Introduction: Africa and futures
African Futures in the Making, the volume in which this chapter appears, aims to engage how African futures are ‘made’, in the sense of how they are envisioned, contested, negotiated, and shaped, etc. This quest to explore the ‘how’ of African futures imposes a need to clarify, at the onset, the notion ‘African futures’, which occurs in the titles of the volume and of this chapter. The phrase implies that ‘African’ and ‘non-African’ futures may be differentiated. This possibility of decoupling the terms raises intriguing questions. Can there be a positive definition of ‘African’ in the context of constructing futures, with meaningful coherence? If so, what factors would determine the inclusion of an idea as ‘African’, and others as ‘non-African’? Would such determination be by formal or by content-related factors?
1 I am grateful to the reviewer of the initial draft of this chapter by the editors of this volume for illuminating this point, and for pointing to many of the questions that follow in this paragraph. Let us suppose a policy, for instance, by which a term will be formally determined as African if it is espoused or written by Africans; and content-defined if it is judged to support African interests and values. Would a policy written by wealthy Africans who hardly represent impoverished Africans then be ‘African’? Conversely, if content determines its African-ness, could World Bank officials who do not hail from the continent produce ‘African’ policy? Further complexities emerge when one considers which among diverse values and interests within Africa (e.g. across gender, class, sexuality, etc.) should count as African. By what means, and by whom, would we reconcile the contradictory claims and values of these Africans in a policy defined as African by virtue of its content?
The foregoing questions animated debates on the existence or otherwise of African philosophy in the 1980s and 1990s. Two perspectives from this debate may guide the discussion of what constitutes African in ‘African futurity’. One view challenged the soundness of the predicate African in ‘African philosophy’ on grounds that it reifies the diversity of African cultures and their modes of thought. Appiah, for instance, argues: ‘the peoples of Africa have a good deal less culturally in common than is usually assumed’, therefore ‘the presupposition that there is, even at quite a high level of abstraction, an African world view’ is unacceptable (Appiah 1992: 17). Several philosophers disagree with this view and assert that formal criteria, such as geography, suffice to define a work as African. A notable example of this formality is Abraham’s book, The Mind of Africa, whose title and conclusions are premised on a presumptively shared mindset, with ‘a certain “smell”’ by which African reactions ‘in describable situations could be fully predicted’ (Abraham 2015: 3). More recently, and arguing from a phenomenological perspective, Olivier has affirmed that there is something that it is like to be African – just as there is something that it is like to be German or Chinese – and that this ‘something’ is a culturally distinctive consciousness of self (Olivier 2014: 102).
A more nuanced approach, like Gyekye’s, asserts that a philosophical thought or work is African that reflects on issues with theoretical or conceptual underpinnings in the culture and experience of African peoples (Gyekye 1996: 72, 211). Such adoption of a joint formal/content-determination approach can be taken to be stipulating three conditions for a work to qualify as African philosophy. First, the author must be African, presumably through birth or acquisition of citizenship. Additionally, the work must deliberate, or be premised, on the culture or experience of Africans, or both. Finally, it must display a philosophical character.
2 This means that its subject matter must not be merely narrated and interpreted but should include an evaluative component conducted with argumentation. These Gyekye-inspired conditions have been considered as overly stringent by content-determination advocates. For instance, Wiredu assigns a legitimate claim to membership of the African philosophical corpus to a work that ‘exhibits elements of the African tradition’, irrespective of its source (Wiredu 2004: 206). I build on these earlier discussions by advancing the claim that the specificity of the notion ‘African’ cannot usefully be determined by a dichotomy between formal and content-oriented definitions. Self-identification with Africa of an author of an idea that is prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa relative to other geographical locations is significant. But this is insufficient. What suffices, in my view, is for that idea to both exhibit appreciation of elements of African traditions and to show, by argument and reference to historical and current phenomena, genuine concern for promoting the interests of Africa.
Also, the notion of African futurity in the titles of book and chapter calls attention to problems associated with the concept of time. One reason for this is Mbiti’s remarkable metaphysical claim that time in African cultures is conceived as a property of events in the past, the present and the immediate future (Mbiti 1971: 17). Difficulties that beset this perspective arise in all claims regarding the nature of time when considered in terms of tense categories (Mumford 2012: 107-121). But of immediate interest to us is Mbiti’s suggestion of specific African conceptions and experiences of time, particularly the purposeful element in his idea of the immediate future, and therefore of African conceptualizations of the future. In my view, his restriction of futuristic concerns to those nearest in forthcoming time is questionable, as evidence abounds to suggest that normative discussion of futures – i.e. different opportunities for upcoming developments – in African cultures proceed from commonsensical intuitions of long-term perspective, expressed in the languages and practices of these cultures.
3 Examples of such practices and expressions abound in the two cultures – Guans who inhabit the Akwapim Hills, and the Akan, of Ghana – that I am most familiar with. These expressions suggest that there is something that
must be that conditions our thoughts and conduct in the present with regard to opportunities, that this thing that
must be, is the future, and that in contrast to Mbiti’s view, a long-term perspective of it is conceivable. In my view, these African conceptions of time make room for specific African conceptualizations of the futures, which proceed from the assumption that history can disclose to us meaning in the present. Philosophically, this assumption imposes a responsibility on agents to see in the conditions and facts of current African life moments for crucial action, and to seize opportunities in the present to influence what the future becomes. This manner, in which I have chosen to approach the subject of African futures, raises political and ethical questions: What does the African past reveal and what does it hide? What opportunities are indicated by inferring from events in African history, and what obligations do we have in this moment to seek to understand these indicators and deploy them to act to influence how futures emerge and evolve on the continent?
This chapter defends the thesis that tertiary education in Africa, conducted by means of a decolonization index, would have good prospects to respond adequately to the existential conditions of Africans and harness opportunities in a manner that can lift Africa from the margins of global wealth and influence. I therefore propose such an index for guiding curricula in African universities. Much justification for this claim lies in theoretical frameworks and histories of conceptualizing African futures. Accordingly, in the next section I discuss one such framework, and turn to conceptualizers of futures in post-colonial Africa, and how the decolonization index will correct their shortcomings, in the section that follows the next.