Ivan Illich: “Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society. Rather, you must tell a new powerful tale—one so persuasive it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story, one so inclusive it gathers all the bits of our past and present into a coherent whole. One that even shines some light into our future, so that we can take the next step.”
It is both symbolic and significant that you are here in Kenya barely a month after the passing of our Professor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, he who gave us words as talismans, sentences as scaffolding of new worlds, and who raged, with precision, against the machinery of global horror and its collaborators. The full depth and resonance of what he stood for across this continent and among peoples will only be fully understood with time. There are other prophets and greats who have transitioned: I am thinking, of among others, the cherished Professor V.Y Mudimbe. If you will allow, I ask that we pause here, for a moment of greeting, acknowledgement, and gratitude.
Ladies, gentlemen, esteemed scholars, organisers of the ALA Conference, and cherished friends, good afternoon. It is a privilege to be here among you, who are so deeply invested in story worlds, mythic architectures, and the urgent, necessary magic of literature.
Congratulations, ALA, on your remarkable 50th anniversary milestone. And here you are in a season of global tectonic shifts, a disenchantment with old realities in a space of youthful vigorous discontent that also test the theories you explore.
Karibuni to our mercurial, mad, and most beautiful country, Kenya. Here, you will find a microcosm of the universe. Whoever you are, no matter where you are from, you will find, to your surprise, a tributary bearing your other name, self, or shadow. It is a space of haunted geographies, whose ghosts an emerging Generation now confront directly.
You glimpsed aspects of this on the blessed day of 25 June. A youthful generation demanding a political existence that is genuine and self-determined, claiming their agency and defining the Kenya project on their own terms. You witnessed cosmopolitan solidarities, a glorious temporal rebellion, shaped by the ethics of care and communitarianism, by lived technopolitics and digital realism, and by an expectation that justice is not only accountability but relationship: one that distributes resources and nurtures social bonds. To quote millennial philosopher-theologian Joe Kobuthi, this was a philosophical moment built in real time. A renewed social contract in the making. Not just for Kenya. A refreshed myth-of-us unfolds, a theme to which I shall return. You caught a glimpse of the beautiful young, draped in Kenya’s colours, cite points from the Constitution like a prayer, who begin their particular mythos with these sacred words: “We, the people of Kenya…”
Welcome, too, to Enkare e Nairopi, place of still waters. Is this the moment we apologise to those who were excited to come to Africa’s Equator for warmth and sunshine? University of Nairobi, you didn’t tell your guests that we reserve June and July invitations for our enemies so when they freeze and complain bitterly nobody will believe them?
Anyway, welcome to a city of worlds, and of worlds in a city. A cosmopolis that erupted in error from territories appropriated from the nomadic nations, most notably the Maasai. It is for this reason that when today you meet cattle and their cattlemen on our highways and byways, like every Nairobian, do not think of these as out of place. This is their place.
You chose your staging ground well. Our ghosts, as you sense, are tangible here. Our hauntedness is not so different from that of others across Global Africa: it infuses our storytelling, shaping the way we make meaning of the world. It renders the artist, maker, and writer not only a chronicler and witness, but also a medium. We inhabit the interstices of our belonging, and are in conversation and relationship with them too.
Now, this is not a lecture, as much as it is a causerie shared in your company. I struggled with this paper. Not with its subject, but with the weight of this moment in the history of our humanity, and indeed this country. In the end, I choose to speak to you from within the discontent of our shared world-space, compelled also by the closing words of the late, great V.Y. Mudimbe to filmmaker-thinker Jean-Pierre Bekolo in the 2015 film Les choses et les mots de Mudimbe: we prefer our thinker-prophets dead, because their role while alive is to create disorder and open new epistemological pathways. This reflection is not about the death of the thinker-prophet, but rather about looking out from within the spaces of disorder and epistemic rupture, those spaces that most clearly articulate the urgency of a time such as this.
And do forgive me if it might seem that I’m milking a few of your sacred cows. I promise I’ve tried to reform, but I have a tendency to relapse daily. No harm is ever intended.
About the world:
“Mobilities,” you say?
Yet now everything is in flux.
How, then, does one stand in such a time as this? What dramatic, context-shifting gestures might literary scholars make when the languages, glossaries, and grammars we’ve inherited and use no longer suffice to carry the weight, depth, sense and feeling of our contemporary reality? How do today’s transitions test our ability and our desire to dream, design, and call into being other worlds?
These are unprecedented times.
Our unfolding chaos is singular in its technology-fuelled speed and planetary reach. Moreover, has there ever been, so overtly and so unashamedly, such a violent rupture in the world’s moral imagination? A severing between the idea of “humanity” and the recognition of human beings?
And you, who live in the United States, probably feel this now more viscerally than ever before, in, for example, the demonisation of the stranger, always of a certain kind, always of a certain hue, which has returned with a terrible ferocity.
We witness the helter-skelter rampage of a dehumanising death cult untethered from reason, conscience, memory, and remorse. Its rituals are televised. Its appetite, boundless. Its gaze cold, dead and indifferent.
