Ethnic Stereotyping and Representation: The Northern Character

ETHNIC STEREOTYPING AND REPRESENTATION: The Northern Character

ETHNIC STEREOTYPING AND REPRESENTATION: TheNorthern CharacterBY FARA J. P. AWINDOR

ABSTRACT

During the colonial era cinematic images of Africa was dominated

by countless jungle epics from the Tarzan series to The African

Queen (1951) and the various adaptations of Rider Haggard’s

deeply racist 1885 novel, King Solomon’s mines. These cinematic

images effectively served to reinforce the Western vision of

Africa as a wild and savage place existing outside of history

(Murphy, 2000). When African filmmakers begun to emerge in the

early 1960’s they set out to counter these senseless images and

demeaning portrayal of Africans as objects to be scrutinized.

However, the pertinent question that arises is whether African

filmmakers have been able to redeem the African image? Or in the

process of redemption and reclaiming have they inadvertently or

knowingly reinforced the very negative perceptive vision of the

West. This paper explores some of these issues by looking at

ethnic stereotyping and representation in Ghanaian films. It


focusses on the people of Northern descent in Ghana where it

explores some of the social prejudices or programmed depictions

of the ‘Northerner’ in Ghanaian films that have long pervaded and

shaped our social philosophy. In fictional narratives the

filmmaker or writer has to his/her disposal countless

possibilities when characterizing, but most often images of some

ethnic groups or minorities are perniciously distorted and

misrepresented. Narratives that lend themselves to predictable

taxonomy and yearn for ‘positive imaging’ are neglected for cheap

entertainment, especially in dealing with subjects that tend to

involve a people’s worldview. These images are consistently

fed to a population where they are likely to develop false

assumptions and prejudiced attitudes, possibly discriminatory

behavior towards others (Chung, 2008). In this age of digital

technology, the popular media products have become the dominant

means by which most people learn about others. Our identity is

partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the

misrecognition of others, and so a person or a group of people

can suffer real damage, if the people or societies around them

mirrors back to them a confining or demeaning picture of


themselves. The paper draws examples from some notable Ghanaian

films and questions some of the avoidable narrative styles and

the blatant misuse of a powerful medium to subvert ethnic

minorities for commercial purposes, and calls for an awareness

implementation to counteract stereotyping in our society. The

paper suggests that to productively engage our creative energies

to any development, we must go beyond these derogatory

characterizations of ourselves and work towards a greater

national consciousness and national identity. For we have a much

greater work to do- to reverse the Western misrepresentation of

our continent, decolonize our mental perceptions and strive to

rediscover our cultural heritage and spiritual consciousness.


Stereotyping and representation in the cinema has been the

subject of many discussions in books, intellectual discourses,

papers and essays. The history of cinema has had a century-long

pattern of stereotypical representation, and to attempt to define

stereotyping within the perspective of cinema we need to have a

more precise understanding of what stereotyping is generally. But

like most social issues, an attempt at defining stereotyping is a

difficult one without having to go into other disciplinary and

inter-disciplinary fields of study. It is worth noting that for

all the decades of meaningful research done on stereotypes and

stereotyping, social scientists have yet to agree on a definitive

meaning for either term. The research and theorizing reflect

different approaches and interests, and consequently, as one

recent surveyor of the stereotyping literature commented, "A

single and unified concept of stereotype cannot be found”

(Ramirez-Berg, 2002). Nonetheless, I will make some general

descriptions of these terms for the purposes of this paper. A

stereotype is normally someone who represents a fixed set of


ideas about what a particular type of person is like, usually

incorrect and mostly used derogatively. On the flip side,

stereotyping for some cognitive psychologists, describes a value-

neutral psychological mechanism that creates categories and

enables people to manage the swirl of data presented to them from

their environment. This categorizing function was recognized in

1922 by Walter Lippmann, who first coined the term "stereotyping"

(see Ramirez-Berg, 2002), and to categorize in this way is not

"wrong," nor is it something that only bad people, or prejudiced

people do.

