 Back again. If you have not forgotten, my name is Mosheud Baderi. I will be chairing this session, which is going to be the last panel for this conference. The panel is titled, How Can Africa Claim the 21st Century? I mean, I want to suggest a few things about how we came up with this title for this panel. But before I do that, I'm not speaking now as perhaps maybe one of the conveners of the Chair of the Center of African Studies. I mean, I personally, I think I've really, really enjoyed the discussions we've had since yesterday and today, especially the last panel. I mean, I do law here and a lot of the time people talk about law being boring. One of our flagship programs, I mean courses we teach in the law school here is what we call the legal systems of Asia and Africa. So we look at law from a broader perspective. We have another course here called Law and Society in Africa, which I teach on. Now our colleagues in the law school know me. When we were talking about language, you know, it intrigued me a lot because in teaching both my law courses and law and society in Africa, I use a lot of African Proverbs. I use it a lot. I mean, because I come from a very traditional background, I know a lot of Nigerian Proverbs. And it makes a lot of sense and it's very, very powerful when you use those Proverbs to explain things, particularly to African students. And this why perhaps what I thought didn't come out very clearly when we were talking about language was we're looking at language much more, language in the sense of literature, literal. You know, in law as a lawyer, I mean, language also need to be understood, language in context, language as context, not necessarily used in African language, but in African language, literally. But sometimes you can speak English, speak English in Africa, in the African context, in the African sense. And this is where sometimes Proverbs, I mean, are very essential in that regard. And I hope we have all also enjoyed it. Now, coming to the panel title, most of us who are in development studies, I mean, I use this a lot. People who have heard me speak about law and development, which I teach in the School of Law, this report, I use it a lot. Since we are talking about futures, at the beginning of this century, exactly April 2000, if we remember a lot of the time, you know, reports come out, we forget about them. There was a report on Africa issued by the World Bank. You can find it on the Internet. You know, I refer, I want people to go back and look at this a lot. And the title of the report was Can Africa Claim the 21st Century? You know, it's at the beginning of the century. Can Africa Claim the 21st Century? It was issued by the World Bank. You know, it raises a lot of questions. I mean, for me, it was a wake-up call in relation to, when I say, what title is this? In relation to, it tried, it's based much more on economics. I've been discussing with Alice in relation to big numbers and things like that. I mean, lawyers don't do numbers, but it was. So, it identified the fact that, yes, Africa can claim the 21st Century. But then it says it depends on the ability of Africa to overcome the development traps that kept it confined to a vicious cycle of underdevelopment, conflict, and untold human suffering for most of the 20th Century. Long English. In one sentence, in one African proverb, I tell this to my students, what it is saying is this, I mean, we need to learn from history, isn't it? Look at what has happened in the past so that we don't fall into the same traps. There's a Nigerian proverb that says that when a toddler, when a young person hits his leg, stumbles on something and falls, he will get up, look forward, and just go on. But when an adult, a wise adult, trips and falls, they will look back at what trips them before they move on. So that they can, I mean, it's a very powerful proverb. It says that if Africa is wise, if our leaders are wise, they must act as the wise adult. If you trip, you've made mistakes. You don't just get up and go on. You get up and look back, see what tripped you, so that when you pass through that same position again, you will not be tripped and you won't fall a second time. So it's quite essential, and perhaps this is what we'll be doing in this session, whereby we want to look at whether, how can, you know, having heard what has kept Africa relatively in this situation, how can we learn from history and also how can we correct the mistakes of the past. Now, the report I mentioned identified four strategies, which will be represented, passed maybe by the presentations. One, it says, well, for Africa to be able to do this, we need to improve governance and resolving conflicts, improving governance, resolving conflicts. Many conferences, when we talk about governance, we talk buzzwords, very big words, governance, development. Nobody talks about literature when we are talking about governance. Nobody talks about culture when we are talking about development. I mean, it's about the big, big buzzwords. Now we will look at that. Then investing in its people, Africa needs to invest in its people. We've been talking, when we talk about investment in people, a lot of the time, you know, we've been talking about language, the use of language in education and things. We don't, I mean, it's about understanding. If you want to really develop, many students, Africa, just pass through schools, the understanding because of language. I mean, all these are quite important. I was very intrigued by Khadija's point that, well, when policymakers are sitting down making big policies, involve people in culture, people in language, people in arts, involve them in the decision-making, it can really go a long way in contextualizing things. Then it also talks about, I mean, increasing competitiveness and diversifying economics and also reducing aid dependence and then partnerships. So we have tried to reflect this in the panel. The panel has changed a little bit. My co-chair convening, Andrew Thomas, who is a partner in Huntington and Williams, they do a lot of practical engagement in relation to development, infrastructure and energy, things, advising governments in Africa. So he will be bringing a practical, he will be doing a substantive rather than just sharing. So I hope we will be able to really enjoy this session, which is trying to look at how can Africa claim the 21st century. So the first person, perhaps maybe who I will be handing over to will be Alice. Alice will be looking at the sub-Saharan Africans growth paths, the relevance of the concept of cumulative causation, which is an economic thing, but she will try and break it down really easily for us to be able to appreciate. Alice. Thank you very much. I have to thank Angelica very much and the African Studies Center for inviting me. This is, as Professor Baderine mentioned, I will present the macro, can you put it, some macroeconomic facts regarding sub-Saharan Africa. And I am the boring economist. And these macro fact provide a particular picture in appearance, which is a picture of divergence. So it is a very depressing picture. And then we will see together how to interpret this graph. And we will see that in fact we should, this graph can be interpreted in many, many different ways. First, the issue of divergence. We will see that the series of graphs regarding sub-Saharan Africa as a whole are quite depressing and showing a divergence in terms of growth and income regarding sub-Saharan Africa. Against neoclassical economics, I will argue that a different type of theory, which is what I call the theory of cumulative causation, is much more interesting and relevant for understanding what we will see. And this body of theories relies on the series of concepts, which I find, I think, much more relevant, which are cumulative causation, past dependence, irreversibility, threshold effect, et cetera, et cetera. And what is important in this type of concept is the issue of time. Time for neoclassical economics doesn't exist. I mean, growth models, usually just say growth is a function of labor, capital, et cetera, et cetera. But the issue of multiple equilibria and time is something which is absolutely ignored. And a concept which is quite interesting, I think, is a concept of trap, trapping effect. And I quoted a sentence from Kiminori Matsuyama, what is a trap? If it exists, because you are not obliged to believe in traps, self-perpetuating condition whereby an economy caught in a vicious circle. So the interesting concept is a concept of vicious circle, virtuous of vicious circle suffers from persistent underdevelopment. And the interesting issue is that in this type of perspective, small events can induce a very large effect and also past dependence. That is, what happened before in the past can comment what we take in the future. So second interesting dimension of this type of theory, which are completely rejected except at source by mainstream economics, is that if we think causalities in terms of cumulative causation, immediately economics becomes a social science. And economics, as you know, is a very arrogant discipline considering that our qualitative things are absolutely not scientific. And if we think in terms of combination of cumulative causes, immediately we can integrate the fact that causes can be political, social, economic, mental, cognitive, and so on. And this is why this theory, which is defended by complexity economics today, is strongly rejected by mainstream economics. So first graph, and you will see how this graph, in fact, you don't have to believe in this graph. This is a graph which is terrifying. This is long-term growth rate of South Africa since 1820. You can say, well, this figure coming from your right, we will discuss this. But somebody called Angus Madison, who is dead, devoted his entire life to try to calculate growth rate since, by the way, 2 millennia. And this is a result. We can see that something quite worrying, that is, Africa, by the way, it is not South Africa, but the data don't exist, this entangling South Africa, since, let's say, the beginning of the 20th century seems to diverge. This is a technical work used by the economy. Western offshoots are Canada, like you said, and so on. If we do the same graph a bit more recently, so from the World Bank, World Development Indicators, we see exactly the same thing, which is apparently an absolutely depressing view that South Africa is in red, and we see cardiac encephalogram, flat, et cetera, something which is extremely strange and worrying. And what we observe is exactly the congruence between low-income countries and South Africa. And immediately, we can start to think and to say, this is a purely tetological reasoning, because in fact, if South Africa includes a majority of low-income countries, and if low-income countries with the World Bank classification mostly includes South African countries, except Nepal and IED, immediately we can see that the label immediately creates the fact. You see, and linguists, we know that much better than me. So second observation, we can have completely different interpretation of this, that is, who are the non-normal countries? Who are the outliers? You can perfectly say that the tortoise is a very normal type of trajectory. We have a majority of countries which are slowly growing, but they grow, or we can observe that two groups of two types of countries, United States, European Union, in fact, can be considered as outlier. And in this case, we completely reverse the interpretation. And we have to explain the exceptional growth of a particular country. So if we believe in the story of divergence, we have to, I mean, some people, including me, say that there is an issue. Some interesting studies show that a key factor for Southern Africa has been lack of social change, which has been mentioned yesterday by Chris Kramer, and of course, the main, main, main issue, which is dependence on primary commodities. And the first graph of the 19th century, Blackman and other researchers have shown that since the 19th century, what has been called the small colonial economy model by H. G. Hopkins, for instance, is typically, I mean, a main explanation of this profile of Southern Africa, commodity dependence. Why? Because commodities are fluctuating, price of commodity, and it is absolutely obvious to show that volatility per se has a negative impact on growth. And by the way, you, we can see that it is quite boring because Africa, Southern Africa, is a fuel exporting region. And if we add metals and ore, it's more than 50% of export in Southern Africa. The consequence are divergence. Other type of divergence, we can accumulate