In grappling with the tensions that undergird the thrusts of Africanism, Negritude, and similar frameworks, Dennis Ekpo’s “Post-Africanism” offers a critical provocation. It foregrounds internal contradictions in efforts to negotiate African identities, realities, and futures.1 Ekpo critiques what he observes as an obsession with an idealized precolonial past and with Africanist or postcolonial gestures that, in his view, have become intellectually stagnant. He argues that these frameworks hinder Africa’s capacity to engage meaningfully with global modernity, proposing instead that Africa must abandon its “ontological monologue” and initiate a new dialogue with the world. However, in its haste to sever ties with the past, Post-Africanism underestimates the recursiveness of colonial-modernity. As Kenneth Omeje warns, coloniality “has generated enough crises to go round, with a potential energy to outlive and reproduce itself in perpetuity.”2 This is where Africanfuturism’s decolonial turn becomes necessary. Not as a nostalgic retreat into the past, nor as a wholesale embrace of modernity, but as a critical negotiation toward more just, sustainable, and self-defined futures.
Esther Mwema’s Bones of the Sea (2022) is a formidable narrative through which these entangled ideological tensions can be explored.3 Developed as part of her broader decolonial media project, Afro-Grids, for which she received the Mozilla Creative Media and the Green Screen Coalition Catalyst Awards in 2022, Bones of the Sea (hereafter, BOTS) confronts the violence of technological modernity. It is centered around the Taahitt, an oceanic people described as possessing “a beautiful kind of memory” and whose lifeworld is grounded in decentralization and ecological harmony. This society, however, becomes imperiled by the sudden and seductive incursion of a “portal,” a technological structure offering “shiny things” and the illusion of infinite access to power and wealth. But beneath these dazzling promises are exclusion, dehumanization, and environmental degradation. The narrative asserts the decolonial condemnation of the “rhetoric of modernity,” wherein the language of salvation and progress conceals the persistent global violence of digital coloniality, which is a structural domination driven by data extraction, technological impositions, and exploitative forms of progress. Unlike Post-Africanism, which urges Africans to abandon their past as a prerequisite to enter global modernity, BOTS, aligned with the operation of Africanfuturism, refuses assimilation. It does not simply seek to insert Africans into existing Western technophilic paradigms. Instead, it challenges the very terms of futures.
The Taahitt are not simply coastal dwellers; they are custodians of memory. Mwema uses the Taahitt’s embodiment of the past to reject Enlightenment-derived binaries of mind/body, nature/culture, and human/environment that also set Africa in opposition to global modernity. This conforms with indigenous epistemologies that conceive memory as ecological and relational, encoded in land and water rather than data. The narrative’s emphasis on rhythm—as well as the sea’s pulse and its soundscape—reorient knowledge away from ocularcentric logic and towards sonic epistemologies, which often function as embodied knowing. Sound bears memory across spatial and metaphysical boundaries. BOTS extends this operation visually through the fluid forms and shifting hues of the illustrated sea, which contrast with the cold, sharp emissions of the portal. The Taahitt people are presented not as victims of technological incursion but as agents of resistance, refusing the terms of imposed colonial futures.
The disruptive arrival of the portal and the subsequent near collapse of the Taahitt’s society portray the turbulence of futures imaginaries, whether they are suppressed, eliminated, or manifested. The portal’s monopolizing force is revealed by the heterodiegetic narrator: “The portal was too powerful. It could not exist alongside another. The portal wanted all the power for itself.” This contradiction resonates with Susan Arndt’s “futureS,” which she frames as expressions of multiplicity, non-linearity, and the glocal entanglement of power, resistance, and imagination. Africanfuturism, to draw on the valence Arndt introduces, does not operate through a singular teleological arc but rather through competing, coexisting temporalities. As Arndt foregrounds, “every struggle about futureS is to strive for access to power, freedom, and justice.”4 BOTS enacts this struggle: actualizing a future through resistance and adaptation. The actualized future, however, is not entirely emancipatory. It is painfully achieved, partial, and most importantly “derivative,” resulting from trauma rather than vision.
Resistance to incursion is not cast as an absolute triumph. In fact, initial attempts to create counter-technologies fail. The protagonist, Kuuba, emerges reluctantly as a leader, which suggests that desires and imagination alone cannot materialize futures. Futures require enactment, labor, and structure. What is at stake here is the emergence of “future consciousness,” a personal and collective awareness that sees beyond present ruptures and dares to imagine possibilities. The narrative makes clear that futures are not conjured ex nihilo; rather, they are cultivated in struggle: “Upon the bones of those that went ahead and in co-existence with her community, she laid foundations for a new design that did not disrupt the natural ecosystem or take dignity away from the people who used it.”
This adaptation, however, is not without cost. The portal’s transformation of Taahitt society, “not only their body parts becoming bionic, their hearts had changed too,” suggests the deep unethical reprogramming enacted by technological infrastructures, which are concerns central to the ecological and psychic toll of extractive digital economies. As with contemporary marketing of AI, the portal appears neutral, even benevolent, while encoding asymmetries rooted in coloniality. BOTS refuses to concede to this inevitability. Rejecting imposed universals, it offers a radical ethic of refusal: “We don’t need portals, only bridges. Bridges from our past hold the truth of who we are.” This refusal is not a retreat into romanticism, but a recalibration of modernity on decolonial terms, resonating with Walter Mignolo’s imperative to “build decolonial options on the ruins of imperial knowledge.”5 The narrative insists that African futures must be rooted in ecological repair, ancestral relation, and situated ethics: “Anything that does not heal the land must be removed.”
Preferable futures are not inherited: they are enacted. Many (Africanfuturist) narratives, including culturally significant works like Black Panther, are celebrated for their technological and aesthetic grandeur. But they remain derivative in their futurity; that is, the futures they imagine emerge not from self-determined imaginaries but as responses to oppression, loss, or incursions. For instance, Wakanda’s eventual transition from its isolationist policy is catalyzed by Killmonger’s violent intrusion rather than any proactive internal vision. Similarly, in BOTS, the horizon of the future that emerges is one shaped by trauma: Kuuba’s leadership and the redesigned technology are born not out of uninterrupted continuity or (re)invention but survival after rupture. While these futures are meaningful acts of resistance and reclamation, they are nevertheless haunted by the structures they resist. They are reactive and not anticipatory of possibilities.
What Africanfuturism must aspire toward are generative futures: futures rooted not in crisis but in relationality and self-possessed/projected visions. These futures do more than merely salvage what is left after disruption; they prefigure worlds before the portal, beyond colonial paralysis. The challenge before Africanfuturism, then, is not simply to resist or escape the entrapment of colonial futurities, but to outgrow their frames, ensuring that African futures are largely generative.
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Endnotes
- Denis Ekpo, “Towards a Post‐Africanism: Contemporary African Thought and Postmodernism,” Textual Practice 9, no. 1 (1995): 121–135.
- Kenneth Omeje, “Debating Postcoloniality in Africa,” The Crises of Postcoloniality in Africa, edited by Kenneth Omeje (CODESRIA, 2015), 1–27.
- Esther Mwema, Bones of the Sea (Afro Grids, 2022), https://afrogrids.com/bones-of-the-sea.
- Susan Arndt, “Human*Tree and the Un / Making of FutureS: A Posthumanist Reading of Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi,” Dreams, Hopes, and Futures: The Imagination of Africa in the 21st Century, edited by. Clarissa Vierke and Karin Barber (Köppe, 2023), 127–37.
- Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Duke University Press, 2011).
Tolulope Oke