African futures: The necessity of utopia

Bill Ashcroft
Department of English
University of New South Wales
Sydney, Australia
b.ashcroft@unsw.edu.au

Abstract
This article examines the utopian vision of much African writing as the dynamic
of hope generated in anticolonial struggle continues to characterise contemporary
poetry and novels. The premise is that utopia is necessary, not as mere wishful
thinking but as willed action, because, according to Paul Ricoeur, utopia is the no
place, the only place from which ideology can be countered. This means that utopia
is the only place from which the discourse of catastrophe continually undermining
Africa can be countermanded, the only place from which European history can be
subverted. The perception of a grounded utopian future requires a vision of the past,
of cultural memory freed from the confines of Western history. According to Ernst
Bloch, the doyen of Marxist utopianism, utopia cannot exist without the operation
of memory. The present is the crucial site of the continual motion by which the new
comes into being. In such transformative conceptions of utopian hope, the not-yet
is always a possibility emerging from the past. African utopianism reconsiders the
possibility of an ahistorical past, rethinks the function of memory and of time itself.
The momentum of hope not only imagines a hopeful future for Africa (crystalised
in the concept of an African Renaissance), but carries forward into a perception
of Africas impact on the world. The key to this is that the subversion of history,
the affective operation of memory and a creative vision of the future are most
powerfully conducted in African art and literature.

ISSN (Print) 1818-6874

ISSN (Online) 1753-7274
University of South Africa Press
DOI: 10.1080/18186874.2013.834557

International Journal of African Renaissance Studies

Vol. 8 (1) 2013
pp. 94114

African futures: The necessity of utopia

95

Keywords: African literature; African Renaissance; hope; Paul Ricoeur; time;

worldliness

Introduction
When we examine the discussions surrounding the future of Africa we very soon come
across the clich-ridden morass of development discourse. Well-meaning analyses of
financial and social investments, projected development goals, and improved decision
making by governments and other stakeholders fall into the trap of seeing Africa as
simply a backward version of some universal economic model, which development
would bring up to the level of the modern world. But the vision of the future projected
by African creative artists obliges nothing less than a reassessment of African modernity.
Modernity is multiple and not just one version or another of Western capitalism. But,
more importantly, the assumptions surrounding our idea of the modern involve a deeply
ingrained conception of time as linear and sequential, that African cultural production
is in an ideal position to dismantle. A circular or layered conception of time produces a
particularly resilient form of utopianism in which Africa, far from slavishly following
Europe into a wealthier future, offers the potential to envision a different kind of future
not only for itself but also for the world.
Here, Europe is used as a metaphor for the West, because Africa struggles with
the fact that the very concept of Africa takes shape in the imagination of Europe the
absolute other of the West. African writers have negotiated a perilous path between the
idea of Africa as a backward version of the West, and the negritudinist idea of Africa as
the emotive counter to the rational West, yet still employing the images and metaphors
of a traditional past to conceive a vision of the future. The task is complicated by the
fact that the very word Africa comes burdened with centuries of cultural baggage.
Utopia is therefore necessary not as mere wishful thinking, but as willed action. Utopia,
according to Paul Ricoeur, is the nowhere, the only place from which ideology can
be countered. This means that utopia is the only place from which the discourse of
catastrophe continually undermining Africa can be countermanded. Certainly, most
African nations are run by kleptocracies, but change comes not by patching broken
governments but by radically reimagining a future into which African societies can
move.

Art and literature

The cultural productions of art and literature, and indeed, creative productions in
general have an unparalleled function in providing a vision of the future, of giving
shape to willed action. Tanzanian Sam Raiti Mtamba (2011, 627) puts it somewhat
hyperbolically in his story The Pound of Flesh:
only art and literature could unlock the mysteries of life. Before men of letters there
was nothing either cabalistic or magical. It was the open sesame, the sea into which
everything flowed, the sea from which everything had its source and succour.

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This is the euphoric outpouring of a man who wants to be a writer. Nigerian Chris Abani
(2007a) puts it more temperately in a talk on the stories of Africa: What we know
about how to be who we are comes from stories In other words its the agents of our
imagination who really shape who we are.
A key feature of that shaping imagination is its vision of the future. For the major
figure of Marxist utopianism, Ernst Bloch, art and literature are inherently utopian
because their raison dtre is the imaging of a different world what he calls their
Vorschein or anticipatory illumination. The anticipatory illumination is the revelation
of the possibilities for rearranging social and political relations to produce Heimat,
Blochs word for the home that we have all sensed but have never experienced or
known. It is Heimat as utopia that determines the truth content of a work of art
(Zipes 1989, xxxiii). It may lie in the future, but the promise of heimat transforms
the present. The issue is not what is imagined, the product of utopia so to speak,
the imagined state or utopian place, but the process of imagining itself. The utopian
function of literature does not mean that literary works themselves are always utopian,
nor even necessarily hopeful, but rather that the imaging of a different world in literature
is the most consistent expression of the anticipatory consciousness that characterises
human thinking. This leads him, in his magisterial The principle of hope, to the very
challenging even startling assertion that aesthetic representation produces an object
more achieved, more thoroughly formed, more essential than the immediate-sensory or
immediate-historical occurrence of this Object (Bloch 1986, 214)
Paul Ricoeur sees the utopian concept of no place as a radical contestation of what
is, indeed the only place from which ideology can be contested, and this is ideally
available through the imagination.
May we not say then that the imagination itself through the utopian function has
a constitutive role in helping us rethink the nature of our social life? Is not utopia
this leap outside the way in which we radically rethink what is family, what is
consumption, what is authority, what is religion, and so on? Does not the fantasy of an
alternative society and its exteriorization nowhere work as one of the most formidable
contestations of what is? (Ricoeur 1986, 16)

