Description
Studies on the ethnography of cinema in East Africa have identified a distinct audience reception practice that has been defined as cinema narration. The artists involved are known as veejays in Uganda and deejays in Kenya and Tanzania. These studies have tended to use traditional anthropological approaches that have taken two directions. First, communities of veejays/deejays and their audiences in East Africa have been studied as delineation of the audio accompaniment to silent cinema that were in vogue in the global north from around 1895 to the 1930s, the most elaborate of which was the Japanese Benji. The second approach has been through the well ingrained theoretical assumption that African audiences are first and foremost “oral audiences” of cinema. Falling back on a 2-year-long fieldwork on cinema narration in East Africa, this paper is guided by one research question, namely, to what extent is media ethnography applicable to the vastly transformed socio-cultural experience of electronic media in East Africa? The aim of this study is to investigate and collect thoughts of veejays/deejays and their audiences on their experiences in and with cinema narration and, using thematic analysis, arrive at their own definition of the practice, its position in local popular culture as well as its contribution to audience reception discourse.
