In 2005, author Taiye Selasi published a short text entitled “Bye-Bye Babar”, which was well received because it encapsulated the attitude towards life of many well-off young people in the African diaspora. Describing their existence between different continents, metropolises, languages and cultures, Selasi noted: “We are Afropolitans: not citizens, but Africans of the world.” 

Afro-political self-confidence

Selasi explains: “Maybe Afro-political consciousness is characterized above all by a rejection of oversimplifications; by an effort to understand what is wrong in Africa, and at the same time a desire to honor what is wonderful and unique.” She thus describes the self-image of a generation that self-confidently refers to the enormous cultural and material wealth of Africa and at the same time deals with the violent (colonial) history and problematic present of the continent.

To be an “African of the world” therefore means to participate in modernity from an African perspective. Against the backdrop of colonial images of Africa, this cannot be taken for granted: the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, for example, positioned Africa outside of history in the realm of human insignificance – a racist way of thinking that continues to the present day.

“Bye-Bye Babar” unequivocally breaks with such a perspective. The title is a reference to Eddie Murphy’s famous line in the movie “Coming to America,” which refers to the children’s book character Babar. Books such as those about Babar, invented in colonial France in the 1930s, still make racist notions of African people an integral part of popular cultural education taught to Europeans from childhood. Saying goodbye to Babar is therefore also associated with Selasi’s “rejection of oversimplifications” that characterize the many colonial ideas of Africa.

A view of the world made up of multiple stories

It is no coincidence that another star of the Afro-political scene points to this sore point: In her ted talk “The Danger of a Single Story,” writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells how she devoured British and American books as a child. Soon she began to write stories herself: “All my figures were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples and talked a lot about the weather […]. I had never been outside Nigeria. There was no snow here, we ate mangoes and we never talked about the weather.”

Based on her one-sided reading experiences, she says herself that she assumed that people in books must always be situated far away from their own experiences. “That changed,” she added, “when I discovered African books.” As a result, Adichie not only encountered stories of people who lived lives similar to the one she lived. They also multiplied the stories that henceforth shaped her view of the world. She thus escapes the risk of reducing people to a single dimension of human existence.

Humanization and dehumanization

Selasi and Adichie are part of a new generation of African intellectuals who are developing a postcolonial debate from an African and Afrodiasporic perspective. The works of Sylvia Wynter, who shows how modern conceptions of man are based on colonial racial differences, belong to this tradition, which goes far back into the late twentieth century. The associated two-way process of humanization and dehumanization led to the emergence of a self-image of the people of the colonial metropolis as progressive and enlightened on the one hand; on the other hand, to the colonial exploitation and enslavement of colonized people.

This includes Valentin Y. Mudimbe’s “The Invention of Africa”. In it he shows how the idea of a coherent, culturally unified continent was developed from a colonial point of view. Mudimbe’s analysis bears close resemblance to Edward Said’s much better known “Orientalism”. which attributes the emergence of a unified “Orient” to Eurocentric sciences.

This includes the work of Audre Lorde, who – long before the introduction of a new and fashionable research area called “Affect Studies” – described how anger can arise from the experience of oppression, such as racism, sexism or homophobia. And how this often frowned upon emotion becomes a starting point for practices that produce alternative knowledge and social change.

This includes the book “The Black Atlantic” by Paul Gilroy. In it, he addresses the emergence of a black diaspora through the forcible deportation and enslavement of African people and shows how fundamental this was for the development of a modern world.

This includes the work “Invention of Women” by Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyéwùmí. She describes how many seemingly “natural” notions of men, women and the family reflect European norms that have evolved historically. Such norms were imposed on African societies by colonial domination. They superimposed and destroyed existing social arrangements in which gender played a different and sometimes (as discussed in the case of the Yoruba in today’s Nigeria) a subordinate role compared to other social factors, such as social age.

This also includes the work of Achille Mbembe. He uses the term “necro-politics” to describe how colonial forms of government distinguish between people whose lives matter and those whose deaths are accepted. As a look at the death toll in the Mediterranean shows, such analyses have lost none of their topicality: This is because the deadly border regimes for people from Africa and Asia who, due to social, political, economic and environmental crises, seek their way to Europe on dangerous routes are largely accepted by European states.

Imagining a different future

Against the backdrop of such profound and at the same time ruthless analyses of a Eurocentric modernism and its consequences for Africa, new approaches are currently being formed. They contribute to global discussions from an African and Afrodiasporic perspective and imagine a different future for the continent.

“It’s about no longer justifying oneself, no longer responding to the demands of others,” writes Felwine Sarr. With the term Afrotopia, he presents a Utopia “which sets itself the task of finding the enormous possibilities within African reality and making them fruitful”. Sarr focuses in particular on the transformation of the economy, which has become far too powerful in Western-dominated contexts and is biased towards the profit of specific individuals. In Afrotopia, it should become more intertwined with cultural and spiritual forms of life and thus create more sustainable conditions not only for the people who live in this economic order, but also for the ecological systems to which we all belong.

Afrotopias become Planetopias

In a similar way, Sylvia Tamale stresses the importance of African knowledge for the rapid transformation and destruction of ecological foundations. According to Tamale, Africans have the lowest environmental footprint in the world due to their very low average consumption of resources. The UN estimates that only two to three percent of global emissions can be attributed to Africa. At the same time, due to the consequences of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism, many places lack the resources needed to protect themselves from climate-related changes or recover from similar disasters, both in their daily lives and at governmental level. According to Tamale, Africa is thus the continent most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Especially in the combination of decolonial feminism, environmental policy and indigenous knowledge through African ecofeminism, Tamale sees the potential to be able to draw a fine line between the use and protection of natural resources. This also makes it clear that Afrotopias are important beyond the continent, as they are also “Planetopias”, Utopias for the planet.