We might say that not only does imagination shape who we are, as Abani says, but
the utopian imagination helps us rethink the meaning of culture, civilisation, history,
identity. Ricoeur would see the imagination functioning beyond the aesthetic, but I
would suggest that a key dimension of the imaginative achievement, and thus the vision
of possibility offered by art and literature, is the power of affect and its connection with
hope. Take these lines from Ghanaian poet Kofi Anyidohos The Harvest of Dreams:
Though our memory of life now boils
Into vapours, the old melody of hope
Still clings to the tenderness of hearts
Locked in caves of stubborn minds

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The children will be home

The children will be home
The children
Those children will
Be home
Some Day (1984, 197)

While we might object that the hope expressed here has no time frame no specific
vision of the future the melody of hope by which the lines conceive heimat explains
the powerful and dynamic nature of hope that re-emerges in the work of so many African
poets and novelists.
As well as art and literature, of course, one of the most powerful mediums for
envisaging possibility in Africa has been film, particularly in Francophone colonies. As
Jean-Pierre Bekolo Obama (2009, 48) explains, Sembne Ousmane used film to open
up new perspectives with the slogan: Decolonize the screen. Thinking is speculating
with images. Cinema had a heuristic function for him, as a comparative study between
the existing, or real, and the possible (ibid., 48). Clearly, cinema was seen to conceive
the possible through the power of visual images. In the imaginative space that emerges
in this way, African viewers could project themselves into a future that they themselves
invented (ibid., 46).

History
The significance of African images of the future is that they are embedded in a past
in a way that transforms the present. This is what Edouard Glissant (1989, 64) calls a
prophetic vision of the past, which implies the possibility of an ahistorical past. Of
course Hegels notorious abolition of Africa from history is well known, but he is not
alone in this. Karl Marx thought Asiatic and African societies to be ahistorical, similar
to Slavic countries, Latin Europe and the whole of South America. The consequence of
this is that Africa, like the rest of the world, wants to enter history, because, as Ashish
Nandy (1995, 46) puts it: Historical consciousness now owns the globe Though
millions of people continue to stay outside history, millions have, since the days of Marx,
dutifully migrated to the empire of history to become its loyal subjects. When colonial
societies are historicised they are brought into history, brought into the discourse of
modernity as a function of imperial control mapped, named, organised, legislated,
inscribed. But at the same time they are kept at historys margins. The consequence
of this is the implantation of both loss and desire. Being inscribed into history is to be
made modern because history and European modernity go hand in hand. As Dipesh
Chakrabarty (1992, 19) states:
So long as one operates within the discourse of history at the institutional site of the
university it is not possible simply to walk out of the deep collusion between history
and the modernizing narratives of citizenship, bourgeois public and private, and the
nation-state.

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So the nation conspires with the imperial discourse of history in conferring the holy
grail of modern being on postcolonial subjects. Nigerian Ben Okris chapter, The battle
of rewritten histories in Infinite riches depicts the struggle involved in the writing of
African history when the governor-general, clearly a symbol of the entire institution of
imperial knowledge-making, puts pen to paper:
He rewrote the space in which I slept. He rewrote the long silences of the country which
were really passionate dreams. He rewrote the seas and wind, the atmospheric conditions
and the humidity. He rewrote the seasons and made them limited and unlyrical. He
reinvented the geography of the nation and the whole continent. He redrew the
continents size on the world map, made it smaller, made it odder. (Okri 1998, 110111)

In his rewriting the governor-general wiped out Africas ancient civilisations, its
religion, spiritual dimension, its art and music, and in so changing the past he altered
our present (ibid., 110).

History and the ahistorical past

Utopia becomes necessary because it is the only place from which the ideology of
history can be contested, and the present regained. The vision of African futures then
begins in a reformulation of African pasts, and there is no better place to reaffirm a past
beyond history, than literature. This has been the way in which postcolonial writers have
represented the past: having been driven to the margins of history, postcolonial history
is habitually written through literature, by means of memory and the imagination. In
Kofi Anyidohos poetic rendition of the history of colonialism, Gods of the Pathways,
he observes that Africa stands at the crossroads at which the ahistorical past can become
the new ground for a vision of the future.
We are standing at The CrossRoads
Stranded so long Stranded
at the meeting point
of NightMare and DawnDream
Leaning against Storms
Watching horizons filled with ThunderBolts
But there are those among us
who still recall the gone years
and speak of ancient joys long buried
beneath a topsoil of bad memories. (Anyidoho 2009, 140)

The message is that the topsoil of bad memories can be swept away, that the DawnDream
can be realised.
In the celebrated Ghanaian novelist Kojo Laings (2011, 102103) Search sweet
country, Allotey offers some sage advice to Professor Sackey:

African futures: The necessity of utopia

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We sat down and let the change, the history be thrown at us. And in spite of over five
hundred years of association with foreigners, we have been very stubborn: we have kept
our basic rhythms; we know our languages and have assimilated so much into them.
Do you really think our traditional ways were so weak that they could have been so
easily swept aside? They were too strong.

