A New Image of Africa’s Future

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.

Whether you label it African science fiction or African futurism, the common thread is its rootedness in culture, history, and mythology that does not centre the West. ‘It’s less concerned with “what could have been” and more concerned with “what is and can/will be”. It acknowledges, grapples with and carries “what has been”,’ writes Hugo award-winning Nigerian-American writer, Nnedi Okorafor. For Kodwo Eshun, African futurism ‘does not seek to deny the tradition of counter-memory. Rather, it aims to extend that tradition by reorienting the intercultural vectors of Black Atlantic temporality towards the proleptic as much as the retrospective.’

Artistic, literary, and cultural productions are sources of knowledge. They are types of knowledge that can be used, deconstructed, reformed and reused. This knowledge suggests the emancipation of paradigms; conjectures towards the moment when our imagined worlds live up to their speculative capacity and theorize liberation as the full expression of the richness of the people’s potential. While African knowledge has been thought to look back, scientists are now using knowledge to look forward.

WEALTH IN BIODIVERSITY

What is the future we want, and how can we direct it? In the 2018 report on the regional assessment of biodiversity and ecosystem services for Africa by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service (IPBES), IPBES notes: ‘Africa has options… The identification and selection of feasible options needs to be facilitated by considering a range of plausible futures using scenarios and by providing an enabling environment for long-term planning.’

IPBES is an independent intergovernmental body established by nations worldwide to strengthen the science-policy interface for biodiversity and ecosystem services for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, long-term human well-being and sustainable development. It was established in Panama City, on 21 April 2012 by 94 Governments.

In these policy spheres, where decision makers debate what steps to take on behalf of their citizens, the need is clear—to think about the future as every decision will have a consequence and will shape the way people and communities live. How we want communities to live is inherently rooted in what future we envision for such people.

Getting decision makers, particularly in the African region, to envision a future for their citizens takes a lot of work and time. However, this is the work IPBES and others have been doing since its inception. The 2018 report is a summary for policymakers and is based on work by scientists and researchers to imagine a more prosperous future for Africans on the continent. Some African scientists and researchers believe narratives and even science fiction from non-Western cultures offer a more nuanced and diverse approach to decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. These varied possible futures, grounded in realities from the global South, have been largely missing from the traditional scientific and political dialogue up until now...

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A New Image of Africa’s Future

WEALTH IN BIODIVERSITY

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