For over a century, filmmakers in West and Central Africa have been making documentaries. This region included the colonies of French West and Equatorial Africa and now encompasses fourteen nations and nearly 200 million people. Documentarists in these countries have made important contributions not only to global cinema but also to our understanding of documentary itself, yet their work has gone largely ignored by scholars of both nonfiction film and African film.

Documentary Objectives works to correct this oversight by offering a rich history of documentary in this region from its beginnings in 1906 through the present. Using extensive archival research, author Rachel Gabara starts with an overview of French colonial documentary shot in sub-Saharan Africa and continues over fifty years of propaganda-infused travel, hunting, expedition, and ethnographic films. In the three decades following independence, directors worked to reclaim their cinematic image from their former colonizers by challenging outsider claims to authenticity and developing new models for nonfiction film. Finally, looking at material from the late 1980s and onward, Gabara examines a new generation of African documentarists whose work has gained greater attention from audiences and critics on the continent and internationally. Across a dynamic range of modes, from essays to observational films and from French to African languages, these documentarists continue to transform the simplistic language of realism on which colonial documentary relied.

By recounting a history of nonfiction film in which Europe and Africa were inextricably linked, Documentary Objectives brings together film traditions that have been both marginalized and kept apart, charting new ground in the disciplines of film studies, African studies, and French and francophone studies.