Ethnic stereotyping is a term that even when described loosely

one could still have a sense of what it is. By just combining the

two words one might fine a generic connotation that will explain

the term to mean a generalized representation of an ethnic group,

composed of what are thought to be typical characteristics of

members of the group. The stereotyping of ethnic people,

especially black people, and some particular minorities has been

exploited by so many films. The images used in these films are

perniciously distorted and thus tend to maintain a certain


preconceived idea. These ideas Woodward (2000) believes are

linked to certain cultural processes by which the majority and

dominant groups define, demean and disempower minorities and

subordinate groups. Most often preconception results from ideas

that are continually reinforced and perpetuated by the powerful

such as a broadcast medium, individuals or a dominant group over

a long period of time and this becomes entrenched in a society

who tend to thrive on it leaving their victims, so to speak,

wallow in their own complexes of low esteem.

In this paper I will not be reviewing or criticizing films or any

particular film. My purpose here will be to draw our attention to

some of the issues that are disquieting that seem to portray some

groups of people in this country as only suitable for certain

character roles and visual narratives. Such condescending

attitude can only epitomize the treatment of the colonized in the

cinema, which ‘have often been marred by a certain methodological

naiveté’ (Stam & Spencer, 1985).

The ravages of colonialism undoubtedly have left some indelible

damages in the continent of Africa. Although most African nations


have had their independence more than five decades ago, we are

still in many ways victims to a new form of colonialism, a kind

that Ghana’s first president, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, often referred

to as ‘neocolonialism’. Jerry Komia Domatob in his essay, “The

Challenge Before African Media” points out that the social,

religious, economic and cultural legacies handed down by the

imperial overlords still permeates all facets of sub-Saharan

African life (Domatob, 1988). There has been no attempt to

decolonize these Western concepts or better still stick to our

own concepts which are readily available in our indigenous

systems. Stuart Hall, as cited by Linda Smith in her book

“Decolonizing Methodologies” makes the point that the West is an

idea, or concept, a language for imagining a set of complex

stories, ideas, historical events and social relationships. Hall

suggests that the concept of the West functions in ways which (1)

allow ‘us’ to characterize and classify societies into categories,

(2) condense complex images of other societies through a system of

representation, (3) provide a standard model of comparison, and (4)

provide criteria of evaluation against which other societies can

be ranked (Smith, 1999:42-43) . It is not surprising that the


colonialist coded and characterized us through these procedures.

We are witnesses to the cinematic images of Africa during the

colonial era that was dominated by countless jungle epics from

the Tarzan series to The African Queen (1951) and the various

adaptations of Rider Haggard’s deeply racist 1885 novel, King

Solomon’s mines. These cinematic images effectively served to

reinforce the Western vision of Africa as a wild and savage place

existing outside of history (Murphy, 2000).

It is interesting to note that this colonialist representation

did not begin with the cinema: it is rooted in a vast colonial

intertext, a widely disseminated set of discursive practices.

Long before the first racist images appeared on the film screens

in Europe and North America, the process of colonialist image-

making, and resistance to that process, resonated through Western

literature (Stam & Spence. 1983). This however had serious

repercussions in the colonies they built. The Europeans managed

their colonies in such a way that provided avenues for the

colonized to rank themselves and classify others into categories.

Such was the case in the Gold Coast (Ghana) where the Gold Coast


was made up of the Colony, Ashanti and the Northern Territories,

generally called the protectorate. History tells us that it was a

deliberate attempt on the part of the colonialists to keep the

then Northern territories ignorant, inept and poor to feed the

South with inexhaustible labour, because it was claimed the

Asantes were averse to any systematic work (see Bening,1999). It

is on record that Sir Hodgson, who was Governor in 1899,

initiated this benign policy of neglect and saw to it that no

money was spent on development in the protectorate. Such an

attitude and other policies brought about untold consequences

which still live with us today despite efforts by various

governments to try to bridge the North-South gap through

education, economic development, and currently the Savanna

Accelerated Development Authority (SADA)[1]. This deliberate

denigration of the North has made the ethnic populations of the

North a subject of scorn and prejudice. The mass media,

especially the visual media has either deliberately or

‘unwittingly sutured into a colonists perspective’ and have

perpetrated and reinforced the ethnic stereotypical images. There

are some ethnic groups even in the Volta Region that have also


suffered such patronizing abuse in the mass media where their

accent of the English language has been subjected to constant

ridicule and comic reliefs. As if there exists a Ghanaian-English

accent which we all have to acquire.

Research has proved that when a certain media message is fed

consistently to a population, that message invariably becomes

cardinal or a construct in the minds of the viewers. Therefore

in constructing the ‘other’ filmmakers should be careful not to

reduce a population to a simple dichotomy such as us and them.

