This is a guest post by Marie-Paule Macdonald, author of African Cinema and Urbanism.
The African continent, estimated to contribute less than 3% to global emissions while experiencing fast-increasing population growth and corresponding urbanisation, faces the effects of climate change on human habitats. Its youthful population holds the potential to reshape many realms, launch new debates with multiple perspectives and generate different worldviews. The effects of climate change on settlements add unpredictable new challenges in the next decades, and the visual and sound data of contemporary moving images may play a role in engaging with these issues.
African Cinema and Urbanism brings together a selection of some three-dozen documentary, docufiction and dramatic, and recent and classic African films that address some of the issues challenging urban populations and urban, infrastructure and landscape designers in Africa’s current ongoing post-colonial context of urbanising transformation. Viewed through cinematic portals, these urban and rural issues anticipate the present and possible future changes of urban and rural landscapes in Africa. The visual and aural nature of cinema and its photographic and documentary character allow for the consideration of contemporary issues in spatial terms, to better grasp the urban and rural dynamic of development, from climate change–related subjects, such as deforestation, sustainability, coastal erosion and biodiversity, to timely water-related issues of drought and flooding, agriculture and food supply, to inequity and women’s rights, political instability, security and sovereignty.
In considering new directions and updated approaches in contemporary urban and rural development, in the face of rapid spontaneous urbanisation of landscapes in a context of climate change and housing need, visual and sound in streamed images augment information and may propel and generate options for landscapes and cities in Africa that are intrinsic to African culture via documentary and narrative cinema, incorporating multiple platforms.
The diverse works of film and streamed media in African Cinema and Urbanism also reference theories and practices from the disciplines of urbanism, architecture and African cinema studies to examine how African filmmakers and, by extension, urbanists, architects, designers, thinkers and artists bring attention to issues of urban precarity, climate change, survival and growth, and creativity on the continent. The theorist Felwine Sarr’s theories in his book Afrotopias posit that the continent is a ‘formidable site for creative potential’, and Sarr identifies the potential of the city as place of ‘production of meaning’. He points out in Habiter le monde (Living in the world) the statistics publicised on the Global Footprint network website that indicate that ‘humans use as much ecological resources as if we lived on 1.7 earths’.1 Sarr discusses the concept of living in multiple places; again in Habiter le monde he notes that ‘it is possible to be psychically and emotionally present in several places, maintaining and nourishing links that tether us to them’.2 Felwine Sarr and other experts feature in the film Restituer l’art africain: les fantômes de la colonisation (Returning Art to Africa, the Ghosts of Colonisation, 2021) directed by Laurent Védrine, debating the impact of the return of pillaged African sculpture to Benin, its country of origin.
Recent media devices factor into the influence of changing contemporary modes of viewing images, transforming communication, data-seeking and investigative research – cinema, once projected light illuminating a cinema screen, gravitated to the small, mobile light-emitting screens of laptops, phones and tablets. The technologies are specific to African regions: cell phones are reconfigured for customers’ needs and adapted to local languages from Hausa to Amharic, with priorities of affordability, switchable sim card ports, longer battery life, adaptability for speaker use and so on.3
Change in the built environment in many African countries is underway, and researchers in geography have identified sites of intense transformation with a focus on regions such as West Africa where concrete is used in rapidly urbanising landscapes, replacing traditional building materials even though innovative architects such as Berlin-based Burkinabé-German architect Diébédo Francis Kéré and Dakar-based Worofila (architects Nzinga Mboup and Nicolas Rondet) advocate for bioclimatic and ecological materials, and work with training builders in the use of organic, bio-responsible and bio-sourced material such as earthen brick, wood, bamboo and thatch.
There is a complex interaction of environmental themes with such issues as agroecology, economic development, women’s issues or traditional social structures. Often themes feature the crucial question of water scarcity or flooding. Drought has been a prime impetus for documentary films: some propose immediate solutions, such as drilling deep boreholes into aquifers. Filmed between 2018 and 2020, director Aïssa Maïga’s Marcher sur l’eau (Above Water, 2021) follows the seasons in formerly nomadic Fulani settlements and demonstrates drilling deep wells as an effective regional response to drought. The cinematography depicts magnificent landscapes and a way of life in disarray caused by lack of rain. The solution may eventually lead to reintroducing pastures and vegetation in Niger. The docufiction feature Aya (2021) directed by Simon Coulibaly Gillard highlights the effects of coastal erosion that has affected the now washed-away village of Lahou-Kpanda, Ivory Coast, tracking the displacement of villagers and the disrupted local coastal cultural practices and language of the Avikam people, due to the perpetual movement of coastal sediment.
Streamed media of weather events of 2024 underline unpredictable rain downpours, in places where little to no rainfall has been the norm for the last 50 years. The arid city of Agadez, a UNESCO heritage monument city, experienced rainfall that damaged historic earth buildings. The recent unusual rain intensity has prompted studies for a ‘greening’ of the Sahara, after palm trees were partly submerged after flooding at a lake next to the desert town of Merzouga in south-east Morocco.4 On an August morning, thirty houses washed away in the Senegalese coastal town of Bargny, 30 miles south of Dakar, and since October, excessive rainfall has caused destructive flooding affecting food security in Senegal. Similarly, excess rainfall has devastated agriculture in Northern Nigeria, as has the ‘rain bomb’ in Valencia, Spain. In these contexts, the visual and sound information furnished by screen imagery is material in motion that can be absorbed and analysed, and could lead to innovative ideas and possibilities for urban landscapes in Africa.
Endnotes
- Felwine Sarr, Habiter le monde, essai de politique relationnelle. Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier 2017. p. 17. See also: https://www.footprintnetwork.org/ Humans use as much ecological resources as if we lived on 1.7 Earths.
- Felwine Sarr, Habiter le monde. pp. 42–43.
- Austin Carr ‘How an Unknown Chinese Phonemaker Took Over Africa (Shenzhen Transsion Holding)’, Bloomberg, 16 September 2024. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-16/africa-s-shift-to-smartphones-is-creating-a-new-chinese-phone-giant
- Eromo Egbejule and agencies, ‘Dramatic images show the first floods in the Sahara in half a century’. The Guardian, 11 October 2024 (accessed 25 September 2024). https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/11/dramatic-images-show-the-first-floods-in-the-sahara-in-half-a-century. See also: Abbas Asamaan, ‘Au Sénégal, des inondations « sans précédent » dévastent les futures récoltes dans l’est du pays’, Le Monde, 5 November 2024.