Xaraasi Xanne explores the agency of community in undertaking the slow, intentional process of redressing the ecologically devastating aftereffects of colonialism. It tells the story of Soumankidi Coura, a Pan-African permaculture collective, through the overflowing multimedia archives of founding member Bouba Touré. Formed by a group of West African migrants’ rights activists living in Paris and its suburbs, following the Sahel droughts of 1973 they retrained as permaculturists and returned to Mali to rehabilitate barren land on the banks of the Senegal River. Irrigation was critical to the project’s success, and in the film’s opening, we are told that a key part of its restorative infrastructure was to build canals out of termite mound soil:

“The termites make small balls of tightly compacted soil. When you wet this soil it becomes waterproof. We retrieved the soil without harming the termite queen.”

The passage exemplifies an ethic of coexistence, in which the repair of landscapes is inseparable from indigenous environmental knowledge and non-human agency. In West African cultures, termite mounds are more than just structural or ecological phenomena. They are living, breathing systems, regulating airflow and temperature internally, while playing a crucial role in enhancing the surrounding soil fertility by breaking down organic matter and cycling nutrients essential for plant growth. But they are also spiritually significant, commonly believed to be inhabited by djinns, ancestors, or nature deities. Soumankidi Coura’s efforts to avoid disrupting local ecosystems stand in stark contrast to colonial and capitalist paradigms of land as inert property, ripe for exploitation, illustrating the interspecies and environmental sensitivity inherent to both Soumankidi Coura’s modes of production and construction methods in the region.

Similarly, Mooladé, inimitable Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène’s fiercely feminist crusade against patriarchal violence through the issue of female circumcision, employs vernacular Sahelo-Sudanese architecture to comment on the connection between termite mounds, human-land relations and philosophical worldviews. The film is set in Djerisso, a Bambara village on Burkina Faso’s western border, specifically chosen by Sembène who explained how the region’s pre-colonial architecture is deeply informed by the natural world and organic forms, reflecting the interplay between human and non-human habitats: 

“I could have done it somewhere else, but I would not have had this setting that I searched for and didn’t find except here. I simply looked for a village that responded to my creative desire. I traveled thousands of kilometers. I went to Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea and Guinea Bissau. But when I saw this village I told myself: this is the village! But there’s more: this hedgehog-like mosque in the middle of the village, its unique architecture in the Sub-Saharan region. This architecture wasn’t inspired by outside influences, we owe it to the termite ants, to the anthills, the symbol of moolaadé. That’s why I chose Djerisso.” 

The village’s topography is punctuated by three towering structures, each signifying key moments of ancestral memory, foreign influence, and ideological transformation. There is the daily sanctuary of the village mosque, established 150 years ago; the jagged shrine of the termite mound, present since time immemorial; and, rising throughout the film’s duration, a pile of radios, confiscated by the men of the village, who deem the outside world a nefarious influence on the women’s morality. The mosque represents the embrace of Islam, an ascendant theology in the region since the 12th century; the termite mound, the burial place and spirit of their cursed ancestor; and the radio, a symbol of modernity and accelerated globalisation. These forces are not in strict opposition—the men listen to Quranic recitations on the radio, for instance—but rather exist in a restless negotiation. As Sembène remarked in a 2004 interview, “When religion doesn’t give satisfaction, we go back to tradition. When tradition gives no comfort, we go to religion.”

One of the most striking compositions of the various configurations of the three towers, is when the radios foreground the mosque and termite mound. Local and diasporic music blares from the pile of radios, bleeding into each other. On the side of one of them is written “Atlantic 2”, evocative of both transatlantic displacement and the global circuits of post-colonial modernity. The connectivity of radio technology is also central to Xarassi Xanne, where Radio Rurale de Kayes, Mali’s first non-state radio, emerges as an agricultural and social tool—a broadcast for and by farmers. The very term “broadcast” originates from an agricultural practice: the scattering of seeds across a field. Xarassi Xanne makes explicit this continuity between embodied, analogue forms of generative dispersion and digital transmission; framing the farmers’ use of radio–”polyradiophonic algorithm technology”–as a continuation of the griot tradition. The radio station is introduced with a special radio broadcast on termites which, like the film itself emphasises the potential role of media as a call for a heightened and active engagement with environmental concerns.

The titular mooladé–in Bambara culture, moolaadé signifies an inviolable spiritual and social protection given to those seeking safety–of Sembène’s film resides in the termite mound, which embodies the village’s first king Yérim Dethi Kodé Ndiak. We learn that “His people rebelled, and as a result, he was turned into the anthill; he had offended the mooladé.” This echoes Xarassi Xanne in which “the ancestors told us that the termite mounds were inhabited by djinns” who confront Bouba one night as he holds vigil over the nascent farm. The film’s spiritual-ecological consciousness is invoked again when we are told, “If you go into an isolated place, the ants will welcome you, and you will be indebted.” This notion of indebtedness to the land and its non-human inhabitants signals a radically different ontology from colonial-capitalist modes of extraction, which (dis)regard land as a possession rather than a relational entity. Similarly, Sembène’s recurrent use of the termite mound as a site of spiritual engagement and atavistic memory suggests an inherent environmental sensibility within an oeuvre typically read as social but often overlooked as ecological. In Mooladé one of the village elders states, “No one can transgress the mooladé. Its spirit is formidable.” reflecting the religious syncretism between indigenous animism and Islam that typifies the region, where landscapes are not merely backdrops but active participants in spiritual, historical, and environmental processes.

Just to the side of the three towers is the realm of Mercenaire, a former soldier who mans the village’s sole shop selling imported goods, a gaudy mix of plastic tat and imported trinkets suspended from the air and accumulating on his cart, which represent the economic market and all that is endogenous and manufactured in this relatively insular village. Mercenaire–an ambiguous character as the only man to take an active stand against the film’s most brutal display of gendered violence but also a predatory capitalist–and his domain represents the penetration o f the market economy in Africa. Through his actions and the terms he imposes upon customers are introduced concepts of credit, inflation, monopoly and the notion of the free market which he explains and props up with relish. Likewise, Xarassi Xanne is fundamentally about the forced entry of environmentally extractive market dynamics in Africa–from the proto-capitalist forces of the Transatlantic slave trade to import reliance today–but stands out from other artistic depictions that merely diagnose the problem, as it presents methods in which we might opt out, subvert capitalism, and return to the reverence, equilibrium, sustainability and coexistence symbolised by the termite mound. 

Next to the termite mound in Mooladé stands the heap of radios, but the two are not in competition or conflict–rather, they coexist as symbols of transmission. Both Xarassi Xanne and Mooladé employ media as tools of dissemination—whether oral, sonic, or visual—to preserve and resist. Sembène’s use of the radio is not incidental, as Mooladé concludes, it becomes clear that the radio is a harbinger of television, and by extension, cinema. In fact, Sembène’s treatment of the radio underscores cinema’s place in a continuum of storytelling—beginning with oral traditions, moving through sonic transmission, and arriving at the moving image. Mooladé was intended as the second film in a trilogy beginning with Faat-Kiné, exploring the heroism of daily life. Sembène passed away before completing the third installment, but in ending Mooladé’s final monologue with, “From now on, I'll have television. ON,” and the camera lingering on a radio antenna, his departing message is clear: like the antennae of termites, these technologies must continue to transmit and receive information and narratives that embody pre-, de-, and anti-colonial modes of life.