This is a resounding statement of the resilience of the ahistorical past, the power of myth
to resist history, the centrality of memory in the maintenance of culture. In Anyidohos
Gathering the Harvest Dance, he suggests that the future can only be realised by
staring history in the face:
We come today to Stare our History in the Face
We come today to Shake Hands with our Deepest Fear
We come today to exchange our Shame for Hope
Our DeepSilence for Ancestral Harvest Songs. (Anyidoho 2009, 142)

Memory and the future

In Ernst Blochs formulation of a utopian ontology, a key role is given to the category
of the not-yet as it dissolves the polarity of past and future that characterises traditional
Western ontology. While utopias are often set in the future, utopianism cannot exist
without the operation of memory. In such transformative conceptions of utopian hope
the in-front-of-us is always a possibility emerging from the past. The polarity between
past and future often seems insurmountable in European philosophy. For Plato, says
Bloch (1986, 8), beingness is beenness, and he admonishes Hegel for whom the
concept of being overwhelmed becoming. The core of Blochs (ibid., 13) ontology is
that beingness is not-yet-becomeness: From the anticipatory, therefore, knowledge
is to be gained on the basis of an ontology of the Not-Yet.
The valuing of the mythic past in the postcolonial imagination is not only an attempt
to disrupt the dominance of European history, but also an attempt to reconceive a place
in the present, a place transformed by the infusion of this past. Postcolonial utopianism
is grounded in a continual process, a difficult and even paradoxical process of
emancipation without teleology, a cyclic return to the future. The present is the crucial
site of the continual motion by which the new comes into being. In such transformative
conceptions of utopian hope the not-yet is always a possibility emerging from the
past. In traditional postcolonial societies the radically new is always embedded in and
transformed by the past.
Whereas for Ernst Bloch the utopian drive, the anticipatory consciousness is a
universal feature of human life, the utopianism of much postcolonial literature is cyclic
and recuperative. A key feature of the utopian in African literature is the intersection
of the anticipatory consciousness with cultural memory, transforming the African
imaginaire through a vision of the future grounded in a memory of the past. As Gambian
poet Tijan Sallah writes:

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For stems must have roots

Dreams must seek tenacity
In lumps of savage earth.
For skies without pillars
Crumble like ancient roofs.
Skies without pillars
Crash to the dust of earth
It is in the roots that the future is planted.
We should open the shutters of the mind
To those hidden spaces of Dusty Kingdoms
For memory is roots; dreams are branches. (Sallah 1993, 9)

There can be no more powerful statement of the location of the future in memory our
Dreams must seek tenacity/ In lumps of savage earth. Memory is not about recovering
a past but about the production of possibility memory is a recreation, not a looking
backwards, but a reaching out to a horizon, somewhere out there.

Time
Memory has a complex relationship with time. Technically, the present does not
actually exist, at least not in stasis, but is always a process of the future becoming past,
becoming memory. To remember does not bring the past into the present, but the act of
remembering or the invocation of memory transforms the fluid present. Memory refers
to a past that has never been present not only because the present is a continual flow,
but because memory invokes a past that must be projected, so to speak, into the future
not only the future of its recalling, but the future of the realm of possibility itself.
This process deploys a radically transformed sense of the relation between memory
and the future:
The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with newness that is not part
of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent
act of cultural translation. Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or
aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, re-figuring it as a contingent in-between space,
that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. (Bhabha 1994, 10)

This leads me to conclude that a proper understanding of the capacity of the creative
spirit to anticipate the future requires a rethinking of the nature of time itself. We think
of time as either flowing or enduring and the dismantling of this apparent dichotomy
between succession and duration is important for utopian theory. The characteristic
of modernity with its concept of chronological empty time, dislocated from place or
human life, is a sense of the separation of past, present and future. Although the present
may be seen as a continuous stream of prospections becoming retrospections, the sense
that the past has gone and the future is coming separates what may be called the three
phases of time.

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Friedrich Kummel (1968, 31) proposes that the apparent conflict between time as
succession and time as duration in philosophy comes about because we forget that time
has no reality apart from the medium of human experience and thought: No single and
final definition of time is possible since such a concept is always conditioned by
ones understanding of it. As Mahmoud Darwish notes: Time is a river / blurred by the
tears we gaze through.
While we think of time as either flowing or enduring, Kummel makes the point that
duration without succession would lose all temporal characteristics. A theory of time
therefore must understand the correlation of these two principles. Duration arises only
from the stream of time and only within the background of duration is our awareness of
succession possible. The critical consequence of this is that
[i]f something is to abide, endure, then its past may never be simply past, but must in
some way also remain present; by the same token its future must already somehow
be contained in its present. Duration is said to exist only when the three times (put
in quotation marks when used in the sense of past, present and future) not only follow
one another but are all at the same time conjointly present the coexistence of the
times means that a past time does not simply pass away to give way to a present time,
but rather that both as different times may exist conjointly, even if not simultaneously.
(Kummel 1968, 3536)

