Xala

Mambéty transposes Dürrenmatt's Swiss parable into a parched Sahelian town where a returning millionairess offers the villagers wealth in exchange for a ritual murder, and they accept while pretending not to. Co-produced through Swiss capital and adapting a Swiss text, it mirrors Xala's diagnosis of an African polity that performs traditional ceremony while being silently restructured by foreign money.

The ABC's co-produced serialization of Galsworthy follows Soames Forsyte's attempt to convert a wife, a house and a class position into freehold property, with impotence of will dressed in the velvet of late-Victorian respectability. The series anticipates Xala's central image of a man whose accumulation of objects—including women—produces only the slow exposure of his own incapacity.

Armah's nameless clerk moves through a Nkrumah-era Accra coated in excrement and rust, where every surface registers the moral putrefaction of a bourgeoisie that simply changed shifts with the British. Like the El Hadji of Sembène's film, the new African elite is figured through bodily disgust, the political abstraction of independence collapsed into the smell of latrines and the grease on a banister.

Kerkorrel's Voëlvry Afrikaans rock takes the language of the oppressor and turns it into a saloon-piano cabaret accusation against the National Party generals who claim to defend Western civilization while ruling by junta logic. The song shares Xala's tactic of using the elite's own performative dignity—suit, anthem, mother tongue—as the precise material of satire.