Visions of Africas future from African filmmakers
As a child growing up in Nigeria,
books sparked my earliest imagination,
but films, films transported me
to magical places with flying cars,
to infinite space with whole universes
of worlds to discover.
And my journey of discovery
has led to many places and possibilities,
all linked with ideas and imagination.
A decade and a half ago,
I moved from working in law
and technology in New York
to financing, producing
and distributing films
in Nairobi, Lagos and Johannesburg.
I’ve been privileged
to see firsthand how in Africa,
film powerfully explores
the marvelous and the mundane,
how it conveys infinite possibilities
and fundamental truths.
Afrofuturist films like “Pumzi,”
Wanuri Kahiu’s superb sci-fi flick,
paint brilliant pictures
of Africa’s future,
while Rungano Nyoni’s “I Am Not A Witch”
and Akin Omotoso’s “Vaya”
show us and catalogue our present.
These filmmakers offer nuanced snapshots
of Africa’s imagined and lived reality,
in contrast to some of the images
of Africa that come from outside,
and the perspectives
that accompany all of these images,
whether sympathetic or dismissive,
shape or distort
how people see Africa.
And the truth is,
many people think Africa is screwed up.
Images play a big part of the reason why.
Many tropes about Africa
persist from pictures,
pictures of famine
in Ethiopia 30 years ago,
pictures of the Biafran war
half a century ago.
But on a continent
where the average age is 17,
these tragic events
seem almost prehistoric.
Their images are far removed
from how people in Africa’s many countries
see themselves and their neighbors.
For them, these images
do not represent their reality.
So what is Africa’s reality,
or rather, which of Africa’s
many realities do we choose to focus on?
Do we accept Emmanuel Macron’s
imagination of Africa in 2017
as a place in which all women
have seven or eight children?
Or do we instead rely on the UN’s account
that only one of Africa’s 54 countries
has a fertility rate as high as seven?
Do we focus on the fact
that infant mortality
and life expectancy in Africa today
is roughly comparable
to the US a hundred years ago,
or do we focus on progress,
the fact that Africa has cut
infant mortality in half
in the last four decades
and has raised life expectancy by 10 years
since the year 2000?
These dueling perspectives
are all accurate.
Well, aside from Macron’s.
He’s just wrong.
(Laughter)
But one version makes it easy
to dismiss Africa as hopeless,
while the other fuels hope
that a billion people
can continue to make progress
towards prosperity.
The fact that Africans
do not have the luxury
of turning their gaze elsewhere,
the fact that we must make progress
or live with the consequence of failure,
are the reason we must continue
to tell our own stories
and show our own images,
with honesty and primarily
to an African audience,
because the image that matters most
is the image of Africa
in African imaginations.
Now, honesty requires that we acknowledge
that Africa is behind
the rest of the world
and needs to move swiftly to catch up.
But thinking of a way forward,
I’d like us to engage
in a thought exercise.
What if we could go back a hundred years,
say to the US in 1917,
but we could take with us
all the modern ideas,
innovations, inventions
that we have today?
What could we achieve with this knowledge?
How richly could we improve quality
of life and living conditions for people?
How widely could we spread prosperity?
Imagine if a hundred years ago,
the education system had
all the knowledge we have today,
including how best to teach.
And doctors and scientists knew all we do
about public health measures,
surgery techniques,
DNA sequencing,
cancer research and treatment?
If we had access then
to modern semiconductors,
computers, mobile devices, the internet?
Just imagine.
If we did, we could take
a quantum leap forward, couldn’t we.
Well, Africa can take a leap
of that magnitude today.
There’s enough untapped innovation
to move Africa a century forward
in living conditions
if the will and commitment is there.
This is not just a possibility;
it’s an imperative for Africa’s future,
a future that will see
Africa’s population double
to two and a half billion people
in just three decades,
a future that will see Africa
have the world’s largest workforce,
just as the idea of work itself
is being radically reconsidered.
Now taking the leap forward
isn’t that far-fetched.
There are tons of examples
that demonstrate the potential
for change in Africa.
Just 20 years ago,
Nigeria had fewer than half a million
working phone lines.
Today it has a hundred million
mobile phone subscriptions,
and this mobile miracle
is mirrored in every African country.
There are over three quarters of a billion
mobile phones in use in Africa today,
and this has spurred justified
excitement about leapfrogging,
about bringing the sharing economy,
artificial intelligence,
autonomous machines to Africa.
And this is all promising,
but we need to think about sequencing.
Forget putting the cart before the horse.
You can’t put the self-driving car
before the roads.
(Applause)
There’s a whole infrastructural
and logical layer to innovation
that we take for granted,
but we have to triage for Africa,
because some of the biggest
infrastructure gaps
are for things that are so basic
that Westerners rarely
have to think about them.
So let’s explore this.
Imagine your internet access
went off for a day,
and when it came back,
it only stayed on
for three hours at a time,
with random 15-hour outages?
How would your life change?
Now replace internet access
with electricity.
Think of your fridges,
your TVs, your microwaves,
just sitting idly for days.
Now extend this nightmare
to government offices,
to businesses, to schools,
to hospitals.
This, or worse,
is the type of access
that hundreds of millions of Africans
have to electricity,
and to water,
and to healthcare,
and to sanitation,
and to education.
We must fix this.
We must fix this because ensuring
widespread and affordable access
to decent infrastructure and services
isn’t just low-hanging fruit:
it’s fundamental to achieving
the hundred-year leap.
And when we fix it,
we might find some unexpected benefits.
One unexpected benefit
of the mobile miracle
was that it led to what is perhaps
the greatest cultural resurgence
that Africa has seen in a generation:
the rebirth of African popular music.
For musicians like P-Square,
Bongo Maffin
and Wizkid,
mobile phones paved the path
to local dominance
and global stardom.
And the impact
isn’t limited just to music.
It extends to film, too.
Beautiful, engaging films
like these stills of “Pumzi,”
“Vaya,” and “I Am Not A Witch” show.
For while its external image
might be dated,
Africa continues to evolve,
as does African film.
Now, every now and again,
the rest of the world catches on,
perhaps with Djo Munga’s
hard-hitting “Viva Riva!”
with Newton Aduaka’s intense “Ezra,”
or with Abderrahmane Sissako’s
poetic “Timbuktu.”
With mobile, Africans are discovering
more and more of these films,
and what that means is that it really
matters less in Kinshasa or Cotonou
what Cannes thinks of African film,
or if those opinions are informed or fair.
Who really cares what
the “New York Times” thinks?
What matters is that Africans
are validating African art and ideas,
both critically and commercially,
that they are watching what they want,
and that African filmmakers
are connecting with their core audiences.
And this is important.
It’s important because film
can illuminate and inspire.
Film can bring visions of the future
to us here in the present.
Films can serve
as a conveyor belt for hope.
And film can change perspectives
faster than we can build roads.
In just over a decade,
Nigeria’s film industry, Africa’s largest,
has taken the country’s
words and languages
into the vocabulary
and imaginations of millions
in many other African countries.
It has torn down borders,
perhaps in the most effective way
since the Berlin Conference
sowed linguistic and geographic
division across Africa.
Film does speak a universal language,
and boy, Nigerian film speaks it loudly.
Making Africa’s hundred-year leap
will require that Africans summon
the creativity to generate ideas
and find the openness to accept and adapt
ideas from anywhere else in the world
to solve our pervasive problems.
With focus on investment,
films can help drive that change
in Africa’s people,
a change that is necessary
to make the hundred-year leap,
a change that will help create
a prosperous Africa,
an Africa that is dramatically
better than it is today.
Thank you.
Asante sana.
(Applause)