Now what interests me about this is that such an experience of time is already present in
African literature. This is particularly so in the novel, the crucial characteristic of which
is its engagement with time. Stories offer the progress of a world in time and thus can
become narratives of temporal order. But magically, by unfolding in time they take us
out of time. It may be that narrative, whose materiality is isomorphic with temporality,
provides a way (though not the only way) of communicating different experiences of
time. One way of communicating a different knowledge of time is through circular
time developed from the forms of oral story-telling, in which then and now are in
constant dialogue.
We can see this layered time throughout African literature, from the scene of the
egwugwu in Things fall apart, who are the actual mythic ancestors of the village and
at the same time the recognisable elders dressed up to dance. The layering of time
continues to the present in a passage from Kojo Laings Search sweet country when Kofi
Loww stands in the market:
He stood still caught in perfect African time time that existed in any dimension and
blocking the paths of other sellers with the same time that brought ancestors to the
market, that touched the eyes of sellers and buyers now, that moved beyond those yet to
be born. (Laing 2011, 156)

In a fascinating poem Anyidoho links the circular African time to the rhythm of the
drums, which lead in a backwards-forwards dance. Ultimately the rhythm of the dance
is the rhythm of time itself. Africa is centred in a union of time and sound and silence, a
circular time in which the future and past are lodged in and energise the present.

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And The Drums

The Drums guide our Feet
In this backwards-forwards Dance
This Husago Dance
This Dance into a Future
That ends in the Past.
Two steps Forward
to where Hope
rises like RainBows.
One step Backward
to where Sorrow
falls like Tropical ThunderStorms.
And Africa
Africa leans against the Storms
Leaning against the Future
Like a Warrior
Tired from Historys BattleFields. (Anyidoho 2009, 134)

The poet goes on to invite us to come with him across the Birth of Time in a union of
sound and silence. The rhythm of the drums becomes a powerful image of layered time,
because drums in Anyidoho have the powerful role of enfolding, collapsing time. In his
poem The Return he takes on the persona of the Creator who made a new world filled
with gods and goddesses who soiled their glory/ with passions unfit for dogs. So he
made a newer world peopled with human beings. The poem ends with the lines:
Call back here those Old Drummers
Give them back those broken drums with nasal twangs
Let them put New Rhythms to the Loom
And weave New tapestries for your Gliding Feet
The Birth of a New World demands the Graceful Dance of Life
Now there is still some Laughter in your Souls
Your feet with skill must teach your Hearts
To weave the Graceful Dance of Life
The Ancestral Primordial Dance of Birth. (ibid., 136)

So the dance of life, which is beaten by the drums, is the birth of a new world. Anyidoho
further develops this interpenetration of past, present and future in the images of the
rope or creeper or birth cord which symbolise time, the different generations bound
together by the creeper rather than separated by the line of history. The ancestors are like
the seed that gives birth to the creeper, linking together the past and present members of
the clan (ibid., 10); the weaving of a rope represents tradition. In a wider sense, the rope
or creeper is the image of life itself and in particular of mans regenerative faculties: the

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weaving of the rope is also a reminder of the importance of procreation, the foremost
duty of every man (ibid., 12). And the procreation of children is linked, in the Ewe
vocabulary, to the creation of poetry and music (ibid., 547). In his paper on Ewe funeral
poetry, Anyidoho (1984, 2122) states:
All the activities generated by death, all the rites, the ceremonies, the funeral dance
and song, may be seen as properly motivated by one overriding desire the desire to,
perpetuate life in spite of and because of death [...]. The dead continue to live not just in
spirit but also in the artistic tradition [...]. The ultimate reality that rules the universe [...]
is lifes permanence in various transformations even beyond death.

Here we find a powerful statement of the cultural underpinning of African hope and the
location of the future in the present.

Hope
The origin of African utopianism lies in the resilience of memory, particularly of the
ancient joys buried deep beneath the topsoil of bad memories (Anyidoho 2009, 140).
It does this because memory refuses to recognise the distinction between duration and
succession. But African utopianism found its most powerful expression in the persistence
of hope for freedom from colonial oppression. In most cases the vision was for an
independent state, which led to great disillusionment as the post-independence nation
simply moved in to occupy the structures of the colonial state. But the dynamic of hope
generated by anticolonial writers produced the energy for future thinking throughout the
subsequent bitter realisation of post-independence failure.
One of the most powerful voices of hope in the pre-independence period was that of
Aghostino Neto, whose cry against the repressive Portuguese regime of Angola stands
as a benchmark for the persistence of hope for freedom, and the clarity of a vision for
the future. Netos road to the future passes through prison, exile, torture, and the death
of close friends, but it is sustained by the certainty of hope. His collection Sacred hope
lodges the cry for freedom in something much deeper than the nation state. This I think is
the source of the power of this poetry, because the cry of freedom expresses the dynamic
of hope that continues to project into the future. As Basil Davidson (Introduction in
Neto 1974, vii) states: He is followed or opposed as the leader of a struggle for the
future, a struggle that all men must fight for their different times and places, and all
women too, shaking off the past, transforming the present. This is a salutary reminder
that despite the disappointments of subsequent national regimes in Africa, the vision of
heimat still persists and the dynamic of hope is one that continues to drive its creative
writers. Neto can say on behalf of all African writers: I am a day in a dark night/ I am
an expression of yearning (Neto 1974, viii).
Some of the energy for this sense of irrepressible hope comes from the poets task
of speaking on behalf of other oppressed people in the colony. This is not so much the
voice of the seer as the voice of one who knows that his sufferings and hopes are shared.

