The films in this chapter address themes of futurities, digital technologies of the moving image, socio-cultural movements and cultural restitution. In an interview with the journalist Oulimata Gueye, the Kenyan writer and film director Wanuri Kahiu debates science fiction and whether the layered contemporary meanings and interpretations of Afrofuturism are a trend. Kahiu said she considers science fiction to be a longstanding feature of the African oral tradition, stating there have always been

Wanuri Kahiu, Pumzi, Kenya, 2009, 20 Minutes

In the short film Pumzi (meaning breath in Swahili), the Nairobi-based director imagines a future dystopian world and inadvertently ventures via science fiction into the lively genre of Afrofuturism. In the scenario, survivors of a World War Three, the ‘Water War’, live in a hermetic underground soci-ety. This future is a totalitarian, technocratic culture governed by military personnel. The protagonist, Asha (Kudzani Moswela), like all citizens, must wear tubes to recycle her bodily fluids in a context of extreme water scarcity and chooses to break free to the contaminated surface.

Asha, a scientifically trained conservator, works alone in an almost empty laboratory of a sanitized natural history museum. She is a member of a hierarchical and fully technocratic society, lodged far underground after a water war contaminated the surface. Water is so scarce in this quiet chthonian environment that she and her co-inhabitants use grafted-on tubing to recycle their bodily fluids through frequent exercise. When Asha receives an anonymous, unauthorized parcel containing a jar of soil with high humidity content and no radioactivity, she contacts her superior who appears remotely on a screen without uttering words. Communication is transmitted and monitored by an unknown process. Her superior does not believe Asha. She orders her to throw the sample away and to take her dream suppressant medication. Asha breaks the rules and plants a seed in the soil, waters it and observes it grow.

Most architects, urbanists, landscape architects and designers broadcast and disseminate their work by means of public speaking tours. In recent years, this practice has been augmented by recorded versions that can be streamed anytime and often are embedded into their company websites. Rwandan architect Christian Benimana, who leads the Africa Studio in the Boston-based architectural practice Mass Design, gave a talk to a large audience in Arusha, Tanzania, on August 2017, as part of the popular Ted Talk series.

In his talk, entitled ‘The Next Generation of Architects and Designers’, Benimana speaks of the African continent's urgent near-future needs to match the population growth, which he estimated would require 700,000,000 sustainable housing units, more than 300,000 schools and 85,000 medical clinics to be built by 2050. He translated those numbers into seven medical clinics, 25 schools and about 60,000 housing units per day. Benimana is optimistic that this massive task can be achieved sustainably by African architects who understand the landscape and the population's needs. He illustrates his talk with examples of his own work, such as a new prototype project, the Kasungu Maternity Village, attached to the Kasungu District Hospital in Malawi. Completed in 2015, it provides shelter and antenatal care for expectant mothers from their thirty-sixth week, which helps reduce maternity casualties.

He also presented the work of other architects in the Ted Talk, which includes a prototype project by the Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi, whose Amsterdam- and Lagos-based design and development practice NLÉ proposed the Makoko Floating School project of A-frame triangular structures on barges to serve as schools and community centres for Makoko's floating informal settlement in Lagos, and Diébédo Francis Kéré in Burkina Faso, who designed the Lycée Schorge secondary school (completed 2018) in Kougoudou, a region with a population of about 200,000. The school was built from locally sourced materials using local construction processes and involves and serves the local community.

In a 20-minute interview, Djibril Diop Mambéty (1945–1998) was asked how to make a movie, to which he responded with a monologue:

In this micro-performance, the film director Mambéty, who filmed the locations where he lived, places that he knew and frequented in Dakar, reveals an inner landscape of cinematic creation from the beginning, familiar and yet ex novo. This study of documentary and dramatic African film is viewed through cinematic portals and is intended to interpret the post-colonial environment and to anticipate the future; a range of examples of African film and video – documentary and fiction – present, evaluate and critique the transformation of urban and rural landscapes in Africa. Operating from differing points of view and at varying levels of investigation, these chapters demonstrate the development and professionalization of African cinema over the years, and also discuss the role cinema plays in highlighting these landscapes by juxta-posing the empirical data that the moving image provides, and in relation to the various domains within, that may not be similar but may adjoin and interconnect. The visual and aural nature of cinema and its photographic and documentary character also allow for the discussion and critique of contemporary issues in the urban and rural dynamic of development, from related subjects on climate change, such as deforestation, sustainability and biodiversity, water and food supply, inequity and women's rights, political instability, security and sovereignty.

