Pumzi, directed by Wanuri Kahiu, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010 as part of the New African Cinema program, and later earned the award for Best Short at the Cannes Film Festival and the Special Jury Prize at the Zanzibar International Film Festival. Described as Kenya’s first science fiction film, Pumzi tells the tale of Asha (Kudzani Moswela) who lives in an authoritarian society thirty-five years after World War III, also known as the “water wars.” As evidenced by the name of the war and the scenes in which guards distribute water to individual citizens or show Asha collecting and purifying her own urine as a method of recycling water, water is now an exceedingly rare resource. Earth no longer retains sufficient environmental stability to sustain human life due to the combined effects of climate change, capitalist exploitation, and global warfare.
The postwar society exists in a massive aboveground shelter where Asha works as the curator of the Virtual Natural Museum, dedicated to the preservation of life and culture. Awakened from a dream—an automated voice jostles her from sleep commanding her to take her “dream suppressants”—Asha finds a small white box labeled with latitudinal and longitudinal readings. The box contains a soil sample, and a test of the soil reveals the rare presence of water. Asha’s discovery sets off a string of events whereby she questions the authority of the ruling matriarchal Council over the fecundity of the natural world. Her adamant questioning leads to the potential destruction of the museum and her placement into forced labor producing electricity for the shelter. Once she recognizes the impending destruction of the museum, she manages to hide the seed with the collusion of a female museum worker. With seed and a small amount of water she escapes from the shelter, and after traveling an unknown distance she collapses in a vast desert wasteland. With her remaining energy, she plants and waters the seed, and although she dies in the desert, a tree manages to grow. As the film ends, the camera pulls outward revealing the tree’s growth as well as a nearby jungle and the sound of a thunderstorm. Pumzi, in this way, reflects Kodwo Eshun’s vision of Afrofuturism as “the exposure and reframing of futurisms . . . to forecast and fix African dystopia” (“Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 [2] [2003]:293).
Wanuri Kahiu denounces the presumed “foreignness” of science fiction in Africa. In a 2014 TEDx talk entitled “No More Labels” (http://tedxtalks.ted.com) Kahiu celebrated the importance of nature in African storytelling: “We have always been telling stories. Even as oral storytellers, we have used nature in our stories. We have talked about animals. We have talked about organic sciences in our stories.” She commented that while she appreciates the concept of “Afrofuturism” as a shorthand for various works that make use of science fiction, speculative fiction, African myths, and folklore, she finds that specificity of the term assumes “an Afro-something” audience. Although Kahiu tentatively casts aside the “Afrofuturist” label, she grants that she would welcome the term from the perspective of “eco-awareness.” In this sense Afrofuturism engages ecological poignancy as a form of activism. The film’s tagline—“The outside is dead”—not only suggests the future of the natural world, but also imagines the inevitability of dystopia if humanity continues to participate in unthinking materialist consumption and continued exploitation of the environment. Aboubakar Sanogo goes as far as labeling Pumzi’s world as “postnature,” a suggestive term about the relationship between humanity and the environment (“Certain Tendencies in Contemporary Auteurist Film Practice in Africa,” Cinema Journal 54 [2] [2015]:14). Environmentalism and Afrofuturism, then, coexist to produce an indictment of unrestrained materialist consumption and its physical effects upon the natural world.
Environmental concerns intersect in the film with a number of other pertinent issues such as matriarchy/patriarchy, authoritarianism, technology and communication, classism, and poverty. Due to its short length, a number of these ideas, such as the rationale for the necessity for an authoritarian government, remain undeveloped. Placing Pumzi in conversation with, for example, Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Les Saignantes (2005)—a futuristic film in which two female protagonists confront governmental power—might provide a productive counterpoint considering Kahiu and Bekolo’s vision of African futures. Generic form aside, Pumzi emerges from the history of African cinema as it calls for audience participation and conversation, not only among Africans and Kenyans but transnationally, for a concerted response to the threats to the planet. Pumzi’s success as activist cinema, then, depends upon its addressing global viewers to imagine their desired futures. The overriding sense of danger within Pumzi, the expectation of an imminent cataclysmic destruction of the environment, invokes contemporary practices of unregulated and untamed materialist consumption and asks viewers to wonder how their actions frame the world for future generations. Through Pumzi, Kahiu proposes the imaginative potential of Afrofuturism as an ecocentric activist project.
