AFROPIXEL 2010 * VIYE DIBA
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I cannot claim to know much more about Africa after spending just one week in the city of Dakar in Senegal, but even this short visit forced me to reconsider what I imagine the African identity to be today. It was a challenging mental exercise to try to connect many vast and complex issues – slavery, colonialism, black identity, etc – to this concrete geographical location.
It would have been a vain effort to try to find the ‘genuine roots’ of contemporary African identity from Dakar. The roots have been dislocated to many faraway places – or rather to imaginary journeys to these places. The local identity is strongly influenced by what has been forcefully taken away from here and in contrast by the longing to escape from Senegal today, to a place where life would be better.
Reports
Making a better future
AFROPIXEL 2010 * JEAN KATAMBAYI MUKENDI * MAKER FAIRE AFRICA
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The Afropixel 2010 festival began with an event called ‘Le Laboratoire de Prospectives Singuleires Dakar’ (organised in collaboration with Les Ateliers de Rennes) which featured philosophers, artists, activists and organisers who gave their views on possible futures.
The starting point for the discussion was this quote from John Samuel Mbiti:
“If, however, future events are certain to occur, or if they fall within the inevitable rhythm or nature, they can at best constitute only potential time, not actual time. (…) In the east African languages in which I have carried out research and tested my findings, there are no concrete words or expressions to convey the idea of a distant future. (…) When Africans reckon time, it is for a concrete and specific purpose, in connection with events but not just for the sake of mathematics. Since time is a composition of events people cannot and do not reckon it in vacuum. Numerical calendars, with one or two possible exceptions, do not exist in African traditional societies as far as I know. If such calendars exist, they are likely to be of a short duration, stretching back perhaps a few decades, but certainly not into the real of centuries.”
So, if African languages are limited when it comes to expressions about future, does it mean that it is difficult or impossible for Africans to imagine future events? Is the idea that ‘tomorrow everything might be different’, a common thought in Western culture, difficult for Africans to imagine?
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