divergence a lot. So a profile of export, which is quite worrying as well. That is, over the last 50 years, we can see that the share of export of Southern Africa has declined, including South Africa. But again, you immediately see that we can exactly say that this is perhaps what we have to explain and not this, because by the way, Latin America is not doing so well. Another graph, which is depressing, which is the same decline showing that, by the way, it is not a problem of performance in export. That is, Southern African country have exported fuel, et cetera, et cetera. But what do we see? That is, commodity dependence. As soon as we have a shock, 2008, the good years of oil, the 2000s, Angola, Nigeria, Gabon, et cetera, so good years. And then the shock of the crisis, financial crisis, and then the crisis of today. So we can see how it is an issue to be commodity dependent. Then, now we start to discuss this graph. As I already mentioned, half full or half empty, so this is quite an important, the tortoise versus how do you say English, Achilles, this is not exactly the same interpretation. Second, I'm not insisting on that because it is obvious that is, you can immediately say, what is the value of these figures? And you're right. Because, of course, everybody knows who has worked in Africa and statistical department know that the figure can be highly criticized and they deserve to be. So I leave aside this observation. Then, something which is a bit more interesting, that is, level of income. I provide the GDP per capita, which is the level of income taking into account the demography, which is welfare of any individual in Africa. But gross rate are not at all the same. That is, in Ethiopia, for instance, we will see departing from, let's say, $200 and having later $400 per capita is an extraordinary performance. But the difference is only $200. So we have completely different rankings if we take the two indicators. Another mystery for me is we see something which is really reducing the pessimism. We can see that against the World Bank and many. That is, there is absolutely no relationship between the volatility of gross rate and income per capita. Even today I cannot explain this graph because normally you agree that gross rate should translate in income. China gross rate, higher income. Here we can see something very bizarre. That is, gross is quite low today for the continent. But we can see that per capita income are increasing. We will leave aside. And now I conclude on something which is, I think, the most important. That is, how you should be critical if you read The Guardian or whatever, New York Times or Wall Street or World Bank IMF and so on graphs. That is, how they are presented. And now we leave the divergent story and we enter a different story which is, first, aggregate data. And I'm sure that you are thinking this may be completely irrelevant. Only case today, and you will be very happy because anthropologists, geographers, et cetera, at SOAS, case today may be the only methodology which is relevant. And why? Not only because case today is the most important, taking into account history and so on. But here, if I take, for instance, let's say, non-oil countries. I wanted to take non-oil countries because oil countries have different profiles. We immediately see exactly the same sad story. And yesterday Chris Kramer has presented Ethiopia as a success story in a very convincing way. And we see that Ethiopia is faring extremely poorly. But you immediately see that if we don't include any more richer country, the inclusion of richer country, by definition, flattens completely the performance of one particular country. And he had to do exactly the same theory with Ethiopia alone. You agree? We see a completely different story, which is a story, by the way, quite optimistic. And this is the last slide. So we should, I conclude in saying that cumulative causation may remain relevant. And this story of high commodity prices combined. I insist combined because causes taken in isolation don't matter. It is only at a certain point in space and time that a particular combination of causality can produce a particular result. If you defend this point of view, you don't do any econometrics. Because econometrics, by definition, present causalities with coefficient, mathematics, et cetera, which are across time and space. But if you say that it is only a particular combination of event, historical, political, commodity dependence, institution, productivity, et cetera, you immediately say that ex honte, you cannot say anything about the future. This is extremely important. You can only observe, expose that particular outcome as taken place. And of course, econometrics, the World Bank, and so on, they cannot accept this type of point of view. And we can see a bad story that commodity price, of course, have influenced growth rate in Africa. And especially the recent period. We can see that growth rate in Africa, in red, very closely follow energy oil price, non-energy. And in fact, why? Because of financialization of commodity today. Exactly. I'll just one slide. Financialization since 20 years makes that commodities are now traded as financial asset. Which means that the discrepancy between oil prices and growth rate we found in the 60s is now over. And we see something which is bad news for Africa, which is really, in this concept I like, the issue of locking. African countries are really locked by precisely globalization, financialization of commodities, and so on. On which, of course, they don't have any control, because the prices of oil are not made in Angola, Nigeria, or elsewhere. And my last slide is, even if there are cumulative causation processes, again, cumulative causation does not mean determinism. And I think this is one of the key points. As I said before, we can observe exposed particular trajectory. But the fact that we observe like we can get snowball effect, that is trajectory which are heavily dependent on the past, for instance, doesn't mean at all determinism. Why? Because the countries which grew, Asia, China, etc., they did it because of public policies. It didn't come from out of blue. And the key founding father of development disease, after the Second World War, recognized and promoted the view that only public policy and precisely the state intervention could implement a big push and reorganize factor of production, labor, and so on, in a developmental way. I mean, public policies are key. And as you know, the IFI, the World Bank and the IMF, precisely at the first crisis in 1979-80 affecting South Africa because of commodity prices, only because commodity prices, what did they recommend in the famous adjustment program, the reduction of the state and precisely the heavy constraint on public policies. So, what I conclude here in saying that precisely public policies may have contributed to divergence across region. And we cannot ignore the fact that some poor public policies have been conducted in Africa. This is a debate. But exactly symmetrically, we can say that public policies typically big push or other type of policies, it is naturally a matter of debate, can also break this cumulative causation process. Thank you very much. That's quite, I mean, interesting. So much to be discussed later on that. I will now call on Alessio, who will look at the issue of security challenges in relation to the leg chart. Alessio. Thank you. And thank you to us for allowing us to be here today. And today I'm going to talk about some very issues that I think are very interesting in the relationship between Africa and its future. And not only the relationship between Africa and the global world, that is security and mobility. We, I'd like to begin talking about the picture that I put on the slide. This is an internally displaced person camp in the leg chart where there is a crisis that is consuming these people in the Department of Mar, this is the name of the locality. I want to draw attention to this place, to the encampment and to the IDPs issue, since there is a lot of evidence that in the future more and more population is going to inhabit on living more or less permanently in a camp like this. So let's begin with some theoretical issues. I want to draw the attention to security because this challenge, the objective has been clearly manipulated for political reasons. And this has happened clearly in the Sahelian states where I conducted fieldwork and my research for the PhD is taking place. That is Chad and Niger and Nigeria somehow. The manipulation of the security concept has come under political pressures from the international donor community and the European Union moreover and through other international organizations. The participation of many of these countries in the military programs and encounter terrorist programs has threatened and politically legitimated governments and leaders which have, let's say, bad records in terms of accountability and human rights. A parallel yet converging narrative about states' effective rule of law and exercise of sovereignty in the mostly desertic or semi-desertic areas of the Sahel underpins discourses regarding security and mobility which are the issues I'm talking about today. This narrative about the effective exercise of sovereignty in these areas which have been called in different manners and are still on the top of the interest of the major international organization and not only even the United States and the European Union. As brought to greater border controls and repressive exit visas which are measures which are implemented actually in several states. As for example, it is not part of the Sahel strip but Eritrea is the most striking example and other forms of intrusive border management strategies which are taking place actually today in countries like Niger and Chad. A progressive convergence between anti-terrorist strategies and migration management strategies is what has become somehow evident. This has produced a pathologized gray area in which most of the times jobless youth has fitted in and as the Emir of Cano yesterday was telling us in the future Africa will have, in Nigeria he was talking about Nigeria of course, Nigeria will have something like 80 million people aged between 20 and 50 years old and so I think this should matter. Depression from international community and international organizations such as the European Union and the Organization for International Migration has brought on to the adoption of a common African Union juridical frame with regard to terrorism. A regional protocol have been formed on the basis, no, regional protocol has formed the basis for lobes that have been adopted locally by states like Niger and Chad. The problems of internal lobes which have received the African Union juridical frame is that in countries like Chad, Niger and Cameroon is that is that of the definition of the concept of security and terrorism, that of the sanctions which are imposed to the guilty persons and the competence of the Kurds. Since in countries like Cameroon it's the military Kurds which are in charge of judging. But behind these problems lies a clear political will to live the concept of security in a relative vagueness so that at the juridical level and most of all at the political level this can be employed for tactical political reasons that is for the next election. This vagueness has allowed the Sahelian government like Chad and Niger and in a lesser way in Nigeria to find out comfortable ways to weaken political opposition and impose greater political control on their constituencies. The security narrative spokes of emotions and produce a moral divide between the perpetrators of evil acts and good citizens which do not dirt their hands with this stuff. But this binary distinction has further divided citizens and polarized discussion about the role of the army and of political leaders in African politics. The employment of the concept of security by states in the lecture at Bezin brutally translates in a first social control and this is most of all true for the case of Chad that is the one that I know better. The vagueness of the concept of security and terrorism has led to the progressive criminalization of mostly marginal social groups that were already marginal and the civil society and possibilities of civil engagement are therefore thwarted due to this behavior let's say. NGOs and civil society have already denounced the liberty action taking place in countries like Chad, Niger and Cameroon but still nothing has come over. Anti-terrorism and migration management strategies seem to be developed in the frame of a pervasive monetized patronage. Since many