‘Dichotomization especially promotes the image of a mythical

Other who is not at all like “us.” Ultimately dichotomization

results in stigmatizing those who are less powerful. It provides

the grounds for those whole categories of people to become the

objects of contempt (Karen, Rosenblum and Travis, 2003). At this

juncture I will want to draw an example from Heritage Africa.[2]

In Kwaw Ansah’s Heritage Africa, the houseboys and watchmen have

northern names such as Atongo and Atiah, very familiar names in

our media landscape. Even though a film’s setting allows a

certain amount of realism, but looking at Kwaw’s Heritage,


hypothetically, if the name Atongo was swapped for kwame, will

the narrative have changed or to be more practical, could it be

that there was a possibility that a Kwame could have been a house

boy to a Colonial Governor?. “While posing legitimate questions

concerning narratives plausibility and (imitative) mimetic

accuracy, negative stereotypes and positive images, the emphasis

on realism has often betrayed an exaggerated faith in the

possibilities of (authenticity) verisimilitude in art in general

and the cinema in particular, avoiding the fact that films are

inevitably constructs, fabrications, representations”( Stam and

Spence, 1983).

I was supervising a student’s thesis and her topic was Ethnic

Representation in Ghanaian Cinema. Her interview with one notable

filmmaker in Ghana confirmed the ignorance and lack of

ideological grounding of some filmmakers that make them denigrate

some ethnic groups either deliberately or unintentionally. When

asked about the roles that characters play vis avis their

ethnicity, the filmmaker said, ‘why should I cast an Akan as a watchman


when a northerner is there?’ This of course has its antecedents, which

has been explained above, where Northerners could only be

employed in unskilled jobs. As artists and filmmakers we should

be sensitive to the ‘other’ and be more broad with our

methodology or narrative style and such “a comprehensive

methodology must pay attention to the mediations which intervene

between ‘reality’ and representation, its emphasis should be on

narrative structure, genre conventions, and cinematic style

rather than on perfect correctiness of representation or fidelity

to an original ‘real’ model or prototype. Our insistence on

positive images, “obscures the fact that ‘nice’ images might at

times be as pernicious as overtly degrading ones, providing a

bourgeois façade for paternalism, a more pervasive racism” or in

our particular case, tribalism.[3]

A research I conducted for the Directing Department at the

National Film and Television Institute, Ghana (NAFTI), revealed

certain startling results. The primary purpose of the research

was to enable teachers cope with the challenges in training

students from various ethnic and diverse social and cultural


orientations. The survey was conducted at NAFTI during four

intake sessions. The fresh candidates were given two sets of

information numbered one to six in two columns. The first column

was composed of ethnic names purposely selected to represent a

cross section of ethnic groups in the country, specifically the

North and South. The other information was character roles, which

they were to assign to the names in the first column. A short

scenario was also attached to the names to give them an

understanding of what they were supposed to do. The roles were;

Managing Director, Accountant, Businessman, Thief, Driver and

watchman. What we realized was that close to 98% of the

candidates gave the thief, watchman and Driver roles to the

Northern names, and the Managing Director, Businessman and

Accountant to the Akan names. The results captured for the four

intakes was invariably the same. From these results we realized

how deeply rooted or methodological flawed our young society have

been constructed. Even though there are some underlining

political and economic reasons for this trend, the biggest

culprit obviously is our visual and broadcast media. The

understanding of images by the population is based upon what they


see every day on the screens. Casting Atia or Atongo [4] as a

watchman might be the reality, and it is not wrong either to cast

any ethnic name as watchman or houseboy, but it is the derogation

that comes with it and the untold deep seething repercussive

havoc this is likely to bring to the Northern group. The same

will not necessarily apply to a name such as Kofi, Kwame or Appiah.

[5] The reasons for this are legion and the political and

economic antecedents described above are part of the equation to

this acceptable norm. The standard description given to the

Northern character is one who is often represented as poor,

irresponsible, deviant, ignorant, illiterate, and prone to

pervasive violence. I have always thought that for us to be

Ghanaians our ethnicity should be invisible. In conversations

with close friends, students and first time acquaintances I will

always be reminded of who I am. Not that I have an ethnic

complex, but once the question of identity comes up a spot light

is thrown on you. I suddenly realize I have become a

representative of my entire ethnic grouping including other

northern tribes and a subject to be actualized. To them all

Northerners are one and the same, irrespective of the diversity


of language, traditions and customs. I must know everything about

Northerners. Some try to make descent statements about

Northerners, probably to be on your side; statements like,

‘Northerners are hardworking and honest.’ The worse is when they begin

to give you examples of Northerners who served them well and kept

their homes, a remark intended to make you feel good. Sometimes

they simply just ask you an ignorant question, ‘Are you Muslim?

