Visions of Africa's future, from African filmmakers

30,274 views ・ 2018-05-15

TED


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00:12
As a child growing up in Nigeria,
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books sparked my earliest imagination,
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but films, films transported me
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to magical places with flying cars,
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to infinite space with whole universes of worlds to discover.
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And my journey of discovery has led to many places and possibilities,
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all linked with ideas and imagination.
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A decade and a half ago,
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I moved from working in law and technology in New York
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to financing, producing and distributing films
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in Nairobi, Lagos and Johannesburg.
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I've been privileged to see firsthand how in Africa,
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film powerfully explores the marvelous and the mundane,
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how it conveys infinite possibilities and fundamental truths.
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Afrofuturist films like "Pumzi,"
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Wanuri Kahiu's superb sci-fi flick,
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paint brilliant pictures of Africa's future,
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while Rungano Nyoni's "I Am Not A Witch"
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and Akin Omotoso's "Vaya"
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show us and catalogue our present.
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These filmmakers offer nuanced snapshots of Africa's imagined and lived reality,
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in contrast to some of the images of Africa that come from outside,
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and the perspectives that accompany all of these images,
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whether sympathetic or dismissive, shape or distort
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how people see Africa.
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And the truth is,
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many people think Africa is screwed up.
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Images play a big part of the reason why.
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Many tropes about Africa persist from pictures,
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pictures of famine in Ethiopia 30 years ago,
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pictures of the Biafran war half a century ago.
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But on a continent where the average age is 17,
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these tragic events seem almost prehistoric.
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Their images are far removed
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from how people in Africa's many countries see themselves and their neighbors.
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For them, these images do not represent their reality.
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So what is Africa's reality,
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or rather, which of Africa's many realities do we choose to focus on?
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Do we accept Emmanuel Macron's imagination of Africa in 2017
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as a place in which all women have seven or eight children?
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Or do we instead rely on the UN's account
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that only one of Africa's 54 countries has a fertility rate as high as seven?
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Do we focus on the fact
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that infant mortality and life expectancy in Africa today
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is roughly comparable to the US a hundred years ago,
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or do we focus on progress,
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the fact that Africa has cut infant mortality in half
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in the last four decades
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and has raised life expectancy by 10 years since the year 2000?
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These dueling perspectives
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are all accurate.
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Well, aside from Macron's. He's just wrong.
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(Laughter)
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But one version makes it easy to dismiss Africa as hopeless,
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while the other fuels hope that a billion people
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can continue to make progress towards prosperity.
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The fact that Africans
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do not have the luxury of turning their gaze elsewhere,
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the fact that we must make progress
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or live with the consequence of failure,
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are the reason we must continue to tell our own stories
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and show our own images,
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with honesty and primarily to an African audience,
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because the image that matters most
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is the image of Africa in African imaginations.
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Now, honesty requires that we acknowledge
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that Africa is behind the rest of the world
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and needs to move swiftly to catch up.
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But thinking of a way forward,
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I'd like us to engage in a thought exercise.
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What if we could go back a hundred years,
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say to the US in 1917,
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but we could take with us all the modern ideas,
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innovations, inventions that we have today?
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What could we achieve with this knowledge?
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How richly could we improve quality of life and living conditions for people?
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How widely could we spread prosperity?
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Imagine if a hundred years ago,
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the education system had all the knowledge we have today,
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including how best to teach.
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And doctors and scientists knew all we do
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about public health measures, surgery techniques,
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DNA sequencing, cancer research and treatment?
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If we had access then to modern semiconductors,
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computers, mobile devices, the internet?
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Just imagine.
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If we did, we could take a quantum leap forward, couldn't we.
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Well, Africa can take a leap of that magnitude today.
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There's enough untapped innovation
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to move Africa a century forward in living conditions
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if the will and commitment is there.
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This is not just a possibility; it's an imperative for Africa's future,
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a future that will see Africa's population double
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to two and a half billion people in just three decades,
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a future that will see Africa have the world's largest workforce,
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just as the idea of work itself is being radically reconsidered.
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Now taking the leap forward isn't that far-fetched.
