Transcriber: Michael Wilson Reviewer: Denise RQ
My talk
[is] about Afrofuturism and the African.
Afrofuturism is considered what speculative fiction,
myths, legends, science fiction,
and the stories of that genre are to African Americans,
Africa, Africa of the Diaspora, and black people in general.
What Denenge Akpem refers it to is what blackness looks like in the future,
real or imagined.
Now, the history of Afrofuturism comes from America
and was first coined by a man called Mark Dery.
When he started talking about Afrofuturism,
he talked about the idea of literature--
so the books that Octavia Butler would write
and things like that--
but then it also moved into a new region, of music,
so we would have people like Sun Ra and George Clinton--
but for me, especially Sun Ra because he has a special place in my heart.
He believed that he came from the planet Saturn
and came to Earth to spread the message of love and peace.
Like in his movie "Space Is the Place"
he introduces the idea of alien
to black people in America.
But that was very specifically about African Americans,
and I wanted to find a place for Afrofuturism in Africa.
The first place that that led me to is Mount Kenya, obviously,
where the god of Mount Kenya lives according to the Kikuyu tradition.
So Mwene Nyaga is seated on top of this mountain,
and he introduced our Adam and Eve, Gikuyu and Mumbi,
and from that we're descendants of the nine children.
But even before the idea of the myth of Gikuyu and Mumbi,
the idea of Afrofuturism,
or legends, and myths, and stories were told to me by my mother.
She is a great storyteller as well as a pediatrician
so I'd have to say that her stories were truly science fiction, truly.
(Laughter)
I remember her telling me stories about the way if I ate the pumpkin,
my hair would grow.
Or if... -- which is strange --
if I attach leeches to my nipples, my breasts would grow.
And also...
I did it.
(Laughter)
And also she would talk about the way that in the Kikuyu tradition,
if you circle the Mugumo tree seven times,
you would change sex.
Growing up, obviously, past my mother's stories,
I began to read stories of my own, and they were inevitably filled
with the ogre and the young girl who wandered off into the forest,
and what would happen if she wandered off into the forest,
and how she would meet this horrible ogre
because she departed from the ways of the society.
That's also when I met Ben Okri, and the idea of the spirit child,
and the idea of using spiritualism or mythical realism within storytelling.
That, for me, is also a link to Afrofuturism.
But what really, really inspired me about Ben Okri
was his ability to merge seamlessly the idea of the spirit world and fiction,
and the idea that we live in a continent
that is so closely linked to the spirit world
that we use it in a very everyday sort of way.
That is true when we come to witch doctors,
sangoma, or people who deal with the spiritual realms.
It's also true of genies of the coast,
and I don't even know how many of you have gone to Mombasa or Zanzibar,
but I know from personal experience
there was a cat that followed me for five kilometers,
or every time I turned around it was there and I could have sworn it was a genie.
I'm positive about it.
In fact, I have friends who attest to the fact as well.
So Afrofuturism has always been part of our culture, part of us.
But more interestingly, it has been part of the history of West Africa.
West Africa believe -- especially in Mali,
there is a nation of people called the Dogon--
and the Dogon people believe
that they were told about a planet called Sirius B
before it was discovered by Western scientists.
They were told of this planet
by a race of amphibian-like aliens
who came in from the ocean
and told them, not only about the planet
but also about the rotation of the planet and how it worked in space.
Some of the cave drawings, like these,
showed the amphibian creatures at the bottom of the people,
or the people who came to speak to them about this planet.
Then, later on, it was discovered.
So they had the knowledge in 1930,
but it wasn't until the 70s that the actual planet was seen.
If that isn't curious science fiction,
history, I don't know what is.
But also from South Africa, we have people like Credo Mutwa
who believes there is a reptilian race of people
whose bloodline extends into modern day royalty
and modern day business people
and is what, I guess, theorists would call The Illuminati.
So we've established that fact-- fact or fiction--
myths have always existed very, very closely to us,
but there's been a growing need for the idea of Afrofuturism,
and I'd have to ask why?
And when talking about it, I talked about it to a friend of mine,
and he said, "Africans are inherently futuristic,
given the sheer capriciousness of our present situation."
That was my friend Michael Odhiambo who reckons he's very clever.
Then there was a writer called David William Cohen who says,
"The struggle of man against power
is the struggle of man against forgetting."
This makes a lot of sense
because it's been suggested that Afrofuturism, as a genre, is growing
because as Africans, or as descendants of Africa,
we've never had a space or a voice within our own history.
We've never had a chance to talk about our own history;
it's always been written by other people.
Now, because we don't have a link to our own history
or because we didn't have a grasp on our own history,
we're using Afrofuturism to stake a place in the future
so we can strongly identify ourselves in the future.
