Paper short abstract:

The current historical conjuncture has caused a sentiment of the simultaneous loss of the future and the need for a better one. Here, we ask what is the role of hope and despair for creating a critical framework in the context of African speculative fiction, and what lies beyond these concepts?

Paper long abstract:

The future is contested. Human induced climate change threatens to make the planet unsuitable for “human life to flourish” (Kohler 2020). Fossil fuel companies make record profits, while global economies have become ever more precarious and austere, all contributing and compounding with new and existing refugee crises resulting from violent conflict and war. With a future, then, that seems always precarious, we ask: what is the role of hope and despair for creating a critical framework in the context of African speculative fiction, and what lies beyond these two concepts?

In our paper, we present an overview of how the concepts of hope and despair have been debated in recent literary and cultural theory, and we contextualize why this is important for the contemporary phenomenon of African science and speculative fiction. We aim to bring together theoretical and creative discussions on how these two concepts can be harnessed to imagine alternative futures, as well as outline the pitfalls that have been identified in earlier conversations about hope and despair.

Paper short abstract:

This paper makes a start in strengthening Kevin Behrens’ argument for a strong environmentalist thread in African thought (2008) by turning to cultural texts. It looks at Ubuntu-philosophy specifically and illustrates with examples from African speculative cultural texts moving in digital currents.

Paper long abstract:

The African continent is threatened and vulnerable to the effects of human-induced climate change. With the scale of this ‘wicked problem’ and precarious lifeworlds it is easy to ‘close off’ imagined futures, instead miring in the sense of despair (Wood, 2022). Yet, as Donna Haraway (Haraway, 2016) reminds us: “neither [hope nor despair] is a sensible attitude. Neither despair nor hope is ruined to the senses, to mindful matter, to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings in thick copresence” (4). There are environmental movements across the continent, yet fewer that explicitly emphasize the links between climate anxiety and structures of global injustice. Can we develop a stronger environmentalism, urgently needed, for and from Africa in the 21st century? One that is more material, mindful, as well as well-rooted in pervasive pre-existing knowledge systems?

This paper makes a start in strengthening Kevin Behrens’ argument for a strong environmentalist thread in African thought (2008) by turning to cultural texts. It looks at Ubuntu-philosophy specifically and illustrates with examples from African speculative cultural texts moving in digital currents (including but not limited to a 3D sculpture by digital artist Yaw Oniya, digital art by Jacque Njeri and artist /spiritual healer Nkosana “the art” Nkomo, short-story We broke Nairobi by Noel Cheruto (2021, Strange Horizons), and recent science fiction musical-film Neptune frost (2021, set in Burundi, by husband-and-wife team Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman)).

In the process, it touches on the notions that 1) The study of African philosophy is often the study of African history in disguise. 2) Modern African philosophy cannot sufficiently be studied without including the contemporary cultural realm. I would argue that much of values, norms and philosophy, including Ubuntu, is not only articulated but partially constructed within art and play on the African continent. Therefore, art (meant here in the broadest sense), politics and philosophy are aspects of a whole, and as scholars we are misunderstanding the African context if we only look at one or the other, or give any one more import than the others. By only looking in academic books and journals for African philosophy, we are missing half the story. This may be applicable to the study of other non-Western thought-systems as well, such as various indigenous cosmologies.

I conclude that Ubuntu is a deep well to draw from when it comes to developing an integrated environmentalism. I examine various aspects of Ubuntu in relation to environmentalism. The spirit, totem and taboo avenue I turn away from. Instead, I argue that the sense of ecological justice, obligations to the not-yet-born and planetarity contained within Ubuntu are strong building blocks in developing an integrated African environmentalism.

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. North Carolina: North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Wood, N. (2022). Just Stories: The Role of Speculative Fiction in Challenging the Growing Climate Apartheid. Psychology in Society, 63. Retrieved from https://www.pins.org.za/pins/pins63/PINS-Issue- 63_Article_Wood_Meyer.pdf

Paper short abstract:

Kampala Yénkya is a storytelling / tabletop roleplaying game customized for Uganda, which embeds learning and debate around just climate transition. It draws on the worldbuilding of SF writer Dilman Dila, while also empowering players to imagine the future of Kampala in many different ways.

Paper long abstract:

UNESCO highlight the importance of futures literacy to a just climate transition: “Democratizing the origins of people’s images of the future opens up new horizons in much the same way that establishing universal reading and writing changes human societies. This is an example of what can be called a ‘change in the conditions of change.'”

In the Global North, games and science fiction have longstanding links with futures research, and more recently have developed a strong connection with climate futures specifically. By contrast, African speculative cultures are underutilised and under-theorised in the context of adaptation to and mitigation of climate change.

