Africans have long been players in a game not of their choosing. Since first encounters with the imperial machine, African bodies, lands, and knowledge have been instrumentalized within vast systems of extraction, domination, and erasure. From the transatlantic slave trade to colonial rule, Africans were not only displaced and dispossessed but rendered pawns in geopolitical and economic games designed for the benefit of others. In this historical simulation, agency was stolen, rules were rigged, and victories belonged elsewhere.
But what happens when Africans claim control of the game? Games offer an alternative to the failures of our current reality. In Reality Is Broken, Jane McGonigal argues that games give people urgent optimism, a sense of purpose, and systems that reward effort and collaboration. McGonigal champions the idea of “gaming the system,” hacking the logic of games to change reality itself.1 Rather than escaping the world, she envisions players as architects of better ones, capable of transforming systems from the inside out.
This vision becomes especially potent when considered through the lens of Africanfuturism, a genre and worldview that insists on African agency in shaping (speculative) futures. While McGonigal does not speak directly to African experiences, her framework invites a reorientation: what if Africans who have long been rendered passive figures in colonial and neocolonial world-building became the game-masters of their realities? What if the same imaginative force used to construct dystopian empires and extractive economies could now be turned toward healing, reclamation, and freedom?
Africanfuturism answers these questions not only in theory but through practice. By centering African worlds, cosmologies, and epistemologies, it offers new rules, new maps, and new stakes. Africanfuturism allows African subjects to win not by assimilating into broken systems but by inventing entirely new ones. In this paradigm, world-building becomes world-remaking and speculative fiction becomes a space of strategy, memory, and resistance. As a Ghanaian scholar engaging both Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, I see this shift as more than literary—it is deeply political, methodological, and creative. I think about the purpose of this burgeoning genre as Toni Morrison does in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination, where she says “imagining is not merely looking at; nor is it taking oneself into the other. It is for the purposes of the work, becoming.”2 What Morrison means here is the potential for writers to turn aspects of their lives into language that is capable of telling stories in ways that are recuperative and subversive.
This essay thus explores how Africanfuturism enables the movement from pawn to game-master, using both literary analysis and digital practice. Through an interdisciplinary lens, I examine how speculative storytelling and interactive media—through the creation of Sankofa’s Cosmic Adansikro (SCA), my original web-based game—can re-map African subjectivity and futurity as a scholarly tool and a speculative cartographic intervention.3 Drawing on works such as Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy, Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet, and Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, SCA uses digital interactivity as a method of engaging with the cartographies of Black speculative imagination. Informed by McGonigal’s theory of gaming the system, this project imagines an atlas where African lands speak, testify, and remember. It is a space where the game, at last, is being played on African terms.
Game as Method: Sankofa’s Cosmic Adansikro
Sankofa’s Cosmic Adansikro is inspired by Sankofa, the Akan philosophy that returning to the past is a prerequisite for moving forward. This game adapts texts into a speculative cartography that remaps Africanfuturist worlds as interactive, inhabitable terrains. Each world within the game is reimagined as a speculative space rooted in African and diasporic epistemologies, allowing players to move through richly constructed terrains, avatars, and decisions that embody the political and philosophical stakes of the texts. At its core, the game visualizes an Africanfuturist atlas. Rather than adhere to Western cartography, I am conceptualizing a map informed by African visual systems and philosophies, questioning the possible aesthetics and ethics of our mapping systems and the occurrence of the Berlin Conference. At the Africa Museum in Brussels, there is a detailed history of the mapping of Africa by white imperialists, including Ptolemy, Sebastian Münster, Abraham Ortelieus, Jodocus Hondius, and many others.They decided what constitutes mapping out Africa, disregarding existing indigenous mapping systems.
This prompts an Africanfuturist rethinking of the elements that could be included in mapping out the worlds that are being reimagined by these authors. While several mapping methods exist, the game leans towards elements such as fractals, complex repetitive patterns of geometric shapes that are drawn from indigenous African architecture.4 Fractals were used to map out communities in many indigenous African settlements. I also include hair braiding patterns, specifically cornrows, which are known to have been used historically to encode escape routes during slavery. Additionally, I draw on quilting traditions as palimpsests of storytelling and cultural survival, as well as a mapping technology used by enslaved women to guide escapee slaves.
The game opens with a Sankofa bird, offering players two paths: one that introduces the philosophy of Sankofa, and another that leads to the map. The map is envisioned as a canvas marbled with blood to foreground the importance of bodily memory, human sacrifice, and historical trauma in Africanfuturist narratives. Blood, here, is not just a symbol of violence but of kinship, survival, and connection. Another significant feature of Sankofa’s Cosmic Adansikro is the ease of mobility between fictional worlds. Players have free mobility between the worlds on the map without any immigration hurdles. This is a deliberate intervention that critiques the real-world restrictions placed on Black bodies and African mobility. While many African countries require visas from fellow African nations, the game imagines a world in which borders are porous and travel is frictionless, an aspirational future where intra-African solidarity is not just symbolic but material.
Theory as Play
SCA harnesses the creative-critical hybridity Africanfuturism offers to bridge the limitations of conventional academic writing. In this space, readers do not simply consume ideas; they co-create them. The act of play becomes a form of scholarship, an invitation into a participatory epistemology that values speculative thought as a legitimate and necessary mode of theorizing African experience.
Also central is the idea of land, not as a neutral backdrop but as a testifying witness. The game asks: what does it mean to treat land as something that remembers, that holds and speaks histories long ignored or erased? Drawing from African cosmologies that see land as ancestral, animated, and sacred, the speculative worlds of SCA are imbued with memory. The soil, the architecture, even the spatial arrangements carry echoes of resistance, loss, and survival. In this way, land is not merely represented—it becomes a subject that speaks back.
This sense of testimony is encoded not only in the narrative but in the design itself. Through symbols like Adinkra and Nsibidi5, through visual references to African fractal architectures and hair braiding patterns, through soundscapes and imagined smells drawn from both cultural ritual and environmental crisis, the game renders testimony experiential. The landscape remembers. It sings. It mourns. It teaches. This is testimony beyond words, an affective archive that refuses silence.
Through speculative tools and terrains such as SCA, alternative futures are not just envisioned but enacted. The game becomes a space where testimony is encoded in design, where land is agentive, and where learning emerges from collective memory and imaginative play. It is a praxis of Africanfuturism that transforms literary theory into lived, interactive experience, opening new pathways for thinking, remembering, and world-building. It affirms that theorizing Africanfuturism is not limited to analysis; it also involves making, playing, and dreaming. In doing so, it not only provides new pathways for theorizing Africanfuturism but actively participates in its creation, offering players not just a game but a glimpse of alternative worlds.
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Endnotes
- Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better And How They Can Change The World (Penguin, 2011), 19.
- Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1993), 4.
- Sankofa’s Cosmic Adansikro, shorted as SCA, is still in development and not yet available online.
- See Ron Eglash, African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design (Rutgers University Press, 1999).
- Elisabeth Abena Osei, “Wakanda Africa Do You See? Reading Black Panther as a Decolonial Film through the Lens of the Sankofa Theory,” Afrofuturism’s Transcultural Trajectories, edited by Eva Ulrike Pirker and Judith Rahn (Routledge, 2023).
Elizabeth Abena Osei