These selected works comprise multiplatform digital video, cinema and streamed moving images, which, with an emphasis on documentaries, open the door to rethinking and eventually to the possibilities of fresh proposals responding to the situations portrayed. Cinematic media convey important visual information regarding the urban and rural built environments in Africa's numerous geographic zones and diverse territories that are projected for major evolution and development over the coming decades.

The films selected for this chapter manifest contemporary hybridities in Africa: Chinese, European, Soviet, North and South American influences; cultural critiques and theoretical influences; infrastructural and urban influences such as the interventions during the Soviet era, and now by China. The impact of Chinese investment on African infrastructure and, by extension, on social daily spaces and landscapes has been far-reaching, and it is the African continent's largest trading and debt partner. Examples of controversial repayment issues are rife, and China's threat to take over Entebbe International Airport in Uganda, for non-payment of a loan secured in 2015 from China's Exim Bank made headline news in mainstream newspapers such as Le Monde. Another news item in Le Monde in 2018 reported that the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa, whose building was constructed by the Chinese in 2012, had discovered that its IT system, also set up by the Chinese, had hidden espionage equipment that had been secretly transferring all the union's data to Shanghai. However the effects of the pandemic on the economy slowed the pace of Chinese investment activity.

Yuhi Amuli, A Taste of Our Land, Rwanda/Uganda, 2020, 70 Minutes

Set in a nameless African country, land ownership is the pivotal issue in this drama. Based on the director's own experiences working in a Chinese-run mine in Rwanda, the film underscores greed, corruption, land-grabbing and the continued exploitation of Indigenous people and workers by foreign mining companies.

The film opens with a quote from the novel Petals of Blood by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o:

Panoramic views of luxuriant rural forested landscapes, typical of the film's location, predominate in this drama and contrast firmly with shots of a desolate terrain ravaged by the indurate exploitation of land by a foreign mining company that has also created social havoc in the community.

Contemporary cinema remains highly engaged in migration narratives. The set of films in this chapter addresses demographic shifts, population growth, dispersion and migration scenarios within the African continent, between Africa and Europe and other nations and continents. Population mobility ranges from rural exodus to populations scattered by military conflict to climate change effects on territory, from drought to flooding to coastal erosion. Early films on migration tend to depict Europe as the desired destination. More recent films have been addressing African migration within the continent and beyond to other continents. In a context of ever-increasing reliance on extensive refugee camps, urbanists speculate that an impending intense rural urbanisation may take forms modelled after the various types of refugee camps.

Med Hondo, Soleil Ô, France/Mauritania, 1970, 98 Minutes

The director has transcribed his own experiences in a work of docufiction, in a process resembling autofiction, which, through the daily experiences and adventures of a Mauritanian in France and his responses and those of his acquaintances to French urban culture and mores, explores the complex range of French reactions to the mid-twentieth-century wave of African immigration to the nation.

The film derives much of its impact from the director's engagement with contemporary and radical theatre of the era. The opening sequences make use of satirical theatrical sketches, lampooning colonial regimes and religions, some set in studio black box contexts, others shot in open air. The arrival on the city scene of the main protagonist, Guadeloupan actor Robert Liensol, sets off an array of scenes that take place outside, on the streets and pavements of a French city, as he seeks white-collar employment as an accountant. In a variety of ways, he is rudely thrown out, brushed off and sent back into the street. This litany of rejections at a personal level opens onto scenes describing even more entrenched, systemic prejudice against the visible minority migrant, causing him to shed his illusions, as he realizes he has been misled by his initial identification with French culture.

Through contemporary African films and documentaries that draw attention to and explore a range of urban and rural infrastructures, this chapter addresses the phenomena of African urbanization and shifting landscapes due to modern mining territories of extraction, megaprojects, new cities, megacities, as well as unplanned cityscapes and informal settlements. In the face of climate change and, in some cases, to obtain more socio-political control, a range of global, private and public organizations have launched proposals for new kinds of cities and modes of urbanization, from top-down to grassroots. There is abundant literature regarding the rapid and imminent urbanization on the African continent and a recent economic report by the consultants McKinsey & Company predicts significant urban development everywhere on the continent, which at a macro scale, suggests that it would be well-advised to develop policies to encourage a more robust network of secondary cities.

At the other end of macro-scale economic growth is the parallel incremental growth of dense informal settlements, which lack a corresponding infrastructure. The compressed scales of informal settlements often become microcosmic worlds within a city, as in the case of Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, the largest of over one hundred informal settlements in Nairobi. Their issues of water supply and drainage are found in these kinds of settlements throughout Africa. This topic is introduced with a very short, succinct film, a micro-film that condenses the water and drainage concerns into a sound and image bite.