Kampala Yénkya is a storytelling game for Ugandan youth developed in 2022 by a UK-Uganda team. The game embeds learning and debate around climate change, and involves mapmaking and collaborative storytelling. It draws on the worldbuilding of science fiction writer Dilman Dila, while also empowering players to imagine the future of Kampala in many different ways.

This paper introduces the game, and in the next session participants will have a chance to try out Kampala Yénkya themselves. Some positive visions of sustainable futures are now relatively well-known, but lack detail, vividness, and localisation — can you make them more concrete? What risks, unexpected side-effects, or political and ethical implications might be revealed by playful, freewheeling exploration of these themes? Or can you challenge yourselves to come up with visions beyond the edge of dominant imaginaries? Or maybe you just want to play to win?

Links

bit.ly/ImagineAlternatives

sadpress.itch.io/kampala-yenkya

kleineberg.co.uk/project/kampala-yenkya/

Paper short abstract:

In grappling with the unrealised hopes of the postapartheid present, Masande Ntshanga's 2019 novel Triangulum employs an enfolded narrative emplotment where dystopian past and apocalyptic future converge. Yet the inevitability of past and future is also prised open, offering a hope in a minor mode.

Paper long abstract:

The horizons of expectation for postapartheid South Africa have collapsed: the present is increasingly at odds with the future that was hoped for during antiapartheid struggles, and anticipated as imminent at the advent of democracy in 1994. Instead of the future overcoming the past, the present is instead haunted by unhealed past injustices. This growing apprehension has ushered in a burgeoning body of literature that grapples with the nation’s unrealised hopes and tries to make sense of a new temporal-affective orientation that I refer to in my work as ‘after-hope’.

In this paper, I present this temporal porosity by way of an engagement with Masande Ntshanga’s 2019 speculative fiction novel Triangulum, which presents a South Africa of enfolded and converging temporalities, where colonial, apartheid, and neoliberal pasts are enfolded into the novel’s present in 2043 as it anticipates an apocalyptic event that is prophesied to take place in 2050. With its recursive narrative emplotment, the events of the dystopian past already bear echoes of the dystopian future. Focusing on the anticipated apocalypse, I draw parallels between the novel’s prophecy and that of the nineteenth century anticolonial Xhosa prophetess Nongqawuse to argue that Triangulum prises open both the colonial apocalypse of the past and the apocalypse of the future. It offers a hope, if in a minor mode, for a future yet to be imagined or realised by writing and simultaneously ‘un-writing’ South Africa’s history as an extended dystopia, resisting the inevitability of either hope or apocalypse.

Paper short abstract:

The paper contends that Kahiu’s “Pumzi” and Bodomo’s “Afronauts”, in their contemplation of hope and despair, experiment with the trope of uncertainty as subversive praxis. By wielding uncertainty, both Bodomo and Kahiu perform a critical narrative gesture of authoring Africa on her own terms.

Paper long abstract:

The paper contends that Wanuri Kahiu’s “Pumzi” and Nuotama Bodomo’s “Afronauts”, in their contemplation of hope and despair, experiment with the trope of uncertainty as subversive praxis. The speculative ‘imagings’ of Africa we find in these Africanfuturist texts contest Euro-Western projections on and about Africa.

In one of the final scenes from Ghanaian filmmaker Nuotama Bodomo’s 2014 short film,“Afronauts”, we observe as an ecstatic group of young Zambian men cheer on their 17 year old fellow Afronaut, Matha Mwambwa, who just launched into space in the drum-shaped vessel, D-Kalu”. As the final footage rolls, we see Matha, space suit and helmet on, staring blankly into the distance with viewers left wondering whether she actually made it to the moon, whether the patch of seeming earth her feet are planted on is extraplanetary.

Similarly, in the final scene from Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu’s postapocalyptic futuristic SF film, “Pumzi”, the camera does a “bird’s eye” zooming out from what seems a “distinctly cyborgian interspecies configuration” of human and non-human futures - the ‘Mother seed, and the recently deceased Asha - (Omelsky, 8-10) revealing what seems a sprawling greenery, an image in obvious conflict with the climate crises we have been presented in the film thus far. By the end of the film, we can only speculate whether the sprawling greenery and the rumbling of thunderstorms signal an end to the climate crises or these descriptors mirror an elseworld removed from and inaccessible to the East African Maitu community we encounter in the film.

This paper’s reading of uncertainty as subversive praxis is situated in the counterhegemonic imperatives we find in African critical and speculative discourse. Like Eshun who insists on the need to “assemble countermemories” that contest the Hegelian colonial archive, Felwine Sarr, in Afrotopia, asks us to challenge Euro-Western authorings on and about Africa wherein “scabrous fantasies” are projected onto a “mysterious Africa”. By wielding and foregrounding uncertainty, particularly in the way these stories end, both Bodomo and Kahiu perform a critical narrative gesture of authoring Africa on her own terms. Whatever mystery we might find in these texts, unlike Hegelian and Euro-Western speculations about the African space, this mystery/uncertainty serves the effect of reclaiming the narrative and reconfiguring it away from a colonial gaze.

