Introduction
‘what we cannot imagine cannot come into being’
(bell hooks 2013: 59).
‘The world of tomorrow is in gestation within the world of today, and its signs are decipherable within the present’
(Felwine Sarr 2020).
African utopic registers of the future are basically ‘freedom dreams’, to invoke Robin D. G. Kelley (2003), encapsulating a spirit of reworlding from the African vantage point. They exist as imaginary sketches of a desired and envisioned future. They have concrete historical, epistemological, and material departure points. They are inspired by struggles for change as well as purposeful strivings for reworlding away from the colonial model of the world. bell hooks (2000: 110) posited that ‘To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imaging possibilities beyond that reality.’ This logic is also expressed by Amilcar Cabral (1979: 44) who urged Africans ‘To start out from the reality of our land – to be realists.’
Felwine Sarr (2020: xii) in his advancement of Afrotopia as an African utopic register of the future argued that ‘Africa lacks an autonomous and endogenous teleonomy resulting from its own reflection on its present situation, fate, and the futures it will provide for itself’ (Sarr 2020: xii). The reality, however, is that Africa might be experiencing an overload of utopic registers of the future/metaphors for the future, although all of them are limited and snared by coloniality of time. The explanation for this overload of utopic registers is a reality that was clearly captured by Pal Ahluwalia and Paul Nursery-Bray (1997: 2):
Nowhere else was oppression so comprehensive, so savage. African history was denied or appropriated; African culture belittled, the status and standing of Africans as human beings was called into question.
Ali A. Mazrui (2001: 107) also highlighted the uniqueness of African experience of humiliation and dehumanization:
[N]o other groups were subjected to such large-scale indignities as enslavement for several centuries in their millions as the Africans were. […]. No other groups experienced to the same extent such indignities as lynching, systematic segregation, and well-planned apartheid as the Africans were. It is against this background that Africa’s dignitarian impulse was stimulated. A deep-seated African rebellion against humiliation was aroused. […]. The deep-seated African struggle has been a quest for dignity – human and racial.
The ‘dignitarian impulse’ reverberates at the centre of the utopic registers of the future. Edward Wilmot Blyden and the Negritude theorists thought of it in terms of ‘African personality’, which had to be reconstructed (Frenkel 1974). Thus, besides the current utopic registers such as Afrotopia, Afropolitanism, and African Renaissance, there are many other long-standing metaphors for the future that emerged from the battlefields and struggles against racism, enslavement, colonialism, and racial capitalism. These include Ethiopianism, Negritude, Pan-Africanism, Black Consciousness, Afrocentricity, African socialism, African humanism, and others. These utopic registers were and are informed by a combination of Black radical thought, struggles for decolonization, and the search of identity and freedom, within a world that is considered to be anti-African/anti-Black (Sithole 2020).
The question is how autonomous were and are these ‘freedom dreams’ from the coloniality of time. Perhaps this is where to start engagements and debates on African futures. Because of the subjection of Africans and Blacks to inimical imperial designs of racism, enslavement, colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteronormative patriarchy, their utopic registers of the future are framed by the spirit of resistance, gestures into the past as a future which was denied and denigrated, as well as a drive to reworld the world in favour of those that Frantz Fanon (1968) termed the ‘wretched of the earth’. This is so also because African conceptions of time tended to follow the cosmological rhythms of regularity, predictability, patterns, and repetition. African conceptions of time in their terrestrial/earthly sphere tended not only to reflect the cosmic rhythms but were also distinctively circular rather than linear temporalities (Nyathi, 31 January 2022). Some may not understand such African notions of time as ‘tomorrow is yesterday’ (kusasa kuyizolo), which highlight a non-linear conception of time.