Popular Ghanaian cinema and "African heritage"

This paper is about the Ghanaian popular cinema industry, which emerged at the end of the 1980s. Mirroring urban people's struggles, their concerns about occult forces, and their dreams about a modern way of life, these low budget movies, which are screened in regular cinemas, have become a major source of popular entertainment in the country's urban south. By contrast, the intellectual elites in general and established film makers in particular are highly critical of these products because of the disrespect which these films show with regard to African culture. This paper addresses this conflict by focusing on perceived differences between high art and popular cinema. Comparing Kwa Ansah's internationally much-acclaimed Heritage Africa with popular products such as Nana King's Beast Within and A. Hackman's Not Without, it is argued that these two types of films approach different audiences with different problems. While the former are concerned with the emancipation of the colonized intellectual and seek to restore authentic cultural roots, the latter focus on the intricacies of ordinary people's lives in the city without drawing any rigid opposition between African tradition and European modernity; here modernity is the context of everyday life.