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Paper short abstract:

Untill recently in speculative fiction, African cities were conspicuous by their absence. This paper will consider how new artistic productions (cinema, literature, visual arts), within the framework of Afro and Africanfuturisms, started to imagine African cities in the future, notably in Nigeria.

Paper long abstract:

In speculative fiction (SF), African cities are conspicuous by their absence. Urban futures have most often been thought of from North America. Nevertheless in recent years, new cultural productions by Afro-descendant and African novelists, filmmakers and artists propose to imagine African cities in the future, within the framework of artistic movements such as the Afrofrofuturism or the more recent Africanfuturism. In many SF productions, Nigeria occupies a prominent place, both as the country of origin of some of these thinkers of urban futures in Africa and as the setting par excellence for the African cities of the future.

Alongside narratives on cities in the future from other (fictional) African countries, we will first see how urban centers on the continent are still often imagined as being bogged down by their current problems (demographic explosion, growing inequalities, decay of infrastructures, criminality, environmental damage, etc.). But we will also look at more recent and optimistic projections such as Birnin Zana, capital of the kingdom of Wakanda in the movies "Black Panther", Mbanza, capital of the kingdom of Katiopa imagined by L. Miano , or Lagos or Ilé-Ifè described by N. Okorafor in the future or an alternative present.