The Afronaut and Retrofuturism in Africa

In a 1964 newspaper article addressing his fellow citizens, edward makuka nkoloso, founder of the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research, and Philosophy, declared, "I see the Zambia of the future as a space-age Zambia."¹ For nkoloso, sending an astronaut into space would affirm the nation's status as an independent state, equal or even superior to Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Although his do-it-yourself space program eventually disappeared without any governmental support, recent art projects that purport to document this and other space programs in Southern Africa have given the African astronaut, or afronaut, a renewed cultural relevance. Such projects nurture a desire for an African space age that is at once nostalgic and utopian, intertwining the optimism of decolonization and the Space Race, and anticipating a future free from the geopolitical or racial inequalities of the past or present. As such, they do not merely recall the past or propose a future but explore the anticipatory dimensions of redirecting, revising, and repurposing futures from the past.

Although the afronaut first emerged as a cultural trope in the African diaspora, these recent artworks relocate it within postcolonial histories of Southern Africa.² The artworks share elements of retrofuturism, a fascination with or desire for a retrofuture: that is, a future imagined in the past. Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel, for instance, reconstructs the fragmentary history of the Zambian space program in a photobook and exhibition titled The Afronauts (2012). Her warm and evocative photographs visualize the program not as it was, but as it might have been in an ideal past. The United States-based, Ghanaian filmmaker Frances Bodomo also addresses the Zambian effort in her short film Afronaut (2014). Although the film is set in the past, she revises the story to reflect contemporary ideas about race and identity. The Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda presents an account of another space mission in his photographic installation Icarus 13, The First Journey to the Sun (2007). This putative documentation of a space flight from Luanda to the sun claims to take place in 2006, but many of the visual elements that Henda uses to signify futurity, such as the soaring monument to Agostinho Neto in Luanda, reference specific moments in Angolan history. Retrofuturism in these artworks raises critical questions: What are the cultural politics of longing for a future imagined in the past? What is to be gained by appending "retro" to futurism in Africa?

Retrofuturism is a subset of a broader global art practice in which artists use archival materials to explore and reinterpret history. This so-called historiographic or archival turn has spurred a contentious debate in the art world since its emergence in the late 1990s. Dieter Roelstraete writes, "art's obsession with the past, however recently lived, effectively closes it off from other, possibly more pressing obligations, namely that of imagining the future, of imagining the world otherwise."³ His claim resonates with theories of modern art but presumes that an artist's interest in the past is antiquarian rather than dialectical. Other art historians characterize the practice more favorably. Mark Godfrey claims, for instance, "the artist is a historian who can open up new ways of thinking about the future"; and Hal Foster asserts that "archive art" can turn "belatedness into becomingness" and "'excavation sites' into 'construction sites.'"⁴ Inke Arns argues that artists can mine the past for unfulfilled possibilities that can be used to "extrapolate a possible future."⁵ However, located as they are in the final paragraph of their respective texts, these rhetorical gestures toward the anticipatory dimension of artistic engagements with the past remain underdeveloped. Consequently, retrofuturism can seem overly nostalgic, uncritical of the past and unconcerned with the future.

Discussions of retrofuturism in science fiction and cultural studies revolve around similar questions about its historical and political inclinations: Is its primary orientation toward the past or toward the future? Does it reactivate dormant utopian impulses and inspire new ways of envisioning the future, or does it indulge in what Rob Latham describes as the "dubious...