African-rooted futurisms have the potential to radically challenge globally dominant visions. This radical potential is not inevitable. For example, there are African governmental strategies for low carbon energy futures that reproduce Western narratives of environmental modernisation. And there are iconic films like Black Panther that illustrate the hybrid ways in which African cultural forms are refracted through African-American lenses and the Hollywood complex, resulting in commodities that are neither straightforwardly African-rooted nor radical critiques of Western futurisms. Yet, African-rooted futurisms have the potential to challenge the ways in which place, temporality, and ecology are typically narrated in Western futurisms. In this short essay, I want to advance this argument through a discussion of Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s novella Lost Ark Dreaming.1
In a larger book project, African Climate Futures, I read the climate fiction of authors like Okungbowa, a Nigerian writer of speculative fiction living in Canada, as well as Nnedi Okorafor, Lauren Beukes, Chinelo Onwualu, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Alastair Mackay, and others, alongside official, governmental long-term climate strategies from Nigeria, South Africa, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. I argue that Africanfuturist climate fiction can help to inspire more radical, reparative, more-than-human ecopolitical imaginaries, and challenge how we envision the places, temporalities, and ecologies—and thus the politics—of global climate futures.
I began this essay by referring to African-rooted futurisms. This is similar to Okungbowa’s terminology of “African-descended Futurisms” to refer to his course on the “multiple paths” through which artists have taken for “imagining possible existences for peoples descended from the African continent.”2 Like many commentators, I draw upon Okorafor’s framing of Africanfuturism as “specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view.” This invites reflection on the entangled, diverse, and often strange nature of roots—encompassing material, biological, historical, cultural, and symbolic connections—and the various ways in which identity and authority are invoked when defining and analysing Africanfuturist manifestations. As has often been noted, the over-representation of Nigerian diaspora artists and intellectuals—such as Okungbowa and Okorafor—suggests that not all roots are equal in the Africanfuturist world.
Even more pointedly, you may be asking: who am I to seek to define and interpret Africanfuturism? I am a British, white, straight, male, English-speaking academic, working within a historically white institution and a discipline (International Politics) historically structured by Whiteness. I claim no African roots; or rather, my roots are limited to the recent and shallow, and the general and diffuse. I have researched and taught African studies for the past twenty years, focusing mainly on South African environmental politics, and like us all, albeit to varying degrees, I am rhizomatically entangled in African commodity chains, colonial legacies, discursive structures, and the genetic inheritance of the Cradle of Humankind.3 It is important to note my status as a relative outsider to debates on Africanfuturism, both in order to disrupt postcolonial hierarchies of knowledge production as well to draw attention to the ways in which Africanfuturist imaginaries can highlight and contest some of the “White anxieties” that animate many global climate futures, including fears about the sustainability of Western high-consumption lifestyles, racialised climate refugees, population growth and/or decline narratives, and the world-obliterating case for climate and colonial reparations.4 The speculative fictions of white African authors like Lauren Beukes, Alastair Mackay, and Doris Lessing offer interesting vantage points on Whiteness and the future that I discuss in Chapter 5 of African Climate Futures, whereas here I’ll offer a few further reflections on place, temporality, and ecology.
In contrast to dominant climate imaginaries that have tended to focus on European and North American cities or melting polar glaciers, Africanfuturist climate fiction envisions Afrocentric global futures that are far from the stereotypes of dystopian African wastelands. Several of Okungbowa’s stories imagine how spaces of sanctuary might be built even in the midst of climate cataclysms. In Lost Ark Dreaming, five towers known as the Fingers rise above the seas, offering refuge to a few lucky Nigerians after the flooding of Lagos. In another example, his short story Rigland tells of how an engineer from the Niger Delta builds a refuge for his community “in the unlikeliest of places” on an abandoned Atlantic oil rig.5 In both these stories, sanctuary is only temporary and partial, and Okungbowa doesn’t avert our eyes from the violence, unequal power relations, and precarity of these offshore havens. In Lost Ark Dreaming, the community is rigidly stratified between Lowers, Midders, and Uppers—reflected in the characters of Tuoyo, Yekini, and Ngozi—in which the ruling Uppers oversee an authoritarian, high-tech, surveillance state. But these tales are testaments to the power of communities to construct their own futures, albeit in circumstances not of their choosing.
Okungbowa’s stories also explore the role of memory and the resurgence of the past into the present and future through storytelling and trauma. In Lost Ark Dreaming, this complication of conventional temporalities is achieved through a multi-perspectival narrative in which events are retold from different perspectives, documents and poetry are inserted between chapters, and memories, traumas, visions, and dreams disrupt “straight time.” The outsider, Omíwálé, remarks, “Memory must be kept alive. It helps us understand our past, situate ourselves in the present and position ourselves for the future” (160). Okungbowa has written about how, for authors in Africanfuturist traditions, “the future is always the past is always the present.”6
As well as complicating the relationship between past, present, and future, Okungbowa’s story also addresses the question of how humans might live alongside nonhuman and more-than-human Others. Omíwálé is an intruder into the tower, a member of a strange and apparently dangerous nonhuman marine species known by the tower occupants as The Children. When Yekini, Tuoyo, and Ngozi encounter Omíwálé, they are told, “My people and yours are of the same root—we are simply different branches” (110). Okungbowa alludes here to stories about what happened to African slaves thrown overboard during the Middle Passage, yet in this story Omíwálé has been exiled by their own people because they can breathe air as well as water: “the body is malleable, and nature is fallible, and sometimes, that creates in-betweens, an either-or and neither-nor” (111).7 Omíwálé has come to the tower to seek—and bring—understanding, and this violent and dystopian story ends with the possibility, through storytelling, of breaching “the distance of time and space and knowledge between both our peoples” (161).
Africanfuturist stories like these play an important role in foregrounding issues of climate justice, reparation, memory, and trauma that are often neglected in mainstream climate change discourse. Stories by Okungbowa, Okorafor, and others help us to imagine how we might memorialize and repair that which the past has bequeathed to the present and the future, and they challenge us to find new ways to live convivially alongside other species. By challenging dominant Western discourses and narratives, which bear a significant responsibility for the currently unfolding climate catastrophe, such stories might help us “save life from the disaster lying in wait.”8
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Endnotes
- Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Lost Ark Dreaming (Tor, 2024).
- Suyi Davies Okungbowa, ‘The Future Is Divergent: On “Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century”’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 12 September 2021. Available at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-future-is-divergent-on-literary-afrofuturism-in-the-twenty-first-century/ (accessed 22 April 2025); see also: Nnedi Okorafor, ‘Africanfuturism Defined’, 19 October 2019. Available at: http://nnedi.blogspot.com/2019/10/africanfuturism-defined.html (accessed 2 September 2020).
- Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick (Duke University Press, 2015), 9–89.
- Audra Mitchell and Aadita Chaudhury, “Worlding beyond “the” “end” of “the world”: White Apocalyptic Visions and BIPOC Futurisms,” International Relations 34, no. 3 (2020): 309–32.
- Suyi Davies Okungbowa, ‘Rigland’, Slate, 16 December 2023. Available at https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/rigland-suyi-davies-okungbowa-future-tense-fiction.html (accessed 11 November 2024).
- Suyi Davies Okungbowa, ‘The Future Is Divergent: On “Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century.”
- See also Arley Sorg, “Questions Presenting as Narrative: A Conversation with Suyi Davies Okungbowa,” Clarkesworld, 213 (June 2024). Available at https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/okungbowa_interview/.
- Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019), 189.
Carl Death