Paper short abstract:

New challenges facing the African continent and its future have created a feeling of despair. Recent African francophone literary works are, however, presenting hopeful futures through speculative fiction. Which approach can have a tangible impact and create a shift towards practical hope?

Paper long abstract:

The feelings of hope and despair have always been conveyed in African francophone literature. During the 1990s, for example, many authors based their novels on their respective political climate and either depicted a society in worse condition or countered their present by suggesting an alternative structure where the leadership offered substantial solutions to the people’s issues. These texts show that hope presented in speculative fiction can be useful to rethink current situations that affect African nations. As such, hopeful narratives with successful politicians and prosperous nation-states offered an alternative critical framework during a period where the transition from colonisation to independence did not garner the desired results. In the 21st century, the sentiment of despair has shifted, given the different challenges, and has thus generated a new form of hope. This paper considers how the feeling of hope continues to inhabit African francophone literature by adapting to the changing realities in Leonora Miano’s Rouge impératrice (2019). Firstly, I argue that through the text’s diachronic structure, decolonisation is the proposed approach to dreaming practically about the continent’s potential by decentering Western hegemonic systems. Secondly, I argue that the opposing views of the various characters living in Katiopa highlight the complexities of said pragmatism and the difficulty of satisfying the collective, as the population is by no means monolithic. By offering a practical way to envision Africa’s future, hope remains a tangible feeling and becomes a tool to create a critical framework within speculative fiction.

Paper short abstract:

As Western narratives often position Africa as heading for dystopia, breaking from linear understandings of time opens hope for African futures. This presentation examines how Africanfuturist speculative fiction engages with non-linear time in ways that challenge Western developmental logics.

Paper long abstract:

Time is not a universal constant. While even Western science recognizes the contingency and relationality of time, linear temporalities dominate scholarly understandings, and, importantly, underlie logics of development. As “history…splits humans from non-humans across the axis of developmental time” (Ibrahim, 2021, p. 16), challenging developmental notions of linear time allows for placing hope toward African liberation. This presentation thus examines the way that Africanfuturist speculative fiction writers engage with non-linear understandings of time in ways that challenge Western developmental logics. Looking to Shingai Njeri Kagunda’s & This is How to Stay Alive and Tade Thompson’s Far From the Light of Heaven, this presentation examines how non-linear representations of time in Africanfuturist fiction open potential for decolonial futures by breaking out of the Western developmental notion of Africa as the “zone of the absolute dystopia” (Eshun, 2003, p. 292). A dystopic future is not set in stone, much as the West may forecast otherwise. In the collection Black Quantum Futurism, Phillips (2015) writes “The truth is, the future, both near and far, is currently impacting upon your present, now, currently reaching back from its position to meet you and create your present experience of now” (p. 14). The imaginings of Africanfuturism reach back to the present to impact the types of futures that will be brought into being, providing avenues for radical hope.

Paper short abstract:

The widespread fragmentation of identity and solidarity in African countries can bind them to cyclical exploitation, collapse, and despair post-independence. However, hope remains, requiring the forging of new national collectives and a reconnection with past, present, and future African identities.

Paper long abstract:

Post-independence, African nations continue to struggle with neocolonialism and alienation. Though officially free, African countries frequently exist “subservien[t] to the interests of Europe, supported by an Indigenous elite” (McLeod 108). In Chinua Achebe’s novel, Anthills of the Savannah, he conducts an autopsy of Africa post-independence, unearthing the sources of estranged national and individual identity which lead to fractured collective unity and hierarchical corruption. Though colonization began the imposition of fractured identity, artificial structures, and corrupt government, the contemporary ruling Indigenous elite often perpetuate these wounds and actively facilitate foreign exploitation, treating the governed at best with indifference and at worst with contempt. Achebe traces African post-independent psychological fragmentation to the continuous decision of the Indigenous elite to reject their precolonial past and instead choose structures, systems, and nationhood from the West. The Indigenous elite become neocolonial by mimicking the colonizer’s style of selfish governance, ruling only to exploit. In this vacuum of identity and unity, the governed become complicit in their own abuse, brutalized and broken. Neocolonialism and alienation are the catalysts for the cyclical corruption and violence present in post-independence Africa and ultimately lead nations to collapse. For African countries to enter an authentically postcolonial future, they need to foster national and individual identity and solidarity rooted in a shared humanity, history, and future. As Achebe delineates, post-independence despair propels the examination of colonial and neocolonial atomization, hope urges the connection with pre-colonial and post-colonial identity, and a future of lasting, authentic healing and solidarity lies beyond.