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Contrary to popular belief, the animated moving image on the African continent has long and diverse histories across many countries. Although it shares both the technology and some of the formal aspects of cinema, its historical development followed a different trajectory to that of indexical film, both in Europe and in Africa. This may be because of animation’s ability to draw upon a range of artistic practice, which means it can take many guises; at times it appears like a cartoon, or sometimes like puppets or sculptures that come to life; at other times it is a metamorphic drawing or painting, or even a photographic montage. In addition, while animation tends to be associated with content specifically intended for a children’s audience, it has in fact been an effective vehicle to conceal sociopolitical critique that would otherwise be considered problematic. Different animators in Africa have used animation to this end, presenting subversive and social-realist content within the unrealistic depictions of fantastical stories, the parodic, comedic or allegorical, or culturally located visual metaphors. African animators have also used animation to safeguard and give permanence to the stories, myths, and legends they grew up with. These legends have occasionally also informed animated superheroes in games such as the Kenyan mobile phone application Africa’s Legends, or the cast of an Afro-futurist setting such as the Nigerian “Afro-anime” production Red Origins. With the onset of digital technology, the landscape of animation in Africa has seen a blossoming of activity from expert and non-expert prod-users. Their work circulates in formal and informal settings, whether visible at a festival, on television and mainstream media, in online social networking spaces or on video streaming sites such as YouTube or Vimeo. The prolific characteristic of animation made for digital spaces has resulted in a paradoxical simultaneous visibility and invisibility. Networks of African artists have benefited from the visibility and distribution that the Internet and smart phone technologies offer; for example, Kenyan multimedia artists Just a Band were quoted as saying that they were discovered online before they were discovered in Nairobi. However, the ephemeral quality of these digital spaces can also be problematic from the archivist’s perspective as digital traces change. For this reason it is increasingly important to capture the traces that African artists leave in this dynamic space as they reflect the zeitgeist.

Tsitsi Dangarembga is Zimbabwe’s first Black female novelist and is now one of the most well-known writers in the canons of Zimbabwean, anglophone African, and postcolonial women’s literature. Her 1988 Nervous Conditions has become one of the most widely read and widely taught novels in the African literary canon. Dangarembga’s published literary works include one play (She No Longer Weeps, 1987), three novels (Nervous Conditions, 1988; The Book of Not, 2006; and This Mournable Body, 2018), two short stories (“The Letter,” 1985; and “Jana Dives,” 2022), and one essay collection (Black and Female: Essays, 2022). Nervous Conditions won the 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region); This Mournable Body was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2020, and since then Dangarembga has won the 2021 German Publishers and Booksellers Association’s Peace Prize, the 2021 PEN Pinter Prize, and the 2022 Windham Campbell Literature Prize for fiction. Dangarembga is also one of Zimbabwe’s most prominent filmmakers. The owner of her own production company, Nyerai Films, she has written, directed, or produced over twenty films, including Everyone’s Child (1996), On the Border (2000), Hard Earth: Land Rights in Zimbabwe (2001), Kare Kare Zvako: Mother’s Day (2004), High Hopes (2010), and I Want a Wedding Dress (2010). While all of Dangarembga’s published work casts a critical eye on postindependence Zimbabwean nationalism and government policy, she gained international visibility as a political activist in July 2020, when she was arrested for participating in a demonstration against the government’s persecution and arrest of journalist Hopewell Chin’ono. Dangarembga was convicted of inciting public violence in 2022; in 2023, that conviction was overturned. In 2021, she received the PEN International award for Freedom of Expression. In 2022–2023, she served as a Radcliffe Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.