Wanuri Kahiu after Rafiki

Wanuri Kahiu's post-Rafiki decade has been quieter than the trade press expected after the film's Cannes premiere and its subsequent ban in Kenya. What she has actually been doing, mostly out of the international attention cycle, is building the AfroBubbleGum aesthetic movement she and her collaborators articulated a decade ago and running the production infrastructure required to fund the films that movement calls for.

AfroBubbleGum's argument is that African cinema does not have to be about suffering to be serious — that joy, colour and pleasure are legitimate subjects for African filmmakers, and that the international festival system's default preference for suffering-as-authentic is a form of critical bias that should be resisted. That argument is not new, but Kahiu has been unusually explicit about it, and unusually rigorous in following through on it in her production choices.

The follow-through matters more than the manifesto. Since Rafiki she has been attached to production on a range of Kenyan and pan-African projects that share the AfroBubbleGum instinct — bright palettes, contemporary settings, character-driven plots, refusal to be genre-labeled as either African-tragedy or Afrofuturist-optimism. The individual films are less internationally visible than her Cannes premiere, but the cumulative effect on Kenyan production is real.

The critique of AfroBubbleGum as a movement is a fair one about scale. There are only so many productions Kahiu can personally attach to, and the aesthetic requires a specific set of craft dispositions that not every Kenyan director shares. The movement risks becoming a house style rather than a general contribution to African cinema. Kahiu's response, in interviews, has been to point at the growing set of Kenyan directors who are working in the register without her direct involvement, which is a reasonable answer.

What Kahiu is really building is not a personal filmography but an institutional case for a specific kind of African cinema. That case is harder to see on any given festival slate than a single Cannes premiere, but it will be more durable in the long run. The next Kenyan director who gets an Amazon or Netflix commission will be operating in a landscape she helped clear. Ban or no ban, that is the more lasting contribution.