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For Neto hope is not a vague wish but something grounded in action, a sense of the
future grounded in the present.
Tomorrow we shall sing anthems to freedom
When we commemorate
The day of the abolition of this slavery
We are going in search of light
Your children Mother
(all black mothers
whose sons have gone)
They go in search of life (ibid., 12)

The words of Netos translator are apposite here, namely that the pressing need is not
to preserve elements of the past which are being shattered by the present, but to release
the future imprisoned in the present (ibid., xxxviii). In the poem Saturday Night in the
Muceques (the poor districts of Luanda where Africans live), after listing the forms of
anxiety oppressing the people he says:
In men
Seethes the desire to make the supreme effort
So that Man
May be reborn in each man
And hope
No longer becomes
The lamentation of the crowd (ibid., 9)

In the poem bleeding and germinating we find that out of blood and suffering germinate
hope, peace and love:
Our eyes, blood and life
Turned to hands waving love in all the world
Hands in the future smile inspirers of faith in
The vitality
Of Africa earth Africa human
Of immense Africa
Germinating under the soil of hope
Creating fraternal ties in freedom of desire
Of anxiety for concord
Bleeding and germinating
For the future here are our eyes
For Peace here are our voices
For Peace her are our hands
Of Africa united in love. (ibid., 43)

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It is possibly only in the context of Netos history of imprisonment and torture that
the euphoria of this rhetoric can be understood. This combination of the sacred, love
and the ahistorical reality of Africa, recurs in Chris Abanis devastating novel about
child soldiers, Song for night, when My Luck, the 15-year-old child soldier, discovers a
mysterious lake and asks its equally mysterious guardian:
And this lake is real? ... I dont understand.
Nobody does. Everybody does. It is real because it is a tall tale. This lake is the heart of
our people. This lake is love. If you find it, and find the pillar, you can climb it into the
very heart of God, he said. (Abani 2007, 69)

Like Neto, Abani was imprisoned, tortured and exiled, but the lake offers a vision of
Africa that perhaps only literature and its various tall tales can provide. Nevertheless
such magical real images may, as Ricoeur states, have a constitutive role in helping us
rethink the nature of our social life. Although the persistence of hope is modelled in
Neto we find it throughout African literature as a dynamic and necessary foundation
for the vision of the future. As Ghanas most famous poet, Kofi Awoonor, writes in A
Death Foretold:
I believe in hope and the future
of hope, in victory before death
collective inexorable, obligatory;
I believe in men and the gods
in the spirit and the substance,
in death and the reawakening
in the promised festival and denial
in our heroes and the nation
in the wisdom of the people
the certainty of victory
the validity of struggle (Awoonor 1991, 445)

When thinking of the revolution that Neto and others hoped for, we must remember
that revolution has two meanings: it is not simply a revolt but a revolving, a spiral
into the future. Seeing this, we can understand that the belief in the future does not
stop with independence it remains part of the continuous spiraling of hope. Even if
independence comes, and hope has been disappointed, creative work continues to spiral
into the future, continues the revolution. That movement into the future must first be a
movement of the imagination.
This is true of Africa (as it is more recently of the Arab Spring). Imagined futures
have continued in a spiral of revolutionary hope. If we consider novels such as Achebes
A man of the people (1966), Soyinkas The interpreters (1965), and Armahs trilogy of
despair The beautyful ones are not yet born (1968), Fragments (1970), Why are we so
blessed? (1972) and many other novels of these decades, including Ngugis Petals of
blood (1977) and Devil on a cross (1982), we might think of the post-independence period

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as one of hope destroyed. Sembene Ousmane presented a Pan-African Marxist utopia in

the film Xala in 1974, which by the end of the century was seen to be unrealisable. But
the 2006 film Bamako, by Abderrahmane Sissako, offered something no less ambitious
than Xala. The World Bank and IMF are put on trial in a courtyard in the capital of Mali.
The prosecution witnesses report how the structural adaptation measures imposed by
these organisations impact everyday life in Africa: the cuts in education, the privatisation
of water management, the dismantling of the railway network, to name a few.
The point about this is that the trajectory of African hope and its vision of the future
came increasingly to look outward, and this corresponds to something developed out
of the dynamic of hope what Ernst Bloch calls concrete utopia. Bloch makes a
distinction between abstract utopia or wishful thinking that is merely fantastic, and
concrete utopia, the outcome of wishful thinking passed into willful action. For him,
the unfinished nature of reality locates concrete utopia as a possible future within the
real; and while it may be anticipated as a subjective experience, it also has objective
status (Levitas 1990, 89). Or, as Neto (1974, 12) puts it: He who has strived has not
lost/ But has not yet won.
In the same vein, Laurence Davis (2012, 127) contends that critics and defenders
of utopia alike have tended to conceive of utopia primarily as a transcendent and fixed
ought opposed to the is of political reality and the was of social history, but it
may also be understood as an empirically grounded and open-ended feature of the real
world of history and politics representing the hopes and dreams of those consigned to
its margins.
Grounded utopias both emerge organically out of and contribute to the further
development of, historical movements for grassroots change. As a result, they are
emphatically not fantasized visions of perfection to be imposed upon an imperfect
world, but an integral feature of that world representing the hopes and dreams of those
consigned to its margins. (Davis 2012, 136137)

The key to grounded utopias, as integral to the real world, and particularly to the drive
for change, transformation and revolution in the colonial context, is the question of
representation because, as the history of colonial domination demonstrates, the most
powerful form of oppression is not military control or the carceral function of the state,
but the control of representation. This is the point at which wishful thinking transfers
into willful action.

