Fourth cinema and Kumawood’s revolutionary turn: a textual and ethnographic analysis of Jackson Bentum’s Captain Ibrahim Traoré: The Last African Hero (2025)

Vernacular African cinema has rarely ventured into contemporary political biography, a genre long familiar from Hollywood treatments of leaders such as Mandela and Gandhi. This paper presents a textual and ethnographic analysis of Captain Ibrahim Traoré: The Last African Hero (2025), a Ghanaian feature film marking a paradigmatic shift within Kumawood, the Akan-language video film industry centred on Kumasi. Using Fourth Cinema as both a cinematic wave and a theoretical framework, as conceived by Barclay (1990) and extended by later indigenous media scholars, the study examines how the film departs from Kumawood’s comedic and folkloric register to take up political biography and pan-African solidarity. The analysis combines close textual examination of narrative, dialogue, visual composition, editing and sound with participant observation, interviews with cast and crew, and fieldwork within the Kumawood production community. The findings show the film operating simultaneously as cultural artefact, political statement and consciousness-raising text, and inaugurating a current within Kumawood cinema that favours indigenous epistemology, anti-colonial narrative and pan-African solidarity over the industry’s customary entertainment formula.