Malikhao, P., 2002,
p. 121). Participatory communication has two goals. It seeks “to achieve some specific development end
[…] and also to empower communities via participation” (Morris, N., 2001, p. 12). The two trends in
this model include the Freirian approach that emphasizes dialogical communication of oppressed
groups, and the UNESCO approach which emphasizes access to the media, participation in the
production process of media as well as selfmanagement, judged to be the most advanced form of
participation (Servaes, J. & Malikhao, P., 2002, p. 127). The outcome identified with this model is
empowerment, community building, and social equity. Examples of participatory communication are
tools such as participatory action research or empowerment education.
The CNA approach, using the screening of educational films, is part of the entertainment-education
approach. According to Singhal and Rogers, entertainment-education is “the process of purposely
designing and implementing a media message to both entertain and educate, in order to increase
56
Rogers, E.M. (1986). Communication Technology: The New Media in Society. New York: The Free Press. Cited in
Servaes, J. & Malikhao, P. (2002). Development communication approaches in International Perspectives. In J. Servaes (ed.).
Approaches to Development Communication. Part 1 [electronic version]. (pp. 102-139). Paris: UNESCO. P. 114.
57
Morris, N. (2001). Bridging the Gap: An Examination of Diffusion and Participatory Approaches in Development
Communication. Online: http://webzone.k3.mah.se/projects/comdev04/frame/MorrisArticle.pdf, downloaded on the 4th
of
January 2005.
Figure 1: A typology of media effects (McQuail, 2005, p. 468)

21
audience knowledge about an educational issue, create favourable attitudes, and change overt
behavior.”58
So the educational films generally aim at changing knowledge, attitude and behavior of the
audience on a number of health related and development topics. But the context in which those films are
screened, the public screenings, makes it a participatory experience: The village inhabitants come
together to the show. They have the opportunity to comment on the films in public and to discuss about
them with their friends. The context in which certain educational films were made have also inbuilt
participatory elements: For example, the Scénario du Sahel series was made after a contest among the
youth of several West African countries to develop creative ideas for short films on HIV/AIDS.59
So the
scenarios are derived from the potential viewers’ daily lives as seen through the eyes of their peers.
African film theory
The CNA does not show only educational films, but also African feature films. This makes this project
quite interesting, because the theoretical background of those films is different from the one of
educational films. According to the Niamey Manifesto of African Film-Makers, which was drafted at the
First International Conference on Cinema Production in Africa in March 1982 in Niger, African cinema
aims to “assert the cultural identity of African peoples; be a means for international understandings; an
effective means of education and entertainment; an incentive for development, contributing to national
and regional policies.”60
African cinema emerged in the context of decolonization and liberation, and the
films responded to the call for national culture, “that is clearly situated at the heart of the quest to
reclaim identities and freedom.”61
Important theorists in this tradition include Franz Fanon and Amilcar
Cabral, in the vein of postcolonial studies. One of the first tasks of African cinema was to reclaim “the
right to represent one’s self rather than simply be represented” (Thakway, 2003, p. 41).
Several theorists have attempted to devise a theory of African cinema, such as Teshome H. Gabriel,
Ferid Boughedir, and Manthia Diawara.62
For this particular study, Boughedir's classifications of
African film is particularly relevant in terms of the impact of these films on their intended audience.
58
Singhal, A. & Rogers, E.M. (1999). Entertainment-education: A Communication Strategy for Social Change. Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Earlbaum. Cited in Morris, N. (2005). The diffusion and participatory models: a comparative analysis. In O.
Hemer, & T. Tufte (eds.), Media and Glocal change. Rethinking Communication for Development. (pp. 123-144). Buenos
Aires: CLASCO. P. 128.
59
Winskell, K. & D. Enger (2005). Young voices travel far: a case study of Scenarios from Africa. In Hemer O. & T. Tufte
(eds.). Media and Glocal change. Rethinking Communication for Development. (pp. 403-416). Buenos Aires: CLASCO.
60
Niamey Manifesto of African Film-Makers 1982 (1996). in I. Bakari & M. Cham (eds.). African experiences of cinema.
(pp. 27-30). London: British Film Institute. 1996. P. 27.
61
Thackway, M. (2003). P. 40.
62
Gabriel, T. H. (1989). Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films. In P. Williams and L. Chrisman (ed.). Colonial
discourse and post-colonial theory. (pp. 340-358). New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Diawara, M. (1992). African
cinema: Politics and Culture. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Boughedir, F. (2000). African Cinema and Ideology:
Tendencies and Evolution. In J. Givanni (ed.), Symbolic Narratives / African Cinema. Audience, Theory and the Moving
Image (pp. 109-121). London: British Film Institute.