Worldliness
Perhaps the most fertile field for grounded utopianism is the dimension of African
worldliness, or its place in and upon the world. This plays out in several ways: there is
the vision of Africas political, cultural and spiritual impact on the world; there is the
history of Afro-modernity and pan-Africanism; and in contemporary writing a vision of
a mobile and transnational Africa.

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In Netos poetry it is the vision of Africa in the world and not simply freedom from
Portuguese rule that begins to transfer wishful thinking into wilful action. His poetry is
avowedly political and there is a sense of the future beyond the immediate attainment
of a nation. He writes:
Now is the time to march together
bravely
to the world of
all men. (Neto 1974, 30)

This suggests something that comes to be taken up by writer after writer in Africa the
desire to enter the world of all men, the world of an Africa that is no longer formed in
the imagination of Europe. This is the ultimate meaning of the Reconquest:
Let us go with all of humanity
To conquer our world and our peace. (ibid., 40)

Neto is profoundly internationalist and this is why he is seen as a key figure in the
African vision of the future. Although profoundly Angolan, profoundly African and
passionately devoted to political liberty, his poems reach beyond Africa. In Sculptural
Hands he writes:
I see beyond Africa
love emerging virgin in each mouth
in invincible lianas of spontaneous life
and sculptural hands linked together
against the demolishing waterfalls of the old
Beyond this tiredness in other continents
Africa alive
I feel it in the sculptural hands of the strong who
are people
and roses and bread
and future. (ibid., 49)

While in A Succession of Shadows he writes:

Here are our hands
Open to the fraternity of the world
For the future of the world
United in certainty
For right for concord for peace. (ibid., 23)

In the poem with equal voice Neto (1974) offers a rousing call for reconstruction, for
(African) men who (as slaves) built the empires of the West/ the wealth and opportunities

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of old Europe people of genius heroically alive now building our homeland/ our
Africa. The poem calls for Africans to re-encounter Africa, to resuscitate man:
From chaos to the worlds new beginning
To the progressive start of life
And enter the harmonious concert of the universal
In dignity and freedom
Independent people with equal voice
As from this vital daybreak over our hope. (ibid., 84)

We can see the vision in which Africa has the potential to change the world repeated in
Ben Okris Infinite riches where, having described the way in which Africa was brought
into history, he proceeds to imagine a counter-history. Here a layering of different orders
of time now projects into a future in which cultural memory can interpolate and disrupt
global history. This occurs when the old woman of the forest weaves the secret history
of the continent. As the novel unfolds, the immense energy of her retelling and thus
re-historicising a different kind of Africa, produces a (pan) Africa that is not only vast
but powerful in its potential effect on the entire world. For the history she weaves is
[f]rightening and wondrous, bloody and comic, labyrinthine, circular, always turning,
always surprising, with events becoming signs and signs becoming reality (Okri 1998,
112).
This is more than a history, it is a laminating of different orders of time. The old
woman codes the secrets of plants, the interpenetrations of human and spirit world, the
delicate balance of forces:
She even coded fragments of the great jigsaw that the creator spread all over the diverse
peoples of the earth, hinting that no one race or people can have the complete picture
or monopoly of the ultimate possibilities of the human genius alone. With her magic
she suggested that its only when all peoples meet and know and love one another that
we begin to get an inkling of this awesome picture, or jigsaw, or majestic power. The
fragments of the grand picture of humanity were the most haunting and beautiful part of
her weaving that day. (ibid., 112113)

This is a richly utopian view of the capacity of the African imaginary to re-enter and
reshape the modern world. It is not merely a hope for African resurgence, but a vision
of Africas transformative potential, a potential that will be realised as the teleological,
expansionist and hegemonic tendencies of the West are gradually subverted. In one
sense Infinite riches is an attempt to show the scope of that cultural possibility by
infusing the language of excess with the enormously expanded vision of the horizons of
African cultural experience.

Afro-modernity and Pan-Africanism

Neto and Okri saw Africa impacting on the world through the dynamic of hope, but the
recirculation of a shared sense of oppression and purpose back to newly independent

African futures: The necessity of utopia

109

African states is one of the more concrete consequences of the African Diaspora. The
emergence of the New Negro and calls for transnational solidarity were heard in Ghana
and underpinned Kwame Nkrumahs demand for a free Africa.
We see in a statement by the African-American formulator of pan-Africanism,
Alexander Crummel, the beginnings of what I take to be a revolution in the postcolonial
relation between memory and anticipation:
What I would fain have you guard against is not the memory of slavery, but the constant
recollection of it, as the commanding thought of a new people, who should be marching
on to the broadest freedom in a new and glorious present, and a still more magnificent
future. (Crummel 1969, 13)