Sahelian states since many Sahelian states are characterized for being low and middle income countries, inherently incapable to produce or market agricultural or manufactured products at a scale in an international competitive manner, profits are seldom obtained through direct or undirect rents. We all know this since yesterday the emmer was talking about the case of Nigeria that is that mainly relies on the exports of crude oil. This mechanism has allowed these countries to be integrated in the emergent global patronage order. On the top of one clearly lies the United States and the African and European Union but on the internal level these profits have allowed the leaders in charge of securing their political future extending their grip on civil society and increasing control over formally independent institutions such as tribunals and curts and being able to adequately price the loyalty of its political elite and ensure their allegiance or cooperation. And since many Sahelian states benefit from natural resources generated profits, this mechanism of the rents has soon been extended to rents derived from military and military connected services. That is what is going on on border patrols on a community which is called the Jisang Sahel and in many other ways I can mention the operation flintlock taking place each year in a different Sahelian country which takes place with American or European instructors and so on. So coming to the conclusions, my question is since we are talking whether Africa can claim a future for the 21st century and which one, which future. I wonder if this dynamic which I described is underpinned by a long-term political strategy or is this dynamic another chapter in the history of the Washington consensus framed projects that since the 1980s have been taking place in places like Sahelian states and moreover where is this path leading and can Africa or Sahel in the specific claim the 21st century without attempting to renegotiate power relations with the West regarding terms like mobility and security which are themes I think that through which they can, they which can be used as a lever from them. And yes I conclude here and thank you. Thank you very much Alicia. I mean it's very very interesting you see I mean when you started I just want to make a comment here in relation to some of these dynamics you mentioned in relation to perhaps maybe whether Africa countries can really negotiate this dynamic the contention between what the state should do and the international community. I remember when I was the UN independent expert for the Sudan you know Sudan also was going through crisis you mentioned the IDPs. Sudan had so many IDP camps and you find out that one significant thing we found out was that people who were displaced were trapped in the IDP camps. A lot of the time they were not prepared to go back and the IDP camps were really very very bad but the international community the UNDP everyone thought that well the only way to solve this problem when the IDP comes. Sudan then decided to come up with a plan indicating that look these IDP camps were really creating problems rather than solving problems. They have problems but the IDP camps were making them much more complex. So they now indicate decided that they were not going to set up any new IDP camps. What they thought was that well anybody who was displaced they were trying to use African solutions to African problems. There's anybody who was displaced from a war-torn area. When they move out they are not going to IDP camps they were going to use the African cultural traditional I mean neighborhood system. The families they were moving to families in other cities live with other families rather than going into IDP camps. Initially the UNDP did not like it they said no you can't do that but eventually they insisted and it worked very well. So perhaps I mean there are ways by which I mean there are a lot of ways by which African countries can negotiate this dynamic as you mentioned. I will be discussing some of them during question time. So we now move on again to Jane. Jane will be looking at African Futurism. This relates to what I mean Miriam presented earlier. I mean and perhaps maybe Jane will be looking at it from a different perspective and taking the discussion on Jane. Well I wish I could just speak off the cuff. I always admire people who can do that but I have to have something in front of me because otherwise the words will fly away. So I'm going to read this short presentation. I became interested in what I'm calling African Futurism when I started reading recent novels by writers like the South African Lauren Bukus and the Nigerian American Nadia O'Cora for novels which would be categorized as speculative fiction and they led me to ask whether science fiction and speculative fiction were really something new in African literature or whether they had a history that I was unaware of. I discovered that for example in South Africa the science fiction society of South Africa had been in existence since 1969 while the editor of the US-based genre journal Paradoxa which devoted its 25th issue to African science fiction traces science fiction in Africa back to early 20th century novels by white South African writers and forwards through writers like Kojolang, Ben Okri, Soni Labutansi, Ngugiwa Siongo, Tuwaberi, Bukus and O'Cora for taking in Kertsia and Marachera along the way and Sylvester Onwardy, the son of Bucci Amaceta who's here at the conference, reminded me earlier of Bucci's novel The Rape of Shavi which is clearly speculative fiction and was published in the 80s so it seemed in other words that we'd been reading African speculative fiction all along without knowing it and what characterizes it according to Zimbabwean writer Ivor Hartman is that most speculative fiction be it fantasy, sci-fi or horror is firmly rooted in cultural mythologies through which he says African writers are already changing the face of literature and beyond the term sci-fi however has been a problematic one as many writers have found with publishers informing them that black people don't read sci-fi or dismissing elements of African spiritual belief systems as ghost stories or superstition this issue has been discussed under the rubric of Afrofuturism the mainly diasporic term from which I derive my own term African Futurism. Kodwo Eschel for example theorizes that while the practice of counter-memory as an ethical commitment to history the dead and the forgotten has traditionally relegated futurism to the sidelines of black creativity this has been progressively challenged by contemporary African artists for whom understanding and intervening in the production and distribution of this dimension constitutes a chronopolitical act so a lot of long words but what he's essentially saying is that the I think referring to the earlier generation of post colonial writing as being concerned with nation building and with reconstituting history and that this is giving way now to writing which is more concerned with imagining the future for Eschel, Afro diasporic subjects live the estrangement that science fiction writers envision black existence and science fiction are one and the same. We can therefore see speculative fiction as a chronopolitical act with its roots in African modes of storytelling that draw on myth orality and indigenous belief systems these lend themselves to the invention of personal mythologies the writing of history in the light of future realities and the use of extra realist or magical phenomena as part of the everyday. Since these elements characterize many novels not thought of as speculative this suggests that futurism has been a strain in African writing from its inception so two points emerge the 21st century has seen a turn from mythic revisioning to speculative fiction as a distinct and recognizable genre notably by women writers such as Nadia Kaurafor and Lauren Bukus in whose work gender and femininity is a determinant in the projection of imagined futures but more widely we can see how speculative narrative strategies in a range of texts are brought to bear on specific historical situations on the African continent for example genocide civil war cross-continental migration urban dereliction xenophobia violence the occult and the potential futures to which they point. We can conclude that such narratives rather than being relegated to the category of fantasy deserve attention as key indicators of futuristic thinking. The Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Becolot certainly thinks and he invented the term applied fiction to convey what he attempts to do in his film Les Seignants in English the bloodettes which was hailed in 2005 when it came out as one of the first science fiction films to come out of Africa he said if technology has been a medium of our utopias won't it be the role of the filmmaker to invent with fiction the reality that we will live in tomorrow. Applied fiction will be that new science we need to master so that machines don't take over our existence applied fiction as a space for tomorrow's activism and citizenship. By this Becolot implies that the futurist futureist text itself does the work of interpreting the world in order to change it through invention and forward projection One of the ways it does this is by unsettling generic conventions. In the film old-fashioned intertitles periodically appear that highlight the difficulty of staying within conventional boundaries. These intertitles ask how can you make an anticipation film in a country that has no future? How can you make a horror film in a place where death is a party? How can you make an action film in a country where acting is subversive? How can you film a love story in a society where love is impossible? How can you make a crime film in a country where investigation is forbidden? How can you watch a film like this and do nothing after? The generic instability of the film a stylized sci-fi action horror hybrid is therefore a response to and a comment on the systemic political and economic dysfunctionality of a particular country at a particular time. But it also acknowledges a crisis of representation in the face of extremes that defy a realist approach. For Becolot critiquing the present must give way to inventing the future. He says each time one speaks of Africa it's in the context of the past or the present never the future. But that future will arrive above all for the young and what we'll do with it then will be what we'll have thought of today. This generic instability can be seen in numerous texts we don't think of as sci-fi often characterized by the refusal of the dead to remain within bounds and at a distance from the living. Examples are Veronique Tadjo's account of her visit to Rwanda after the genocide in Imana where the dead persist in tormenting the living. As well as Sonny Labu Tansi's life and a half in which a grotesque dictator's desire for absolute power is constantly frustrated and undermined by the refusal of those he kills to die. A speculative technique in a number of novels is a simultaneous defamiliarization and invocation of an actual place. For Tansi it's the Congo of the Mobutu era. In Ngugi's Devil on the Cross and Wizard of the Crow it's Moise Kenya. In Patrice in Ganang's Dog Days and Jean-Pierre Becolot's film Les Seignants it's Paul Bia's Cameroon. In Dambuzo Marachero's Black Sunlight it's Mugabe Zimbabwe and so on. Through such mythical devices Tadjo, Tansi and the others satirize and destabilize patriarchal power. Often destructive feminine archetypes like Sonny Labu Tansi's Chaidana and the bloodettes in Becolot's film who embody desirable and deadly femininity magically intervene in social reality by seducing and murdering corrupt and powerful men. As Matthew Omelski puts it in Becolot's work women are the radical Cyborgian subjects who undermine organic notions of femininity the female body and masculinist power structures. In Kahiu Wanuri's 2009 film Pumzi the future is ruled by a matriarchate that appears to the heroine Asha in the form of a hologram and dictates her every move. In this film the hybridity and ambivalence of many futurist texts is seen in the extreme use of technology for authoritarian control including the surveillance of dreams counter poised by Asha's subversive dream of a tree growing in the desert where nothing has grown since the great water wars that have devastated the earth. Escaping from the controlled world of the interior Asha uses precious drops of liquid from her own body to nurture a magical sea that has somehow survived. Here rationality and science are contested by dreams and this recourse to