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.

This chapter examines the intersections between #MeToo, crime fiction, and LGBTQ+ themes. LGBTQ+ representation is a key issue in crime fiction in the age of #MeToo. However, as Jess Ison and others state, queer communities have been marginalized from the #MeToo debates which have focused on cis gender white women. As Tarana Burke points out, “[w]omen of color, transwomen, queer people—our stories get pushed aside,” whereas the #MeToo movement must be for all genders and colors, and gender and sexuality outside white cis heteronormativity must receive more attention. The #MeToo movement is working to rectify this, by thinking intersectionally and inclusively—what Guadalupe-Diaz and Whalley call “queering #MeToo.” My book argues that LGBTQ+ perspectives are central to the #MeToo movement and fourth-wave feminism, and that these perspectives are bringing crucial innovations to crime fiction in the form of positive and more complex representation. The final two chapters of this book investigate LGBTQ+ representation in the genre, specifically in relation to #MeToo themes. Contemporary crime fiction examines how LGBTQ+ people are the victims of sexual crime or homophobic or transphobic crime, using plots and characters to portray and expose these forms of crime. Furthermore, in contemporary crime fiction, LGBTQ+ people are crucial to solving crime and achieving justice for victims. They are often portrayed as victims of crime often specifically related to their identity, but importantly they are also the solvers of crime. I begin by analyzing a canonical crime novel, namely Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939), focusing on the novel's male-identification and representations of homophobia, in order to illustrate persistent stereotypes in the genre. Moving on to contemporary crime fiction, I investigate Nekesa Afia's Dead Dead Girls (2021), Michael Nava, Lies With Man (2021), and Stella Duffy, Fresh Flesh (1999). Through the contrast highlighted between canonical texts and their representation of sexuality and contemporary LGBTQ+ themed and authored crime fiction, the influence of fourth-wave feminism and the #MeToo movement can clearly be seen both thematically and stylistically. I do not define LGBTQ+ as a genre, but rather as a range of thematic concerns and preoccupations which are personally and politically informed and which impact on crime fiction representation. To clarify that in terms of my position in relation to this material, I am writing as a white cis woman and an LGBTQ+ ally.

Toward a Global Approach to Political Philosophy

The problem of harmonising the claims of individuals with the claims of the groups of all sizes to which they belong has occupied the human mind throughout history. All but the smallest collective units have usually been found to require a recognised arrangement to coordinate or regulate action and restrain individuals or subgroups from pursuing their own interests in opposition to others or the group as a whole. These arrangements, when they are on a scale necessitating certain kinds of formalisation, constitute political systems. To a great extent, they have been the products of historical forces rather than rational deliberation. But as humanity has evolved, the need has increasingly been felt to find intelligible principles by which they can be explained, justified, improved where possible or replaced if necessary.

Political philosophy is the search for such organising principles. Taking a variety of forms in different times and places, it has alternately sanctioned, questioned and repudiated the existing order. Sometimes it has had little effect on practical politics. At other times, it has stimulated reform or triggered revolutions. Today, political philosophy confronts global issues that demand global thinking. But the conceptual tools it brings to these problems have so far tended to be those that have taken shape mainly in one part of the earth – the ‘Western’ part – whose relevance to the rest and adequacy for dealing with the complexities of a multicultural world may legitimately be questioned. An expanded dialogue would seem to be called for so that we can bring as rich a diversity of viewpoints as possible to our encounter with the unprecedented challenges we now face.

The need for some kind of global political philosophy has not gone unrecognised. But often this means little more than applying concepts and methods of Western political theory to the new problems arising from globalisation. Whatever the value of this approach, it leaves the potentially limiting cultural assumptions of political theory itself unexamined. Global political philosophy would surely benefit from a broadening of its foundations through creative interaction with non-Western thought, past and present.

Kete Dance as Indigenous Knowledge

Kete encapsulates embodied knowledge, undergoing continuous evolution to meet the dynamic needs of its practitioners in an organic and responsive manner.

To expand on this, the Indigenous Knowledge System (IKS) incorporated within the broader framework of Afrocentric theory as advocated by Asante-Kete, is here regarded as an alternative theoretical lens for addressing African artistic developments. An IKS encompasses the entirety of historical and contemporary knowledge, including actions and reactions, grounded in a people's interaction with their environment. Kofi Anthonio shares that “human beings, are defined by the way we socialise, including communal gathering which is representative of the society or its coming together to live as an identifiable entity […] and that community is not complete without music and dance.” I contend that any definitions pertaining to the cultural evolution of African people should be based on their own voices, experiences, and interactions with their history. Meaning and contexts are derived from these activities, supporting social functions and activities that are relevant to a people. This chapter serves as a conceptual exposition of Kete as an IKS within the Afrocentric paradigm.

As espoused first by Molefi Kete Asante (Asante 1988) and later by scholars like Frances Owusu-Ansah and Bubela Mji in their push for recognition of African indigenous knowledge forms, I have recognized, through existing literature, the necessity for adopting an Afrocentric approach in African dance scholarship. Ghanaian dance research has not explicitly utilized Afrocentricity until now. This necessity is echoed by Owusu-Ansah and Miji (2013), who share that in exploring alternative approaches to studying their reality, African research must endeavor to diverge from the established Western research methodologies in which many have been trained. This stance does not aim to dismiss or belittle recognized Western investigative methods but encourages African researchers to consider alternative inquiry methods for investigating and preserving indigenous knowledge (Owusu-Ansah and Mji 2013). An Afrocentric method as an alternative approach to existing Western conceptions of dance-music and their functions in African societies is not only necessary but more so needs constant promotion. Historically and presently, Western perspectives on the African body and dance have been sources of fascination and, at times, misunderstanding.

Chapter 2 investigates crime fiction's engagement with #MeToo, taking a broader approach that focuses on the genre's representations of women's oppression and how patriarchy uses women's sexualities and bodies against them to victimize them. I place this analysis within the context of fourth-wave feminism and the #MeToo movement. Phil Hubbard argues that #MeToo has provided fresh momentum for the feminist movement, but also stresses that #MeToo is part of an ongoing feminist struggle “against misogyny and patriarchal violence” for women and “socially marginalised groups.” In this chapter, I analyze representations of major #MeToo themes, such as sexual violence against women, gender discrimination, sexual harassment against women in the workplace, and reproductive justice. These topics reflect ongoing feminist preoccupations since the second wave of feminism; however, the contemporary crime texts examined here demonstrate that the feminist struggle against sexual violence, gender discrimination, and reproductive rights must be fought with renewed vigor in the face of conservative political and cultural forces which seek to row back on equality for women and other socially marginalized groups and that crime fiction plays an active part in that. This chapter shows how crime texts that problematize male violence and misogyny contribute importantly to “call-out culture” by explicitly linking these topics to crime and the search for justice. Ann J. Cahill comments on the politics of representation and objectification, stating that:

This chapter focuses on crime texts which expose misogynistic cultural narratives and crimes originating in white male supremacy which are key to fourth-wave feminism and the #MeToo movement. These crime texts demonstrate how crime fiction can interrogate these narratives and crimes, creating greater awareness among readers and audiences of patriarchy's insidious and explicit harm instead of perpetuating it. Traditionally, crime fiction has tended to focus less on the victims of crime and their traumas and more on the detectives and their crime-solving skills.