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There are tons of examples that demonstrate the potential
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for change in Africa.
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Just 20 years ago,
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Nigeria had fewer than half a million working phone lines.
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Today it has a hundred million mobile phone subscriptions,
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and this mobile miracle is mirrored in every African country.
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There are over three quarters of a billion mobile phones in use in Africa today,
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and this has spurred justified excitement about leapfrogging,
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about bringing the sharing economy, artificial intelligence,
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autonomous machines to Africa.
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And this is all promising,
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but we need to think about sequencing.
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Forget putting the cart before the horse.
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You can't put the self-driving car before the roads.
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(Applause)
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There's a whole infrastructural and logical layer to innovation
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that we take for granted,
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but we have to triage for Africa,
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because some of the biggest infrastructure gaps
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are for things that are so basic
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that Westerners rarely have to think about them.
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So let's explore this.
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Imagine your internet access went off for a day,
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and when it came back,
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it only stayed on for three hours at a time,
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with random 15-hour outages?
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How would your life change?
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Now replace internet access with electricity.
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Think of your fridges, your TVs, your microwaves,
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just sitting idly for days.
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Now extend this nightmare to government offices,
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to businesses, to schools,
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to hospitals.
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This, or worse,
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is the type of access that hundreds of millions of Africans
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have to electricity,
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and to water,
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and to healthcare,
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and to sanitation,
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and to education.
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We must fix this.
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We must fix this because ensuring widespread and affordable access
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to decent infrastructure and services
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isn't just low-hanging fruit:
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it's fundamental to achieving the hundred-year leap.
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And when we fix it,
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we might find some unexpected benefits.
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One unexpected benefit of the mobile miracle
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was that it led to what is perhaps the greatest cultural resurgence
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that Africa has seen in a generation:
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the rebirth of African popular music.
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For musicians like P-Square,
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Bongo Maffin
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and Wizkid,
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mobile phones paved the path to local dominance
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and global stardom.
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And the impact isn't limited just to music.
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It extends to film, too.
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Beautiful, engaging films
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like these stills of "Pumzi,"
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"Vaya," and "I Am Not A Witch" show.
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For while its external image might be dated,
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Africa continues to evolve, as does African film.
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Now, every now and again, the rest of the world catches on,
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perhaps with Djo Munga's hard-hitting "Viva Riva!"
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with Newton Aduaka's intense "Ezra,"
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or with Abderrahmane Sissako's poetic "Timbuktu."
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With mobile, Africans are discovering more and more of these films,
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and what that means is that it really matters less in Kinshasa or Cotonou
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what Cannes thinks of African film,
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or if those opinions are informed or fair.
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Who really cares what the "New York Times" thinks?
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What matters is that Africans are validating African art and ideas,
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both critically and commercially,
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that they are watching what they want,
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and that African filmmakers are connecting with their core audiences.
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And this is important.
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It's important because film can illuminate and inspire.
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Film can bring visions of the future to us here in the present.
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Films can serve as a conveyor belt for hope.
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And film can change perspectives faster than we can build roads.
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In just over a decade,
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Nigeria's film industry, Africa's largest,
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has taken the country's words and languages
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into the vocabulary and imaginations of millions
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in many other African countries.
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It has torn down borders,
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perhaps in the most effective way since the Berlin Conference
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sowed linguistic and geographic division across Africa.
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Film does speak a universal language,
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and boy, Nigerian film speaks it loudly.
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Making Africa's hundred-year leap
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will require that Africans summon the creativity to generate ideas
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and find the openness to accept and adapt ideas from anywhere else in the world
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to solve our pervasive problems.
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With focus on investment,
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films can help drive that change in Africa's people,
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a change that is necessary to make the hundred-year leap,
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a change that will help create a prosperous Africa,
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an Africa that is dramatically better than it is today.
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Thank you.
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Asante sana.
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(Applause)
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