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