Culture and the conundrum of African Futures
The framework I examine now is Arjun Appadurai’s ‘future as a cultural fact’, a notion he advances in his articulation of an anthropology of the future. In The Future as Cultural Fact, Appadurai assesses the role of cultural systems – as combinations of norms, dispositions, practices, and histories – in framing practical paths to the achievement of suitable ends. Central to his ideas in this work is that activated social energy is a vital resource for producing ‘the future as a specific cultural form’ (Apparudai 2013: 286). The specificity of a cultural form, on his thinking, requires a society’s engagement of social, political, and ethical concerns in a society with the combined vigour of imagination, anticipation, and aspiration, along with the affective states of its members, in negotiating their future. Understanding the future as a cultural fact, then, entails employing culture as ‘a map for negotiating and shaping new futures’ (Appadurai 2013: 288). In Apparudai’s opinion, people have a moral obligation to aspire to defeat what traps and limits their capacity to create a future free of avoidable confinements. This ‘capacity to aspire is a cultural capacity, in the sense that its strength and dynamism are forged within local systems of value, meaning, communication, and dissent’, as these systems derive ‘their force from configurations of value, ethics, and religion that are strikingly local and variable’ (Apparudai 2013: 290).
Another pivotal idea for my thesis rests in Appadurai’s distinction between a ‘future of probabilities’ and a ‘future of possibilities’. The former is subject to calculation and forecast, whereas the latter is largely unknown and open. These categories of futures underlie two ethical frameworks that struggle for futures construction in a globalized world. The ‘ethics of probability’ represents conceptions and activities that flow from liberal values, particularly those that are ‘typically tied up with amoral forms of global capital, corrupt states, and privatized adventurism’ (Apparudai 2013: 295). Conversely, values espoused by the ‘ethics of possibility’ are less economistically grounded, and could increase the horizons of hope, expand equity in the capacity to aspire, and widen the field of creative and critical citizenship.
The foregoing suggests that the future is a cultural fact for Apparudai because, first, culture is an inevitable fact for humans as social beings. Accordingly, human futures cannot unfurl independently of culture. Human futures are at once culturally infused constructions, and prospective realities to be fashioned for cultural benefit from the furnace – at least partly – of cultural resources. Accordingly, the future as a cultural fact cannot be the same everywhere. Hence the idea of African futures seems sensible. A second inferable claim from Apparudai’s conclusions is that any conception of the future as a cultural fact is a shared act: those who do so see their lives as intertwined in a conception that binds them to living and progressing together through agreements and disagreements, and this shared conception underlies their motivation for action. Thirdly, I see Apparudai’s connection of practice (structural constructions) with possibilities in his conception of the future as a cultural fact to be stressing a particular kind of agency, i.e. the subject of cultural self-definition must be the same as the object defined. This amounts to the idea that self-directed futures must be capable of underlying projects and processes designed to benefit their subject-agent.
Finally, there is little doubt, as will be seen in the next section, that in the construction of African futures, Apparudai’s ethical ‘possibilities’ suffer marginalization in favour of ‘probabilities’. This is because fundamental structures and ideals of social institutions, including our constitutions, have colonial foundations. The upshot of this is that the force of Apparudai’s ‘aspiration’, as outlined in the previous paragraph, is overlooked in constructing futures on the continent. The question therefore becomes how futures can be conceptualized in ways that impel a wish to dismantle colonially inspired structures and forge a new order of mentalities that connect practices of aspiration with possibilities that mitigate the excesses and failures of such structures in order to create societies with capacity to respond adequately to the existential conditions in which their citizens function and promote their welfare (Gyekye 1994: 48). Undoubtedly, such futures must be self-conceived and strategies for their attainment self-directed.
A reviewer of this chapter
1 The same reviewer mentioned in Footnote 1. opines that Appadurai’s arguments are mostly about how future
always is constructed as cultural fact; and that my call for ‘decolonizing tertiary education in a manner that accords with pursuing the future as a cultural fact’ hardly aligns with this. Accordingly, my use of Appadurai’s conception as an ‘ideal’ merits clarification. I take this critique to be suggesting that Apparudai’s conceptualization of the ‘fact’ which emerges in the future is unalterable given that its antecedent conditions have already been lived. In other words, the future will factually be what it must be, because agency that was exerted in conceptualizing and working towards its presence is unalterable. One can, in retrospect, assess past actions and wish alternative courses had been taken. But arrival points, as the future of those past actions, remain a fact engendered by expired actions. In this account of the future as a cultural fact, the most we can do with unrealized aspirations for the future would be to alter them or wish for them anew. The future appears as a cultural fact that assigns little weight to conduct that obstructs or demotes the ‘ought’ that was wished for in the future. Such agential deficit in assessing the relationship between current action and futures introduces the risk of placing aspirations on probation forever.
But I am inclined to thinking we can conceive the construction of futures in a manner that sets aside such a deficit and instead announces the possibility of construing in idealistic terms the idea that future always appears and is constructed as cultural fact. This latter reading can lead us to aspire to understanding the idea of the future as a cultural fact in terms of it responding to our ideals. I wish to inject such a normative dimension into reading Apparudai’s concept, in my discussion of decolonizing tertiary education, in a manner that accords with my proposed pursuit of the idea of the future as a cultural fact. By this I mean enacting decolonization strategies in accordance with cherished standards, but not that the outcome of such enactment would constitute a fact that would inevitably occur.