This goes beyond the political. It includes the brazen resurgence of Occidental messianism, the tiresome fantasy of moral supremacy dressed in the language of human progress, now overtly laced with the texture of evil: a meticulous, scientific disregard for human life. A supremacist intoxication so deep, that when it disorders life, or sheds blood it calls it “order”. Occidental ethnochauvinism returns to centre stage, its primordial tribal instincts cloaked in the rhetoric of civilisation and moral authority. It has dropped its masks.
We watch in terror as the repellent excuse of war becomes a veil for the systematic elimination of non-Western intelligentsia: academics, researchers, artists, doctors, scientists, journalists. Those who carry memory. Those who create other worlds, other goods and futures. A genocide of the imagination and mind even as their global counterparts look on in near-total silence.
Ritual violence and war crimes flourish beneath a spectacle of mass slaughter, the main purpose of which is to test newly invented weapons of human destruction. The killing fields are laboratories. The human bodies, data. The horror, monetised.
International law is invoked only when convenient. Human will and conscience are assaulted relentlessly through language, narrative, image and the repetition of lies. Media institutions perform as the dutiful propagandists and stenographers of empire that they are. The United Nations has purposed to go the way of the League of Nations. We live through the formalisation of lies, the sanctification of hubris. And amid it all, the everyday becomes absurd. Bureaucracy slides into farce: visa applications now demand your social media contact list to be handed over to immigration officers who can barely read. Hypocrisy is now the default mode of statecraft. And all of it is underwritten by unrestricted access to the most fearsome of doomsday arsenals, access of which is supposedly reserved for a select few.
And we?
We, like frogs in slowly boiling water, adjust, rationalise, adapt until the scalding lunacy feels like weather. We have become used to the temperature of despair.
The collapse of the world’s moral fabric is near total, alongside the crumbling legitimacy of global institutions which, in hindsight, reveal themselves as elaborate mirages. Facades. Instruments through which the Minotaur in the labyrinth surveilled and manipulated our collective humanity. An insecure hegemon, desperate to maintain its stranglehold on the planet, turns to sabotage, siege, assassination, and manufacturing consent and narratives; sanctions, coercion, neorological warfare, and the ecconomic and socio-political crippling of nations on the rise.
Wars without horizon.
Campaigns without end.
This is hubris in its most perilous form: a branch of humanity so affronted by the return of pluriversal, multipolar sensibilities that it would sooner scorch the earth than loosen its grip. Doublethink reigns. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”—George Orwell, 1984
We can admit that the so-called Enlightenment was not the world’s illumination, but its dimming. What we have now are not democracies, but thanatocracies: death-worshipping regimes, necrophilic abysses adorned in the polished robes of public relations. Nations animated by doctrines of destruction and systems that live off consuming the futures, bodies, and dreams of others. And everyday, we are forced to contend with new iterations of ancient hallucinations: of “chosen people,” of “master races,” of the old civilisational pathologies within the decaying delusions of empire.
Tell me, dear ones, how do we live with the viscerally nauseating, grotesque spectacle of an US-Israeli food distribution mechanism in Gaza? The Squid Game-Hunger Games tableaux. Of “officers and soldiers … ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near food distribution sites in Gaza, even when no threat was present.”1The murders of the desperate, intentionally starved including children. The adulteration of flour with soul and mind destroying narcotics. British newspapers referring to the imagination of a concentration camp in Gaza as “Gated communities.” What sort of entity does this to another being? Sadism and quintessential evil engaged as if nothing by a system, culture and a world as if this is the norm. Such fiendish metaphor, image, symbol; the exposure of what nations, at their core, have chosen to become, and likely, always were. In this unending season of revelation, and also, despair, decay, devastation, despondence and derangement, this horrible age of monsters and demons, there are absolutely no moral grey zones, dear friends. The boundary between good and evil is clearly defined.
And it’s all feels so disorienting, so exhausting, isn’t it?
What remains is for someone, anyone, to call off the pretence of global institutional order. To stop the theatrics of legitimacy draped over decaying structures.
The world is already at war.
The entity called “the West”, its cultists, political apologists and imperial eruptions desperately tries to uphold a world that no longer exists. In its lunacy, it forces even nations like dear Seychelles to contemplate the acquisition of nuclear-weapons as deterrence and a means of ensuring their survival before a hegemon that’s gone beserk.
It is so irritating. After 500 years of bombardment with collective cultural delusions: ‘enlightenment’, ‘discovery’, ‘best empire ever in history’, ‘master race’, ‘chosen people’, ‘civilisational masterpiece’… after centuries of philosophical pomp, moral posturing, and civilisational gaslighting… everything boils down to this: My mass killing tool is bigger than yours.
This. This is supposed to be the summit of the human project? The harvest of “reason” and “progress”? The irony isn’t just bitter, it is apocalyptic.
Anyway, let me speak without ambiguity:
Palestine.