Crummels desire exemplifies a strategic utopianism that comes to be one of the most
powerful instances of the postcolonial transformation of modernity. Where Western
modernity became characterised by openness to the future we see now a situation in
which that openness is revolutionised by the political agency of memory. These various
features of Afro-modernity: its supra-national character; its circulation and recirculation
of liberating discourses of identity; its recovery of history in a vision of the future are all,
incidentally, features of the utopian in African literature, features shared and augmented
by a growing utopianism in other post-colonial literatures.
In Harvest Dance, Kofi Anyidoho calls on Africans to reach out to the world:
So raise your arms Brothers
Stretch your hands Sisters
Reach your hand to the BrotherMan from Birmingham in Alabama still
Standing Tall with Wonder in his Eyes
Stretch your arm to the Sister from SouthSide Chicago still
Standing Firm against the Hostile Winds
Stretch your eyes to that Tender Child from Harlem in Nu York wearing a
Rainbow for her Hair
Embrace that Grand Mama from San Salvador de Bahia
And yes that Hell of a Guy from KingstonTown in Jamaica
From GeorgeTown in Guyana and From Barranquilla in Colombia.
From CapeTown in MandelaLand and From Addis Ababa in Abyssinia.
From Kumbi-Saleh of AncientTimes and from Timbuktu of Ancestral Dreams.
(Anyidoho 2009, 142)

Transnational Africa
At the heart of this vision of a pan-African world, beats the energy of a growing
transnationalism. Like Caribbean literature, African literature finds itself increasingly
emerging from London and New York, and no less African for that. Chimamanda
Adiche, Chris Abani and Kojo Laing, prominent contemporary examples of this, spend
time moving between Nigeria or Ghana and the West.

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110

Adiches latest novel Americanah moves between the United States, United
Kingdom and Nigeria a mobility that allows her to poke fun at the super-sensitivity of
Americans about race. Friends are dress-shopping in the novel and when they go to pay,
the cashier asks which of two saleswomen helped them, but theyre not sure. She lists
numerous physical characteristics to identify the salesperson before giving up. Why
didnt she just ask Was it the black girl or the white girl? Ifemelu exclaims after they
leave. Because this is America, her friend tells her. Youre supposed to pretend that
you dont notice certain things. The ironic and superior tone is interesting here, but the
relationship of contemporary African writers to the West is ambivalent, to say the least,
as these contemporary worldly narratives nevertheless appear to look to the West, to
history, desiring inclusion.
Chris Abanis work is a commentary on the violence, poverty and oppression in
Africa, first in the images of child soldier in Song for night and in a familiarly dystopian
view of Lagos in Graceland. While he does not use the words hope or utopia, Abani
(2004a; Aycock 2009) often talks about transformation and possibility, even though the
transformation sometimes involves reaching the sublime through the grotesque. On
his website he calls himself a zealot of optimism, despite the violence, darkness and
indeterminacy of his accounts of Nigeria. In his talk on the Stories of Africa he says: I
am asking us to balance the idea of our complete vulnerability with the complete notion
of transformation ... (Abani 2007a).
So, for Abani transformation is a key, even though the idea of America as utopia
is a troubling one. Youthful protagonists like My Luck in Song for night and Elvis
in Graceland are ideal subjects for transformation, because identity and agency are
negotiated through discovery and possibility. But the euphoric optimism that pervades
Graceland even in the face of the horror of Lagos is deeply problematic because it is
generated by the possibility of America as utopia. For Elvis, who is given a passport by
his friend Redemption, America is redemption: Yes, this is redemption, he says as they
call his name. This is unsettling because the implication is that utopia lies, like Elviss
dancing, in a simulation of America and its popular culture. For Omelsky (2011, 85) the
ambiguous politics of Graceland is a strategy:
Abani deploys ambivalence as a discursive vehicle with which to expand the contours
of how we come to think and imagine African youth resistance pressing us to consider
the inherent contradictions, complicities and contingencies that perhaps accompany any
ascription of agency.

This seems supported by Abanis comment on this aspect of the novel:

Its a story about a loss of innocence, and yet that being some sort of redemption. Its
already a lie. Healing, or any kind of transformation or transubstantiation is never an
erasure of the trauma, but its the attempt to cobble together damaged self, that can limp
through in a very beautiful way. Its not America thats important, or that hes coming
to it, its that hes able to have that moment of transfiguration right there at the end.
(Aycock 2009, 8)

African futures: The necessity of utopia

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Perhaps we will have to take Abanis word for it. It is not America that is important but
the moment of transfiguration the very idea that such transformation is possible that
generates a utopian vision of the future. The thing that holds this idea in place is that
[i]dentity is a destination and thats why all of my work is about becoming. Were
all transnational, either in the real sense of a passport, where youve lived in different
countries and have spent life migrating through different continents, or in the way in
which culture mixes. (ibid., 8)

Whether Elvis achieves it or not, Abanis concept of African worldliness is utopian.