[6] As if being a Muslim is synonymous to being ‘Northern’, or

they might probably ask you a very impolite one, ‘why don’t you

have tribal marks? Especially when I tell them I am a Grunŋa

(Frafra) from the North. Again, as if Northerners should always

remain marked to be recognized. And lastly, a statement that I

personally feel insulting, ‘you don’t look like a Northerner’.

Maybe, that’s the reason Northerners should be marked so that

they don’t look or pass off like others. These unsavory

questioning is borne out of the ignorance that is permeating our

media products and our educational systems. Most Ghanaians,

especially in the Southern part of the country are just not

interested in knowing about the ‘other’. This might sound

fallacious and very generalized but the ignorance is just


overbearing. Our educational books are silent about the people

who make up the nation; their histories, geography, traditions

and culture. And if they do, it is nothing to write home about. I

have not seen or read any book that probably had said a dry warm

weather is more accommodating than a humid warm weather. But that

is respectively, the condition that exists between the North and

South. Going through the educational system in Ghana, you are

certain to learn about the West, our colonial masters and you

will definitely learn a great deal about the Akans, especially

the Ashanti Kingdom, its rulers, its geographical wealth and

colourful traditions. Nothing great or colourful is written about

the Northern tribes except their recurring conflicts and hot

weather, a geographical heritage they did not ask for, which at

the slightest opportunity is reinforced; dry hot savanna, very

low vegetation, low rainfall patterns, dry deserted landscape,

dry hot harmattan, dry hot winds and so on. You will be surprised

that most journalist and news readers mix up the names of the

towns and cities in the three Northern Regions. They don’t really

care whether Lawra is in Upper West Region or Bawku is in the

Upper-East Region. Once it is in the North that is enough.


Stereotyping arises as a result of one not having enough

information or in-depth knowledge of the people they are trying

to portray.

In Kwaw Ansah’s Heritage Africa, Bosomfield represented the perfect

product of colonial education who went through identity crisis

like most educated people today, but the film has a redeeming

quality for the central character that takes him through several

phases of change until he redeems himself. Likewise there are

conscious embedded themes that reveal conflicts between

traditional and western values where traditional values are

portrayed as having a certain superior quality. Heritage Africa’s

depiction of class is very clear visually. You will easily notice

the difference between the educated and the illiterate through

costuming. However in terms of dialogue both the literate and

illiterate speak good English except Bosomfield’s mother and

household who speak Fante (Akan), and of course, the northern

illiterate whose identity must remain real, whose character must

conform to the stereotype to make the plot work, so he speaks bad

and exaggerated accented English . These days you hardly find the


Northern character portrayed so overtly in Ghanaian movies, but

when they do it is refined to hide the conventional cliché.

However the Kumawood films, Chorkor Trotro, New Generations,the

Interplast water Advert and other advertisements or media

products blatantly distort the sensibilities of the Northern

character. Portrayal of the ‘Other’ in most Ghanaian films are

sometimes traded for cheap entertainment without considering the

subliminal references they carry. Mass media is a powerful factor

which influences our beliefs, attitudes, and the values we have

of ourselves. It is said that today’s mass media is just as

influential as religion was 500-600 years ago.

Stereotypes are usually employed to explain real or imaginary

differences due to race, gender, religion, age, ethnicity socio-

economic class, disability and occupation etc. Today’s youth are

constantly exposed to the images they see on TV, and from it they

form a sense of reality. From the mass media children are

learning about gender roles, and ethnic and racial

identification; the result of this self-socialization is that

children are learning from a pretentious and lopsided sense of


reality. This raises the question, as to how racial, ethnic, and

gender stereotyping in the mass media have on society today? The

media have the main influence on our notions of ethnic groups. In

order to counteract the stereotyping imposed upon us from the

mass media awareness has to be implemented in society at all

levels.