a spiritual dimension points in turn to alternative realities so I'm wrapping up now my shoot. These then are examples of chronopolitical interventions by which writers and filmmakers draw on indigenous modes of spiritual apprehension to create a fantasy of an alternative future. Tadjo does this in her representation of trauma resulting from the genocide in Rwanda the grotesqueries of dictators and novels by Tanzi and Gugi and Nganan are magnified to cartoon-like effect projecting a world in which obscene power has become embodied in immortal. These novels then can be seen as urtex of speculative rewriting invoking orality and myth to de-familiarize and challenge the assimilation of violence into the everyday rewriting the script of vengeance based on false modes of memorialization. Tadjo also points the way to a transformation of consciousness and subjecthood. If the dead in Imana or dogs and in Ghanang's dog days or aliens in Neil Blomkamp's film district nine are subjects who have rights and express their desires the concept of the human is radically altered. In exploring this alteration speculative fiction novels and films challenge us to reassess the boundaries of our own subjectivity. Thank you. Thank you so much Jane. I mean this subject of futurism really intrigues me I smell out when I was listening to Miriam but one thing is I mean we keep on I mean this challenges the argument that perhaps maybe this concept is not known in traditional Africa but we have been referring I mean and I do understand too a lot of English literature to prove this. I mean some of us who are from Nigeria here who are Yoruba's I mean I remember in our primary school days there was a book written very long ago in Yoruba it is called Ubudjua Denin Ubudjumari and the meaning of that is you know the extraordinary hunter in the extraordinary forest you know I mean it's I mean if you look at it it's it's it was it's so intriguing this extraordinary hunter's hand turning to different weapons I mean which could really and in those days and it's really registered in the mind of youths you know when but perhaps maybe once understanding then was very different from what one is picking up now you find out that even primary school students then when find themselves in difficult situations they refer to themselves as the extraordinary hunter you know in the extraordinary forest you know that their hands can turn into something in order to so I believe even in local languages even in local languages you can find material literature written not in English but written in local languages that perhaps someone could argue relates to the concept of science fiction also in that regard we'll have more to discuss on that later now coming to language again I want to call on my colleague Shage Gefura who preceded me actually at one time as the chair of center of African studies who will be looking at the connection between language linguistics and governance Shage thank you very much I should that was a very apt start for my presentation because I'm going to talk about the importance of African languages and it's remarkable how I'm not sure about how old you are but many years ago you were told about this story which stuck in your mind in Yoruba and it has continued in your life to this day and I think this is one of the point I'm going to highlight in my talk about the importance of African languages in reclaiming the 21st century so it is a very simple thesis that knowledge begins where one is located and that language is an important indispensable tool for accessing knowledge language is also human right because it is also the chief medium of instruction in all types of formal and informal education and subsequent access to legal justice and knowledge it is also the chief medium for the preservation practice and cultivation of culture in my view African languages have been undermined and their natural growth is stifled and this disruption of the development stretches back to the slave trade that oversaw the massive transfer of African peoples and knowledge and the erasure of the languages through fossil means and structures of domination colonialism generated further contexts for the disempowerment of Africans Latin Americans and some Asians upon whom the languages of conquering European languages were imposed in all areas of higher learning and literary expression ex colonial languages continue to dominate all prestigious domains such as education science big business and laws parliament good jobs etc they are therefore the languages of power whose deployment often serves to establish formality and social distance between the interlocutors to me this is one of the greatest challenges for Africa and how language has created new divisions based on language and social economics now the asymmetric relationship existing between African and next colonial languages is reflected by the roles and the functions taken up by individuals when selecting to use either language in specific contexts in the current language situation African languages lack prestige in the face of dominant European languages which are the vehicles of upward social mobility the exclusive use of English or French or Portuguese in all but basic education in practically all African countries create a negative context for African languages which further undermines an already poor culture for example of reading and writing in them the chief result of all this is acculturation at very many levels social political organization dietary habits dress and of course language now all this in my view or rather further more with exceptions with few exceptions education systems have no place for African languages in tertiary and higher education all this contributes in my view to what I call a psychic disbelief in the potentiality and abilities of African languages that we distrust our languages in their capacity to articulate higher knowledge science and technology as one responded declared to me well why bother teaching my children kikuyu if they are not computers that speak in kikuyu or that are programmed in kikuyu furthermore African languages are generally taught for the purposes of basic literacy for native speakers and equally basic communication for non-natives now these apply is not only in adult literary classes but also in some universities also of Africa where languages African languages are taught and the underlying assumption in all these cases that the African languages will only serve basic purposes such as letter writing basic accounting and for entry in the field research about other topics in the case of some western scholars ultimately it is expected that all parties will reverts to a european or other foreign language for any higher purposes as a such as writing dissertations or books about Africa now in another extreme situation such expectations are actually further used to justify aspects of the simplification of aspects of African languages such as for example the absence of tone marking in many of the languages which have tones but are not actually marked because well that can be dispensed with it's not too important orthography is that impede or meet or fail to be embraced by speakers all of these add to what I refer to as a disbelief in the ability of our African languages now because I was asked to talk about linguistics language linguistics and governance let me say briefly something about linguistics so the scientific study of language otherwise known as linguistics is important to development and governance in Africa I believe a mere fraction of Africa's 2000 plus languages are described in any meaningful way today in form of published or accepted grammars dictionaries or even orthographies a number of languages are endangered as well requiring trained field workers to record documents and preserve them descriptive studies provide policy makers with the data required to make useful decisions related to language planning or educational policy and I will cite a few examples of what I think are relevant examples of linguistic studies that have been applied to policy to various degrees of success one of them being actually a 1970s study on language in society in East Africa by former soil lecturer Wilfred Whiteley where which provided a massive well a very widespread study of the uses of language socially in not just in East Africa including Ethiopia Tanzania Kenya and Uganda now some of the results of these work were very useful although not only to the Kenya government but also to bodies such as the UNESCO who had in the first place commissioned this this study there is also the rigorous but little known work of Brandt and Moliq in 1980 who also went around Kenya and other parts of East Africa documenting the usage of languages numbers of speakers who speaks languages and so who speaks what languages where and when very useful data which I will come back to that a bit later the Aqalan the the an organization that is dedicated to African the study of African languages and based in South Africa as well as various other academic bodies continue to work on research and advocacy linguists were very much involved in the Kenya Constitution review which now gives constitutional protection to Swahili as a national and official language and which also guarantees the place of all indigenous and minority languages now we can go back to earlier times in the 19th century where linguists were wittingly or unwittingly instrumental in the scramble for Africa the classification of languages for example was used as a basis for many colonial policies not least apartheid Wilhelm Bleak for example is best known for coining the term Bantu in about 1857 having noted the indisputable unity of a number a vast number of languages covering East and Southern Africa Bleak had in fact attempted to prove a North African origin of the hot and taut what we call the Khoisan language today in his PhD dissertation of course he proved himself wrong in about 1855 sorry before he published his work in the language of Mosambik in 1856 and in the following year he was appointed interpreter to the British governor of Cape Colony now Bleak introduced the term Bantu to cover this macro family of African languages which is a very correct term and very linguistically speaking it is a very apt coinage now one little note that one comes across in another publication by one of his students and followers Doki in 1961 he had prepared a little manuscript in which he published which was published nearly a century later under the title Zulu legends in 1952 now he had written it in 1857 in which he wrote and I quote the word Abantu which means men or people in in his intelligence means par excellence individuals of the kafiris particularly in opposition to the noun abelungu which means white men now it appears therefore to be the best general term for the family of languages that's fine now this bonus script was published just four years after the formal establishment of apartheid a race-based political system implemented by the minority white South African rulers and in my interpretation such a statement by an eminent linguist could have served the apartheid regime very very well in justifying a separation of races based on an opposition between abantu and the abelungu indeed the apartheid state went farther in racializing the term bantu whose use remains contentious long after the end of apartheid another good example is during even of the 20th century is the Phelps talks commission which was set in 1920 to investigate the educational needs of African people again this commission went not just to East Africa they started actually out in West Africa in Nigeria they went to Central Africa Southern Africa and in 1926 they compiled their report about the East African situation on language this report commissioned by this philanthropic American was very instrumental in determining the language policy of Kenya and the other nations which were under the British colonial rule so I'm just giving these examples to highlight what how important linguistic research is and I cannot fail also of course to mention that there are many other projects going on some of the the work happening here at right here at source the work of Riki for example in understanding multilingualism the study of further study of bantu parameters for example by Lutz Martin all these works hopefully they will also contribute to some kind of policy making decisions in the future now so as I said the the systematic understanding of languages is really really important now in my understanding the one of the key challenge in addition to breaking this psychic disbelief in our own languages is a challenge of