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.