Narrating African Futures

Abstract

Africa’s demographical and economic growth is spectacular nowadays, as the continent is about to host a quarter of the working-age world population. The issue of “African futures” is therefore a major geopolitical and economic debate, discussed as such by a great variety of discourses. Economists, historians, philosophers, novelists and artists have developed innovative ways of imagining, staging and narrating African futures, which give way to utopias and dystopias, depending on whether Afro-optimistic or Afro-pessimistic views prevail. Thus, apparently very different discourses often share similar literary images, figures of speech, modes of arguing or of narrating that rhetorical as well as narratological analyses could usefully bring out so as to emphasize their com­mon assumptions, ways of thinking and of imagining. This paper underscores the neces­sity to study the overlaps between economics and literature, prospective studies and fic­tions, or counterfactual history and novels on the topic of African futures.