Cinema and highlife in the Gold Coast: The Boy Kumasenu (1952)

The Boy Kumasenu (Sean Graham, Gold Coast, 1952) produced by the Gold Coast Film Unit during the 1950s, before independence in Ghana, had a public impact and success with local Ghanaian audiences that other colonial films never achieved. About a boy, Kumasenu, who moves from a rural village to the city of Accra, the film attempts to represent an African experience of modern life, using a local cast. This article explores the film’s popular reception by drawing on advertisements, newspaper coverage, reviews, awards it received, as well as contemporary personal correspondence and retrospective interviews with the filmmakers. It proposes that the film’s appeals lay in its inclusion of highlife, its fashions, styles and music, popular in the Gold Coast, alongside cinematic conventions of documentary, drama-documentary, neorealist film styles and the Hollywood gangster genre, already familiar to urban Ghanaian audiences. Furthermore, its theme of urban youth and citizenship evoked the concept of the “African Personality,” an identity that Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party would link with highlife music at independence. By tapping into the popularity of cinema and highlife, the film promoted nascent nationalist sentiments, and became associated with anti-colonialism and social change in the newly emerging independent Ghana

miR-34/449 control apical actin network formation during multiciliogenesis through small GTPase pathways

International audienceVertebrate multiciliated cells (MCCs) contribute to fluid propulsion in several biological processes. We previously showed that microRNAs of the miR-34/449 family trigger MCC differentiation by repressing cell cycle genes and the Notch pathway. Here, using human and Xenopus MCCs, we show that beyond this initial step, miR-34/449 later promote the assembly of an apical actin network, required for proper basal bodies anchoring. Identification of miR-34/449 targets related to small GTPase pathways led us to characterize R-Ras as a key regulator of this process. Protection of RRAS messenger RNA against miR-34/449 binding impairs actin cap formation and multiciliogenesis, despite a still active RhoA. We propose that miR-34/449 also promote relocalization of the actin binding protein Filamin-A, a known RRAS interactor, near basal bodies in MCCs. Our study illustrates the intricate role played by miR-34/449 in coordinating several steps of a complex differentiation programme by regulating distinct signalling pathways