“Cameroonian Women in Motion”: At Shoe Shop Festival, Braamfontein, South Africa

“In many narratives of the nation, it is women who are symbolically the nation, the bearer of tradition and culture... she is the unsung who makes the song.”
Teshome Gabriel (2000)

“Cameroonian Women in Motion” is a mosaic portrait of women engaging in a variety activities and events. It uses the documentary mode to visualise factual representations of women’s images in different social, economic and cultural contexts. This documentary is part of the evolution of a body of research-as-practice, mainstreaming African women’s images and lived experiences by documenting their stories and experiences and thus, increasing their visibility. It is an attempt to embed in digital form some of the social realities of women’s experiences in Cameroon.

Research Imperatives

The film is part of a larger project, the broad objective of which is to present expanded cultural representations of African women by offering images that define them as agents of their actions. A specific aim is to document women’s lives outside of defined spaces of the ‘home’. The research proceeds by using documentary film as a mode of examining the African woman in contemporary life - outside of the home, pre-occupied with things other than children, away from her husband, and thus evoking other dimensions of women’s lived experiences and realities in her community and society at large.