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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how The Heart of Redness and The Famished Road reimagine development through African agency, indigenous knowledge, and speculative futures, challenging Western paradigms using postcolonial critique and African futurist vision.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how African literature articulates grassroots agency and alternative visions of progress by analyzing two seminal texts: The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda (2000) and The Famished Road by Ben Okri (1991). Grounded in postcolonial theory and African futurism, the study examines how both novels challenge dominant development paradigms and offer culturally rooted frameworks for imagining African futures. Mda’s narrative, structured around the ideological conflict between the Believers and Unbelievers in post-apartheid South Africa, critiques the imposition of Western development models and foregrounds indigenous knowledge systems as vital resources for community renewal. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial insights, the paper argues that Mda positions development as a contested terrain where agency is reclaimed through collective resistance, historical memory, and cultural resurgence. In contrast, Okri’s The Famished Road employs magical realism to destabilize linear, technocratic notions of progress. Through the spirit-child Azaro, the novel bridges the material and metaphysical, offering a vision of development rooted in cyclical temporality, spiritual resilience, and imaginative autonomy. Using African futurism as a lens, the paper interprets Okri’s narrative as a speculative reimagining of futurity, where uncertainty becomes a catalyst for transformation rather than a barrier to advancement. By placing these texts in dialogue, the paper argues that African literary traditions offer powerful critiques of Western teleologies and illuminate alternative pathways of progress grounded in indigenous agency, communal ethics, and ontological plurality.