Two Thousand Seasons: A Conversation

Rahima Gambo, Tatsuniya (still), 2017–ongoing.

On January 15, 2026, e-flux Screening Room hosted Two Thousand Seasons: A Look Into 2026 and Beyond, an evening organized by the African Film Institute at e-flux to open its 2026 program. A screening of clips, trailers, fragments, and complete works conceived as a playlist compiled by Christian Nyampeta introduced some of the themes and methods that will shape the Institute’s work in the years ahead. Following the screening, a conversation took place between Nyampeta, KJ Abudu, Kaneza Schaal, and the audience. The transcript of this conversation was edited for the present publication. More information about the African Film Institute and its upcoming April 14, 2026 screening in memory of the late curator Koyo Kouoh, focusing on RAW Académie, can be found here.

Christian Nyampeta: Thank you all for being here. Tonight has opened the African Film Institute’s 2026 program and introduced some of the methods and themes that will shape the years ahead. It takes its title from Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons (1973), drawing on the novel’s long historical horizon and its insistence on a way of living together not defined by kingdoms, nations, empires, or “great men,” but by a communitarian, mutual, life-affirming path that refuses the predatory and destructive forces that continue to shape the present.

Conceived as a “playlist,” the program we have just seen consisted of In the Shadow of Our Ghosts by Ayesha Hameed and Hamedine Kane (2018), Ceddo by Ousmane Sembène (1977), La Pirogue by Moussa Touré (2012), Colobane Express (1999) and The Silent Monologue (2008) by Khady Sylla, a trailer from Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), Dika Ofoma’s A Quiet Monday (2023), Guy Deslauriers’s The Middle Passage (2000), a brief fragment from Carlos Diegues’s Quilombo (1984), a trailer for John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film Collective’s The Last Angel of History (1996), Baloji’s Peau de chagrin / Bleu de nuit (2018), a short fragment from Abderrahmane Sissako’s Waiting for Happiness (2002), and finally Rahima Gambo’s Instruments of Air (2021). These clips, trailers, fragments, and complete works propose a method of collective study and collaborative action, pointing to alternative sites where memory is held and learning is made. Moving between the film image and practices beyond the screen, the program samples transitional ways of recording histories and practicing commemoration, foregrounding inspiration as both a lesson and a tool for loosening the grip of manipulation characteristic of the world today. A recurring thread in the playlist takes its cue from Rahima Gambo’s ongoing project Tatsuniya (2017). The Hausa word tatsuniya can be translated as story, tale, or riddle, and Rahima’s work unfolds through collaboration with a group of young women in Maiduguri, Nigeria, in the wake of the Boko Haram conflict and the targeting of schools and universities. Structured as a gathering space for support, access to resources, and sustained exchange over time, the project also becomes a way of negotiating the terms of long-term collaboration, agency, representation, and authorship.

If you knew tomorrow would be the end of the world, what would you do today? I would plant a tree. If it is not the end, I will enjoy its fruit. And if it is, those who come after us will enjoy its fruit or its shade. I first heard this phrase in 2015 from Quinet Obed Niyikiza, a Rwandan pastor and philosopher of education, during one of our regular conversations at his home in Huye. Niyikiza was reflecting on his pedagogical work and on collective efforts to refuse what he calls misery. For him, refusing misery begins by teaching people to plant trees. It becomes harder for children, once grown, to throw bombs at their own gardens. They will want to protect their seeds. Planting trees, and sharing gardens with those who have none, can inspire hope where life and death begin to seem equal. We were speaking in 2015, one of the deadliest years of the Mediterranean migration crisis. Niyikiza’s point was devastatingly simple: If life were viable there, people would not leave home to die in the Mediterranean, or walk for miles across arid deserts in order to flee deep misery. They would not reach the point of saying, perhaps we may die, but not all of us will die. Some will survive.1

This brings me back to Armah’s novel. Two Thousand Seasons reimagines the African past and present through communal resistance and cultural renewal. It is narrated in the first-person plural, through a choral “we,” in order to render collective memory. Perhaps there is something here of Saidiya Hartman’s sense of the chorus in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), but located in the Akan lands of West Africa and spanning a thousand years. It narrates what we now call decolonization as an ongoing struggle to preserve an indigenous, communitarian, life-affirming way of life, what the novel calls “the Way,” against destructive forces arriving from the north and the west.