multilingualism and emerging languages in Africa and this is directly linked to urbanism now one fact that has not been mentioned much in this conference is the speed and rate at which Africa is urbanizing there are certain state countries now where up to 40 or 50 percent of the population has become urbanized and this is generating again new contexts especially for language and this producing new languages which we must content with in the very near future so and one example is a shank which has been mentioned before and on which I have been researching on for quite a few years now this this particular code marks an addition to a new mark the addition of a new variety of Swahili to the Kenyan repertoire of languages it is adding to the complexity of the social stratification that exists in Kenya today now what is of interest here to everybody economists not just linguists is this link between language and social economic class and I cannot emphasize that enough what are the implications of all this that we have to deal with such new new emergencies in an effective way in the in the in the coming century so what to be done in the in the 20th century well reality is defined as something that we can that cannot be wished away multilingualism is a reality in Africa and it cannot be wished away nor can it be eradicated by the stroke of a pen outlawing many languages and institutionalizing one as the official language these emerging and mixed languages full of global influences and transnational influences of global black culture and other cultures must be taken into account and given the democratic space that they merit the same with creole languages and others that have developed out of different parts of Africa and therefore the challenge of the 20th century in my view is to turn the vision that desires construct of all these desires that we have about the prosperity of Africa about the development of Africa reconstructed in our languages I think if we don't do that we will have accomplished part in part what we intend we want to do and of course translation comes in quite importantly here I noticed that in Kenya today many many Kenyans and in Tanzania of course they enjoy lots of Nigerian movies yeah lots very and many of those movies are not in English they are in Hausa or Yoruba these are some of the most popular ones well through translation subtitling you know dubbing etc Kenyans are enjoying the reality of Nigeria with very little encompasses not only can they relate to what they see on the film but they can also fill in the gaps that they have in language and therefore I don't think multiplicity of languages is necessarily a barrier to enjoying our cultures and also taking them in other parts of the continent there's too much more to talk about it's about language remember so I will stop there and thank you very much for listening to me thank you thank you very much I mean Che Gue I cannot also help by chipping in some illustrations again here you know when Che Gue was talking about the issue of I mean disbelief in African languages I mean I can talk about the Nigerian community because that's where I'm from in Nigeria actually I mean we do take pride if you go if you really visit the Nigerian family and they have children who even in primary school nursery school if you speak to the children in the native language the parents will be annoyed they don't spoil their English they are annoyed they don't want to don't talk to them in local now in the UK here there are many Nigerian families I mean with children who do not understand the local language at all so losing both ways now coming to illustration I used to use this illustration for my law students in the law courts in Nigeria when we used to practice English is the official language and a lot we used to make a joke about certain things that happens in court sometimes in court you find out that the judge is a local he's a Yoruba both the litigants are also Yoruba do you understand one another the judge understands what they are saying but the official language of the court is English he has to record everything in English but the litigants don't speak English even though the judge understands them there has to be an interpreter so when the lawyers speak in English so the lawyers will have to speak in English and the interpreter will then when the evidence is being given the translator will interpret sometimes the translator does a poor job the judge knows when the translator interpreted do you think you understood what he said I mean so the judge will ask asking the interpreter are you sure you understood what he said that's because he cannot write he understood the judge he has but he cannot write because the litigant is using a language which is not a language of the court so sometimes when we talk about language and governance and development sometimes he can stop I mean process because if the interpreter is not good enough the judge will have to rise find you tell you find a better interpreter because he knows that even though here why does he not just go on straight because he understands the language but because English is the language of the courts and it's about I mean lack confidence in the local languages so perhaps I mean this also illustrates one of the problems now finally I want to call on Andrew before I do that I mean everything we've been saying perhaps also need to be illustrated by practice Andrew is a partner in Hutton and Williams legal practice in the city and we they are partners with us in the law school we do law and development in Africa we have a course here called law and development in Africa so we partner with I mean Huntington and Williams in relation to where they are actually our partners in this conference Andrew has handled so many major international financing and energy infrastructure projects advising governments in different parts of Africa so many of the things we are theorizing about so Andrew will pass maybe talk about how perhaps I mean effort is being made actually also in practice to improve development on the ground through collaboration with local partners so Andrew good afternoon everyone and congratulations on making it to the last talk of this conference and I don't see a single nodding head in the audience so that's encouraging machine is right what what I want to talk about is development in Africa and the way in which the language of law affects and assists in that process I was slightly alarmed when Alice Nicole said that economists are arrogant and machine said that the law can be boring and I thought well that's that sums up maybe the start of my my speech one of the things I want to come on to is there is a lot of talk in Africa at the moment about public private partnerships as a solution to a lot of the infrastructure problems that are in Africa at the moment and this talk is designed to give a slightly critical view of that process I use this slide a lot to show there was talk yesterday that rather than a dark continent people wanted a bright continent I think what this slide demonstrates is that what we also need is a light continent we can talk a lot about literature and art but without light bulbs and lighting and power and heat to some extent they become secondary in people's lives Africa has an extraordinary infrastructure deficit I mean a couple of these figures are quite interesting in that sub-Saharan so just sub-Saharan African countries with approximately 800 million people generate the same amount of power as Spain currently does in the transportation sector the road density in Africa is only one third of Africans are within two kilometers and all season road water storage infrastructure is incredibly inefficient and poor at the moment and health care facilities are negligible we were recently looking at the health care facility in Nigeria and talking about bringing in new forms of electromagnetic scanners to be told that whilst there were four in West Africa not one of them was operational at the time of speaking the World Bank currently estimates that African nations sub-Saharan Africa will need approximately 35 billion US dollars a year to bridge this infrastructure gap the grand solution that is talked about almost everywhere on the continent is PPPs public private partnerships the idea of PPPs is to spread the risk between government and the local parties they are designed to cover most of the areas of shortfall in infrastructure in Africa at the moment I won't go through this slide today but that basically is the sort of slide that we sometimes put up to scare people into why these things aren't as simple as they might seem this is perhaps a better slide in encompassing exactly what these PPPs are meant to do they're meant to provide transportation social infrastructure and public utilities all of which are fundamental shortfalls in African economies as we speak why one thing that has been made incredibly clear is that there is a simple in its trickable link between development and productivity we saw in Alice Nicole's slides how Africa is just lagging seriously behind the rest of the world in terms of development and one of the core features of this has to be the failure to implement efficient infrastructure there was a figure that came out recently using sort of first world country statistics that Germany is now 20 percent more efficient than the UK you can look at various reasons for that but one of the major reasons is that the UK has failed to invest in its underlying transportation infrastructure in the way it should have done it is extraordinary that you are looking at countries like the UK and saying they have insufficient infrastructure then turning to African countries and saying well if the system in the UK isn't producing the productivity that we need what chance do the African countries have at present with their transportation systems without creating this infrastructure you don't create jobs without jobs you don't create productivity and without productivity you don't create jobs and you end up in a vicious cycle whereby you create poverty we all heard the tales and the statistics of people earning less than a dollar a day in West Africa yesterday one of the things that's interesting when you talk about infrastructure is the connectivity of the various shortfalls we put up not possibly the best road that I could find but the idea of this was to make the point that it's all very well building roads but equally if you don't have a safe and decent bus system at the moment if you go to Lagos or any of the mega cities in Africa you have unregulated poorly put together buses let alone having roads on which they can operate this then I want to come on to the more controversial part of the talk which is about what is wrong with PPP and what strikes me above anything else is that these are first world constructs and systems that are being imposed upon African countries and I think there is a huge danger in a almost post-colonial arrogance in the way that structures that may well work for first world countries are being imposed upon third world emerging market countries that are perceived to be ready for these structures I would argue very strongly that they're not yet ready for that this is very difficult to see is a request for proposals which was put up by the Lagos state government for a new hospital in Lagos what this effectively says is we want a new hospital you will do it using a public private partnership and that's great it doesn't say how how much when why what cost how much profit when it'll be completed how long it will last for it's simply in effect is a big page contract that says we just want someone else to solve our infrastructure problems because we have been told that PPP is the answer to everything we then come on to capital structures of projects and to talk very quickly about this every single one of you will know somebody who is developing a power station a road a business a project something in an African country all of these require two effective bits to their capital structure i.e. how you're actually going to pay for them one of which is the debt and one of which is the equity almost every single project that I see that comes across my desk has no equity and people come to you and say well we want to build this power project I think at the last count the Ghanaian request for proposals for power projects had 64 current proposed projects way too many very few of them have the equity that are required most of them are not viable these things are not being addressed properly this is just using a large hydro project that we were involved with which shows the size of the amount of equity that you need this