[LINK] "Black to the future: afrofuturism and tech power"

[rfmcdonald]

Florence Okoye has a great article up at Open Democracy exploring the idea of Afrofuturism. Why can't Africa be imagined as having a shiny high-tech future?

I grew up learning that all the kids in Nigeria were geniuses. Whenever a laptop broke, our mother would shrug it off and say “Well, when we go home this summer, we’ll take it with us to Enugu. The boys there will know what to do with it.”

Fast forward to now. I'm not at all surprised to see hand-made vehicles and green blazered teenage girls showing off urine powered electricity generators, all over the Maker Faire Africa website. We’ve always been makers, even before it was cool.

Both in Africa and amongst the diaspora, the rise of affordable computers, electronics, mobile technology and access to free education, facilitated by an ever more accessible internet, are making black futurist dreams a reality.

As a young black girl who read too much science fiction, I discovered within it a striking lack of futuristic black cultures. It seemed obvious to me that this was part of an overarching association of blackness with stunted development, whether artistic, political, social or technological.

In 1990s Britain where I grew up, generally blackness was equivocated with violence and low achievement. We were too ‘street' to see the stars above. The kids of Onitsha and Enugu who could hack into networks and mend laptops by hand went ignored, the distance in geography and perception rendering them almost fictional.