‘Kizazi Moto’: What Disney’s first African show means for the continent’s future

Having grown up queer, I’ve always had a special place for Disney’s animated villains – particularly Maleficent, Scar, Ursula, and Cruella de Vil.

These villains were all blatantly queer coded baddies that were confident, fierce, witty, intelligent, sassy, flamboyant, and usually one of their movie’s most well-rounded characters.

And it’s not so much the sassy flamboyance that attracted me – rather how unapologetic they were for being sassy and flamboyant. They didn’t just live in their Otherness, they revelled in it fiendishly.

As someone innately Othered pretty much in most spaces I enter – be it conscious or unconscious – I used characters like these to create a mask I could use to combat that Othering, which I sometimes still utilise when I’m in spaces or events that make me feel uncomfortable.

That’s why when Disney+ launched in Africa in May 2022, I wanted to reflect this reverence for queer-coded villains by having Cruella being my outfit’s primary inspiration.

Think of it as if Cruella was cast in Gossip Girl.

The launch was my first major event I went to as a journalist and, honestly, I ate that.

It’s at the Disney+ launch where I first found out about Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire after I got the chance to the senior VP and country manager at Walt Disney Co. Africa, Christine Service.

Being that it was my first major event, coupled with my genuine love for the House of Mouse, I was pretty geeked to be speaking to someone directly linked to the corporation.

Of course, I told her about my little anecdote about Disney villains and she called my enthusiasm ‘infectious’, which geeked me out some more.

“At Disney, we are so committed to making sure that our audiences see themselves reflected and can identify with our characters… it’s so rewarding,” she told me.

I ate that answer up, but retrospectively, I’m not 100% sure how true this is. It was only in 2022 that Disney Animation Studios had its first openly queer lead character with Strange World. Keep in mind that Disney Animation Studios was founded in 1923, one hundred years ago, and was still having ‘firsts’.

Nevertheless, change is change and progress is progress, even if it remains to be seen whether Disney will stick to its inclusivity guns by continuing to represent explicitly queer, not just queer-coded, characters after Strange World flopped at the box office pretty much everywhere, allegedly costing the Mouse House up to a $197.4 million loss.

Fast-forward to June 2023, the month of the world premiere of Disney Africa’s first original production for Disney+ – just over one year after its launch in parts of the continent.

After I was sent the invite, I was obviously amped to see what Disney has been cooking up as their newest ‘first’, but I did side-eye its dress code: Futuristic African Visions.

This was obviously a convoluted way to rephrase Afrofuturism, meant to tie in with the sci-fi elements of Kizazi Moto – described in the PR email as an animated “anthology [series that] draws on the continent’s rich and diverse histories and cultures, featuring bold and brave new worlds of advanced technology, aliens, spirits, and monsters”.

Basically, the Wakandafication of Africa in animation form.

Picture: Devon Thomas/Eyewitness News

I have yet to actually watch the show (the premiere had screenings of the episodes sectioned to different rooms in the building, but the quality was so poor that I decided to just wait before I saw it), so I’ll save my thoughts on it until then.

However, this increasing fixation on ‘futurising’ Africa by the West in an attempt to undo its self-conceived depiction of the continent as a destitute place, home to nothing but safaris, a sepia filter, and a hoard of lions, is getting a little weird at this point.

Disney, of course, helped popularise this with Blank Panther, and from what I’ve seen, its first foray into African story telling is to tell it from a lens of what Africa could be.

I could be wrong, but it feels like another iteration of the dated trope centred on the ‘promise’ of a developing Africa.

With each episode being directed by creators from across Africa, at least this time, however, it will (theoretically) be told from the lens of creators who are actually from the continent.

Fingers crossed that Africa will be unshackled from Western depictions of it as a singular, monolithic nation.

To be clear, I’m not expecting Kizazi Moto to be a flop, and I’m not mad about the sci-fi elements either, I’m just cautious of the rising trend of repositioning Africa through the lens of mimicking – and inevitably conforming to – the West.

Picture: Devon Thomas/Eyewitness News

Disney’s reign in Africa, if it’s smart about it, could reshape the continent’s global identity that propels its voices, and not just exploit them until the world’s pseudo-inclusivity fetish inevitably ends.

I don’t want Disney to box our creators into the trap of pandering to an audience for the sake of global appeal.

I want it to grant them the platform to break away from the neocolonial bubble that fixates on Pan-Africanism.

I want them to show the world that Kenyan stories aren’t South African stories, that South African stories aren’t Nigerian stories, that Nigerian stories aren’t Ethiopian stories, and so forth.

I want to be able to see myself reflected from a lens that is contextually specific, complex, and abundant, not in the ‘promise’ of development, but in long-undervalued untold stories.

And with Disney being the most powerful entertainment conglomerate in the world, (formerly) known for its innovation, who better else to do it than them?

“There is such a robust creative industry [in Africa] and so many stories to tell – that is so clear… We’re really excited about what the future holds [and] these two projects that we are starting are really going to be great kicking off points,” Disney told me over a year ago.

As the first of these projects to drop, Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire and its geographically diverse creators have the massive potential to spark exactly that – let’s just hope these promises don’t go down in flames.

Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire drops on Disney+ on 5 July.

You can stream the trailer below.