22
Ferid Boughedir, a Tunisian critic and filmmaker and Professor of Cinema at the University of Tunis63
distinguishes five trends: the political (or socio-political) tendency, the moralist or moralizing
tendency, the "umbilical" tendency, the cultural tendency, and the commercial tendency64
. This
classification is interesting because it was made "according to the theoretical positions of their auteurs
and their effect on the public… their ultimate fonction."65
The socio-political tendency analyses reality
through a social, political, and economic lens. "The main effect sought is for the viewer to become
aware of the structures which condition and encourage him to demand change and improvement in his
condition" (Boughedir, 2000, p. 112). The moralist tendency focuses on the individual and compels him
or her to change his way of being: "The clash between old and new is placed on the level of moral
choice" (Boughedir, 2000, p. 112). This conservative trend proposes as a solution a refuge in the
tradition. The "umbilical" trend is centered on the director and his personal issues with his own identity.
He doesn't try to change anything in his society, be it at the collective or the individual level, but is in
search of his own identity. He "talks above all to himself rather than addressing his audience, wanting to
give priority to resolving a sometimes too "umbilical" personal problem which doesn't concern the
majority of people" (Boughedir, 2000, p. 113). The fourth trend is the cultural trend that presents a
discussion on tradition. It shows the tradition and culture without idealizing them showing the positive
and negative aspects. It is similar to the moralizing trend without the focus on the individual. In the
commercial trend, films are made with the Hollywood goal of financial gain, "to the detriment of
cultural or social enrichment" (Boughedir, 2000, p. 114). They want to entertain their audience, and if
sometimes they have a moralist or social message, they usually have a happy ending and the purpose
remains the amusement of the audience.
Table 1 classifies the categories according to their intention, the type of audience they are meant to
reach, and whether their purpose is meant to be short term or long term. This will be helpful for the
classification of the films shown by the CNA and for the analysis of the intended impact (intention) and
what has actually been reached.
Classification Denominations (according
to Boughedir)
Intention Type of
audience
Short
term
Long
term
Hollywood type
films
Commercial trend To entertain The
spectators
X
Umbilical trend Author's search for his own
identity
The author X
Historical films Cultural trend To show the positive and negative The people x
63
Givanni J. (2000) (ed.) Symbolic Narratives / African Cinema. Audience, Theory and the Moving Image. London: British
Film Institute. P. vi.
64
Boughedir, F. (2000).
65
Boughedir, F. (1982). The principal Tendencies of African Cinema." African Films: the Context of Production. Ed. Angela
Martin. London: British Film Institute. Cited in Zacks, S.A. (1995). The theoretical construction of African cinema. Research
in African Literatures, 26 (3), 6-12; (AN 9509184641). Retrieved September 1st
, 2006, from
http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=afh&an=9509184641

23
Classification Denominations (according
to Boughedir)
Intention Type of
audience
Short
term
Long
term
sides of both past and present
Individual change
films
Moralist tendency To encourage the individuals to
change in order to avoid the
clashes between old and new
Individuals x
Social change films Social political tendency To make their viewers aware of
the structures of society and
encourage him to demand change
The people x
Table 1: Classification of African films according to Boughedir
THE RESEARCH QUESTION
Since the films screened by the CNA are assumed to have social effects on their audience, what types of
change occur? Are there changes in knowledge, in frames of references (stories referred to when
thinking about one’s course of action or giving somebody else a piece of advice), in attitudes, opinions
and behavior at the individual and at the village level? Figure 2 shows the expected effects of both types
of films that will be investigated through the case study. Many effects are common to both types of films
(in black fonts). While the expected effects of educational films are more concrete (changes in
knowledge, attitude, behavior and practice), one change in African feature films relate to change in
awareness.
METHODOLOGY AND FIELDWORK
This project is a case study. A case study is a “method of studying elements of the social through
comprehensive description and analysis of a single situation or case.”66
This method will allow an in-
depth study of what the medium term impact of the CNA actually is in a village compared to what the
66
O’Leary, Z. (2004). Essential Guide to Doing Research. [electronic version]. London: Sage Publication. P. 115.
Figure 2: Classification of media effects of educational and feature films
Short term Long term
Planned effects
Propaganda
Individual
response
Media
campaign
News
learning
Distribution of
knowledge
Diffusion of
innovation
Entertainment
Individual change
Change in knowlege
Change in attitude
Change in practice
Change in awareness
intention of educational films
intention of African feature films
intention of both types of films

