Eco-cinema, sustainability and Africa: A reading of Out of Africa (1985), The Constant Gardener (2005) and District 9 (2010)

The language of eco-sustainability is seeping into what would otherwise be considered as establishment thinkers and in many ways is beginning to become accepted as part of the common global culture. Meanwhile, developing countries like those in Africa urgently require more immediate poverty and primary health-care issues to be addressed. The danger of environmental issues becoming simply topical and embracing populist, business-driven notions like ‘universal sustainability’ is exacerbated of course by the conflicting directions and often contradictory objectives of the broad ecological movement. The long established tradition of Hollywood films set in Africa almost always appears to use the continent to tell a white and western story, while also reaffirming the western archetype of Africans not being able to live peacefully and wallowing in internecine wars. In this article I signal how an ecological, revisionist reading of three seminal (Hollywood) African films might be made.