It is often said that African film was borne as a resistance to

her representation by the West. Ironically do we have to

misrepresent others to free ourselves from western

representation? Our first President Dr. Kwame Nkrumah after

independence sort to change the direction of our values and

attitudes to restore our lost image and this was done through

various policies for national unity. The educational boarding

school concept, the Arts Council, the Ghana Film Industry were

some of the approaches put in place to moderate ethnic

tendencies. So during the early 60’s ethnicity seemed to have

declined dramatically, but after the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah

the phenomena was revived. It was therefore not surprising that

in 1979 when the bid for presidency by Dr. Hilla Limann, a


Northerner under the Peoples National Party (PNP) contested

against Victor Owusu, an Asante on the ticket of the Popular

front Party (PFP) was met with disdain that eventually sparked a

barrage of unsavory allegations and insults against Limann and

his northern ethnicity. One such insult was that if Limann was

allowed to win the election Northerners would flock to the castle

(the seat of Government), and disfigure the walls and carpets

with kolanut and tobacco spitum (Bening, 1999;West

Africa,1979:1151). The PNP won the election and a report by a

correspondent of the West Africa Magazine gave a sharp indication

of the true level of national integration in Ghana as reflected

in the reactions to the prospect of the election of the first

Northerner as President of Ghana after twenty-two years of

political independence (Bening,1999):

“ One important element in the reception of the PNP by members of other

parties and supporters is based on class consciousness, which cuts across

the southern tribal, administrative and business elite. There have been so

many jokes and sarcastic comments about Limann based on the fact that

he is a northerner; that he had to have his teeth scrubbed of kolanut


stains. Some members of the southern middle class claim that their night

watchmen have stopped work following the PNP victory, and even that the

night soil carriers have left the work to the Fantes and Asantes…”

A riposte was made to the sentiments expressed above in West Africa

magazine by Joe Kubayanda. His response was that “ this was a

nationally dangerous proclivity towards ethnic intolerance, and

that there are still in Ghana some tribal rejects who nonetheless

project themselves not only as the restricted embodiments of

sectional images, but dangerously as the larger symbols of

divinely ordained leadership in an increasingly more complex

country” (West Africa, 1979:1426).

The feelings and thoughts stated above can only exist in a

country that does not respect multiculturalism or diversity. Most

Ghanaians will deny that this fact exists, because of the

seemingly integrated coexistence that is currently taking place

in Ghana. However, it is significant, and rightly so that there

has to be a conscious effort at creating a politics of

representation.


Charles Taylor (1994, in Gutman ed. 1994, p.25) has argued that

in contemporary politics a need arises for the recognition of

mostly minority or “subaltern” groups “in what is today called

the politics of ‘multiculturalism’. Taylor observes that

“…our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its

absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and

so a person or a group of people can suffer real

damage, real distortion, if the people or society

around them mirror back to them a confining or

demeaning or comtemptible picture of themselves.

Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm,

can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a

false, distorted, and reduced mode of being” (ibid,

p.25).

Taylor argues further that the consistent negative and

condescending portrayal of some cultures and identities as

inferior or “uncivilized” do have long-lasting effects on such

people, who tend to accept such inferior portrayal as fact and


may behave accordingly in relation to the dominant culture.

Taylor suggests that the first task in dealing with this

situation is for the minority or disadvantaged identities “to

purge themselves of this imposed and destructive identity”. As

Taylor (1994, in Gutman ed. 1994, p.149) has also pointed out,

“people have the right to be acknowledged publicly as what they

already really are.” It is not right for one culture or form of

identity to reject another and then impose itself on that other,

even if in subtle ways. Most African states, especially those

found in south of the Sahara where you are likely to see numerous

languages and countless dialects, dominant ethnic groups tend to

‘colonize’ the rest and impose on them their language and culture

and worse of all present themselves as superior. Examples can be

drawn from the following: Mossi in Burkina-Faso, the Berbers in

the Maghreb, Akan in Ghana, Zulu in South Africa, Shona in

Zimbabwe, Hutu in Burundi, Hausa and Yoruba in Nigeria, Fula in

Gambia and Guinea, Bambara in Mali.

In this era of digital technology, the current and popular media

products have become the dominant means by which most people


learn about others because as rightly posited by Taylor our identity is

partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others. We

should as filmmakers productively engage our creative energies to

developing a greater national consciousness and national

identity. We must go beyond the derogatory characterizations of

ourselves and work towards reversing the Western

misrepresentation of our continent, decolonizing our mental

perceptions and strive to rediscover our cultural heritage and

spiritual consciousness. This challenge is obligatory and

incontestable. It is very possible to make an ideological

relevant cinema and yet accomplish a balance between

entertainment and commerce. The challenge is to undertake a

sincere and radical re-examination of the media industry and

build values and attitudes that will make our ethnicity

invisible.

