We’re digging the future: Afro-future mining in Africa

Abstract

Mining in Africa continues to be a relevant and important endeavour in building up the African economy, however, it is also a site that encapsulates the history, (re-)organisation, and on-going consequences of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism and heteropatriarchy – a few of the key issues that continue to permeate Africa’s socio-political and economic struggles. While Afrofuturism provides pathways towards future-orientated, often technological, solutions for present-day concerns, little attention is given to the ways that Afrofuturistic representations can act as critical, cultural, and political frameworks, as well as aesthetic counterpoints, to Euro-dominated conceptions of mining within African contexts. This study, therefore, engages with literature on Afrofuturism in light of Afrofuturistic visual texts such the films Black Panther (Coogler 2018) and Neptune Frost (Uzeyman & Williams 2022), as well as the artwork of African contemporary artist, Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, such texts are used to explore Afrofuturistic representations of mining and the miner – past, present, and future, in Africa. In doing so, the study hopes to demonstrate the relevance and power of Afrofuturism in working through and beyond issues of the black miner’s exploitation, subjugation, and continued marginalisation; a positioning of the miner that aids and abets black living as an impossibility.

Additionally, this study seeks to establish that within African contexts that are increasingly technologised, there exists new ways to narrate the lives and identification of the black miner, new ways that are often free to emerge in Afrofuturistic representations. In critically analysing Afrofuturistic visual representations related to mining in Africa, this study further uncovers how Afrofuturism utilises the power of narrative through a strategic relation of images, that although contextualised in the future, are in constant dialogue with the past. Afrofuturism’s deliberate oscillation between the past and future in the images of African mining under analysis, make the past alive to the present contexts of the living. Consequently, this re-awakening of the past for the presently living allows for a more urgent and critical re-assessment, re-investigation, and a re-imagination of new and liberating possibilities for the future that actively centre, and therefore value, the marginalised voices of the black oppressed – the black miner.