My suggested reading of Apparudai’s concept points toward understanding its significance for the agency of cultural resources: the fact that the future depends on action to make it beneficial for human culture. Such a normative interpretation gains credence in the context of Apparudai’s connection of practice with possibilities. The introductory section stressed a particular kind of agency in cultural self-definition – that my construal of the future as a cultural fact is contingent on a self-directed conception of the self by an entity that is capable of supporting processes designed to benefit itself. There is good reason in adopting such a normative reading in a discussion of African futures, as much evidence points to Apparudai’s ethical ‘possibilities’ suffering marginalization on the continent in favour of ‘probabilities’. I argue in subsequent sections that African assertions of identity and agency in creating futures have failed to achieve desired outcomes for Africans. My reading of Apparudai’s concept is thus grounded on the belief that the object of action in constructing futures is to realize wished-for, but not unwanted, futures, as a fact.
Recently, Felwine Sarr has elaborated a particular vision of Africa’s future – Afrotopia. He defines this as an ‘as-yet-inhabited site’ which ‘nothing insurmountable will prevent’ from coming realization (Sarr 2020: 102). Afrotopia is, thus, an idea that that requires committed action to shape its inevitable future reality. Culture for Sarr is ‘a palimpsest composed of different, super-imposed layers, borrowing from a universe of diverse references’ (Sarr 2020: 102), that is a required vehicle for realizing Afrotopia (Sarr 2020: 51) and the infrastructure of culture should have the capacity to discard a ‘selfhood that translates into an inability to think for oneself, [and] to judge and evaluate things on one’s own’ (Sarr 2020: 62). Thus, realizing Sarr’s Afrotopia is contingent on a self-directed process of self-apprehension. If this is so, then Afrotopia shares much in common with Apparudai’s future as a cultural fact, in as much as it gears toward a process of self-definition intended for self-benefit. Preliminarily, it is worth noting that Sarr’s Afrotopia, as well as the several African visions to be explicated and assessed in the next section, provide cogent directions for Africa’s future. Yet Sarr’s and the other visions offer little in terms of concrete conceptual approaches to attaining a normatively interpreted ‘future as a cultural fact’ for Africa.
Apparudai and Sarr convey visions that can underpin the construction of practical means for bringing about desirable African futures. One such means is a concrete tool – an index for conceptual decolonization of the curriculum and research agendas of tertiary education that serves to shift current understandings and practices of decolonization in African universities and offer actionable metrics for practicing conceptual decolonization in productive research and teaching. But why is decolonization important, and why are universities places where this should be practiced? As Fanon noted, the defining characteristic of colonization is the construction of an imaginary world in which the humanity of the colonized is erased. Hence, deposing such dehumanization and the restoration of the equal humanity of all humans – the task of decolonization – is crucial for African futures. Nkrumah’s Neo-colonialism describes how remnants of colonial interests endure in African cultural, political, intellectual, social institutions and practices; and how ex-colonial powers exert effort to retain substantive control over African states and their leaders.
Theorists have emphasized how colonialism has unleased moral and epistemological injury and distortion of the course of modernity on Africa. These injuries are expressed in a loss of fit between prevailing conceptual apparatus and life experience in the post-colony. This lack of fit generates what Jonathan Lear has termed ‘conceptual loss’ (Lear 2006: 32), in his description of the mental state of the Crow in their effort to come to terms with their lives after the near annihilation of their livelihoods by the European conquest of the Americas. Following Lear, I assert that concepts that had meaningfully ordered African lives lost their applicability under colonial rule, rendering them inapplicable in the post-colony and creating difficulties for Africans to understand the lives they live. (Lear 2006: 62). Akin to conceptual loss, I claim conceptual disorientation to be a phenomenon that describes the overwhelming misfit between the outcome of colonial education and patterns of future-making in post-independence Africa. Such disorientation is consistent with Nkrumah’s depiction of the fragmented consciousness of Africans negotiating post-colonial experience by commuting between strands of conflicting Euro-Christian, Islamic and traditional African conceptual systems (Nkrumah 1970: 68–70).
Universities are well placed to correct the historical injustices of colonization through critically appropriating African resources for reconstruction. Such effort, in Wiredu’s view, ‘implies also that [such reconstructive effort] is one which is conceptually decolonized and decolonizing’ (Wiredu 1984: 42). A deconstructive future-making project, then, would seek to reverse the conceptual disorientation that underlies self-estrangement, by negating negative images that humiliate Africans’ consciousness. The resulting liberated self becomes invested with renewed motivation and vigour for reconstruction. I consider the decolonization index, as a tool for conceptual decolonization of tertiary education, to be pivotal for African futures construction. By ‘conceptual decolonization’, I follow Wiredu to mean the avoidance or reversal of unexamined assimilation of non-African thought and practices into the educational framework of African universities (Wiredu 1996: 136).
I indicate in the next section that since the mid-20th century, African scholarship has clarified why self-defined conceptual sovereignty is essential for African futures. Nonetheless, earlier scholarship offers few or no actionable indicators to guide the continent’s tertiary institutions as they strive in their tasks as generators of knowledge and educators of a new generation of citizens. Recent events, like the inequalities in the production and allocation of resources to combat the COVID-19 virus, highlight even further the need for African to discard its perennial consumption of conceptual imports and consciously endeavour to train future generations to be conceptually independent. The decolonization index I propose will yield a decolonization ranking generated from an inclusive understanding of the concept and shared goals across the social scientific and humanistic disciplines. Its purpose is to help researchers and teachers to self-examine and transform their practices, and to serve as a tool for holding them accountable. Success in producing such tools, I argue, is a necessary condition for constructing an African future as a cultural fact.