My interest is not only in this novel, but in Armah’s broader project, especially in his book The Healers (1979). In some modest ways, the book’s call for collaboration and inspiration is also taken up by the African Film Institute: to assemble, converse, collaborate, and cooperate with an ever-widening circle of filmmakers, art workers, custodians, educators, environmentalists, learners, and healers in the service of recuperating and rehoming more just forms of social life. This work proceeds not through academic judgment, intellectual measurement, or cultural critique alone, but through offerings, through bringing into contact while also recognizing the distances that separate us. It is an attempt to open our minds to a future that extends beyond individual lifetimes, and beyond the lifetimes of single tribes and nations.

KJ, Kaneza, thank you for being here. After a journey like that, perhaps what is needed is not explanation so much as an ekphrasis, a way of drawing words out of what we have just witnessed, not to describe it fully, but to think, feel, and move within it.

KJ Abudu: Thank you, Christian. It is always a pleasure to think alongside you, your work, and the artists we have just watched, especially Rahima Gambo, whose work I deeply admire.

During the screening, one of the things that kept returning to me was the question of space, or what we might call black space. I am thinking here, for instance, with scholar Katherine McKittrick, on her insistence that spatial matters are necessarily black matters, and also with artist Nolan Oswald Dennis and their guiding proposition of “a black consciousness of space.” In all the works you assembled, landscape recurs insistently: sand, earth, wind, water, rivers, oceans. But these spaces never exist merely in the abstract. Space is always threaded through the production of history and social life.

What emerges, I think, is a dialectic with respect to the production of black space. On the one hand, black space appears as a geometry of dispossession: the hold of the slave ship, the slave fort, the prison, the Atlantic shore, the boats currently crossing the Mediterranean, and so on and so forth. On the other hand, there is a differentially articulated production of black space, a “loophole of retreat,” to borrow Harriet Jacobs’s phrase, a contingent and oblique interstitial space of liberation, or at least a prefigurative, improvised architecture of liberation—here I am thinking of artist Torkwase Dyson’s notion of “black compositional thought.” In contrast to the fixed geometries of dispossession, this other kind of space is motile and irreducibly social. People are always moving, dancing, walking, eating, and talking.

The films oscillate between these two senses of black space, which are, of course, bound up with one another. They are also structured by time. We move from the speculative futurism of The Last Angel of History to the neocolonial present of Rahima’s work, and then into the spectral “past” of the hold in The Middle Passage. That movement across temporalities felt central to the program.

Kaneza Schaal: I want to place another offering alongside KJ’s beautiful invitation. What I felt consistently in these works, and in your hand as they were assembled, Christian, was a syntax of human relation to land. And perhaps also a syntax of scale, of how human beings understand themselves in relation to scale.

We were talking earlier about ancestral practices as a lever toward liberation. In Rahima Gambo’s work with the girls, I was struck by the spaciousness created through her way of being with them on that land. KJ, you had mentioned the surreal, and I kept thinking about the generosity of that space.

In 2016, I spent time in Munich with young people who had arrived there from many places: Nigeria, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia. We were working in a library and art space, trying to make room for people to be together outside the sanctions of the state. Two girls, one from Syria and one from Nigeria, had been living together for months, but only during a mapping exercise did they realize that both had crossed the Mediterranean by boat. Suddenly, they were saying to one another: “You were on a boat? I was on a boat. We have to tell our sisters not to get on those boats.” Their stories included horrors that are not mine to recount. But what I can say is that, in the middle of all that, what most excited them was remembering the cats on the Grecian island of Kos. There were so many cats. And as they mapped that memory together, the cats became a way of describing the ecological violence that had forced them to flee in the first place.