Space, place, metaphor, symbol, reckoning ground, scrying mirror. The world’s moral frontline. This is not to deny or ignore the other haemorrhaging lands, including those just next door, our cherished Sudan, Congo, Libya. But Palestine has become the televised site of a stark battleground; the psychic tissue that makes us human is at stake here. And it horrors are live-streamed.
I hear that some of you in Western institutions can no longer say “Palestine” without looking over your shoulders, worried for your funding, your visa, your right of abode. Watching what you say, wondering who else is listening. To imagine that it has actually come to this? It must be nerve-wracking for those accustomed to imagining their worlds as the pinnacle of human attainments.
I also imagine that many of you are as perplexed as I am by the thunderous silences from the hundred thousand theorists, the table-top revolutionaries, the warriors of post- and decolonial thought. The intersectionalists. The panel circuit prophets. Not a word for the Palestinian mother, the widow, gunned down a few weeks ago while gathering a handful of grain for her seven starving children. Not a murmur. Not even a rebuke for the murder of that most luminous of poets, author, essayist, academician, soul, Refaat Alareer.
When all is said and done—if we do make it out alive—there is one line that will not be permitted to our present humanity when an audit of evil in this present world is done:
that we did not know.
that we not see.
that we did not hear.
The grossest horror is no longer what humanity is doing, but that it doesn’t horrify us. Do you imagine there’s a place in the longed for future for a race who can’t react with anguish and rage at the hourly visions of a well-armed state assiigning its young men and women duties to kill toddlers, babies, children, by any means included institutionalised starvation, innocents whose deaths are explained, justified and even applauded? A race that prefers its souls, its hearts, its consciences to shrivel?
We look away, telling ourselves it is for our own survival. We circle the wagons around our little lives, believing we are safe, that detachment protects our sanity.
The horror! A tragic existential crisis of meaning, spirit, emotion, essence. A catastrophe of geopolitics. The death of an ethical imagination.
And we? We are also losing our treasury of what it means to be human. In turning away, we are not spared, we are hollowed. If we are now inside an elevator descending into hell, it is because we signed up, or were signed up, for the ride, in exchange for our silences, amnesia, collusion and consent.
The atrocities unfolding in the world are both reverberations and admissions. Revelations of what went before and remains excused, unexamined, buried, lied over, erased, or ignored. We now glimpse a little of what our ancestors contended with. They, however, couldn’t livestream their endings. We live in the gap between their stories, the stolen worlds, threshold lands.
And those of us from preyed-upon worlds, perhaps more than others, can read the subtexts in Gaza. We see what was buried in Fallujah. What was exploded in Tripoli. What was scorched into the soil of Helmand. We recognise the children turned into missing limbs, into breathless names. Families reduced to data points. Genealogies and bloodlines erased in phosphorus fire. We know the look of the bewildered soul peering at humanity in the face of a beautiful boy child starving to death because some politician needed to collect brownie points. We know the patterns: the targeted decimation of the intellectual and skilled classes, so later, the predators can claim there was nothing there, that the story they impose is the one, true, thing.
In Palestine we find Sudan. We find the DRC. We find Korea. Yemen. Afghanistan. Guatemala, Yugoslavia too. What bleeds out beneath the million-ton rubble of nations is not only life but also the memory of what it means to be human and whole. What haemorrhages is the grammar of love: how to seek, how to welcome, how to receive and be received.
I don’t know about you, but in a world that insists we conceal our innermost feelings and thoughts so that the outer self aligns with approved political and epistemological frameworks, there is, beyond the daily negotiation of cognitive dissonance, an overwhelming sense of existential malaise. A bone-deep weariness. And an awareness that our present words and stories are not capable of sheltering the weight, depth, and demands of the present age. Intellectualising atrocity, abstracting horror and suffering into theory and position papers is not it. This is not an accusation, so forgive me in advance for asking this. I really need to understand: If our theoretical frameworks do not tremble before the agonies of a wilfully starved and hunted civilisation today, in the scheme of the grand story of our humanity, if these cannot serve the ache for human repair, who and what exactly are they for? For whom or what do they exist?
A devouring ghoul shadows each of us. A perverse Babel multiplies. Not of languages, but of euphemisms, neologisms, censorship and linguistic erasure, of gaslighting wrapped in the garb of reason, of pathology disguised as policy. Everything gets lost in the current translation of our world.
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”(G. Orwell)
The Azov battalion we were first introduced to as terrifying neo-Nazis are reborn as Europe’s flag-bearing freedom keepers.
The disintegration of Libya into a slave-trading entrepot, is entirely Libya’s fault, and few care that an amoral politician who at the terrible sight of a lynched African leader, cackled and declared: We came, we saw, he died. She still roams the earth as an archetype of ‘western freedom”.
A dying hegemon collectively and publicly equivocates and denies the morality of letting newborns starve to death in incubators, and then assumes the language of the victimised.