24
CNA and the people hiring its services say it is. But it will also reveals the goals and intentions of the
films shown by the CNA intend on having as a short term or long term impact. The case study format
allowed me to talk with the people in the village to discover together with them what the CNA changed
at the individual and social level in their community, if anything. It was an occasion for them to take the
time to think about it, three years after the passage of the CNA, to see what was good for them and what
was not so good. Of course, this audience's responses are not generalizable to all the villages, and case
studies are not supposed to be so (O’Leary, 2004, p. 115). The choice to undertake a case study was also
motivated by the fact that the time and the financial means I could allocate to this work were very
limited. So doing a case study is, in my opinion, a valid way to balance between a shortage of resources
and the goal of scientific objectivity. It allowed me to combine quantitative and qualitative research. I
did a random sampling of the population and conducted a face-to-face questionnaire that gave me
quantitative and qualitative data.
Informal interviews (both semi-structured and non-structured) were used at the initial stage, especially
with the animators of the CNA and the village authorities. Informal conversations were also conducted
with local people such as a male nurse and a former military man, who gave me background information
on the village. Focus group interviews were carried out by myself together with a translator to
complement the survey and concentrate on how certain organized groups already constituted as such (a
youth group called Fada and a women's group) perceive the impacts of the CNA. In order to
complement the survey and to get more complete and individual answers, I also did four individual
interviews with women. These two last tools concentrate more on the impact of educational and African
feature films as those groups (the women's group, the youth group and the women taken individually)
are mostly the target audience for these films.
CHOOSING THE VILLAGE
Scouting for the village
There are ten villages around the capital city in Niamey that fit the criteria of having had ten screenings
three years ago (in 2003). I chose one using the following criteria: It could not have access to electricity
or water sanitation; it must be hard to reach; it must not, at the time of the screening, ever had cinema
projections before (even preferably not even a video club operated by a generator); it must have limited
access to media; and finally, it had to accept my coming to them and agree to participate.
The reason I have applied those criteria is that I wanted to get a typical setting, considered by the CNA
as being the "ideal" village to receive the CNA. I wanted the village to have access to few media sources
to avoid the interference with the impact of other media. I then asked the female animator, Hadjara
Thoguyéni, who had put together the screening campaign three years ago, to name three villages that fit
the above criteria. Hadjara gave me the daily reports that were filled out when they did the campaign

25
three years ago. Before going to the village, I could already start to familiarize myself with what had
happened there.
Then, I visited all three of them together with a driver and a female translator. As is usual in African
villages, the gatekeepers are the village chiefs, and whenever one comes to a village, one has to go and
pay him a visit. I introduced myself and my team as a research team from the university for a project
aiming to measure the impact of the Cinema numérique Ambulant project. I was very careful not to give
the impression that we were from the CNA and I stated it also very clearly, so as not to raise the
expectation of an imminent return of the CNA. The objective of the visits was to get to know the
villages. In the introduction discourse I did in each village, I exposed among others the purpose of the
study. I asked permission to talk to resource persons. I also asked, in the eventuality that I would do the
research in their village, permission for my team and myself to ask questions to the inhabitants, and to
get accommodation.
Hondey Koira Tégui
I chose Hondey Koira Tégui because it fit most the above-mentioned criteria. In the last three years, one
of the other two villages, Kara Bédji had set up a community radio that also had a video club. This
video-club worked in a similar way as the CNA, in the sense that first part they show educational films
and everybody can come in for free. Then they show feature films, and you have to pay a fee. The
feature films are not African films, but rather American, Chinese, and Nigerian action videos. Regarding
the third village, Sansanne Haussa, the second criteria (being hard to reach) was not fulfilled, as it was
along the asphalt road. It also had electricity (although it had been recently installed). They also had
televisions and video-clubs before the CNA came (all operated with generators).
Hondey Koira Tégui is not as hard to reach as Kara Bédji, but the road is pretty bad and it takes a good
car to get there. This village, which is part of the municipality of Namaro, was created in 1953.67
There
is no electricity and no water sanitation. When I went there, the village chief, who had been there when
the CNA came three years ago, had told me that there was no video club. Later on, I realized that there is
one. It is operated with a generator and has also a two-part program. The first part is the showing of the
news from the national television and it is for free, and the second part shows videos, like in Kara Bédji,
and there is a fee for admission. The village has one pirate radio station managed by young people. It
broadcasts in the evening. They record radio drama from the national radio and re-broadcast it. They
also broadcast discussions among themselves. But right now, the radio doesn’t work due to failing
connections. The village is reachable by cell phones (as the other two villages), which was very
convenient to make appointments.
67
According to the information given by the brother of the head of the village, M. Nouhou.

