Overview of the contributions

Ndlovu Gatsheni’s poignant reflection of the coloniality of time is of crucial significance for all contributions of this volume. Colonial visions of time are deeply informed by the linear character of temporality: the past, the present, and the future are neatly spaced on a continuum that itself is framed by ideas about modernity and progress. Africans were habitually linked to the past and generally speaking challenged by the present. Future registers engaged thoughts on modernity as a distinct counterpoint to the past. Specific strategies to deny co-presence and utopia are analysed and linked to the colonial ideological apparatus. The Kenyan author and politician Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo interpreted the application of European registers of the future and of modernity as ‘cultural bombs’ preparing African minds for mental colonization. Ndlovu Gatsheni then elaborates, using various examples, the diversity of authentic African future registers. Starting off with Garveyism and diasporic imaginations and Leopold Senghor’s well-formulated ideas on Negritude and the remaking of the African personality, Ndlovu Gatsheni leads us through a time-scape of African future registers. These registers at times strictly juxtaposed African and colonial registers and at other times emphasized hybridity. They also took different stands on the scalability of their temporal registers and reflected whether they were strictly related to African communities and African landscapes or whether they had a planetary scope.

In his contribution, ‘Conceptual Decolonization in African Universities: An Imperative for Shaping African Futures’ Martin Ajei further elaborates the quest for a decolonization of African futures. Ajei critically inquires whether there is an ‘African futurity’ that is distinct from other trajectories of future-making. Ajei cites prominent African scholars who have advocated against such categorization, reasoning that African societies and cultures are too diverse to be homogenized into a single meaningful category and that therefore the idea of an ‘African world view’ is untenable. There are other authors, though, who argue that such a shared mind-set resulting from a shared history on a shared continent justifies the adoption of categories like ‘African futures’. Ajei reconfirms such thinking but asserts that an authentic African perspective on future-making must appreciate the diversity of African traditions and must have a ‘genuine concern for promoting the interests of Africa’. With this argument in mind Ajei goes on to explore John Mbiti’s theorization of African conceptions and experiences of time, Arjun Appadurai’s more recent exegesis of possibilist and probabilistic future-making, and Felwine Sarr’s ideas on Afrotopia. Sarr’s constructivist approach to culture that precludes any form of essentialism is the vehicle for realizing Afrotopia in Ajei’s analysis. In essence Sarr’s and Appadurai’s approaches share their impetus in future-making as a self-defined act. Ajei finally argues that universities have to play an important role in this context through critically reflecting upon, reconstructing, and appropriating African resources for reconstruction.

The ethnographic effort of this contribution opens a window into how agricultural futures are currently being made by a group of experts and with apparently very little recourse to direct project evaluation. The overt concern for technological improvement, and the reification of smart technologies via the gathering of immense amounts of data, moves the farmer (and his knowledge) out of the centre of attention as the debate moves from ICT for Development (ICT4D) to Data for Development (Data4D) (see Development Co-Operation Report 2017, Pawelke and Herandez 2018). Agricultural development is progressively linked to automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning and the rise and spread of high-tech sensor technologies. The success rate of such projects often lags far behind well-published expectations. Progressive datafication, gamification, and experimentation are lauded as smart approaches to overcome setbacks. The contribution comes to the conclusion, however, that while the technological apparatus is developing rapidly, surprisingly little actual agricultural development takes place on the ground.

Eric M. Kioko, Detlef Müller-Mahn, and Maxmillian J. Chuhila, in ‘Green Futures and National Planning: Rhetoric and Reality in Rural East Africa’, focus on another register of agricultural future-making: green agricultural futures increasingly matter in national planning across the continent. The ‘greening’ of agriculture promises to bring about a transition to more sustainable and better climate-adapted forms of agricultural production. This shift is meant to satisfy the food needs of a rapidly growing population and to produce food or other plant-related products for export. Green agriculture comes with the promise of harmonizing environmental, economic, and social challenges. Kioko and colleagues analyse policy discourses and documents in Kenya and Tanzania in order to understand the rationale and rhetoric behind green agricultural policies. The chapter takes inspiration from the ‘travelling model’ approach, which scrutinizes how development blueprints designed by international experts for global application are translated into regional settings.

