African futures: The necessity of utopia

This article examines the utopian vision of much African writing as the dynamic of hope generated in anticolonial struggle continues to characterise contemporary poetry and novels. The premise is that utopia is necessary, not as mere wishful thinking but as willed action, because, according to Paul Ricoeur, utopia is the ‘no place’, the only place from which ideology can be countered. This means that utopia is the only place from which the discourse of catastrophe continually undermining Africa can be countermanded, the only place from which European history can be subverted. The perception of a grounded utopian future requires a vision of the past, of cultural memory freed from the confines of Western history. According to Ernst Bloch, the doyen of Marxist utopianism, utopia cannot exist without the operation of memory. The present is the crucial site of the continual motion by which the new comes into being. In such transformative conceptions of utopian hope, the ‘not-yet’ is always a possibility emerging from the past. African utopianism reconsiders the possibility of an ahistorical past, rethinks the function of memory and of time itself. The momentum of hope not only imagines a hopeful future for Africa (crystalised in the concept of an African Renaissance), but carries forward into a perception of Africa's impact on the world. The key to this is that the subversion of history, the affective operation of memory and a creative vision of the future are most powerfully conducted in African art and literature.