Preservation policies for moving images made in Africa by Africans was, for a long time, not an issue for most librarians and archivists in Europe with an interest in Africa. They thought of ‘African moving images’ as moving images made on that continent (mostly by non Africans). But in recent years they have become aware that there is a (huge) amount of audiovisual production by Africans, and that makes a difference. For studying and understanding Africa, these are important sources. But it is not easy to find them, or to get to them and to know where and how they are preserved. This issue is of course linked to the state of archives and libraries on the African continent. It has to be said that for most people the definition of an African film is a film made by an African.

During my undergraduate years, a long time ago now, I cannot remember a single instance when any form of film was used for any purpose whatsoever in a history course at Cambridge University. Yet clearly film has become more acceptable to the historical academy as a whole in recent years. My own experience of engaging with film has been in three ways: with film as a form of historical evidence; through exploring the role film has played ‘in’ history, possibly by influencing opinions and policies; and, most controversially for historians at large, with analysing film as attempted history, as a form of history itself.

In 1954, an African welfare association, the African Association of Tanganyika, decided to create a new organisation, TANU, to campaign for selfgovernment. Their reasons for taking this step were many, but among the long list of criticisms of the colonial government documented at that first conference was one which related to films. According to the colonial government's report on the conference, among the “social topics” discussed was “the portrayal of Africans as savages in popular films”, and “a campaign to persuade people not to perform dances or allow themselves to be photographed by Europeans was proposed”.

The representation of Africa in general and African history in particular in film is not, then, a new concern. Created in a web of power relations, films are both shaped by and in turn serve to shape our understandings of the present and of the past.

The 20th Century saw a movement from the Industrial Revolution to what we could call the Communication Revolution, and perhaps a newer revolution in the past 20 years, which we could characterise as the Information Revolution.

The Communication Revolution began with the discovery of photography (and shortly thereafter, cinema) at the end of the 19th Century. The Lumiere brothers in France, Edward Muybridge in England, and Thomas Edison in America explored the possibilities of moving and still images. Rapid expansion of technology and opportunity saw the rise of revolutionary cinema in Russia, and the emergence of Hollywood - the beginnings of an industry that today engulfs our world with images.

Villon Films (http://www.villonfilms.com) is a former production company that is now largely devoted to the distribution and collection of films, videos and photos on a variety of subjects. Most of these are related to my work when I was more active in production, and consist mainly of social and political subjects ranging from 1960s Britain to the USA, Central America, the Middle East, and Africa. Of interest to current readers would be my African collection, which is based on my anti-apartheid work which began in 1975 and ended during the last years of the old regime. It includes some work done after the ending of apartheid, and extends to some other parts of Africa.