More than any other continent, Africa is an imagined entity that has been apprehended largely through representations constructed from beyond its borders. It is not surprising, therefore, that images of Africa have become an important subject for critical study in recent years. Historians and other scholars working in the field have generally proceeded along one of two primary trajectories. The first, in an effort to understand visual paradigms of the past and the weight of accumulated stereotypes, examines images (filmic and otherwise) generated in the Western world, largely over the last 150 years. A second line of inquiry, though, looks at the more recent phenomenon of postcolonial African cinema itself, and the struggle to control the means of cinematic production in order to chart a future for a truly indigenous film industry.

One of the strengths of Black and White in Colour, edited by Vivian Bickford-Smith and Richard Mendelsohn, colleagues at the University of Cape Town's Department of Historical Studies with a longstanding interest in historical films on Africa, is that it serves to pull these two strands together. Rather than sustaining the conceptual distance between Western ‘fantasies’ of Africa and the cultural expressions of indigenous filmmakers, the editors have issued a useful text of collected essays that ably engages films from both worlds. While this approach might at first glance seem unmanageable due to the sheer volume of Western and non-Western cinematic productions on Africa, Bickford-Smith and Mendelsohn deftly provide a tighter focus by limiting the study in several ways.

First, the seventeen essays examine only dramatic, historical films produced during the four decades of the postcolonial era, such as Zulu (1964), Ceddo (1977), Noir et blancs en couleur (1977) – from which the book's title is derived – Flame (1996), Hotel Rwanda (2004) and many others. This strategy allows the individual authors to engage films with a fairly extensive temporal and geographic range, while eliminating colonial-era productions like Sanders of the River and The African Queen that have received treatment elsewhere.

Second, the films chosen for analysis are not meant to be exhaustive, but rather representative of many of the dominant themes of contemporary African historiography, including the nature of precolonial African cultures, the expansion of Islam, the slave trade, imperialism, colonialism, anti-colonial resistance, human rights abuses and genocide.

Finally, as one of the book's guiding themes, the editors requested that contributors incorporate, explicitly or implicitly, Robert Rosenstone's analysis of the role of dramatic film in evoking the historical past, particularly his contrast between ‘true invention’ (fictional films that effectively and honestly grapple with what he calls the ‘issues, ideas, data and arguments’ of current historiography even while engaging in creative adaptations of the past), and ‘false invention’ (fictional films that intentionally violate the general preponderance of historical evidence, for ideological or propagandistic purposes).

In 2002, Rosenstone was the keynote speaker at the University of Cape Town's First International African Film and History Conference, convened by Bickford-Smith and Mendelsohn, and thus he was a logical choice for the editors. Rosenstone has become something of a fixture in the field for what the editors call his ‘energetic defense’ of dramatic film, arguing that cinema, no less than written history, has the ability to ‘recount, explain, interpret and make meaning out of people and events in the past’.

While this may be true, it is less certain in some cases whether there is always a single, unitary body of historical evidence on a given subject by which we can readily determine whether a fictional film is, in fact, engaging in ‘true’ or ‘false’ invention. Similarly, to push Rosenstone's analysis in a slightly different direction, what do we do in the case of a filmmaker whose interpretation is compelling and original, but flies in the face of all existing literature on the subject? Moreover, a critique often levelled by grumbling historians is not simply that specific elements of a film are ‘incorrect’, but rather that the alterations made are merely gratuitous, and in fact do little to elucidate deeper processes of historical change. While Rosenstone has repeatedly taken historians to task for ‘misunderstanding’ the function of dramatic historical films, one might argue that the primary burden of justification remains with those filmmakers who alter historical ‘facts’ for purposes of narrative convenience.

Three minor notes about the book's layout: the text comes without illustrations; the bibliography, barely spanning three pages, is a bit short; and most egregiously, the hyphen in Bickford-Smith's name on the front cover is misplaced. Nevertheless, Black and White in Colour is a solid addition to the canon, and will prove useful for scholars studying the nuances of Western and non-Western reconstructions of African life. Moreover, the readability of the essays also makes this text a good choice for graduate students interested in the link between imperialism, images and identities.