Abstract
Abdoumaliq Simone ends his book, For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities (2004), with a poignant description of Francois Woukoache’s film, Fragments of Life. Set in Yaounde, Cameroon, the film depicts three different scenarios involving an out-of-work student lured into illicit activities for survival, a girl out to avenge the death of her father, and a couple who get reunited after a mysterious separation. The couple goes around the city taking in the various sights on display: street vendors, hustlers, prostitutes, and various interweavings of the city’s narratives in what appears to be a bizarre mosaic of fragmentation, disinstitutionalization, dispossession, and informalization. But the overriding themes are concerned with alienation, despair, and anxiety caused by the realities of existence inherent in the violent transitoriness of an African urban city. The city, in this context, can be a site of dread where human lives and fortunes are made and lost with a bewildering arbitrariness. Shot mostly at night, the meaning of the darkness isn’t only conveyed in its literal sense; it also connotes uncertainty and the dread of the unknown. Thus ends Simone’s narrative of different African cities that attempt to grapple with a competing set of demands, challenges, and futures.
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Notes
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© 2014 Sanya Osha
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Osha, S. (2014). Urbanscapes. In: African Postcolonial Modernity. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137446930_3
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