Introduction

In the late Senegalese filmmaker-novelist Ousmane Sembene's (1970) novel God's bits of wood, the history of a 1947–48 workers’ strike against the colonial operators of French West Africa's Dakar–Niger railroad is retold through the stories of the social networks of the strike's organizers, activists, and opponents along the line of rail at three urban junctures: Dakar, Thiés, and Bamako. Sembene connects the cities, and the countryside between them, in a kind of produced socio-nature of resistance to colonial rule and its consequences. As Sembene does in nearly all of his works in print and film, in God's bits of wood, he places women at the center of the narrative, and he emphasizes their roles in the production and re-production of the cultural and physical cityscape. It is one of the strongest African novels for linking the urban and the environmental in firmly political ways. However, there are, in fact, hundreds of African novels that do so, and those novels are only a thin sliver of the body of works by African artists that are, in effect, works of urban political ecology (UPE).

Since political artistic visions of urban environments come in many forms of art, it is totally impossible to do justice to the whole panoply. In this chapter, I examine the visions of environments and environmentalism in art largely with novels, but extend in the end to popular music and, to a lesser extent, institutions of the arts. (All of these visions provide some connective tissue with Chapter Five, on the grassroots, and thus my discussion of them overlaps into that chapter.) Artists, writers, and artistic institutions obviously also cover the map of the continent, and while I take examples from a variety of settings, I acknowledge the utter impossibility of covering that whole map. In keeping with my approach in the previous three chapters, each of which has a main focus city, here, my concentration lies with Dakar, as a city alive with visual, musical, performing, and written arts that have been influential around the world—and specifically with its satellite city of Pikine—as well as the environmental issues surrounding waste, water, and urban floods.