'The Cinema Is a Great Influence in the Life of the Modern Child': Instructional Cinema and Child Spectators in Colonial Kenya, 1926-196

Between 1926 and 1963, instructional cinema in colonial Kenya emerged as the most powerful instrument of "education" and persuasion, which the British colonial government utilized to propagate imperial ideas and draw African filmgoers into a complex web of Western convictions (instructional cinema were motion pictures addressing the problems affecting the everyday lives of the African people). Colonial filmmakers produced instructional films for African adult audiences, but they persuaded African children to attend the performances and used the occasion to advance a well-worn colonial logic purporting that these films influenced the children's lives in profound ways. This romanticized and cushy thinking undergirded instructional cinema production throughout colonial Kenya---and in other British colonies in Africa and beyond---and it constitutes a unidirectional approach informing studies of cinema in Africa.;My study considers a second approach, a bidirectional approach suggesting that African child spectators also influenced cinema production, especially aesthetically. Based on official records, oral data, and visual elements produced for African film consumers, the study contends that as much as instructional cinema influenced African child spectators, African children also influenced instructional cinema in many ways. This argument is predicated on the conviction that children attending instructional cinema shows expected entertainment, not didactic lessons espousing various elements of Europe's "civilizing mission"---a rationale for intervening and colonizing Africa, proposing to spread Western civilization to indigenous populations. Consequently, children rejected the films as "boring" and disrupted the performances through unconventional techniques that forced the colonial government to rethink how it produced cinema for its African viewers. The study employs the experience of African children as a vista through which to historicize colonial cinema, teasing out elements of continuity and change in an industry that, in many ways, determined the country's fate for many generations to come.;Viewed narrowly, the study uncovers social relationships and encounters involving African children and colonial officials; situates children at the center of the discourse informing colonialism in Africa; highlights children as actors in societal transformations taking place within the continent; maps the contours of everyday life in colonial Kenya through film; and contributes to history and the humanities by redressing the scarcity of scholarship investigating visual culture with power and authority. Broadly, however, the study exhorts us to critically (re-)evaluate socially engineered programs and notions of modernity embedded in certain elements informing progressive ideas.