Notes

1. The Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) is an independent intervention for coordinating a comprehensive development agenda for the northern savannah ecological zone in Ghana comprising the three Northern regions of Ghana namely, Upper East, Upper West and the Northern Region, and stretches to


include districts contiguous to the North that are located north of Brong-Ahafo and north of the Volta region. Its main thrust isto promote sustainable development using the notion of a forestedand green north to catalyze climate change reversal and improve livelihoods of the most vulnerable citizens in the area.(http://mofa.gov.gh/site).

2. Heritage Africa (1989) is set in 1955 in the violent run-up to Ghanaian independence, this ambitious political drama follows theconversion of conscience of the first black District Commissioner, an anglicised Cambridgeman so dedicated to his duties that he refuses to attend his mortally ill son. Kwaw Ansahpresents a diffuse political analysis - with the complex pains and ironies of colonialism coming over powerfully.

3. Tribalism refers to a way of thinking or behaviour in which people are more loyal to their tribe than to their friends, social group, country or any other social group. It is defined as‘the state of being organized in, advocating for, a tribe or tribes.

4. Atia and Atongo are common names mostly used by people in the Upper-East Region. There are variations to the spelling and sometimes in pronunciation, such as Tia. Tia or Atia simply means aTree. These two names have been used derogatively in Ghana for comic reliefs.

5. Kofi, Kwame and Appiah are names commonly found in the southern part of Ghana.

6. Islam is wide spread in the Northern part of Ghana with Hausa as a common language and there’s a reason for this. The upper northern belt of West Africa during the 11th and 12th Century BC was dominated by the trans-Atlantic trade and Islamic proselytization. These activities moved south to most states south of the Sahara. Hausa was the common trading language, because of the numerous languages and dialects that existed in this area. Today pockets of these activities exist in Ghana and mostly found in the Zongo, where Hausa is the dominant language. These Zongos are inhabited by people mostly from the north of Ghana and other middle belt countries such as Burkina-Faso, Mali,Niger, Northern Nigeria and Mauritania. Therefore most Southern Ghanaians erroneously refer to all Northerners as Hausas and


Muslims. But the Ghana Statistical Data (GLSSS, 2006), has recorded more Christians than Muslims in the North.

References:

Bening, B. R.(1999). Ghana Regional Boundaries and National Integration. Ghana University Press.

Chung, S. K. (2008). An Exploration of the Issue of Stereotyping in the Artroom. Art Education, Vol.61. No. 3. Pp 22-24. NAEA

Karen E. Rosenblum and Toni C. Travis: The meaning of Difference 2003 3 ed.

Murphy, D. (2000). Africans Filming Africa: Questioning Theories of an Authentic African Cinema. Journal of African Cultural Studies, Vol. 13. No. 2 pp 239-249

Ramirez-Berg, C. (2002). Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion and Resistance. University of Texas Press.

Stam and Spence, L. (1983). Colonialism, Racism and Representation: An Introduction. Screen 24 (2): 2-20. Oxford Journals.

Smith, L. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books Ltd. NY.

Taylor, C. (1994). The Politics of Recognition – In Gutman, Amy (ed) – Multiculturalism – Princeton University Press.

West Africa Magazine, 2 July 1979, p 1151

West Africa Magazine, 6 August, 1979, p 1426

Woodward, K. (2000). Questioning Identity: Gender, Class and Identity. Open University Psychology Press. London: Routledge.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jim Fara Awindor is a Senior Lecturer at the National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI). He is a Fulbright Scholar and studied at NAFTI and Columbia College, Chicago for his MFA. He has contributed immensely to curricular and to the learning environment at NAFTI for two decades and currently teaches documentary filmmaking and developing story ideas for both fiction and non-fiction films. Fara has written several papers onvarious film topics, which includes, Ousman Sembene: The Auteur; African Cinema, a Social and Political Force; Transdisciplinary Methods in Documentary Filmmaking; Audio-Visual Archiving in Ghana. Currently at the final stages of his PhD research work in Endogenous Development with special interest in finding an interface between Biomedicine and African Traditional medicine.

Ethnic Stereotyping and Representation: The Northern Character

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