Idrissou Mora-Kpaï, Arlit: Deuxième Paris, Niger/France, 2004, 98 Minutes

The documentary Arlit: Deuxième Paris explores the environmental and health struggles resulting from uranium extraction in industrial sites near Arlit, a desert town in Niger. In interviews, the inhabitants of the region give first-hand accounts of an industrialized mineral resource extraction process which they perceive as incomprehensible, menacing and incongruous with their traditional way of life, one that has blighted their health and left indelible, destructive after-effects on the desert landscape, on Arlit and on other similarly exploited Tuareg towns in the region.

This selection of films covers a range of issues that address the urgent need for sustainable, ecological urban and landscape strategies, taking into account biomes, ecosystems, biodiversity, reforestation and the ever-important question of water scarcity or excess (flooding). Contemporary documentary film is engaged in advancing the case for environmental justice, demonstrating the complex interaction of environmental requirements with economic development, the role of women and traditional social structures.

Aïssa Maïga, Marcher sur l’eau (Above Water), France, 2021, 90 Minutes

Marcher sur l’eau is a full-length documentary that follows the seasons in the settlements of a formerly nomadic people obliged to settle near scarce and diminishing water sources, and demonstrates how providing water by drilling boreholes deep underground to reach the aquifer can impact their lives and help to mitigate the depredations of climate-change-induced desertification caused by drought, and eventually lead to the reintroduction of pastureland and vegetation in Niger.

The village of Tatiste is a settlement of semi-nomadic people in the Azawagh region, with Abalak as its nearest town and administrative centre. It is inhabited by the Fulani Wodaabi people, whose former traditional nomadic way of life is no longer feasible due to prolonged drought. The failure of several rainy seasons has obliged them to alter their roaming patterns. While the men leave on solo journeys to tend their herds, it is often groups of women who travel to other countries, such as Togo or the metropolis of Lagos in Nigeria, to find work in hairdressing or traditional medicine and remain away from their families for lengthy periods of time. In an interview with Olivier Barlet, Aïssa Maïga, the Malian-Senegalese director, notes that the Fulani Wodaabi people stay true to their character of somewhat liberated traditions when it comes to women. For example, it would not be customary to allow groups of Tuareg women to leave the family to seek work and then return.

The film's narrative centres around the life of 14-year-old Houlaye Yidimama, whose mother Jowol, her activist Aunt Souri, and another female relative are shown walking away from Tatiste in order to find work; Houlaye's father must also undertake long journeys away from the family to find pastures for his herd.

The transformations of African landscapes, from rural to urbanized spaces, have engaged African media producers since the emergence of the African film industry in the 1960s. This chapter selects key early films in African cinema by filmmakers recognized as groundbreaking innovators who contributed to the canon of early African cinema, as it developed along with independence movements. Many early productions address the urban and post-colonial contexts, when compared to later films on the rural and pre-colonial settlements and ways of life that aim to educate audiences to value and safeguard traditional African cultural values, and advocate traditional and often rural ideals. The directors were pathfinders in terms of their social vision, working somewhat in parallel, if not necessarily in accord, with the French New Wave and auteur theory.

Ousmane Sembène, Borom Sarret (The Wagoner, Le Charretier), Senegal, 1963, 20 Minutes

Borom Sarret visualizes a day in the life of a cart driver who risks entering the modernized, official districts of post-independence Dakar, where horse carts are forbidden and their drivers do not usually stray beyond the Indigenous, informal districts. The film represents the city as a site of possibility for some, while those like the wagoner continue to be marginalized on the outskirts of what is effectively a segregated zone of Dakar's Plateau – its exclusionary spaces functioning as obstacles in daily living. (See Figure 1.1.)

In the director's first acclaimed short film, Dakar's social layers unravel into restricted zones. The title, Borom Sarret, possibly derives from the French expression bonhomme charretier (the good wagoner). In under 20 minutes, the film compresses the principles of a socio-political critique that the body of Sembène's work aspired to: attention to fundamental post-colonial issues, critique of class exploitation, corruption, Eurocentric modernism, and attention to workers’ and women's issues are presented in a socialist realist mode made riveting by an unrelenting criticism that spares no one. As summarized by Amadou T. Fofana, the unequivocal narrative ‘contains all the thematic seeds’ of Sembène's oeuvre.

The film opens with views of the mosque and a prayer scene, and then the camera lens travels over the sandy roads and streets of an improvised settlement, as the wagon driver sets off to encounter those who need a ride but are not included in the cash economy and have no means to pay him.