Against defuturing: Contemporary utopic registers of the future
These four African utopic registers, namely Afrotopia, Afropolitanism, globalectics, and feminism, are advanced by leading African intellectuals, and they appear as carryovers from the early African utopic registers that emerged from the time of anti-racism, anti-enslavement, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, and anti-heteronormative patriarchal sexism. Afrotopia is advanced by Felwine Sarr (2020). Afropolitanism is a gift from Achille Mbembe (2021). Globalectics is a vision of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2012). Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche (2014) gifted the world with her ‘we should all be feminists’ vision of the future.
These African utopic registers of the future emerged within a context in which previous visions of the future were somehow exhausted or ran out of steam. It was within this context that Michael Neocosmos (2016: xiii) posed a soul-searching question about the African future: ‘How are we to begin to think of human emancipation in Africa today after the collapse of the Marxist, the Third World nationalist as well as the neoliberal visions of freedom?’ Not only was Africa said to be experiencing exhaustion of visions of the future, the whole world was said to have fallen into what Tony Fry (1999) termed ‘defuturing’ – that is, a vanishing of futures of human and non-humans resulting in a condition of futureless ontology. The question is, can Africa and Africans afford to fall into the dystopia of ‘defuturing?’ The response comes from Lewis R. Gordon (2021: 127), who posited that:
It struck me that there is a dialectical aspect of living or being located at the underside. If we look at history, those from the underside usually hold the key to the future. Those on the surface imagine themselves to be where humanity is going. When they fall, they often watch their world serving as the outline for another to come, and it is often one with which they do not identify.
Perhaps it is because of this reality that from the stable of African intellectuals, African utopic registers of the future continued to be produced. The Hegelian idea of an Africa that did not belong to the world still provoked Mbembe and Sarah Balakrishnan (2016: 28) to introduce Afropolitanism, with Mbembe insisting that ‘there is no world without Africa and there is no Africa that is not part of it’. The premium of Mbembe’s reflections is on the position of Africa and Africans in the global world informed by his experiences from his location in South Africa. The second instalment of Mbembe is that ‘Africa has to become its own centre. It has to become its own force. Not as a way of separating itself from the rest of the world, but as a precondition for it to exercise its weight among other forces in the world’ (Mbembe & Balakrishnan 2016: 30).
While Mbembe thinks that Afropolitanism is decoupled from pan-Africanism, these two ideas of repositioning Africa in the world and making sure that Africa is a force among other forces in the world is traceable to pan-Africanism. Pan-Africanism was always a planetary force based on an interpretation of African and Black people’s position in the world. Yes, Afropolitanism is worlds apart from Afrocentrism in that it acknowledges the plurality of being African and tries to transcend race as a definer of Africanity. In Afropolitanism, there is emphasis on movement, mobility, and circulation as forms of enrichment of Afropolitan practices. Yes, taking entanglements into account in the reworlding of Africa is crucial, but to attain Afropolitanism there is still need to continue the struggles for a world that is not hierarchized racially or in terms of gender. Afropolitanism is not yet clear on how to deal with the paradigm of difference, which continues to re-enact and reproduce racism, patriarchy and other politics of difference and alterity.
The next utopic register is called Afrotopia. Its starting point is a rethinking of Africa beyond the ‘fog of treacherous clichés, stereotypes, and pseudo-certitudes’ (Sarr 2020: ix). The second intervention is to decouple African thinking from the dominant episteme which prioritizes the ‘Western dream exported the world over’ (Sarr 2020: xiii). Sarr (2020: xiv) explained that ‘Afrotopos is this site of another Africa, one whose arrival we should expedite in order to realize its brilliant potentials’, and added that ‘Afrotopia is an active utopia that takes as its task the cultivation of vast and open spaces of bountiful possibles in order to help them flourish’. A key element of Afrotopia is to rescue Africa and Africans from ‘a teleology with universal pretensions’. This speaks directly to how to deal with the problem of coloniality of time, to which Africans have been subjected. Sarr (2020: xii) suggests that Africa has to establish its own ‘autonomous and endogenous teleonomy’. What is emphasized in Afrotopia is the importance of Africa’s ‘own socioculture’ as the basis for its self-improvement freed from the colonial library.
Regarding modernity, Sarr pushed for an autonomous and endogenous modernity anchored culturally but also domesticating technologies from other places for its own brevity. Decolonization of knowledge is presented as an essential prerequisite for the emergence of autonomous and endogenous African modernity with decolonized universities playing a leading role in ‘resolving the contradictions within African society and […] taking up its own part in the creation of new social forms’ (Sarr 2020: 90). In short, through the gift of Afrotopia, Sarr is inviting Africans to dream as Africans and take charge of their destiny unencumbered by mimicry. Finally, Sarr also emerged as a leading advocate in the politics of restitution – that is, the return of looted and stolen African cultural and ritual artefacts.
The next contemporary utopic register comes from Adichie, who in her 2012 TEDxEuston talk invited humanity to embrace feminism and all people to become feminists. This is an important intervention in a world where heteronormative patriarchal sexism continues to reproduce inequalities between genders. Drawing from various experiences of discrimination in Nigeria and other parts of the world, Adichie made a very compelling case for the world as whole to embrace feminism, and she defined a feminist as ‘a man or woman who says, “Yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better”. All of us, women and men, must do better’ (Adichie 2014: 20).
The last contemporary African utopic register is known as globalectics, a term coined by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2012). Like Mbembe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2012: 8) wished to break from ‘straightjackets [sic] of nationalism’. This is how Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o explained globalectics, as a utopic register of the future:
Globalectics is derived from the shape of the globe. On its surface, there is no one center; any point is equally a center. As for the internal centre of the globe, all points on the surface are equidistant to [sic] it – like the spokes of a bicycle wheel that meet at the hub. Globalectics combines the global and the dialectical to describe a mutually affecting dialogue, or multi-logue, in the phenomena of nature and nurture in a global space that’s rapidly transcending that of the artificially bounded, as nation and region. The global is that which humans in spaceships or on the international space station see: the dialectical is the internal dynamics that they do not see. Globalectics embraces wholeness, interconnectedness, equality of potentiality of parts, tension, and motion. It is a way of thinking and relating to the world, particularly in the era of globalism and globalization. (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 2012: 8).