As long-enduring, and minotaur-surviving nations, I don’t believe we have ever properly reckoned, with the terrible will, and surgical desire with which the Occidental project indulges in, summons, and cultivates mass horror as a strategy for domination. Its architects have made terror into a diabolical art. Beneath the surface of its geopolitics, it is as though some covenant was made with a fearsome force, a Faustian pact through which horror and fear would be transmuted into world policy and praxis in exchange for lucre and power, generating a reality where nightmares now infuse the architecture of ordinary life, especially for those pre-designated as sacrifices. A monstrous alchemy renders destruction not only permissible, but ordinary.
And so we watch. As humanity is annihilated on an industrial scale, we become voyeurs of unspeakable terror, and witnesses, too, to our own helplessness. Until the spectacle breaches our inner sanctums, turning our private worlds into battlefields. Lonely. Inescapable. Haunted.
How do we stand in the presence of such devastating ruin? How do we name the present world for what it is, and do so safely, if such a thing as safety can still exist?
Yes, there are still those who lick the edges of human luminosity. A heavily bombarded yet still undying Yemen, waving ancient scimitars at raging alien hordes and their gruesome fleets. The everyday, unsung heroes in all the devastated lands. Those who survive and create joy, who speak poetry not only into their own humanity, but into ours. We follow some of them on social media, these radiant witnesses who have refused to let evil have the last word on what it means for us to be human. South Africans invoking the highest laws of humanity in pursuit of fragile justice. Twelve people aboard a ship named Madleen, sailing with meagre supplies, trying to break a siege of starvation, later followed by convoys that continue, regardless, to crash against the walls behind which horror lives unchecked, excused, and protected by a devastating 500-year idea of the world.
Given this context, for this conference, a pressing question arises: In a world where language and narrative are deployed as instruments of confusion, dehumanisation and erasure, what responsibility falls upon scholars of story and literature to reclaim these whether covertly or overtly? How do you enter the breach to refute humanity’s hurtling towards the abyss? That is, if you wish to halt the fall? What grounds do we have for a new kind of narrative revolution and resistance, even if the shadow of nuclear annihilation hangs over each of our heads?
I ask this as an African, in an African place, hoping, perhaps naively, that the coming wars will confine themselves to the angry lands. But history tells me otherwise. They won’t. They never do. They will find us.
Incidentally, in this rather bleak season, when was the last time you heard an adequate rearticulation of our ongoing climate and ecological crises? Once an hourly refrain, and now, barely a whisper, unless it is justifying the buying up and sealing off of African landscapes in the name of “carbon trading” and “saving the planet.” The guise of environmental justice functioning as a Western-led Lebensraum: the appropriation of African worlds, and the dispossession of African communities of land, agency, and future potential. We are living in a time when our magnificent terrains are falling under foreign overlords who look and act exactly like the old ones. One of East African renewed spaces of resistance. But this is a topic for another day.
Across the Global Majority world, a visceral unease coils, disgust not born of surprise, but of recognition. No one doubts that what unfolds now is a rehearsal, and blueprint for near-future violences. We once thought Götterdämmerung was aural and apocalyptic poetry, not prophecy and policy. So much stands exposed now: the world’s present powers revealing themselves as unapologetic death cults, devoted to to the commodification of the essence of existence.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Dear friends,
Given all this, and I’m only just warming up , what can one possibly say to a world aching with such confusion, voicelessness and loneliness?
Had I waited for more history to unfold over a few days, I would have titled this keynote with the echo of Mr Kurtz’s dying words: “The horror.” Not as condemnation, but as aperture. A diagnostic, not a judgement. The genre of literary horror stages this very question:
What does it mean to be human when all our illusions fall away?
Horror as genre offers the clearest lens through which to confront our deepest fears, suppressed desires, and to finally face the monster, both within and without.
Many of you dwell at the centre of this uncanny unfolding, amidst the debris of faltering ideologies, frontline witnesses to the unravelling of the myths upon which modernity built its dream: Manifest Destiny. The Free World. Doctrine of Discovery. The Clash of Civilisations. The Civilising Mission. Survival of the Fittest.
What does this time of unraveling mean for your scholarship?
What does it demand of your language, your frameworks, your certainties?
What are we to do with the reality that so many of our inherited paradigms, patterns, and grammars no longer serve our existence?
True, archetypes of this emerging age are still in formation, but we continue to use old names for new conditions of being. Right. Left. Centre. What do these even mean now? Or have we, perhaps, chosen deafness, a muting of the dialect spoken by the approaching future that gestures to what we must unlearn and relinquish if we are to remake ourselves and the world?
I turn again to you, those who have long invested time and energy in the study of story, of words, of literature: In the face of society’s mythic decay, our mythic-scale quandary what will it take to disentangle ourselves from a mythos now dragging humanity into the abyss? Can the ruins of a viciously decaying age also become fertiliser for fresher epistemologies, ones that could revolutionise and rehumanise our species? And how might we re-interpret the fragments of history, so as to recover other ways of being, thinking, making, living, and dreaming that feed our human light?