Rhetoric and development practice in both East African countries are deeply entrenched by ideas of ‘greening’ agriculture. This is well reflected in national plans such as Kenya’s Vision 2030, Tanzania’s Vision 2025, and the newly prepared Tanzanian Vision 2050. The analysis by Kioko et al. shows how concepts of ‘green agriculture’ are framed, negotiated, and brought to the local level. In contrast to the rhetoric, green development is not at all socially embedded or sustainable; nor is it a peaceful transition towards more sustainable land use, but rather a conflict-ridden and at times even violent expansion of neoliberal economies. Often small-holders are further marginalized in grand projects that come with the pretense of a greener agricultural future. Often ‘green’ projects promulgate technical solutions and relegate social considerations to the back bench. The analysis shows that there are pertinent differences though: while the Kenyan government strove to find inroads into a greener agriculture, the Tanzanian government under Magufuli only paid lip service to green ideologies and clearly favoured an industry-led growth despite a greening rhetoric.

Javier Revilla Diez, Peter Dannenberg, Carolin Hulke, Linus Kalvelage, Gideon Tups, and Richard Mbunda, in ‘The Growth-Corridor Vision and its Realities – Regional Economic Impacts in Namibia and Tanzania’, analyse a third approach to modernizing rural Africa: growth corridors connecting rural hinterlands with towns and export hubs are a planning device that has gained immense prominence in recent years. Revilla Diez and colleagues emphasize the colonial ancestry of corridor tropes. Already during early colonial days the idea that corridors could support and accelerate agricultural growth inspired planners, and early railroads and roads often serviced emergent corridors. Corridors were tightly coupled with major investments in railroad and road infrastructure in the early 20th century. At the beginning of the 21st century such corridors are often joint projects of private and public stakeholders, while the overall aim to accelerate economic growth by investing in large-scale and wide-spanning infrastructure resembles colonial imaginaries. Revilla Diez and colleagues reflect upon the visions and realities of growth corridors in Namibia, Zambia, and Tanzania. Their results show that the tangible infrastructural results (e.g. roads, bridges) and also the less tangible ones (e.g. flow of finance) have major effects on rural livelihoods and economies in regions adjoining these corridors. These effects, however, are not always those that had been anticipated, and Revilla Diez and colleagues successfully also pinpoint the dark sides of corridor development resulting in increasing inequality and at times ending in infrastructural failure.

Clemens Greiner, Britta Klagge, Kennedy Mkutu, and Frankline Ndi, in their contribution ‘The Making of an Energy Resource Periphery? Scalar Politics, Frontier Dynamics, and Future-Making in Northern Kenya’, take us to another complex of future-making strategies: extractivist and energy-producing technologies shape socio-economic developments in many rural African landscapes. Oil and gas exploration and extraction at the fringes of the Kalahari, in Uganda and Kenya, the tapping of geothermal energy as well as wind energy in Kenya and possibly soon in neighbouring countries are of major significance in understanding the development of an energy resource periphery. Additionally, explorations into and mining of minerals facilitating the energy transition (e.g. copper, lithium, rare earths) are significantly contributing to competition over control, quests for participation, and demands for the acknowledgment of rural stakeholders. Greiner and colleagues focus on Kenya’s semi-arid north, which has seen a great number of such projects arising over the past 20 years. A formerly marginalized region was rapidly transformed into a resource frontier, as capitalist and state actors penetrated this former periphery with the aim of exploiting its mineral and energy resources. The contribution focusses on the Lake Turkana Wind Power (LTWP) project, the expansion of geothermal energy production, and the extraction of crude oil in the region. Like the development corridors treated by Revilla Diez and colleagues, these extractivist projects bring substantial ancillary infrastructures into landscapes that were dominated by pastoralists until very recently. However, it is not only infrastructure, roads, and water supplies that are brought to this frontier, but also promises of future development, modernity, and prosperity. While Greiner et al. focus on northern Kenya, their theorizing of resource peripheries and capitalist/extractivist frontiers allows for a wider continental and global perspective.

