Prosper Ìféányí’s futuristic narrative, “Things We See Under Water,” begins with a grim invocation: “The story you have asked me to tell you does not begin with bravery. It begins with our naivety, and then loss.” This self-reproach sets the tone for a story set in the 3060s with aliens invading a Nigerian Ijaw community. The Ijaw people are represented in the narrative as skillful at navigating marine environments. Not only have they mastered the physics of swimming, but they also possess the scientific knowledge and technical infrastructure upon which they maintain a connection to marine life. Ìféányí’s reference to their naivety is, at the very least, startling, if not a contradiction. I, however, consider this reversal instructive: the Ijaw people’s assumptions of their own capacities and their invaders’ limitations point to probable naiveties in futuristic visions of Africa. This realization prompts mapping an Africanfuturist narrative’s questioning of its own idealistic and utopic imaginary of Africa’s futures.
While conceptualizing Africanfuturism, Nnedi Okoroafor notes it is “concerned with visions of the future,” “skews optimistic,” and is “less concerned about ‘what could have been’ and more concerned with ‘what is and can/will be.’” The need to create overly optimistic futures of significant technological advancements and political progress is implied in Okoroafor’s definition. Given the scale of such optimistic visions of Africa, it is safe to posit that there is a gap between the futures envisioned and the grounded realities of the continent. Ìféányí’s narrative positions readers to grapple with the contradictions between Africa’s present infrastructural deficits or unstable political climate and imagined futures of vibrant technologies and ethical governance. This reveals the potential, and perhaps need, for the present and the future to confront each other as a crucial step towards envisioning and actualizing desirable future imaginaries.
At the surface level, Ìféányí’s “Under Water” aligns with Okoroafor’s definition yet entertains this confrontation between a lived present and an imagined future. This is because the future it presents critiques the legitimacy of overly romantic visions of a powerful Africa. “Under Water’s” representation of the Ijaw community’s invasion by alien creatures reminds us of the continent’s current vulnerabilities. Paul Collier notes quite eerily Africa’s present vulnerability to invasion. He describes the continent’s security and political forces as ill-equipped to address the numerous threats facing it.1 Some of these threats include vulnerabilities to resource extraction. While Collier’s work might be read as reflecting some of the fatalistic or paternalistic predictions around Africa, his submission aligns with Cajetan Iheka’s situated discontent with Africa as the primary focus of global media-driven exploitation and waste disposal.2 This threat of exploitation is integral to Africa’s colonial experience of labor and resource exploitation through which the goal of the West is to control the region’s natural resources. Africa’s communities today are still plagued by these same invasive experiences. It is thus humbling, so to speak, that the vestiges of an uncomfortable past erupt unexpectedly from futures expected to arrive without them. But should this not be? After all, futures, utopic and otherwise, are built from remnants of the past.
The point here is less about the past than it is about how narratives like “Under Water” position us to see the way Africanfuturism’s optimistic vision might naively preserve a pattern. In this pattern, the present, once the future of a past, retains a version of exploitation because it glosses over deep structural issues, setting itself up for collapse. These structural deficits, I believe, can be shaped into methodologies for constructing a vision of Africa aware of its contradictions and the vicious cycle that it preserves. Thus, the magnitude of the futures we construct or the futuristic imperative to correct dystopic speculations of Africa become less effective if alternative futures do not help us identify the contradictions in our imaginations. By dragging the weight of a troubled past into the future, “Under Water” extends the work of Africanfuturist narratives beyond providing the blueprint for Africa’s possibility.
Navi, the narrator in the story, performs this methodological function when he recollects the sudden arrival of the alien known as the Cryonoids. In one instance, Cryonoids infect the body of one of the young children, Ekpeki, causing a bodily mutation that transforms him into his enemy’s likeness. This kind of invasive, morphological domination might be all too common and a sharp departure from Africanfuturism’s positive momentum, but it rehashes anxieties raised by Collier and Iheka about African life. For example, Navi narrates how Cryonoid soldiers hit and stuffed the mouth of a man with cryogenic bugs. Whenever these bugs are ingested, they drain the blood of humans, while serving as fuel that sustains the Cryonoids. Still, an Ijaw person’s body is not the only valuable thing subjected to the violent actions of exploitation.The extraction of human blood in the narrative weakens the Ijaw people and, by extension, the community.
Land, institutions, and people are bathed in a Cryogenic Bath as part of the larger project of domination. The project entails covering the expanse of the earth with water, up to sky level, to enable Cryonoids to breathe, while causing deaths to the Ijaw people. In this vein, I read Ìféányí’s work as more than just a reflective analogy of the present; it resists overindulgences lurking at the extremes of futurist imagination of Africa. At the core of Navi’s narration is the message that the future of Africa remains vulnerable to sudden reversals if the path there is laced with starry-eyed aspirations. The urgency of this vulnerability is represented through the dominant presence of the Cryonoids, whose alienation symptomatizes a persistent cycle of domination that can tack onto the future from the failings of the present.
One among these perennial failings is the discrimination that accompanies the politics of belonging. The depiction of Ekpeki symbolizes the legacies of discrimination and otherness on the continent. Subjected to social ridicule, Ekpeki’s persona as an avatar of the future exposes the injustices and exclusionary behaviors inherent in current social relations. More than not, it shows the incompatibility of sustaining the integrity of a future Africa when the site of imagination is anchored on harmful exclusions. Navi refers to Ekpeki as “‘fishman’ because the latter is considered a discordant and an outcast in [their] tribe.” Ekpeki’s sudden bodily transformation leads to his ostracization, mirroring bodies and persons who defy society’s perception of normalcy and acceptability. It, therefore, doesn’t matter that Ekpeki was born and raised in the community or whether he is a victim of the colonial actions of alien invaders. “His leg had turned powder-white, like those of the Cryonoids, and he had developed dorsal fins and claw-like legs, just like the enemy”—that was what mattered. “Under Water” calls attention to our socio-cultural failings: it suggests that covert discrimination persists in the epistemologies and structures of the present and harms the futures that may emerge from them.
While Ìféányí’s text draws our attention to the failings of the present using futuristic narratives, the writer ends the work on a hopeful note. The narrative brings together the Ijaw people and a group of elderly scientists of the land in search of a solution to the presence of the Cryonoids on their lands. In sum, Africanfuturist narratives do not just project or imagine flawless futures of the continent. They also do not simply reflect on the present as much as they offer spaces of resistance against its troubles. These texts, serving as radical reminders, adjust Africanfuturism’s tendency to overextend its desire for a better tomorrow.
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Endnotes
- Paul Collier, “Security Threats Facing Africa and Its Capacity to Respond,” PRISM 5, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 31–46, https://www.docslib.org/doc/11456592/security-threats-facing-africa-and-its-capacity-to-respond.
- Cajetan Iheka, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke University Press, 2021), 222.
Adanna Ogbonna-Oluikpe