Something in Rahima’s images brought that back to me. You do see lushness there, yes, but you also see desertification, dryness. The bodies engaged in calisthenics against the land. It felt to me like a very precise articulation of the colonial residue, the sludge that has transformed land so profoundly that Boko Haram can exist and that these other violences can unfold there. I was struck, throughout the program, by the ecological presence in the filmmakers’ practices and by the way image and sound were used to register it.

Christian Nyampeta: Thank you both. I tend to trace the emergence of the ecological question around the publication of Donella Meadows’s The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind, but obviously the question has always been there, certainly in rural communities outside of the global metropoles, communities that for a long time constituted the greater part of colonized populations on the African continent.

In that sense, what we call diaspora also extends to the homelands themselves, because those places have undergone such profound transformations. There is a moment in The Last Angel of History where someone speaks of a lost Africa, and one immediately wants to ask: lost to whom? Yes, something was lost through violent separation, through abduction and dispersal and forced labor that was slavery. But Africa was also lost to those who remained, who had to cut down trees to build churches, military posts, bridges, and even square houses where there had once been round ones, and so on. My mother tells a story about their then newly built square house in which they were nearly buried alive by a mudslide because the surrounding trees had been cut down to build it. The landscape changed, but so did architecture and with them, social forms.

And yet what is beautiful is what remains when so much is gone: in dance, in naming, in forms of recognition, in memory, even in how one might read a comet not simply as an object from a remote future but as a sign arriving from a far past, as we saw in the fragment from Carlos Diegues’s Quilombo. I think that is part of what holds this sequence together.

I also wanted to say something about form. The previous season began with a playlist of music videos, and it made sense to continue with the playlist format here. The challenge was to find a form capable of creating conversations among works that would otherwise require days of viewing. I wanted something meaningful and intentional, but also open enough that the works would not be stripped bare, and that each viewer might reconstitute the sequence differently, according to entirely different criteria. In other words, the playlist attempts to start a conversation among the works themselves.

Kaneza Schaal: There is something in that form that discloses creative labor in a way that refuses the trap into which curation can so easily fall, namely, the trap of the anthology. I had the pleasure of working recently on the film BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (2025) with Kahlil Joseph, Arthur Jafa, Garrett Bradley, and many others, and one of the things that the process reaffirmed for me was an ancestral understanding of the relation between singular force and collective force.

There is such a thing as singular force, precise and ferocious singular force. But there is also precise and ferocious collective force, and the two are inextricable. Anything else is a denial of the labor around singular force. The way you disclosed your own hand, Christian, in presenting these works, while also inviting all of us into the evening itself, was exciting to me. It felt like an opening into curation as a practice.

I am curious how that resonates with you KJ, and what kinds of questions guide you in the extraordinary way you move ideas between people.

KJ Abudu: I do not think I am going to offer any meta-curatorial insights tonight, but what you have done is something I relate to very strongly, because you are not simply putting things next to one another but creating cognitive, aesthetic, and historical intimacies that are produced by, yet are in excess of, their spatiotemporal proximity. One of the transitions I kept thinking about was the movement from a scene from Daughters of the Dust back into Rahima’s work. In my own curatorial practice I am constantly trying to map alternative space-times within colonial-capitalist modernity, constellatory traces of history and place threaded through evolving ideological manifestations and infrastructural materialities that link up racial slavery with (post)colonial statecraft and financial-imperial formations across multiple centuries. Such an exercise allows me to grasp the conditions indexed in a number of these films, especially those set in contemporary neocolonial Africa, within an extended timeline, within a longue durée.