Hauke Vehrs’ and Michael Bollig’s contribution, ‘Africa, The Conservation Continent? Future-Making and the Globalization of Wildlife Protection’, sets a counterpoint to the two foregoing contributions. As much as corridor development and resource extractivism shape Africa’s rural futures in the more immediate future, large-scale conservation projects do so as well. In their contribution they examine past and present conservation visions. Taking theoretical inspiration from Sheila Jasanoff’s and Jens Beckert’s ideas on the intricate relation between future-making agendas and political action, Vehrs and Bollig contemplate the history of conservation visions and their impact on contemporary conservation planning in and for rural Africa. They highlight how projections of pending ecological doom have influenced conservation agendas. Vehrs and Bollig allege that doom scenarios have often been used to legitimize the extension of conservation measures and as a counterpoint project conservation futures that are based on sociotechnical imaginaries in Jasanoff’s sense. They describe in some detail how such doom scenarios are generated and how the positive conservation futures were and are established in the 1960s, the 1990s, and in the present. The contribution, which begins with a quote from a recent publication by Desalegn, H., Du Toit, M., and Mills, G. (2020) – ‘Why Africa must become the Conservation Continent’ – emphasizes that next to future agendas based on extractivist ideas, on visions of smart agriculture, and on rapidly unfolding value chains, the vision of rural Africa as conservation landscape has become an immensely powerful trope.

Maggie Opondo, Gilbert Ouma, Anne Oketch, and Dennis Ong’ech, in ‘Gendered African Futures and Extreme Climate Events in Turkana, Kenya’, analyse the effects of future climate changes on social dynamics. In order to do so they go to one of the most arid stretches of land in Eastern Africa, Turkana County in North-western Kenya. There the impacts of a changing climate are clearly felt. While climate statistics leave little doubt that temperatures have already increased significantly, projections of precipitation are more ambiguous. Overall, there seems to be more rainfall. However, this rainfall comes at an increasingly unpredictable rate. Severe interannual drought is followed by flood years, and both result in catastrophes for local pastoralists. The greatly varying levels of precipitation as well as the increasingly uncertain onset of rains contribute to an increasing vulnerability of the pastoral system. Considerable numbers of herders have already been relegated to relief camps after they have lost their herds. The formerly highly specialized and resilient pastoral economy evidences significant ruptures. In many households it is no longer livestock that makes for the mainstay of the family, but alternative strategies like charcoal-burning and craft production. In fact, pastoralism has become a prerogative of well-established households headed by senior men, while female-headed households or the households of younger herders struggle to maintain a foothold in pastoralism.

Opondo and colleagues clearly show how pre-existing inequalities are deepened and how intersectional disadvantaging, e.g. of women from poor households, of elderly people of non-pastoral households, or of young people is accelerated by climatic imponderability. The search for adaptive strategies results in a widening of societal cleavages rather than in broad societal transformation. The contribution by Opondo et al. offers important empirical material on heightened social tensions brought about by climate stress. Also, intercommunity raiding is linked to drought and flood effects when in a frantic effort herders try to compensate for losses with aggressive strategies against their neighbours. Opondo et al. single out some effective strategies for limiting the worst effects of droughts and floods. The paragraphs outlining these interventions show how different forms of and technologies for projecting future states of the environment may become salient parts of rural life at the edge of habitable parts of the earth.

Prince Guma, in ‘Reimagining Africa’s Rural Futures in the Age of Mobile Money’, focusses on the emergence and dispersal of mobile-phone-based products and services. Guma’s empirical data originates from rural southern Uganda. His contribution asks how mobile money and mobile telephony in general are shaping the social life of groups and communities most at risk of rural poverty and social exclusion, and what forms of identity, community, and lifestyle are emerging as a consequence. One of the significant aspects of mobile-phone-based communication is its capacity to encompass even remote rural areas for financial inclusion, allowing, for example, access to formal savings products, free balance checking and transfer of money from one person to another, paying for products, cashing-out of money, and formal money transfers. The mobile phone has become an essential tool and precondition to enable rural dwellers to participate in these flows of finances and goods. Indeed, mobile phones have been advertised as vital for maintaining urban-rural linkages and fostering solidarity and communing across urban-rural boundaries, with marketing slogans like ‘send money home’.