one needed 174 million it was an early and very large project and therefore it had a very good international sponsor it also got a lot of the IFIs behind it who were prepared to assist one of the potential solutions for this is the sovereign wealth funds Africa has finally started to invest in its own sovereign wealth funds Nigeria about two or three years ago started its own NSIA and what I am very very hopeful for is that these entities will start to plug some of this equity gap timeframes these projects take a very long time as somebody pointed out to me most African politicians will not commission projects if they don't think they're going to get to cut the ribbon in front of their electorate most of these infrastructure projects you're talking about years if not tens of years in their completion exchange rate risk very quickly most of these projects will ultimately be funded in US dollars we've seen the effect of oil price hits on exchange rates in African countries the Naira is a good example despite attempts to hold it to a pegged level bonds are often now suggested as a means of financing capital expenditure but I think in brief what I wanted to conclude with is that where I think things are going astray in Africa at the moment is that the middle ground for infrastructure is being highly populated and the micro projects and the massive projects are being overlooked I think unfortunately whether we like it or not it will have to be large state projects which are the way forward or very small mini bus type projects at the other end so it's not an entirely happy way to conclude this talk but I think that it is designed to say that we have a huge need to fix infrastructure problems in Africa at the moment and I think to some degree to paraphrase what his Royal Highness the Amir of Karnu was saying yesterday is it something that needs to be done within each African country it is not clear to me that external help is any more helpful than aid has been over the last 30 40 years and that an element of prioritization needs to be done because at the end of the day you can't do everything immediately you have to pick so thank you very much I indicated in the report of I mean the World Bank on whether Africa can claim the 21st century they argued the fact that well partnerships are essential we have been talking about the issue of perhaps I mean Africa trying to solve its own problems the AU now is pushing a lot the concept of African solutions for Africa African problems now we've heard and I mean the point usually is usually the report also indicates that there should be less dependence on aid you know from from the developed world now less dependence on aid partnerships then Africa solving its own own problems now the truth of the matter is sometimes when we talk about Africa solving its own problems a very nice article by I mean bones to men's are from Ghana arguing that well it's very good to say this African solving its own problems in order to take out take us out of the trap which we believe that the international community perhaps maybe or the developed world puts us in bones to them asks Africa solving its own problem with African solutions where is the research you know that's just trying to say Africa solving and African solutions for African problems where is the research you know and the argument he is raising is well it's good to say these things and it's good to talk about the fact that well the numbers don't add up economically I mean the economic numbers the data big data doesn't add up I mean Africans have to look at things by themselves check your own language I mean similarly issue of security international community plotting against Africa I mean similar to Andrew's closing point the fact that Africans have to look within it how I mean how do we identify this where is the African solution we've just been talking about where is it what is it so perhaps maybe can we can we address this what is it what is the African solution where is it how do we find it I mean I think one of the problems with the African solution is that as long as there is an alternative we are always all of us human nature is that if there is an easy way of proceeding an easy route you take it and at the moment a lot of that is to look to the West and to look at developmental institutions to try and find quick fixes easy fixes opportunities to use Western constructs to to work on African projects and I think one of the easiest fixes unfortunately is you just have to stop relying on those constructs and do it yourself necessity breeds invention I agree about the research but as long as there remains this ability to rely on somebody else I'm not sure how quickly anybody will wish to do to put in the hard work okay yeah just to add to that yeah I think one of the reasons that many Africans sometimes we look to the West is because a some of those problems we are trying to resolve were planted by the West B the structures that we've inherited you know including you know physical infrastructure they actually in fact the blueprints are actually held in the West and so there's no way actually you're going to resolve the the drainage system of a city like Lisbon or or maybe Nairobi even if you don't know where the the actual blueprint for those things are and some of them are held in London or some other place yeah so I think there is a bit of necessity in looking to the West for some of these solutions but I agree that we have to enter a new paradigm now the most radical solution would be to dismantle all that and start afresh then therefore we would have African solutions for African problems that's interesting I mean Alice I mean when we were talking about I mean I know there is this book by you know Morton Gevin I mean about I mean poor numbers that's you know economy really he's an economist himself but he really critiques the fact that all these numbers that are made up by the world bank sometimes they make those numbers up if you ask him to research to find out what are the sources of these numbers they sometimes they make them up now if that is the case I mean what will be the alternative do Africans have to really provide their own data in relation to this or I mean economically how do we solve this yes thank you I just wanted to address the first question before Morton of course issue just to confirm what you what you were saying I think that we should absolutely insist on the fact that Ed is I mean it's not politically correct but Ed is something very detrimental you know because it creates per se an asymmetric relationship and this asymmetry is really per se as long as you need something else or somebody else or whatever because if we are in a symmetric relationship by definition this is the donor which is not at all a donor but most usually a lender as you really highlighted I mean it comes with conditions I mean if you borrow for your apartment or whatever there are conditions and condition what does they do they restrict your policy space so just to address the first question it is extremely serious to find and of course you have a ideological discourse in development economics which is coming with Ed saying right from the beginning right from the second world war with the founding father of development economics the famous two-gap deficit model was just for justifying with apparently scientific issues that you have a gap in saving and whatever okay Ed will be beneficial and we have really to rethink this second your question on numbers I left aside Morton-Gervain issues because it's a issue per se I just wanted to highlight the issue of divergence and I think that it's something a bit different from the quality of numbers the quality of number is a disaster we can make a political economy of statistics in Africa some people in France work with Morton-Gervain and another group at Sciences Po on the political economy of numbers our numbers are built which is really could be a next workshop I think because it's really something absolutely crucial and which would be appropriated by precisely African and I completely agree my point was just to say that even if number completely cooked fake whatever there is a trend and this trend is as you as you mentioned not it's a bit worrying and we should but it is absolutely clear that African statistician and it is my last point should absolutely take extremely seriously the issue of construction of number and I insist it is the same issue as Ed because statistical department in Africa how are they financed by aid by external consultant paid exactly 10 times at least as a local statistician as you know and the conditionality is I mean they want to make a survey in whatever country they have to beg for any oil ticket or four-wheel drive car or whatever everything is financed by Ed what is the autonomy of African statistician in this regard for census Nigeria is a very good example that's right of that thank you very much I'm Alicia your issue of security how do we do it better and an African solution well I think we should not talk about African solutions because I think it's a way to to to to live the continent alone I think that unavoidably we are entrenched in the north and the south of the world this entrenched winner globalized world winner globalized economy so there's no way to find African solution that which are not global solutions and so rather than talking about finding African or East Asian or Latin American solutions to each of the continent's problems we should look at in a global manner to the to the issues and and try to cooperate and and and I think then nowadays there are some some countries in Africa since we are talking about this which are finding their their own agency in relating to global partners or global organizations and of the north of course and but still lacks the the the continental vision to to channel this this agency and and and talk fairly about the issues like security and mobility and others so again what is the role of futurism in all this in relation to past maybe looking at things strictly from an African perspective I'm a little bit upset by the idea that art and literature are secondary to light bulbs given that art and literature preceded light bulbs you know that people were painting on walls of caves before they had electricity and storytelling and so on but what the example of science fiction in Africa shows I think is that African literature didn't have to wait for a label from outside to define what it was doing that the it looked inside for its own conceptual forms and I suppose that this is where my presentation fits into the panel if it fits in because I feel that I'm seeking a very different language from the other members of the panel I think it does I mean in relation to looking in what I see rightly mentioned okay I'm now ready to defer to the audience now for questions you have I mean about 20 minutes to take questions yes here Mike please here thank you it's all the panelists for your interest in talks we have been discussed this is just kind of a comment and maybe another topic of discussion but we're discussing the issue of a kind of African solution to African problems and I personally kind of agree with Alessio saying it's not necessary just to leave the content alone but I think there's already the infrastructure within Africa banks like the African import export bank African Union even just looking at some of the unions the countries have themselves echo s sadc and just saying is it not possible for us to look inwards and look to these institutions and saying well why are you not the providers of if we reference Andrews presentation of equity in some of these key projects especially if they are projects that will link the countries within within the organizations themselves so if we look at echo us if it's a project that will link you know Nigeria to a country like Sierra Leone or in SADC is something that will link South Africa to Congo why are these institutions not becoming more economic players in Africa and actually providing equity providing support instead of us looking outwards to the World Bank to the IFC so is that not a way that we can use African solutions to African problems thank you any other questions the okay Kenneth so we take about three questions and thank you very much first the first presenter I was talking about what is this the first topic that was the novelist ideas I mean futuristic ideas of course yeah I was I was thinking that there's no so sad that can live without fiction and Africans had fiction perhaps it was not just written so I just wanted to say that but then the question that I have is on the Africa debate leaving it alone we must