One thing is sure: the contemporary moment is beleaguered by mounting inequalities, political disruptions, and ecological disasters. But the crises of this period are not just material. They are also consequences of specific rationalities. Evidence of this can be found in the way pro-capital democratic legislation widens inequalities and wealth gaps. Or in the way executive overreach tailspins into tariffs and trade wars, while international treaties shrink in the face of belligerent incursions. Correcting a problem that is as material as it is epistemological requires re-evaluating the models of knowledge, governance, and resource distribution that sustain it. In this cluster, we ask: what possibilities does Africanfuturism offer in this contemporary moment?
Attempting to answer this question constellates what was once a string of informal, diffuse, and unconnected conversations held in different spaces around how Africanfuturism changes the way we understand Africa as more than a geographic or discursive referent. Since it was first coined, Africanfuturism has served as a radical literary language for thinking and doing the future. Beyond debating Africanfuturism as a cultural or aesthetic genre rooted in African epistemic, ontological, or ancestral modes of relations, each contributor, from across many different disciplines, shows the multi-tiered ways Africanfuturism’s critical and creative praxis constructs worlds that are sustainable and just.
Often contrasted with Afrofuturism, based on its deliberate anchoring in African lived realities, Africanfuturism comes alive here as a generative conceptual terrain. One of the two shared orientations that ground the contributions in the cluster is that Africanfuturism draws from cosmogonies, technologies, material conditions, and moral practices of African peoples, past and present. The other is that Africanfuturism resists the pull of nostalgic romanticism that idealizes a precolonial past, even as it rejects the seductions of Western techno-utopianism that equates futurity with automation, extraction, and speed.
There is, instead, an insistence on futures rooted in interdependence. This model of life is frequently occluded or dismissed by dominant paradigms of development and linear progress. The essays collected here affirm that thinking the future from Africa appears fringe but is imperative. When we realize this manner of reflection is more than a belated supplement to post-Anthropocene or decolonial conversations, we can begin to see future-sensitive concerns from the continent as constituting a robust praxis. This praxis resists extractive ideologies. It radically reconfigures life outside the ethical imbroglios of techno-capital or the developmentalist rationalities of the flawed democracies that permit them.
For instance, Marta Tveit shows that Africanfuturism is grounded in political struggle, a vehicle for conceiving, activating, and actualizing counter-hegemonic imaginaries. Similarly, Carl Death argues African futures “radically challenge globally dominant visions” in their insistence on new parameters for policy, planning, and governance. Hence, Africanfuturism might be unapologetically African, but it articulates a planetary vision. From Nigeria to Norway, Germany to the United States and the United Kingdom, the thinkers in this cluster attest to Africanfuturism’s translocal and transdisciplinary reach.
Africanfuturism’s insistence on equity in futurity is rooted in an ethic of repair that redresses the ongoing violence and devastations wrought by the racial capitalism of settler and non-settler colonialism. The future of planet Earth and the human species cannot emerge from extractive or asymmetrical relationships: it demands reciprocity, recognition, and clean hands. Pamela Carralero’s intervention is especially relevant to this subject. Positing that the very conditions for planetary co-survival require radical receptivity, she reminds us that “decolonial sustainability only comes to the fore if the Western thinker accepts and reflects on her decentered position.” The Akan proverb, “The river does not refuse the swimmer, but the swimmer must respect the river,” encapsulates the ethic of interrelation and mutual accountability that sits at the heart of Africanfuturism.
This ethic of relational accountability finds sharp resonance in what Damilare Bello terms “rusty ethics,” which articulates Africanfuturism’s refusal to be seduced by the superficial aesthetics of sustainability offered by the global apparatuses of neoliberal consumerism. Dominant aesthetic regimes turbocharged by artificial intelligence often repackage ecological destruction in minimalist design to serve performative eco-consciousness, masking deep structural harms with surface-level restraint. Bello cautions that minimalist material improvisation can, in the absence of an adequate affective commonsense, contribute to deeper ecological degradation. Likewise, resource abundance without ethical frameworks of redistribution and cosmological utilization becomes more wasteful than redemptive. This caution parallels Adanna Ogbonna-Oluikpe’s reminder that imbalances in our present cannot be overwritten with exaggerated futures. Inequities can be palimpsestic or recycled into the future if commitment to the latter is purely escapist.
Ogbonna-Oluikpe’s reminder affirms that Africanfuturism speaks not of utopia in the sense of pursuing generalizable or totalizing perfection. It does not seek maximal outcomes through grand acceleration or authoritative solutions to crises. Rather, it stresses possibility through productive alignment, grounding what Jenna Hanchey describes as the “liquidity of resistance,” which is symbolized through water, a recurring motif in many Africanfuturist texts as the essays in here have shown. This significantly contrasts with extractivist futurisms that reduce possibility to the determinism of instrumental logics. As Hanchey urges us, “water is all about connection. From the droplets that form a wave to the composition of human bodies, we always carry water with us.” Water resists capture, refuses stasis, and calls for a rethinking of futurity as an interdependent process rather than the conquest of one.
Africanfuturism reorients speculative practice toward multiple, co-existent, and sometimes contradictory futures, what Tveit calls “multiple equally whole manifestations.” Such an orientation refuses linear progress narratives in favor of pluritemporalities and co-evolving realities. Carralero’s notion of “circulation” resonates here deeply. Through it, she articulates a version of techno-digitality she calls “The Afridigital,” where the digital is not a tool of labor exploitation or value extraction but a generative site of African possibility.
In a decolonial renegotiation of Dennis Ekpo’s “Post-Africanism” and what Tolulope Oke refers to as the “reclamation syndrome,” which is the tendency of African intellectual traditions to remain tethered to reactive gestures of recovery, Oke proposes a necessary movement from derivative to generative futures.1 Such generative futures do not erase the enduring legacies of colonialism or global capitalism, but they refuse to allow these forces to define the imaginative and architectural expressions of African futures. One can read Elizabeth Abena Osei as responding to this ethos with Sankofa’s Cosmic Adansikro, a digital game that uses speculative cartography to reconstruct worlds outside of racial capitalism’s organization of Africa. This digital project embodies what is possible when people are led to imagine and live worlds unhindered by the territorial barriers preserved from the colonial era and that continue to serve imperial modernity. Reorienting us towards ontological autonomy and imaginative sovereignty, Africanfuturism is a resource for emancipatory governance.
This cluster emerges from a commitment to deploying Africanfuturism as more than an epistemic conquest or technological acceleration. Quite the reverse, Africanfuturism allows for ethical co-existence within a substantive ecology of knowledge. Cluster participants challenge us to rethink what our futures are, whose futures they become, and the terms on which they are built.
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Endnotes
- Denis Ekpo, “Towards a Post‐Africanism: Contemporary African Thought and Postmodernism,” Textual Practice 9, no. 1 (1995): 121–135; Tolulope Oke, “Narrating African Futures: (Re)conceptualising Africanfuturism as an Onto-Epistemic Mode” (PhD diss., University of Bayreuth, 2024).
Tolulope Oke
Damilare Bello