Why African stories are better told by foreigners – SA actor John Kani explains

On November 27, 2024, 7:49 PM

South African actor John Kani has suggested reasons why most foreign filmmakers are able to produce better movies that tell the African story than African filmmakers.

Speaking in an interview with Doreen Avio, he mentioned that the challenge of inadequate funding results in most African stories either being untold or poorly told.

“Why can’t we do a better Wakanda, or a better Black Panther? Why do people from another country tell African stories? This is because they have big budgets.

When we do movies, we have tiny budgets that cannot aid us in exploring the beauty of this continent or digging deeper into the different cultures that come together to create these unique people,” he said.

He therefore called on Africans with the financial resources to collectively help grow the African movie industry.

“We need the rich Africans to support the art, television, and film industry, then we can compete with other countries. On our terms, we don’t want to go there and be allocated in the foreign lands with categories of the Oscars and Grammys, but we compete on our little side with them. You can’t go to the main, because we are the main and the beginning of humanity; therefore, our work is critically important,” he added.

John Kani intimated that another way of improving the quality of movies produced in Africa is to create a learning space for the production process.

“What we will seek to do is to create a learning space. A young person in Ghana or Nigeria can take a script, develop it, and make it approved, acceptable, and easy to find within the moguls of Nollywood,” he said.

John Kani is known for portraying T’Chaka in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films Captain America: Civil War and Black Panther, Rafiki in The Lion King, and Colonel Ulenga in the Netflix films Murder Mystery and Murder Mystery 2.