For him the impact of Africa on the world is simply in being there. But while Abanis
understanding of culture and identity is exemplary I am not entirely convinced by
Elviss transfiguration, and I think both Adiche and Abani are caught in the paradoxical
trap of cosmopolitanism a trap that opens where ideology and utopia meet. There is
a cosmopolitanism of the sophisticated global traveller, the elite cultural producer and
there is the mobility of the ordinary subject. The ethical dimension of cosmopolitan
theory is its great strength and I admire its utopian orientation. But it does not solve the
problem of who can be allowed into the cosmopolitan club. Part of the problem here
is the temporal linearity of the Bildungsroman. Elvis is headed for escape rather than
redemption, and while transubstantiation is never an erasure of the trauma, memory
and the past are merely things to be overcome rather than a recollection through which
the future takes shape.
A better term, perhaps, is one that avoids the question of inclusion to see mobility
as both a spatial and metaphoric function of subjectivity itself. This is the concept of
the transnation (Ashcroft 2010), which perhaps better captures the intent of Abanis
claim that we are all transnational. The concept of transnation does not refer to an
object in space but to a way of understanding subjects beyond normative formulations
of the nation the fluid, migrating outside of the state that begins within the nation.
One writer who avoids the trap of cosmopolitanism, despite his energetic espousal of
syncreticity, is Kojo Laing. In Search sweet country he avoids the trap because his
utopia is not the promise of a cosmopolitan future but a space of transformation that
exists within language itself, making the novel both very worldly and very local. Accra
is multifaceted and multivoiced, a rhizomatic interplay of border-crossings, which is the
key to the novels perception that growth, change and mobility are already part of the
life of the transnation.
I once asked Chris Abani Where is home? and his very prescient reply was that
home is in language. I want to extend that to suggest that heimat, that is, the home
we have sensed but not yet experienced, the utopian no place, may be achieved in
language. Kojo Laing reveals that not just the future, but the future of Africa in the
world, the future of African worldliness, may lie in the capacity of language to disrupt
accepted ideas of nation or culture by the circulation of difference. The appropriation
and transformation of English informed by the grammar and syntax of the vernacular
is a fundamental strategy of postcolonial writing. But Laings language is much more
than this, for while he does include Ga names, and other Ghanaian terms from various

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sources, and while there is evidence that he uses a poetic syntax that is typical (with
variations) of both poetry and oratory in Akan and Ga (Dakabu and Kropp 1993, 23)
his language is fundamentally comic a comic disruption of the cultural space between
languages.
The two beards crowded in one corner of Accra did not agree The fathers beard
shifted and pulled at different angles, taking in the sun and folding its rays under the hair
The sons beard was soft and vast with Vaseline, the hair parting ways at the middle
... Both beards were, in the brotherhood of hair, heavy with commas (Laing 2011, 2)

The utopian element of Search sweet country lies in the displacement of linear narrative
as it is overwhelmed by a proliferation of subject positions. The national story is
many individual stories, a transnation in which the overlapping multitude of stories
overwhelms the borders of history and even time itself.
Beni Baidoo was Accra, was the bird standing alive by the pot that should receive it, and
hoping that, after being defeathered, it would triumphantly fly out before it was fried.
(ibid., 1)

He represents not just language but the failure of language, which is one of the novels
major themes: in the past he had been a clerk (but never of the first division) and an
unsuccessful letter-writer; now he is desperate, indiscriminate talker, obsessed with
founding a village, a town of his own, but unable to find a more solid building material
than words. But this is part of the point of the novel that the utopia of the syncretic can
be achieved in words.
For Laing identity is not so much a destination as a dialectical process. He holds
passionately that the search for wholeness involves change, cultural and social interaction
between Europe and Africa (Cooper 1998, 179). But Woman of the aeroplanes offers
a relationship with Europe far beyond an ambiguous cosmopolitanism. By employing
a comic language, completely disrupting, even eviscerating, the linearity of narrative,
Laing layers time and circumvents history with a constantly embedded past that enters
a dialectical process with Europe. This emerges in the exchanges between the Ghanaian
town of Tukwan and Scottish Levensvale, both doubly oppressed and marginalised.
This novel, balanced as it is between two marginal spaces, undermines the idea of the
West as a shimmering utopian goal, and also reveals the transnation as operating both
within, beyond and between borders.
Like Tukwan, Levensvale has to transform itself. First it has to become human by
purging itself of racism and colonising practices. Second, it has to become economically
viable and independent. The material and the spiritual are complementary, like the two
towns, the twin brothers and the twin aeroplanes:
So both towns wanted a prosperity of pocket to go with the reincarnating prosperity of
the soul, as if to remain mortal took too long, and that money would shorten things a
bit. (Laing 1988, 92)

African futures: The necessity of utopia

113

Like lovers, the towns must entwine and embrace, syncretise and mix:
Now since a snore in Levensvale could originate in Tukwan, and since an elbow in
Tukwan could have its counterpart in Levensvale, everybody was free to be and do what
he or she liked. There was a blast of freedom from the freely-mixed bodies and worlds,
ampa. (ibid., 86)

Despite the magical real dimension of Woman of the aeroplanes, Tukwan, according to
Laing, is realistically possible in terms of cross cultural interchange. In terms of hope
it is a realizable utopia (Cooper 1998, 195). It is realisable because it is grounded,
not a fantasized vision of perfection to be imposed upon an imperfect world, but an
integral feature of that world representing the hopes and dreams of those consigned to
its margins (op.cit.). Tukwan is realisable in terms of the circularity of time and space it
sets in motion within the story of cultural interchange. In the future of Africas contact
with Europe, both must be transformed. Transformation of the future emerges out of the
transformative layering of past and present, for this may be the only way in which the
empire of history may be resisted and the grounded utopia of a worldly African future
be realised.
African visions of the future, then, are driven by the dynamic of hope, which
took shape in the experience of colonisation, but continues through an anticipatory
consciousness that is grounded in ahistorical memory. They emerge out of an empowering
experience of layered time that envisages an impact on the world. Utopia is necessary
because it is only from the no-place of a utopian future that ideology particularly the
teleological ideology of history can be contested. What remains remarkable about
African literature and cultural production is the stunning tenacity of its hope and its
grounded vision of possibility.

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