In grappling with the tensions that undergird the thrusts of Africanism, Negritude, and similar frameworks, Dennis Ekpo’s “Post-Africanism” offers a critical provocation. It foregrounds internal contradictions in efforts to negotiate African identities, realities, and futures.1 Ekpo critiques what he observes as an obsession with an idealized precolonial past and with Africanist or postcolonial gestures that, in his view, have become intellectually stagnant. He argues that these frameworks hinder Africa’s capacity to engage meaningfully with global modernity, proposing instead that Africa must abandon its “ontological monologue” and initiate a new dialogue with the world. However, in its haste to sever ties with the past, Post-Africanism underestimates the recursiveness of colonial-modernity. As Kenneth Omeje warns, coloniality “has generated enough crises to go round, with a potential energy to outlive and reproduce itself in perpetuity.”2 This is where Africanfuturism’s decolonial turn becomes necessary. Not as a nostalgic retreat into the past, nor as a wholesale embrace of modernity, but as a critical negotiation toward more just, sustainable, and self-defined futures.
Esther Mwema’s Bones of the Sea (2022) is a formidable narrative through which these entangled ideological tensions can be explored.4 BOTS enacts this struggle: actualizing a future through resistance and adaptation. The actualized future, however, is not entirely emancipatory. It is painfully achieved, partial, and most importantly “derivative,” resulting from trauma rather than vision.
Resistance to incursion is not cast as an absolute triumph. In fact, initial attempts to create counter-technologies fail. The protagonist, Kuuba, emerges reluctantly as a leader, which suggests that desires and imagination alone cannot materialize futures. Futures require enactment, labor, and structure. What is at stake here is the emergence of “future consciousness,” a personal and collective awareness that sees beyond present ruptures and dares to imagine possibilities. The narrative makes clear that futures are not conjured ex nihilo; rather, they are cultivated in struggle: “Upon the bones of those that went ahead and in co-existence with her community, she laid foundations for a new design that did not disrupt the natural ecosystem or take dignity away from the people who used it.”
This adaptation, however, is not without cost. The portal’s transformation of Taahitt society, “not only their body parts becoming bionic, their hearts had changed too,” suggests the deep unethical reprogramming enacted by technological infrastructures, which are concerns central to the ecological and psychic toll of extractive digital economies. As with contemporary marketing of AI, the portal appears neutral, even benevolent, while encoding asymmetries rooted in coloniality. BOTS refuses to concede to this inevitability. Rejecting imposed universals, it offers a radical ethic of refusal: “We don’t need portals, only bridges. Bridges from our past hold the truth of who we are.” This refusal is not a retreat into romanticism, but a recalibration of modernity on decolonial terms, resonating with Walter Mignolo’s imperative to “build decolonial options on the ruins of imperial knowledge.”5 The narrative insists that African futures must be rooted in ecological repair, ancestral relation, and situated ethics: “Anything that does not heal the land must be removed.”
Preferable futures are not inherited: they are enacted. Many (Africanfuturist) narratives, including culturally significant works like Black Panther, are celebrated for their technological and aesthetic grandeur. But they remain derivative in their futurity; that is, the futures they imagine emerge not from self-determined imaginaries but as responses to oppression, loss, or incursions. For instance, Wakanda’s eventual transition from its isolationist policy is catalyzed by Killmonger’s violent intrusion rather than any proactive internal vision. Similarly, in BOTS, the horizon of the future that emerges is one shaped by trauma: Kuuba’s leadership and the redesigned technology are born not out of uninterrupted continuity or (re)invention but survival after rupture. While these futures are meaningful acts of resistance and reclamation, they are nevertheless haunted by the structures they resist. They are reactive and not anticipatory of possibilities.
What Africanfuturism must aspire toward are generative futures: futures rooted not in crisis but in relationality and self-possessed/projected visions. These futures do more than merely salvage what is left after disruption; they prefigure worlds before the portal, beyond colonial paralysis. The challenge before Africanfuturism, then, is not simply to resist or escape the entrapment of colonial futurities, but to outgrow their frames, ensuring that African futures are largely generative.
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Endnotes
- Denis Ekpo, “Towards a Post‐Africanism: Contemporary African Thought and Postmodernism,” Textual Practice 9, no. 1 (1995): 121–135.
- Kenneth Omeje, “Debating Postcoloniality in Africa,” The Crises of Postcoloniality in Africa, edited by Kenneth Omeje (CODESRIA, 2015), 1–27.
- Esther Mwema, Bones of the Sea (Afro Grids, 2022), https://afrogrids.com/bones-of-the-sea.
- Susan Arndt, “Human*Tree and the Un / Making of FutureS: A Posthumanist Reading of Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi,” Dreams, Hopes, and Futures: The Imagination of Africa in the 21st Century, edited by. Clarissa Vierke and Karin Barber (Köppe, 2023), 127–37.
- Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Duke University Press, 2011).
Tolulope Oke