differentiate between alone and aid okay but the problem that we have currently and that is pertaining for example in Zambia now is that they want to borrow but then we are told we have a political situation in the country for example at the moment our main opposition leader is incarcerated and so Zambia perhaps wants to borrow money but IMF has certain conditions of good governance and the like so there is a pull and push the opposition is saying don't give us the money because the government will not look after your money tenants of good governance are not being taken care of look at incarceration the government is saying give us the money if you don't give us the money then you are telling us that I mean you are still ruling us you are holding on to the money because you have certain certain certain conditions you have applied so if you don't if you don't want to so I mean to give us the money then it means that you you are using the money to rule us so colonialism is still continuing so I am wondering why do we attach what I put in inverted commas bad conditions to borrow as against aid okay thank you conditions to that's yep further okay yeah so we take those questions after three questions I wanted to ask you a little bit about agency because what struck me in Cheggis and Jane's presentations was that there is a lot of agency and their visions expressed in literature and there is creativity and resilience in informal language use and then we see you know we changed scene and then we see the institutional view institutions African institutions or global institutions that are built on colonial model and that also dictate what the problem is so I think it's very hypocritical to ask Africa to find solutions for a problem that it hasn't even defined itself or that the majority of Africans has not defined as a problem but a very small elite has defined as a problem and so rather than reiterating that this is a problem we know that this is a problem right I wanted to ask especially Jane and Cheggis and I think Jane you have a very important place in this panel to to think about places where this agency exists and how it could be used to talk back to these excluding institutions thank you so we have three questions I mean in one could go first who wants okay Jane you want to well just in response to Federica I'm thinking of examples of social media and the internet as tools for the distribution and creation of new platforms for literature in places as diverse as Nairobi and Cape Town with the journals Kwani and Chimaranga and the way they've been embraced by a whole new generation of writers who are creating networks and sharing work in ways which were never envisaged by the old-fashioned publishing houses which of course were based in Europe anyway and how literature festivals and workshops and all kinds of literary communities have grown up as a result of these and this is a very material example of young Africans talking back to institutions I think yeah yeah sorry can I add to that because I think I fully agree with with this line because I the more I look at things in Africa the more I think and believe that the youth the young generation or the future generation well the current generation coming up actually might present more better solutions than we have now part of the problem is the the the the ruling elite are neo-colonial ruling elites and so they really can't understand things in any other way or do not wish to understand in any other way and I think yesterday the mayor of Cardinal said it very well that in Africa there is a tendency and everyone else where I suppose there's a tendency to stare at solutions in the face and do nothing about it and just you know look for another you know another direction okay when the judge in Nigeria or Kenya for that matter in the example you gave a while ago that the same same scenario you will find in Kenya the solution to making a good judicial a good judgment and understanding the case is to actually listen to this man or woman in their language but we all avoid that and we insist on using English all right whereas it is clear to everybody that the Yoruba or Swahili or Kikuyu or whatever is the one that should be done so what I see now is that the younger people and I'm talking about the 65 percent of Africa's population according to the United Nations Development Program currently is under the age of 25 now these are the people who in a sense and linguistically what I see is a sort of a rebellion a rejection of the high standards the high standard codes such as standard Swahili standard English standard French and so on and so forth at the same time there is a wish to use the African languages without the baggage that comes with our parents generation of ethnolinguistic or ethnic biases and based on on earlier conceptualizations of the African so the solution at least in the case of Shang it seems to me the younger people say well we need modernity and we still want to be African okay but we don't want that those alien things that our parents and the westerners are imposing on us we will create our own and I'm hoping that this is a trend okay that the youth will demand more power eventually and that they will be able to wrestle power from the current ruling elites and I think it is happening to an extent at least in Kenya again I'm sorry for the bias because I am more of observer I observe a bit more Kenya and I'm not and as I again it has been said before it is very difficult and anybody who tries to talk about the whole of Africa as one I mean you have it is very difficult so allow me to give more examples from Kenya and East Africa but I can see that happening and more importantly these younger generation because of their transnational and global links and because of their saviness and because of the internet and because of the exposure to the world and the less need to travel to the metropolis now as before you don't have to come to London to you know to do the things that you know many things you know there's an internet easy there's this Skype there is WhatsApp there is everything going on I think they stand a better chance okay of actually achieving these and that's where I think Africa might have a solution now if they do that and then they manage to bring down the borders of Africa then we are sorted yeah thank you thank you I mean I think to answer the specific question about why aren't the specific African financial institutions doing more it's partially because they are somewhat paralyzed by the constructs that they have they are all funded to a greater degree not only by African countries but also by international countries they have put in place international standards which are then very difficult to comply with locally but I think I would echo what Chege had just said which is my point about African derived solutions was not that the entire result of those plans be African derived it's that these solutions have to come from within some of the plans that are then put in place to implement them and some of the money must come from outside and should come from outside particularly from the countries that in many respects have caused a great deal of the mess that certain African countries now find themselves in but I think the process has to come from within and I think specifically from the youth I think one of the problems you find with the older generation is they say well Germany and France and the USA have trains that go like this and have power stations that produce this that's not necessarily necessary or needed in these particular scenarios and so I think what I'm saying is that the solutions must come from within but then often we'll need implementation with the assistance from outside so answering to the question posed by the conditions from borrowing money and so on for me as a political scientist it's clear that if the North has the money then he has to preserve its favored position and that's why it gives conditions the point is that it's not a win-win solution it's there's the north that which wins every every every time every single time that because this is in every project which is implemented is basically for the for the benefit of the north in this way and well there are studies and research such as the one which has been showed by Alice Nicole which showed that from one side we have to know that there is the cumulative causation which causes underdevelopment and so on and the clear solution demonstrated by economists is that we need more state but the more yes we need more involvement by policymakers and and and to to to envision some solution but somehow the the the consensus is that we need also lesser states and so this creates an imbalance and we are kind of stuck right now just just to jump back in for a second nobody should view these international aid institutions as charities as you rightly say any debt that they provide come with conditions and often onerous conditions and unrealistic conditions and there are interest rates that are usually far higher than anyone could get in the west so my view would be the answer to some degree is you just simply say no we don't want your money until you're prepared to offer it to us at reasonable terms yeah no and thank you very much because in fact the kind of summary the big issue what I wanted to to to say through the concept of cumulative causation is exactly what everybody said that is what is the issue I mean let's have a look on developmental state China Korea etc that is to create wealth you need firstly jobs I mean I mean you cannot then you cannot have more than jobs make that you can increase productivity I mean you cannot have any productivity which is wealth by the way without jobs if you have let's say 30% of 50% of use which is unemployed I mean by definition the creation of wealth is zero then more productivity and jobs create more wealth and what does it mean it creates savings the saving rate in Africa is absolutely I mean extremely low compared to France Asia and so on with savings what do you do you have investment so and in this case you don't need the donors I mean if investment is produced through domestic savings then if you have investment you can of course invest without PPP external organization and so on but for this what do you need you need also a taxation system if you don't have any performing taxation system I mean a state cannot levy some money from the citizen who are above the subsistence level because you cannot take any taxation if people of the population is at the one dollar per day etc so and also if countries usually african country are about 15% of tax ratio compared to France 50% etc in avian country 55% and so on so if you cannot tax anything you cannot redistribute if you cannot reduce you cannot create infrastructure if you're not having infrastructure you cannot tax because by definition you cannot collect revenue let's say Niger Mali or whatever if the cost of revenue collection is so high that it is not profitable to invest in a civil servant and so on or cars to collect taxes and this is why even the IMF has made plenty of interesting papers saying that it is not even profitable to tax and so let's not even collect taxes because it is not profitable for any state to collect and this is why the infrastructure issue is so important and then I conclude in how can you trigger the virtuous circle the issue of cumulative causation is just to say okay if your resources are coming from commodities that is the price of oil is 50 in June no 150 in June like in 2007 or 2008 and then 50 in November and what can you do even the somebody coming from Harvard or Princeton or whatever the best economist cannot manage this fluctuation in revenue and I think this is and then I conclude in saying that it was not intervention in the sense of owning the economy it is clear that nobody and especially in Africa can public policy is not necessarily owning the economy it is just providing incentive and this is public policy for precisely increasing saving productivity making that for instance investment can be in long-term infrastructure which is education health and so on that is for having jobs and productive jobs by definition it has also to do with the public system of education that I'm very sorry but in Senegal if you are a colleague you should reduce only economists this is people are completely useless you know and so you can produce engineer accountant and so on that is people who can anyway so thank you I would take one more round before we before we we depart here in the middle here the elegant lady here yes thank you yes I have really come to learn and I'm I'm I'm sitting here wondering do I dare