“The old world is dying. The new one is slow to appear. And in this chiaroscuro, monsters are born / The old world is dying. The new one is slow to appear. And in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks.
This Gramscian quote is everywhere these days. Much is made of this ‘chiaroscuro’ of monsters. The interregnum, or, as a South African colleague aptly put it, interregna, plural. The conference theme: Space—interregnum. The Revenants are on the move, true, but don’t you see that this is also the age of midwives?
Hasn’t it always been the task of literary scholars to serve as midwives of worlds, attuned as they are to subtexts and undercurrents beneath language, to the symbolic residues of spaces not yet fully formed, to the unfinished grammar of becoming and world-making? Isn’t yours a vocation of tracing meaning in the ‘chiaroscuro’? Might your task in this present age be to not only interpret/translate the violent withering of the old world, but to also participate in shaping the syntax of what is being born, to help us listen for the emerging strains, and then guard the fragile coherence of a reality still in formation?
What say you?
First, toward this purpose, let’s remind ourselves again of that most elemental of questions most pertinent for our times:
What does it mean, for us to be human now?
What are the foundations of reality?
What does the humanity of the other mean in this time?
How do we respond to these in a way that bears witness to, carries the weight and wound of the age? And by the way, what do you do with those whose answer to the first part of the question is, to be human is to not be human?
Second, if literature is also a method of re-coding reality, then in this time of planetary unravelling, transitional ecologies, and temporal dislocations, the Mignolian “fissures in the colonial matrix of power”, how would literature offer itself more lucidly as a spaceand place of resistance and ritual re-existence, where another poetics of the human is conjured for a new age?
There are two words I find myself thinking about far more often these days.
The first is, ‘Exorcism’, because we are haunted.
The second, is ‘Autopsy’, because in the coldest of lights, and in the rawest of circumstances, to survive this roiling, we must see for ourselves, to know what pathologies to resist, what truths sustain us.
An exorcism. To purge the invisible entities, the voids that possess us. Derrida reminds us that the past is never truly dead. It returns, unbidden, to disrupt, to haunt, to demand reckoning. This is the true root of our present discontent: the unquiet dead of history pressing against the walls of all our fictions. So how, then, does humanity purge itself of these parasitic narratives rather than continue to live alongside them?
Autopsy: an epistemological act of cutting through illusion to expose the raw mechanics of reality. In a world of simulations (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation), where reality is mediated through layers of distortion, autopsy, I argue, becomes an act of radical truth-seeking, of subversion: a turning from below. Forensic spirituality: a doctrine of seeing even when the sight hurts.
Thinking about that Nietzschian imperative: “look into the abyss long enough, and the abyss looks back”. (F. Nietzche, Beyond Good and Evil, 146 )
Our deepest, truest stories are etched in the sites of our most uncomfortable wounds.
Once located, Literature, may offer itself as a ritual exorcism, an act of nomination, a way of speaking the unspeakable into the light so that what does not serve or honour life may be expelled. Thinking of Toni Morrison’s Beloved where we see that literature is a space where the dead return, demanding witness. The act of writing, or reading turns into a rite of deliverance, a confrontation with what has been wrongfully buried. Literature, then, offers itself as a ritual of space-making where the possessed (the traumatised, the colonised, the silenced, the afraid) dare speak their hauntings into dissolution.
Exorcism, Autopsy. These, I think, may offer a way to understand what was, is, and can be. A technology of re-worlding, of “finding the ceremony” (Sylvia Wynter) to reassemble what has been fragmented, and in a kintsugi-like way, re-making something both old, new and other.
And in this sense, literature is a counter-archive, a reassembly of the corpse of memory, whether to expunge or to learn it. Autopsy and exorcism are future-facing. When we peel back the layers of scripts we live out as life, or clear the forces that obscure or seeing, we do so to locate what is true to life, to existence. Literature, then delivers an activation. For now, it reconfigures. It reconstructs. It reshapes the being in the world, the being of the world. It refigures by taking responsibility for the world by walking deep into it, by way of its cracks and wounds.
I recognise the literatures of global Africa as portals into and across thresholds. As Wynter might suggest, “ceremonies of realities”, where the dissected and the exorcised can be ritually (by way of words) reintegrated into a new kind of wholeness. Literatures of Global Africa, and indeed most literatures born of rupture, tend to emerge from the interstices, the interregna where threshold energies unfold. They are the dowries from and of the in-between, the ‘chiaroscuro’ that has shaped contemporary African beingness. The literatures of global Africa draw their power from thresholds, where histories and contradictions coexist in states of becoming and unbecoming. What I am trying to say is that this season in the world is not unfamiliar in form to us. It is unique only in its intensity and brazenness. What might it mean, then, to read our literatures as inheritances that offer clues on how to navigate the fractures of our present time and then imagine the future?
What if these literatures are midwifery’s tools that draw out the unborn futures tangled in our present disaffection? To you, then, stewards of word, metaphor, cartographers of narrative terrains standing at the crossroads of a planetary dark night of the soul,are you going toremain as record-keepers of ruin, or can you imagine yourselves as co-conspirators in a world-building, future crafting process and project?
