Editorial

African cinemas continue to be at the forefront of publicizing the underlying issues within the continent’s diverse communities. From cultural modernism, social and political discussions to those of morality, historiography, identity, folklore, gender and power. But more commendably, the questions that emerge from cinemas across different African countries offer new frameworks for understanding the epistemological diversity underway, which we may term ‘experimental ontology’. In this issue of the Journal of African Cinemas, we are inspired by the idea of a ‘scalene triangle’, not as an object, but as a mnemonic for the disequilibrium, chaos, lack of harmony or consistency, variations on contexts and experiences; and within these, the different possibilities which we morph into the idea of Africa as represented in cinemas. The academic debates on the issue, by scholars from South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, USA and China, represent a new effort to experiment with the African film to demonstrate the ‘unevenness’ of ideas about contemporary Africa as the truer possibility for grasping the continent’s cultural ontology. The authors tease out fragments of the emerging scalar consciousness, not about which ideas of Africa may be dominant, but about how the incoherent relationships across in situ experimental filmmaking, historiography, folklore, gender, feminism and queerness create a unique ‘whole’. We would like to single out the commentary arising from the industry-academic alliance coming together to deliberate on Africa through cinema as a further example of the multipronged nature of debates in this issue.