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It's going to be an African summer. That's the title BBC2 are using for their current season of African programming. But it could equally well encompass the series of classic African films that starts at the National Film Theatre next week and Africa '95, the huge cultural beano that kicks off around the country on 12 August.

There's no official connection between these events, but one man has his finger in all three pies, lending advice to the BBC, the NFI and Africa '95's organisers, as well as making a series of films for BBC2. John Akomfrah's omnipresence is a sign of the regard in which the director is now held by black film-makers. The chances are you'll know his work from three films: Handsworth Songs, Testament and Seven Songs for Malcolm X have earned him a host of international prizes and an undisputed place among Britain's top black directors. "What distinguishes John from the others," says June Givanni, head of the African-Caribbean Unit of the British Film Institute, "is that he's also well-known in Europe and the States, and has a strong foothold in Africa, where directors regard him as a colleague." Akomfrah's personal contribution to this summer's events begins on Saturday with the first of 10 shorts on African leaders, to be followed later in August by two films, for BBC2's African Footsteps, following the comic David Baddiel and the ex-West Indies cricketer Viv Richards to Namibia and South Africa respectively.

Born in Ghana, Akomfrah arrived in Britain in 1962 aged five, after his father, a minister in Nkrumah's government, died in a mysterious car crash. He left film school in the Seventies "more interested in Proust than whether or not I thought of myself as British, which was the big debate among black people at the time. The modernist project made perfect sense to me. I read Ulysses and that sense of alienated people trying to find their way in the world fitted perfectly into my experience as a young black."

Although the issues in Akomfrah's films typically come straight from the street, a fascination for form and the avant-garde has become characteristic of his work. It has gained him accolades in the film world and among black intellectuals and artists, even if some younger black film-makers are suspicious of what they see as an elitist approach to cinema. "What they're looking for," says Givanni, "is an attempt to reach a mass audience: blockbusters with broad appeal to the black community." Many of those younger directors now look across the Atlantic for inspiration. By contrast, while Akomfrah and a handful of others acknowledge and use American innovations, they continue to experiment with influences as disparate as Tarkovsky and early blues.

The new films have taken Akomfrah on a journey across 11 African countries from Eritrea to South Africa. He admits that "before I started, my thoughts about Africa seemed to be caught in a time warp. I'm sure most viewers' ideas haven't changed much since Live Aid, which in some ways simply confirmed what people thought. I was tremendously excited by the possibility of showing new types of narrative, alongside more familiar stories of war and starvation." The Namib desert gave him a chance to "abandon the baggage of what I'd done before". For Baddiel's surreal safari, Akomfrah uses a backdrop of dunes and an abandoned diamond-mining village. The result is a beautifully shot, unashamedly arty film, sure to raise his critics' hackles.

The political broadcasts, however, show a sharper side to his art. Subjects range from Kenneth Kaunda, the former president of Zambia, debating the merits of ballot and bullet, to Patricia De Lille of the Pan-African Congress musing on the place of whites in Africa. "African political leaders don't often have a chance to speak without being interrupted by a film-maker's agenda," he says. "Viewers may be surprised by what they see."

n BBC2's 'African Political Broadcasts' start 10.55pm Saturday with Kenneth Kaunda. 'African Footsteps' with David Baddiel and Viv Richards is on the same channel on 17 Aug

n The NFT's 'Screen Griots' season opens with a season of African classic cinema on 2 August