Mark Dery argues that the younger generation
have used technology as a way to insert themselves
into both a real and imagined landscape
to physically assert their presence in the present
and to make it clear they intend to stake their claim in the future.
So because we can't reclaim our history,
we are now trying to project our own future.
Of course, in projecting our own future, we have to ask where are we doing it?
In what spaces are we doing that?
In Kenya, we're doing it in music,
and we have some of my favorite musicians here as well,
but just a band have, to me, demonstrated Afrofuturism
in their own music,
especially in one of their latest songs Huff+Puff.
They say, "Give me five, it's good to be alive.
The sky seems so far away.
Hope you know we've been to the moon and back.
Be sure that nothing's going to hold us back."
So we know that we are larger than life.
We know that we are larger than Earth,
we know we are larger than the cosmos,
and that is reflected in our work and in our music.
Around the continent, obviously,
there's people like Nnedi Okorafor
who wrote a book called "Who Fears Death".
And this is a matte painting done by Ivonne Wende, a Kenyan,
about the book "Who Fears Death".
In "Who Fears Death" what Nnedi does
is that she uses the idea of manipulating technology,
as we know it,
to understand where we are
or to be able to grasp our environment.
And as Africans, we do that all the time.
We use technology that has been used outside of our space
or that was invented outside of our own spaces
and use it in our own ways.
What Nnedi Okarafor does in "Who Fears Death"
is that she creates these particular machines
called water catcher stations,
and they absorb all [the water from] the atmosphere around them
so that people can take baths, can have clean drinking water,
[inaudible] and so forth.
That's the fictional side of it.
But in practice, how are Kenyans using Afrofuturism?
I have to say I would refer to AfriGadget, the website
that has a plethora of different people doing very inventive, and for me,
very futuristic things, including a young 13-year-old called Richard Turere,
and what he did is that he created a way to run a flashlight invention,
run off a car battery,
to keep predators away from his family's property.
That to me is a very Afrofuturist sense of using technology,
but in a very rustic way, in a way that makes sense to us.
In my film "Pumzi" I used the idea of technology,
and this is a picture of what we call self-powered generator;
and there would be these people running on treadmills
and they would generate electricity in order to power where they lived.
I thought I was being very imaginative until I googled it.
(Laughter)
And I wasn't so much.
Self-powered generators do exist.
They do, there are ways of using kinetic energy to power stations.
It's not completely in practice at the moment,
but it's an idea of the ways that we can use technology
in a very Afrofuturist setting
to be able to run our everyday things.
There's obviously nowhere we can talk about the future
without talking about technology.
In "Pumzi", I also talk about the idea of communication,
and I know from my own experience
that I would be sitting across the table from a friend
and we would tweet each other.
Now we have learned to communicate in 140 characters or less.
Even when I'm talking about the things that are happening in my life,
I'll use a hashtag, as if it were part of the sentence.
In "Pumzi", what I did is I created this idea --
and we'll see it in a second --
about how we use different layers of technology in order to communicate
and the thought process of that
is that we're looking for more efficient ways of communicating
rather than finding emotive ways of communicating.
For me, what is most important and what I've found from making "Pumzi"
is that the idea of Afrofuturism worked the best for me
because I'm able to extrapolate on ideas, and thoughts, and feelings I have
about the way the world is running
without offending people or without being too heavy-handed.
For me, what "Pumzi" was was a reflection of society,
and it's set 35 years after the Water War,
and where everybody lives inside because they've been told the outside is dead,
until one character, Asher, wakes up from a dream --
which is not allowed,
because everybody is supposed to be taking dream suppressants --
and she finds a seed that she then plants, and it starts to grow.
But in a world where the outside is dead,
and her being the curator of a virtual natural museum --
and that's the only place you have access to nature --
she had to find, to fight a way outside of herself
to be able to prove that life exists.
That's "Pumzi".
But my metaphor for "Pumzi" is about life and sacrifice,
and the fact that we ourselves have to mother Mother Nature.
We have to make sacrifices in order to live in this one,
and we have to know that our own behaviors will affect generations to come.
As a storyteller in the tradition of the Kikuyu,
my job is to be a seer, not just a historian
and to be able like Moreau who predicted the coming of white people
as if they were colorful butterflies or the train in the sense of the way
that he saw a snake with smoke coming out of its head
to be able to say:
there is more to life than we see and listen to the storytellers.
They also have a voice, and their voice is important.
So, I leave you with a clip from "Pumzi",
and this is just an indication of the possibilities of the human mind,
the possibilities of Afrofuturism,
and how Afrofuturism relates to us as Africans.
(Applause) (Cheers)