Guma presents impressive figures that frame his observations from southern Uganda. Of nearly 1.75 billion mobile-money-related accounts globally as of 2024, 656 million are in Africa, and East Africa has over 372 million subscribers. Within two decades East Africa has experienced one of the highest levels of mobile-money adoption globally, and rural Africans have been driving this dynamic. Guma’s contribution focusses on mobile phones and related technologies and their impact on rural identities and the understanding of progressively deterritorialized communities that increasingly rely on and manage cross-scalar and rural-urban linkages, and smartphones are an essential technology in this process. In an intriguing way, Guma enquires into how the delimitation of spatial distance of various actors as a factor for marginalization impacts their social dynamics and cultural processes. Places, landscapes, and communities once perceived as marginal and inaccessible are now very well-connected to events taking place in the metropoles of the globe, to fashion trends and music styles, and also to global challenges such as market failures and multiple crises brought about by environmental change.

Dorothea Schulz and Uroš Kovač take us to a remote rural setting in northern Kenya. In their contribution, ‘“Joining the church” as a Form of Future-Making? Il Chamus Christians’ Futural Orientations in Baringo County, Northern Kenya’, they look at a very different, faith-based approach to future-making. They reflect upon narratives of conversion to Christianity among the Il Chamus in Kenya’s Baringo County and interpret them as a distinct approach to future-making. Local believers connect their transition towards Christianity with future material and physical improvement and communal moral advancement. The analysis focusses on devoted Christians in that community: pastors, catechists, and those who describe themselves as ‘dedicated Christians’, all of whom are associated with the African Inland Church (AIC).

The believers Schulz and Kovač worked with often depicted their conversion in spatial terms as a journey that moved them in spatiotemporal terms away from the sociocultural world of their upbringing. Schulz and Kovač do well to interpret local idioms of conversion and future-making in an ethnographically dense way, and the reader gets a good idea of how believers frame the juncture between conversion and future-making. In a metaphorical way they create distance between what they depict as their origins and what they hope to be their futures. Conversion, adherence to a new gospel, and belonging to a new church community enables and empowers them as cultural engineers that prune out ‘traditional’ cultural elements that they identify as benign and compatible with their new religious orientation. It is specifically the claims to a peculiar ethnicity and the status of an indigenous community that has ancestral rights in the landscapes around that those who convert seek to retain and to combine with their new faith. Schulz and Kovač mainly work with biographical accounts to foreground aspirations and hopes of single actors. They distinguish between two kinds of futural orientation: while one is grounded in the aspirations of the here-and-now and circles around hopes for material and physical advancement, the second centres on the aftermath. Schulz and Kovač argue that the actors they work with are peculiar as they clearly emphasize immediate material and physical improvement over concerns for an afterlife and hopes for salvation.

In their contribution, ‘The Politics of Anticipation in East Africa’s Rangelands’, Ian Scoones, Tahira Shariff Mohamed, and Masresha Tayes analyse how uncertain futures are framed and negotiated through a range of technical and political practices in pastoral areas of southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya. There they focus on a newly introduced index-based livestock insurance and on established internal strategies of risk management. Very different politics and techniques of assessing future risks form the basis of each approach. While the index-based livestock-insurance scheme is based on an individualized, market-based approach which heavily relies on scientific forecasting and early-warning systems, the second approach rests on a collective, redistributive approach that is deeply rooted in social networks, moral obligations, and values of sharing and is grounded in the local knowledge on the specific vulnerability of pastoral economies. While the formal insurance is based on the assumption that futures can be marketized and risk can be contained and managed through apt insurances, the second approach emphasizes uncertainty and the non-controllability of outcomes and the significance of collective action to adapt to such circumstances.

Insurance schemes are being tested across rural Africa, and their significance may become even more salient when climate shocks become more frequent. The commodification of risk buffering through commercial insurances comes with the promise that the effects of climatic perturbations may become controllable. Scoones and colleagues emphasize that this approach is beset with numerous challenges: often the capacity to calculate risk via remotely sensed images is grossly hampered by land grabs, market crises, or violent conflicts. Scoones et al. do not, however, assert that index-based insurances are insignificant in the pastoral contexts they studied. They do, however, show that it is habitually the asset-rich herd-owners who are the major beneficiaries, whereas the majority of herd-owners do not gain more security and resilience from such schemes. For them social relationships embedded in networks of kinship and friendship are essential social institutions to adapt to present and future climatic stress.