This is something we see in your juxtaposition of these two films by Dash and Gambo, one which refuses exotic or romantic renderings of the African continent as a site of primordial memory, instead presenting it as a wounded and ever-transforming geography that has been subjected to related forms of violent uprooting and cultural alienation as in the diaspora. Your curatorial enactment of a kind of pan-African cosmopolitanism also made me recall a transatlantic curatorial project I conceived, Traces of Ecstasy, which was presented nearly simultaneously in Lagos, Nigeria, and Richmond, Virginia, in 2024. One of the simplest but most powerful things I noticed in developing this project was the presence of red earth in both exhibition locations. Here, moving from the American South of Daughters of the Dust back into Rahima’s work prompted similar kinds of reflections. Julie Dash’s film is attentive to a specific community and history—the Gullah of South Carolina—and Rahima, through aesthetic decisions that estrange nationally recognizable pedagogical materials and the conventional Western-centric demands of the documentary genre (particularly as they pertain to working-class African subjects) works out a playful, participative, and oblique mode of encounter that cleverly challenges the expectations of Nigerians, Afro-diasporans, and global audiences all at once. 

Christian Nyampeta: You said you would not offer any meta-curatorial nuggets, but “historical intimacy” is already one. It is a beautiful formulation.

KJ Abudu: Of course; it comes from Lisa Lowe. It allows us to think across scales.

Christian Nyampeta: What you said, Kaneza, about a syntax of the human relation to land also helps me think about aspiration, and about the need to focus on what might be called minor conflicts, though they are not minor at all: internal conflicts, residues that remain and mutate. There is a moment in Ceddo in which a woman is traded for wine. In another fragment from The Silent Monologue by Khady Sylla, we see a domestic worker enduring abuse at the hands of her boss, in a kind of intramural Black Girl. These forms persist, but in altered shapes. It is important to find ways of identifying them.

That is why, to return to The Healers, Armah tasks us to form relations with figures who often remain unseen. The Silent Monologue raises the question of why the emancipation of some should come at the cost of the freedom of others. Works that move across scales can help us perceive such problems and perhaps also help us imagine the labor required to address it.

Kaneza Schaal: Earlier you said something, a little shyly, about being a filmmaker, and I wanted to return to that. You were speaking about scale of production in relation to the films we saw tonight. You described the difficulty for larger forms of production to articulate something like liberatory potential, or to trace a human relation to land, or to remain faithful to indigenous practice. Could you say more about that?

Christian Nyampeta: I was thinking particularly about Rahima’s work. The scale of it, a cell phone perhaps, or a small handheld camera, and recordings that are barely edited, or not edited through multiple setups and cuts, allow something to unfold in real time: cloth opening, a habit moving, rhythm emerging from the fall of fabric as the wearer moves. It creates a very slow frequency of expansion, simply of being there.

That matters when you are working with young women who may have witnessed unspeakable traumas and proceed to recreate scenes that emulate abduction, waiting, movement from one place to another, being moved rather than moving. A conventional production would simply disturb that serenity. It seems very hard for a large production to maintain the kind of care Rahima gives without it disappearing into its scale, and it would be hard to create the conditions in which children could feel at ease enough to perform that kind of reparative work.

In that sense, artistic work can sometimes do something a Hollywood-scale production cannot. In Rahima’s films, the moment an adult passes through the frame, the otherworldly world the girls have created is suddenly punctured, and one is reminded that they are in the world. That single interruption raises so many questions. So yes, there is something to be said for the nimbleness and humility of the desire that produces such an image. I think that, in itself, such a scale is a form of militancy.

KJ Abudu: I have one last question for you, Christian. There are recurring geopolitical tensions that reappear in many of the films. In particular, I was struck by the way they articulate relationships not only between Europe and Africa but also between Africa and China. In Moussa Touré’s La Pirogue, set in Senegal, a man is told by his wife or partner to go to China because Europe is in crisis, which is a rather humorous subversion of dominant cinematic narratives that hone in on the African migrant’s verging-on-irrational obsession with migrating to an idealized Europe. Then in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Waiting for Happiness, there is the bar scene with a Chinese man singing a ballad. And in one of Rahima’s works, shot in Burkina Faso, there is, at least in retrospect, the haunting presence of the recent anti-imperial formation of the Alliance of Sahel States. It would therefore seem that there is a subtle allusion to the erosion of the present international (that is, Euro-America-centered) world order and an opening onto what some refer to as a multipolar world order. Could you say more about this?