26
The village has a health care centre operated by one male nurse. It has one primary school with three
classes, and one Medersa, a French-Arabian primary school, where the pupils are taught Koran along
with the regular curriculum. Since the village is located along the Niger river, the main activities of the
village are farming, gardening, stock breeding and fishing. The village has a compost project, and a
project that works to prevent the silting up of the Niger river (financed by the African Development
Bank).
GETTING READY FOR THE FIELD WORK
Before going to the village, I familiarized myself with the films they had watched and how the campaign
had gone. I took this information from the daily reports. Table 1 shows the number of spectators at each
screening, and what films were shown each evening. Every evening, they were shown a slapstick
comedy, two to three educational films and one African feature film. The campaign ran from August 7th
,
2003 until January 9th
, 2004. There were two cancellations due to rain. The audience grew steadily from
the first evening with 600 people to a peak of 970 people on the eighth evening, then went back down to
800 people on the last evening. These numbers are only an estimation and usually, about half of them
are children. Furthermore, people used to come from nearby villages.
Date
Number of
spectators
(estimation)
Slapstick 1st
educational film
2nd
educational
film
3rd
educational
film
African feature
film
7/08/03 Cancelled due to the rain
1 11/8/03 600 Malec forgeron Anna et Basil
Camp de
Thiaroye
2 18/8/03 650
Frigo et Baleine
(Buster Keaton)
Moussa Taximan (2) La vie est belle
2/9/03 Cancelled, due to the rain
3 17/9/03 700
Frigo déménageur
(Buster Keaton)
Educational song on
malaria
Moussa taximan 3 Bal poussière
4 2/10/03 700 Malec l'insaisissable Moussa Taximan 4 A vous la rue Le ballon d'or
5 21/10/03 900
La voisine de Malec
Souko (Buster
Keaton)
Moussa Taximan 5
Kokoa - L'enfant
et le caiman
(short feature
film)
Guimba
6 3/11/03 800 L'épouvantail Moussa Taximan 6
Faune en folie
(slapstick)
Kirikou
7 19/11/03 950 Buster Keaton Cas sévère de malaria Tilaï
8 8/12/03 970
Malec champion de
golf
Kokoa Moussa 1 Gito l'ingrat
9 22/12/03 900
Convict 13 (Buster
Keaton)
Moussa 7
Cahakomay ma
ifo hanse borose?
Wênd kûnni
10 9/1/04 800
9ème mari de
Léonore (Buster
Keaton)
Charlot boxeur
(slapstick)
Une volonté de fer
- la voix de la
raison
Anna et Bazil TGV
accumulated number of
spectators
7 970
Average number of
spectators
797