At a recent literary meeting in Nairobi, Kenyan philosopher-theologian Joe Kobuthi presented the 500-year hegemon as a creed wrapped in conquest.
“Kenya is a theological project.” He said.
And we gasped.
You see, to admit to the theological character of the imperial project is to also admit that we were not just conquered, we were unworlded, unwritten, displaced ritually, cosmically, geographically. A spell was cast. The infiltrator reinvented another cartography of us. They rewrote our beginnings, our meanings, our futures. We lost our story.
The European Age of Atrocity involved, among other violences, the appropriation of the Messiah. This may explain the current messianic rhetoric that continues to afflict global geopolitics. That epoch invented non-existent hierarchies of being, an obsession it has yet to relinquish, which, with astonishing immodesty, placed a constructed whiteness at the centre as god, priest, author, and arbiter of existence. The Occidental enterprise cloaked its avarice and appetites in the fig-leaf of a theodrama: the “discovery” of lands; a Genesis redux, where the ‘voids’ of other existences were made visible only through the Logos of the West. The Indigenous other was conquered in order to be baptised into a mythos in which their prior existence was rendered null, unless, of course, touched by Occidental “enlightenment.” A redemption story. When empire sails, then and now, it is always toward eschatology. Mythos as catechism. The Age of Atrocity was, and still is, a cosmogony.
Years ago, when I staggered away from the cult of social development, I scribbled in a notebook: “We need a counter-theology.”
Simply “telling the African story” was never going to be enough to uproot the depth and reach of the devouring ideology underpinning the so-called development agenda.
I saw then why, no matter how often we objected, the narrative-producers would persist in flattening and subbing the Sahara with deafness, impunity and foolish confidence. Why even the most mediocre of that mindset, once they landed in an African space, were swiftly infected by the irritating traits of virtue-signalling, pontification, and paternalism, at the heart of which flows a golden calf upon which the rest of humanity must bow if they wish to access a rigged economy.
This mythos presents itself as perpetually innocent, and it is always right. Its atrocities are framed as tragic necessities in the pursuit of eternal order. In its imagination, it arrives in Africa as a kind of visiting archangel. It imagines its infiltration as an epiphany, a gift. “We brought you civilisation,” it whines.
As Macron so often reminds Africa, our most appropriate response to their incursion is meant to be perpetual gratitude. This hollow mythos also claimed dominion over time, more particularly the future, positioning itself there as the inevitable destination, so that all other worlds are condemned to play eternal catch-up, even when, in truth, there is nothing to catch up to. They are “developed”: nirvana realised ahead of nirvana itself.
“The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history … They have never really launched themselves into the future,” Sarkozy said in the address at Dakar’s main university, leaving many students opened-mouthed. “The African peasant only knew the eternal renewal of time, marked by the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words,” he said. “In this realm of fancy … there is neither room for human endeavour nor the idea of progress.” Sarkozy, Nicolas. “Allocution prononcée à l’Université Cheikh‑Anta‑Diop de Dakar.” Université Cheikh‑Anta‑Diop (Dakar), 26 July 2007. Speech
On the back of Joe Kobuthi’s statement, a young Gen-Z zeitgeister asked what we needed to do as Kenya and as global Africa. First, I replied, we need to conjure a mythos of us. That we become fluent, again, in the grammar of the unseen, the language of new archetypes, patterns, spirit, symbol, metaphors and presence. To seek and recognise the raw materials of the future within and among us, before they unfold as someone else’s story, shaping the imagination of those others.
Under Kobuthi’s idea, we recognise why mythic figures like Lumumba, Nkrumah, Nasser, Sankara, Machel, and now Goïta, Tchiani, and Traoré, are cast as global heretics, marked for erasure by the full force of imperial arsenals. For all their human failings, they share a common power: the ability to project, with crystalline clarity, a counter-mythos of Africa, one that resonates across continents and draws other worlds into their story’s premise.
Given this perspective, I am convinced our Global Africa has to temporarily but urgently lay down its 500-year moral and psychological quest for restitutional justice, reparation and atonement from an entity structurally incapable of a moral reckoning, that believes itself to be God-adjacent.
Our rightful preoccupations with our hauntedness, the inheritance of griefs, our unrequited ghosts, and the intrinsic horror that seeps unwanted into our spaces and dreams, has not left us with sufficient room to conjure new worlds, has it?
In this time, dare we ask: in the midst of this spectral weight, what does turning toward the labour of imagining worlds demand?
Re-worlding.
The Africa edition.
To re-world Africa is not a sentimental exercise. It is an epistemic, temporal, and imaginative imperative. It begins with the will for global African narrative sovereignty. What does that mean? It involves a collective turning inward toward the infinite wells of our own time, voice, and vision. A consecration of our time, space, memory. Saidiya Hartman speaks of, “care as the antidote to violence”. That care, I posit, includes a radical act of storying. A re-inhabiting of myth, map and meaning on terms not determined by the fallout and afterlives of a decaying empire.