Christian Nyampeta: I think that Waiting for Happiness is a film about being between states and belonging fully to neither. I think Sissako rendered this tension by setting the film in the Mauritanian border and coastal town of Nouadhibou.

Maybe a part of what is at stake in this film is the reorientation of alliances among African nations. Another part involves looking outward, even revisiting the possibilities of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Sissako, who studied in Moscow, is attuning us, as you said, to ideals that do not hold Paris or London as the putative centers of the world. The point, I think, is to open new horizons, new shorelines and landings that expand alliances.

And perhaps I can turn that back to you, Kaneza. In speaking about BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, Kahlil Joseph has said that one reason for making new work is the need to generate new imaginaries. So much of what we think we know about AI, the future, or science fiction comes to us through Hollywood’s projections. It becomes imperative to create the kinds of futures we actually want to see. Could you reflect on that in relation to this question of making new images that might open new aspirations?

Kaneza Schaal: I remember seeing one of Kahlil’s early cuts in Los Angeles. I was working on an opera and joined some of the early editing myself. Over time, and as the project evolved, what changed above all was what we might call the data set. In the context of this conversation, I keep coming back to grammar and syntax, because so much of that material was not shot by those of us who directed segments of the film. It already existed in the world. For me, then, the new image is about syntax rather than grammar.

That makes me think of something the film’s producer, Onye Anyanwu, once said in an interview about the saxophone: we took the saxophone and showed you how to use it. What does it mean to create a new syntax for processing data, rather than simply inhabiting the Aristotelian logic of a three-act structure? If film is the instrument, then the history of an instrument like the saxophone, as something repurposed and shown to be usable otherwise, becomes a useful analogy.

There are two things I think about constantly in relation to making new images, though they are not art projects in the narrow sense. One is the Gihanga Institute of Contemporary Art in Kigali, Rwanda, where Christian has generously agreed to serve as custodian of the library. That space asks what it means to begin from a hyperlocal relation between human beings and land, and how such specificity can become the ground of a genuinely expansive conversation. If we begin there, then Paris and London and Dubai are no longer automatic centers.

The other is Prismid Sanctuary in Portland, Oregon, where esperanza spalding has been thinking deeply about indigenous practice, land, and the ways black, Indigenous, and other communities of color might repossess ancestral knowledges that allow reciprocal, fully resourced relations to land. So when I think about new images, or new capacities to imagine the future, I find myself thinking less about singular works of art than about the conditions that allow ideas to move between people, and about reclaiming the syntax that makes that movement possible.

Audience question: I keep returning to the opening image, which I took to be a view from an old fort out toward the ocean. I just came back from Ghana, where I visited Cape Coast Castle, and one of the things that stayed with me there was the force of these spaces as living spaces, however haunted they may be. They are not inert.

That returns me to the discussion you were just having about space, scale, and coloniality. Critical geography often insists that there is no such thing as uninhabited space, no empty space. Here, though, the dialectic of space felt especially complicated. So I wanted to ask, from both an artistic and a curatorial perspective, how you think through spaces that may first appear to be in crisis, abandoned, or empty, but are in fact inhabited by history, by the present, by the future, perhaps by all of these at once.

Christian Nyampeta: The work you are referring to is In the Shadow of Our Ghosts by Ayesha Hameed and Hamedine Kane, and yes, I believe the camera looks out from the Door of No Return on Gorée Island in Senegal. This is a powerful site of memory, a monument to the departures forced by the brutality of the transatlantic slave trade, but also a reminder of what continues to bind and connect us.

Regarding your question about land and landscape: Maybe the notion that one belongs only to a single fixed place could be a recent evolution relative to the history of humankind. It is a political construction, tied to industrialization, subjugation, borders, and war. It is not a human constant.

