Across Africa and its diaspora, there is a rich database of culture already at play, by novelists, poets, musicians, filmmakers, with diversely imagined futures. These imaginings are now no longer restricted to the cultural space but are finding their way into the world of science, research and policymaking.
Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, A Nation Divided. Buy the issue here.
In Chinua Achebe’s An Image of Africa, the author recounts a meeting in 1974 with an older man on his way from university. The older man, surprised that Achebe taught African literature—confusing it with African history—remarked that he ‘never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff’. The ‘stuff’ being written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit. The confusion with African history is the telling part.
Art, literature and culture do not exist in a vacuum. African literature is as wide and varied as any other category of literature. Literature is not only a reflection and examination of the past; it also holds up a mirror to the present, and most importantly imagines a future we do not yet know. African literature is constantly up against the ‘colonial library’—the global minority of Western culture which has perpetuated a single story of the continent.
As such, Africa has rarely been the centre of its own story, especially when we envision the future. The exploration of the future is not so far-fetched, but intimately linked to the past and present. In a world where Africa stands to lose—from climate change to environmental degradation—the continent has to determine that future. This approach, one that imagines other social-ecological alternatives (through literature, art, climate, and environmental scenarios), advocates for a broader conception of futurity as a lived practice embedded within local places and histories.
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