This re-worlding demands a vast, cosmic-scale imagining. What Wynter might call a rewriting of the “codes of symbolic life and death.” To re-world is to rename: to exorcise the enchantments cast by unserving grammars of reality.
Literary metaphysics; spell-making and spell-breaking.
Within the nine parts of a story premise lies a pivotal moment, borrowed from, among others, St. John of the Cross’s Dark night of the Soul, sometimes referred to as the Moment of Doom. Aristotelian anagnorisis: the turning point: the moment when truth breaks through illusion, when the self or world is revealed in its rawest form. Every mythos, every story, carries a point where the light goes out. Here, the protagonist, having crossed thresholds, survived ordeals, and pursued a need, reaches the brink of failure, undoing and unbeing, and does so in depth solitude. A kind of death. In this chasm, the protagonist is stripped bare. They face truths they have evaded: their most haunting fear, their hidden flaw, the unbearable cost of the desire they had refused to acknowkedge, the character of the most tremendous of enemies, the one within. They confront their ghosts, demons, failures, self-deceptions. It is a self-autopsy, a death of illusion, of self-image, of inherited or borrowed myth in a threshold. Yet in this interregnum, they must also make a choice, choose a path. This is the crucible, the molten and moral centre of the narrative. It is here that a new mythos may begin to unfold: one that arises from truth. The protagonist sees and accepts who they were, who they are, and who they might yet become, if they choose differently.
There are only two paths for the protagonist:
to enter into the truth by also making peace with death,
or to flee from it and try to shelter under the status quo.
That decision defines the arc of the self, the direction of the story and the shape the future storyverse will take. A turning point not only in plot, but in moral vision and story life. In this moment, the protagonist’s relationship to good and evil is clarified through the texture of decision. The tedious Heidegger would say, “ being-toward-death”, an awareness that propels authentic existence, and perhaps even metarmorphoses. To re-world Africa requires a cold and honest admission that humanity is, and we are undergoing a metaphorical planetary dark night of the soul.
What we choose to do with what we encounter, tthe truths we must then face, the hauntings we name give shape to the mythos we must create, for and within ourselves. If the world to come is to behold our beauty, our loveliness, our luminosity, our vision for humanity and for life itself, then that mythos must also be forged with with courage, clarity, love, and a delight that emerges from within.
In narrative terms, this is the moment when living out of fate ends, and living from agency begins. A threshold moment. And when the protagonist emerges, the setting too is transformed, charged with new energy, emotion and meaning. The landscape itself becomes a refreshed topography of beingness.
Here is another word: rewilderness. To reworld is to rewild. It is the act of liberating our imagination from tameness and domestication, the unbinding of thought, art, self, community, land, and story from the violence of enclosures. It is the affirmation of transtemporality, and the quiet conviction that even what was lost might yet be found.
To reworld Africa is to enter the crucible of this narrative moment of possibility, where Global Africa, recognising itself as a civilisational protagonist choosing metamorphosis to secure the elixir of a more wholesome framing of the world. Re-worlding Africa is entering into narrative authorship of a continent and the universe. To conjure and wield language; metaphor, image, sentimenr that can shelter and liberate our humanity.
Reworlding Africa is counter-theology. Wielded correctly, it can transmute a 500-year tragi-horror into a redemption story. It requires the awakening of story workers as midwives, also, of the human imagination. Re-worlding Africa would, I imagine, include an oath that future generations of global Africans will never again have to live trapped in the tentacles of a stranger’s malevolent mythos.
A parallel reference:
In 1976, following the death of Chairman Mao and the arrest of the Gang of Four, China entered the pits of disillusionment and grief. The revolutionary myth had collapsed, leaving the nation spiritually starved, economically broken, and ideologically orphaned. A founding mythos that had devoured itself, and the west mocked them. Into this moment stepped Deng Xiaoping. After a season of intense soul-searching, he sent emissaries across the globe with two urgent questions: What does each nation do well? And where has China fallen short? (Autopsy. Exorcism.) His creative realistic interventions included a radical reappropriation of story, myth, and history. With support given to Fifth Generation Filmmakers assigned a “Cathedral project” task of restoring soul, retrieving, re-enacting and reclaiming identity through history, story and remembrance depicted on screen. All too soon, a broken people began to live inside the projected mythos, and to recognise and affirm themselves as transcendent survivors.
Story as alchemy and a psychic revolution. When a people rewrite their myth, they rewrite their future. China’s narrative rehabilitation, its strategic mythopoeia, preceded its strategic re-entry into the world. Lesson. Humanity rises or falls on the back of the collective story they tell themselves about themselves. A country is first, the story it tells itself about how it came to be, and where it will go.