People have always moved, and they have had to find ways to cohabit with what was already there, beginning with spirits, with rivers, with forests, with existing forms of life, acknowledging that it is not empty, learning the religions of those already there, and honoring the spirit of the river, the forest, the land itself. People have tried to move in ways that do not only disturb everything in your path.

Perhaps what we have lost is an indigenous navigational practice, and perhaps that is one thing Rahima’s work is trying to rebuild: instruments for passing through, for greeting, for singing with, for learning invisible, extant languages.

esperanza spalding (Audience question): There were a few phrases early in the program that stayed with me, especially “ocean death” and “slave-trade fire.” Those are such striking constructions. When I think about migration, slavery, or people dying at sea, I do not usually pair ocean with death in that way. And when I think of slavery, I do not instinctively think of fire, which also evokes movement, transformation, and rebirth. Those tensions really stayed with me. I was also struck by the scene in Rahima’s work where a girl in the classroom reads from a book and names the question mark aloud but not the period. Listening to you speak about grammar and movement, I kept thinking again about blackness and motion, about being pushed into motion and having to make language within it. Kaneza, earlier you spoke about the relation between singular force and collective force. Could you say more about what that means to you?

Kaneza Schaal: I feed my child by making performances and directing performances. In theater, in opera, in performance more broadly, you create from collectivity and you give unto collectivity. Yet in the Western, siloed logic of creation, the singular force of the author becomes the organizing fiction through which all that labor is understood.

Whether you write alone in a room, direct an opera, make a film, or paint by yourself, you are surrounded by labor. To understand the force at the center of the work as purely singular is simply a lie. It always has been. And I think that lie has diminished both our understanding of authorship and our understanding of collectivity.

Once we stop treating those two things as oppositional, once we see that singular force and collective force are symbiotic, we release a greater capacity for creative force in both directions. The framework that sets them against one another is outside truth and outside logic.

Audience question: I am still thinking about the question of alternative imaginations. On the one hand, they seem to emerge from past experience and from historical memory. On the other hand, you were also speaking about localized practices and place-based relations. I found myself moving back and forth between those two scales.

I do not mean local culture in a narrow or essentialist sense, and I do not mean identity politics in any simplified way. I am asking more about what happens when alliances are built across very different cultures and at a global scale while still remaining grounded in specific territories and local practices. Could that kind of specificity actually make solidarity stronger? How do you think those two dimensions coexist?

KJ Abudu: I do not think of these dimensions as separate, and would insist on a both/and approach. And with the local, I understand you to mean not an identity but a practice, a way of being with land and with where you are. That may be informed by particular cosmologies, certainly, but it remains a practice.

The concrete always contains the abstract, and vice versa. In other words, the “local” always contains the larger structural totality within it. So those scalar operations are simultaneous. The contradiction does not lie primarily in scale, but in the ends toward which different scales operate. If one operates toward capital accumulation and another does not, then that is where incompatibility emerges. It is less a matter of how local or how global an alliance is than of the values by which it is organized.

Chinenye Ozowalu (Audience question): I was struck, across the program, by the tension between handheld images and more stabilized cinematic framings, and also by the tension between improvisation and more structured movement. Because the sequence was assembled anthologically, I found myself wondering whether that tension is what allows separate works, and separate histories, to enter into relation. In everyday life these things remain dispersed, but here they were gathered and made to speak to one another. Does anthological form make that relation newly possible? And can such a form ever be liberatory?

Kaneza Schaal: That is a beautiful question. We all come into a room like this and, even when there are rows of chairs, people still choose to sit within their own space. That too is a taught way of being with others. Yet once we are in the screening room, we are at least provisionally gathered into a shared duration. Not quite the same perspective, but the same condition of being here, now, with these images.

So yes, I think form matters in that sense. The nonlinear editing of time can reopen our sense of relation. It can make other kinds of adjacency thinkable. But I would hesitate to say that form alone guarantees liberation. It can create an occasion. It can invite people into another relation. That is already meaningful.