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What we‘ve learnt from the younger generation of practitioners is that genre as a freestanding commodity is dead. Mixed-use experience is ubiquitous and it’s no longer novel to be indulging in more than one good thing at a time.The marketing slogans that sell us the “eat, play sleep, shop, work” idea of space are very tired now. When they still seemed modern it was Achille Mbembe who lambasted them. It’s been over five years since he called Montecasino and Melrose Arch in Johannesburg “the architecture of hysteria.” These fantasy islands are apparently, “the manifestation of the failure of the racial city to assimilate the passage of time.”But he also wrote in the now-famous essay Aesthetics of Superfluity, in his book Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, “if there is anything the history of the metropolitan form in Africa brings to the critique of modern urbanism, it is that the metropolis is neither a finite nor a static form. In fact, it is almost always

a site of excess, of hysteria and exclusions.”One could go on and on quoting Mbembe in the context of the series of six short films in African Metropolis. This is because they, wittingly or unwittingly, provide a visual companion to what he wrote in 2005. That, and the claim by Edgar Pieterse of the African Centre for Cites, in his book Rogue Urbanism, that “African cities and towns are marked by profound crisis.” The visible face of this crisis is the “endless vistas of shantytowns and the burden of self-help and abandonment they imply.”In this context, we are told it takes “inventiveness, tenacity, (and) cunning” to get by. The producers of African Metropolis know their theory. After all, the collection is an initiative of the Goethe-Institut South Africa, and the institute itself supported the publication of the expanded English catalogue of Afropolis, a 2012

exhibition that took place in Cologne under the curatorship of Kerstin Pinther, Larissa Förster and Christian Hanussek.In Afropolis Marie-Hélène Gutberlet tells us that the African city “provides the external structure within which urban life unfolds, while the cinema accommodates the film in which ideas of a life in the city are processed and given concrete shape”.So in African Metropolis we have films not exceeding 25 minutes from Abidjan, Cairo, Dakar, Johannesburg, Lagos and Nairobi. The motivation is the fact that over 50% of the continent’s total population now lives in cities. “Vital urban cultures are forming and transforming – fast, and with growing complexity. In African cinema, the shift is towards urban stories, with less focus on the traditional, rural Africa that dominated in the past.”This is the statement by producers Lien

Heidenreich-Seleme of the Goethe-Institut and Steven Markovitz of Big World Cinema. Yet the fact of urban stories in an African setting will hardly be surprising to anyone who has spent a minute in front of a television set anywhere on the continent. There is the entire Nollywood industry, the third biggest in the world, that grew out of the conflicts that raged between the modern and the traditional.But as a collection African Metropolis is, in some new way, quite special. Perhaps it is because it shows a departure from soap opera, the endless fascination with new wealth amassed under dubious circumstances and the obsession with African family values.Although there are traces of all of the above, they do not dictate the content but are used with slight irony by a new generation probably quite tired of the same old thing. In Folaskin Iwajomo’s The Line-Up (Lagos) a wealthy

woman demands a nightly display of naked, blindfolded men as a sort of living menu for her need. In Marie Ka’s The Other Woman (Dakar) lesbianism is hinted at as a way of dealing with polygamy. And in Philippe La Cote’s To Repel Ghosts (Abidjan) a reimagining of a visit to Africa by the late Jean-Michel Basquiat provides territory to explore the romanticised aspect of an African diaspora identity.Then there is South African Vincent Moloi’s Berea (Johannesburg), the only work to include a white character, in this instance an aged Jewish man left behind after apartheid, in the inner city ghetto, with a penchant for black flesh.Two things strike me as pertinent when watching African Metropolis. The first is the fact that we’ve now gone beyond the need to tell Africa as a good news story, as an antidote to the bad rap the continent used to get. The second is that, thankfully, we’re getting over the pursuit of authenticity. The Africa portrayed

is just a place, however dynamic, but it’s not necessarily a political concept or a cause. It’s merely a backdrop to stories of ordinary people doing less remarkable things than waving fists in the air, overthrowing regimes or being crushed by outmoded traditionalisms. One’s not entirely sure what this says to Mbembe’s claim that the African city is a place of excess, hysteria and exclusions. But maybe all cities are about that, regardless of where they may be. African cities may not be so exceptional.

Matthew Krouse was arts editor of the Mail & Guardian newspaper for 16 years and currently works for the Goodman Gallery. He won the 2014 National Arts Festival journalism prize for art reviews

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: African Metropolis Logo. The African Metropolis Short Film Project is an initiative of the Goethe-Institut South Africa and South African executive producer Steven Markovitz, with support from Guaranty Trust Bank and the Hubert Bals Fund of International Film Festival Rotterdam. Image courtesy of the Goethe-Institut; Still from The other woman © Erick Christian Ahounou. Courtesy of the Goethe-Institut; Still from The Line Up. Directed by Folasakin Iwajomo. Courtesy of the Goethe-Institut; Still from The other woman © Erick Christian Ahounou. Courtesy of the Goethe-Institut.

AFRICAN METROPOLISGOETHE INSTITUT

REVIEW / MATTHEW KROUSE