27
Date
Number of
spectators
(estimation)
Slapstick 1st
educational film
2nd
educational
film
3rd
educational
film
African feature
film
Median number of
spectator
700
Table 2 : The films watched by the inhabitants of Hondey Koira Tégui68
Watching the films
I made a list of the educational and feature films shown during this campaign and watched them in order
to be able to understand which film the interviewees would be talking about when I would interview
them.69
I watched the films less to analyze them, but instead wanted to identify the main and secondary
characters, the setting, and the plot. I determined what the main social messages of the films were, and I
made notes about what other scholars and the filmmakers themselves said the films intended to say,
especially about their classification as stated in the section on African film theory. Regarding the
educational films, I did a thematic classification.
HIV/AIDS Malaria Hygiene Family planning
Moussa Taximan (1-7)
Chanson de
sensibilisation sur le
paludisme
Anna et Basil
Cahakomay ma ifo hanse
borose?
Une volonté de fer – La voix de la
raison (scenarios du Sahel)
Cas sévère de malaria
Table 3 : Thematic classification of the educational films
From tables 2 and 3, we can see that on eight evenings, the audience was exposed to nine educational
films about HIV/AIDS, through the Moussa Taximan series (seven short films), or the Scénarios du
Sahel series (two short films). On two evenings, they were exposed to short films on malaria, on one
evening to a film about hygiene and on one evening to a film on family planning / birth control. All the
themes are related to health communication.
Topic Message
HIV/AIDS Only opportunistic sicknesses can be cured
Pregnant women should get tested.
Even if the father or the mother is HIV positive, they can have a healthy child, provided they are
monitored by a doctor.
Resisting having sexual intercourse with a girl is a matter of will.
One should get the HIV test before getting married.
If you're unfaithful, not only might you catch AIDS, but you will be a joke for your friends.
Get tested or use a condom. Do your test especially if you're pregnant. If you meet somebody
special, do your test and stay faithful.
Beware of traditional medicine, and there is no cure to HIV/AIDS
68
The sources for this table are the daily reports filled out by the animator after each screenings and kept at the CNA office in
Niger.
69
I did not take the slapstick comedies in consideration, as they are not part of this study.

28
Topic Message
If you don't know the serologic state of your companion, use a condom.
Know about the existence of female condom.
Don't be afraid to talk about sex with your children, as they might get the wrong information
elsewhere.
You can eat from the same dish as a HIV positive person.
Pregnant women should do the test.
The social obligation of a daughter to obey her father might keep her from acting in a
responsible way (in this case, she could not force her father to get her future husband to undergo
the HIV test).
Do not reject HIV positive people.
Malaria Go to the doctor if your child is sick or if you're sick and you're pregnant.
Use insecticide treated bed nets.
Hygiene Wash your hand before you eat.
Brush your teeth after every meal
Do not eat unprotected food
Family planning Women should wait at least until their child has stopped breastfeeding before conceiving another
child.
Pregnant women should go regularly to the doctors.
Pregnant women should not do hard work.
Table 4 : Messages of the educational films
The classification of the messages of the educational films shows that most messages focus mainly on
individual behavior change. Some messages relate to the social context (the social obligation for a
daughter to obey her father and the stigmatization of HIV positive people). The medical approach
perspective is dominant, and there is no space for doubting the ability of modern, Western medicine to
cure illnesses. Of course, traditional medicine, if not completely rejected (in one message, the possibility
of an alliance between modern and traditional medicine to find a cure to HIV/AIDS is mentioned),
Western medicine remains the most advocated medicine ("Beware of traditional medicine, there is no
cure to HIV/AIDS"). Table 5 show the African feature films seen by the audience in Hondey Koira
Tégui, some thematic keywords70
and their classification according to the African film theory.
Title of the film Keywords / Classification according to African film theory
Wênd Kuuni (The Gift of God)
traditional life in Africa, female emancipation, love
cultural tendency
Tilaï
female emancipation tradition, polygamy, incest
Cultural trend
Gito l'ingrat (Gito, the Ungrateful)
alienation, urban life, bi-racial relationships, homecoming, education, love
popular comedy / social realist narrative
Guimba, un tyran, un époque (Guimba the
Tyrant)
tyranny, tradition, witchcraft, women emancipation
Cultural trend
La vie est belle (Life is Rosy)
polygamy, urban life, witchcraft, women emancipation, poverty, elite life,
love
social realist narrative
70
These keywords have been generated through my own reading of the cinematic text and other scholar's reading.