I read the documents of the Belt and Road Initiative as literature and found a futuristic epic rooted in timelessness, one that has already reshapes our sense of geography, identity, and time. The world is reconfiguring itself around a compelling mythos of existence and relating as humanity. And why tiptoe around the fact? We know that the current Occidental discombobulation stems from one undeniable truth: China dared to re-member itself.The China example confirms to us that a civilisation can claw back its narrative, reclaim its tempo, and rewrite its destiny. So I ask, us who have so much more: older maps of meaning, richer dreamscape: What of us? What about us?
I, for one, am so done with the roles that the mediocre occidental script assigned to us: the preyed upon, the host, the crowd scene, the hungry, the victim, the appellant pleading for justice in a rigged tribunal, the sacrificial goat fated to perish halfway through the plot. I reject the role of loyal, mute acolyte, the beggar at civilisation’s gate. I refute the trope of the magic negro, the cautionary tale, the afterthought. The pitiable “hewer of wood, drawer of water”. It is one thing when a malicious hegemon insists on casting us thus, but the more insidious wound, is that there are millions living out these roles as though they were real and destined.
This conference speaks of Ecologies of Transition. But I suggest that the summons facing Global Africa is not only one of transition, but also metamorphosis. Metamorphosis: the reconstitution of a new geometry of being. A process capable of matching the infinite needs and desires of an emerging age, offering an intrinsica epistemic reordering. ‘Autopsy’ and ‘exorcism’ as ecological acts.
Several years ago, friend and scholar, Professor Wandia Njoya, warned that the impulse of a collapsing hegemony would be to destroy the world rather than relinquish its chokehold on the world. At the time, I thought it was hyperbole. Turns out Wandia is also a prophetess. We have been hearing lately about the “Samson Option” Doctrine, or story, of final planetary detonation. It goes something lie this: If the west must fall, it will pull down the pillars of the entire earth. A Götterdämmerung mindset in its most deranged form. Is there a more pitiable, pathetic and grotesque mythos of being? What ancient wound, what malignant fable so enthralled a people that they would rather become gods of ruin than co-dwellers in human renewal?
For an answer, as the literary minded, we may look to the marrow of story. Probe beneath the surface, to interrogate the foundational energies that shape story and myth.
The first is Fear: primal jolt of existential horror.
The second, desire: from desiderare, “to long for,” from de sidus: “from the stars.” Yearning etched in our core for something cosmic that once was, or might yet be.
To study a protagonist in depth, is to trace the tectonic forces beneath the voice and plot, beneath the shape of the story itself.
We ask:
What wound is speaking?
What star is missing?
It is, I believe, far too late to approach the obdurate, dying, desolate hegemon with these questions, particularly as its main wound points to a festering fear of irrelevance. That without dominion, its illusory self will dissolves into nothing. A mindset that is convinced that if it cannot be central, then there should be no centre at all.
Story-world people, particularly from the Global Majority, still, in view of this, what can you offer to our humanity? A cadence, a cosmology, a lexicon born of the good, the true, the beautiful, the just, the desired, the joyful, all our infinities. Oh, how little, how very little we have allowed ourselves this: an encounter with our infinitudes, the timeless character of our eternal relationship with, and translation of the sun.
We cannot escape the battlefileds. It will look for, and find us, even where we hide with our good books and popcorn, praying that the malignant tide will wash over us peacefully. It will not.
What I am suggesting is that to reworld Africa is to cross, with no further f’s to give, into a metaphysical battlefield, drawing from our collective value lineages to understand what we most fear and desire. Reworlding Africa is asymmetrical narrative warfare. To work towards and intend to change the planet’s story, the book, the plot, the rules, and the game. To use this interregnum to respond with immense vision to existence’s urgent questions for humanity:
What is life?
Do you desire it? How do you choose life? What does it mean for you to exist? What are you willing to live for, even if it means walking through the valley of the shadow of death to obtain the elixir? Which voices of life accompany you now? (I remind us also of the treasury of transmission: the archive of our forebears, the echoes of response held in literature and art, in wisdom and ritual, the grand pantheon of all who have loved humanity and our Earth.)
So, inside this present fray, into the depths, can we still brave falling in love with life and humanity again? And if we succeed, wouldn’t that be the highest form of reparation and atonement? Imagine! A resurrection mythos. A resonant love story to us, for us, by us, and, yes, also for humanity.
We have a detailed audit of what is broken, shattered, and lost, but not enough, I think, not yet, of what good, beautiful, true, and just has been built, is being built, and can be built. The bend towards pluriversalism, multipolarity, and pluralisms already re-opens vast portals for a fresh, living, type of narrative infrastructure.
“Creative realism,” to echo Ronald Finke and others.
Literary alchemy.
To reworld Africa is to intentionally choose to re-mythify the human and the Earth, to awaken the deep desire to swallow, to transmute, the horrible deluge of fear. Reworlding Africa is transmission: the recalling into being of all that is gorgeously possible in existence, once more.
We, the people of the world….
What do you say?
I will stop here.
Welcome once again to Kenya. May this country, this city, this portal, be deeply good to you. May it meet you with grace, surprise, and a renewed sense of belonging.
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First published by Writing Africa Blog