29
Title of the film Keywords / Classification according to African film theory
Bal poussière (Dancing in the Dust)
Polygamy, women emancipation, tradition, education, love
popular comedy genre / social realist narrative (Boughedir)
Le ballon d'or (The Golden Ball)
Football, child abuse, fame, success
No classification found / Hollywood type of film / Commercial trend
TGV
Politics, traveling, encounters, witchcraft
No classification found / Hollywood type of film
Kirikou Witchcraft, water scarcity, childbearing, child education,
No classification found : African folktale, mythology
Le camp de Thiaroye Combative phase / colonial confrontation / social political tendency
Table 5 : Classification of the African feature films according to African film theory
According to this classification, five films belong to what I called in table 5 the commercial type of film
whose main purpose is to entertain the spectators, albeit with social messages like the consequences of
polygamy, female emancipation or poverty. Three films belong to the historical films category, whether
about the cultural trend or the return to the source. Their purpose is to show the positive and negative
sides of both past and present times and to show historical Africa. Only one film has been classified in
the third phase, the remembrance phase or the colonial confrontation phase, whose purpose is the
decolonization and total liberation of the people and to show the colonial confrontation between
Africans and colonizers.
One last film, Kirikou, falls out of the classification of African film theory, as it belongs to another
genre, African mythology and folktale. This cartoon has a particular history with the CNA project, as it
is the only film with international recognition, and that has been made specifically for a French or
Western audience that the CNA was allowed by the filmmaker himself, Michel Ocelot, to show in
Africa for free. Regarding the function of folktales, Anne Godin, in her thesis about illustrated folktales
in youth books in France, writes that folktales have first of all an entertaining function, but also a
pedagogical, political, sociological, initiatory and fantastic function:71
What is important for the storyteller is to induce reactions from the audience, to raise their awareness and to arouse
feelings. Only then will the wise man or the storyteller propose a solution to the problem, in order to make up for the
excesses or outpouring of feelings certain members of the audience might get themselves into. This then leads to a moral
of the story. (Godin, 2005, p. 19)72
Sampling
Since this is a case study, I chose to analyze the whole population of Koira Tégui over 15 years of age.
Statistics show that 54% of the population in Niger is under 15 years old.73
According to the 2003
survey the village had 2,407, inhabitants 54% of them children, so my size was of about 1,100 people.
According to a sample calculator,74
with a confidence level of 95% and a confidence interval of +/- 5%,
71
Godin, A. (2005). Les contes illustrés Jeunesse d'Afrique noire dans le paysage éditorial et culturel français. Mémoire à
l'Institut Universitaire de Technologie. René Descartes. Paris 5. Département Information et Communication. Option Métiers
du Livre. Paris. Online, retrieved May, 2nd
, 2007. P. 18.
72
My own translation.
73
74
Found at www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm.

30
I needed to interview about 285 persons. Since 52% of the population are women75
, I needed to
interview 148 women and 137 men. I chose to do a random sample, so the interviewers walked through
the village and interviewed people they met either on the street or at home in the compound.
CARRYING OUT THE SURVEY
To do the survey, I developed a questionnaire guide according to my research questions that were: 1)
Assess the attendance of the interviewee at the screening; 2) getting a general appreciation of the CNA
screenings; 3) understand whether they liked educational films or feature films better; 4) assess what the
audience learned through the educational films; 5) learn what feature films the audience liked most; 6)
Assess if the films have a role model the audience responds to; 7) ask if the audience has learned
something new; 8) measure change at the individual and the village level; 9) give the interviewee a
chance to say something he/she'd like to add.
This was developed in a four-page, twenty-six question survey with thirteen quantitative questions (with
either several levels or with multiple choice answers) and the rest being qualitative. All the quantitative
answers were nominal variables. In order not to make the survey too long, personal information gathered
about the interviewees was minimal: gender, age, educational level, mother tongue, and understanding
level of French. Before starting the survey, the interviewers were instructed to ask three questions, the
answer to which would determine whether the interviewee qualified for the survey or not: the age of the
person, whether the person knew the CNA, and whether the person was in the village at the time the
CNA was there. If the answer to the latter two questions was no, or if the person was under 15 years old,
they would not qualify.
The survey was carried out on a face-to-face basis in the village by four people, three men and one
woman. One man and one woman had been recruited from Niamey, and two men were recruited from
the village. The man from Niamey, Ado Saleh Mahamat, is a person I am used to working with and he
does theater for development work. He is used to being with the rural population and to doing
educational work. I've known him for a long time and I knew he could do good work. I appointed him
the team leader. The woman, Halima Boubacar, is a young person who has studied sociology at the
university and who had applied for an internship with the CNA project. I thought it would be a good
introduction to her internship for her to start with doing a survey about the impact of the CNA. I
recruited two male teachers in the village, so that this project would be a part of the village and so that
the villagers would have a sense of ownership of this study. I selected them during the pre-testing of the
questionnaire, in which five people from the village were also tested as interviewers. Each interviewer
had a follow-up sheet on which he/she would daily write down the number of people interviewed, and
75
Institut National de la Statistique (INS) et Macro International Inc. (2007). P. 17

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