ask this question because if it hasn't sheds I think you asked I think you you you mentioned it but I'm just gonna I'm I've just got to say it out loud and you can tell me shut up you don't know what you're talking about is it possible to affect transformation in Africa with the leadership who created who created and who are perpetuating the problems that you're talking about that's that's a good one okay now the gentleman behind me thank you thank you panel very stimulating inputs but I've noticed as we're discussing the future of Africa we're thinking it very much of it very much in the context of Africa's relationship with the the north Africa's relationship with the the west whichever term we choose to use but I wonder would you like to reflect on Africa's future in the context of its relationship with the east given that China is now pursuing a very aggressive economic colonialist policy in Africa okay what about the east thank you um I have the mic can I can I speak oh sorry okay thank you very much Lina sorry that's power I have a very quick question to Jane first of all thank you very much for your paper there was a very interesting session on Afrofuturism in the morning it's a shame that you went you went there I was there you were there okay great so then I can contextualize that my question even better um you mentioned in passing that you had a different concept of african futurism which was different from afrofuturism and you didn't explain that I was wondering whether you could elaborate a little bit on that I'm I'm particularly interested in the connections between african futurism and two concepts one concept is the concept of race which seems to be very prominent very important in the afro diasporic afrofuturism so some of the definitions of afrofuturism are for example to put a black face on the on the future or somehow project a black future or black faced future and the second concept I'm interested in is afro-polytonism so do you see any any relationships between that concept and african futurism but basically I'm interested really in the differences between the afro diasporic and african futurism thank you thank you I'll just take one more and then we'll round it up the gentleman here sorry and then we just round it up sorry yeah I just wanted to mention one aspect of Alyssa's presentation which really struck me and I think I like to express an opinion on it and a question the charts and the graphs which were presented were so clear in the disparities that you express that I wonder if you would agree that the only way of african producers and suppliers of all these resources to manage the value at which those resources are internationally valued and expressed is to make sure that the actual valuation is done from a context of actual control of those resources then they export it I just wonder if you would agree with that yes control the issue of control okay so thank you now to the panel let's start from again okay then we come down this way yes well shall I shall I address the question that was yes definitely and I'm any question that you are convenient with yes the point about afro futurism versus african futurism I just felt I needed a label which was specific to the continent since afro futurism emerged out of a sort of diasporic aesthetic and you're quite right to to emphasize race in that because I see race as being less prominent in african speculative fiction than specific material realities on the african continent and I reeled off a list of them you know from from genocide to the various other things I mentioned and so african futurism is really just a sort of cognate of afro futurism and afro afro-politanism again I see that as something which really pertains to the diaspora although if you look at the movie Prumsy that I that I talked about the representation of the female figure in that film is quite clearly a sort of afro-politan um figuration so there are crossovers um I hope that answers your question yes um I'll stay away from african futurism um but I think the two things I would talk about one is I think africa has already looked east and I think somewhat to its peril I think it has not been an ideal experience and I think there have been economic colonial tendencies that have started to occur there have been quite extreme bargains that have been put in place by eastern nations for roads and power stations and mobile networks so so I think africa has looked east and not necessarily found it the experience that they might have thought it might be and certainly not a panacea and then I think to very gently touch on the issue of the current political regimes in africa I think it's a question you could ask of any country right now I think even in our own country we've seen a huge groundswell from the youth against the older incumbent political class and I think that is just a tension between young and old that is centuries old and will continue thank you well um talking about the relationship between africa and the east well uh china has already highlighted it's the win-win relationship which has been well built with africa throughout the years starting with the colonization and so on and so um it's hard to go to any african countries and talk about the chinese colonization without talking about the political issues which are entrenched and implied so it has already posed or tried to pose as a as a some kind of political economical alternative to the western vision of the of its relationship with africa well um talking about the future and talking about the world east which is not only east asia but the middle eastern gulf countries I think that the the best way we can envision some some kind of future about this relationship is is when the west and the east will will be able to to find some kind of agreement or some kind of economic cooperation because right now I think it's not working very well and africa is is is already paying this cost and that's it thank you thank you yeah I will let the economist talk more about the east west china china intervention all I can say that um yes I've heard this term colonialism being used very much in with regard to china in africa uh but I think these are qualitative difference here because I don't see yet maybe later I don't see boots and guns and bullets an enslavement of african people as european colonialism did so there might be you know future repercussions of what you know china is doing right now but suddenly it cannot be compared to the kind of intervention colonial intervention that took place with uh with the europeans so that that's one thing about the leadership yes to an extent I I do agree that there is a generation issue here that's for sure that every generation would like to take about and in fact part of the problem with africa again at least with the regions I'm more familiar with is that there was no handover to a newer generation um if if it did happen it would have been simply to the children of those who started the you know who took over in the first place and so it would be very difficult at this point to have that you know change change change their ways um with regard to um the term afro and african I again my own view is that um the african diaspora is simply one branch of the african people and of course the material conditions uh within which the new world africans so to speak have been in the last 400 years are different but again qualitatively not too different because slavery and colonialism I don't see too much of a difference in my view so I would go more for a term that covers both africa and the diaspora because in my view we share a lot more than we differ thank you thank you so regarding china uh east yes I just confirm africa looks east since since stop in africa since a long time I would say that exactly I would confirm what what you were saying that is it is not a panacea recently a bridge and a very collapsed just inaugurated in kenya which has been a bit a bit uh worrying uh I would say that the only positive dimension of china is that it is more players just more capital but also uh of course china quality of project is can be criticized uh plenty of publication on that but the uh previous western powers investing in africa building bridges and then and so on didn't do so much better before because the white elephants and the list of white elephants in africa since colonization and I would mention my father was an engineer in gabin I should not mention that so first hand view of the effectiveness of project so uh but more players I think it's more positive too the specific question is extremely important and interesting question first the cumulative causation issue just highlight that we have many causes and vicious circle affecting southern africa today of course commodity dependence and Nigeria is an incredibly disastrous example of that you know 98 percent of export are oil and it is absolutely a flat uh curve uh so the the the issue of commodity dependence is the main element of this cumulative causation not the only one but you mentioned control the problem is international market and the the comment in uh regarding commodity so it is impossible to control anything and this is why commodity dependence is such an issue because by definition the price of commodities are decided not within africa uh older people like me know that wufua bony in codivo 20 years ago decided to control the price of cocoa and failed miserably because immediately the cartel the oligopoly controlling the cocoa uh industry immediately precisely imposed to codivo to stop the uh uh restraint in in export that decided by the so it is impossible the solution is precisely get rid of commodities diversify diversify diversify that is wise management can be that with windfall coming from commodity let's say during the good years of the 2000 would have been precisely to get out of these dependence on commodity what does it mean industrial and it means exactly the issue of public policy which i agree not owning the economy but incentive that is to try and it is extremely difficult to identify within different countries in case today nigeria is not the same as angola and so on or gabon just what could be the industrial sector uh the whatever the comparative advantage which can make that precisely some economies could find uh the possibility to produce something else which is not a commodity because a commodity even the imf just say a commodity is a shock that is if you produce only commodities you are just exposed to shock to permanent shock and no economy can survive uh in shock and what do we need for that in this fashion infrastructure how can you run any industry if you don't have electricity if you don't have water so we see exactly the complex complexity of uh of the uh thank you very much i'm before we round up i just pass me want to make a small comment based on the china i mean sometimes i mean the practicalities on the ground i mean there's a lot of materials are this indicator in relation to what china is doing in many parts of africa but i have a very practical experience when i was working for the un in the sudan i mean it's practical sometimes the states are caught in between the rock and the hard place now you find sudan was really under very difficult pressure then most of the western big countries most of the western countries were emphasizing my mandate was really to push sudan in relation to improving its civil and political rights freedom of expression good governance and things like that now sudan was really concerned they were emphasizing the fact that look yes we will do this but i mean we are in their streets economy social and cultural rights are very very important i mean schools we want water we want this and things like that sudan wanted to build a big dam but there was a conditionality i mean from the un indicator before we i mean we will support you but you have to improve your governance your civil and civil and political rights china stepped in and provided money to build the dam sudan jumped at it because i mean the truth of the matter is i mean in yoruba language there's a proverb again that you see dried meat dried meat takes time to mature dried meat when it matures is very sweet but you have to have something to eat before the dried meat is ready you know so i mean did you get the point i mean sudan will not yes civil and political rights i was saying look people need water we cannot wait for this for this to improve before we get the water i went to the chinese embassy because i used to visit all i mean missions in order to seek cooperation and things like that the chinese talking to the chinese ambassador and cartoon indicator well you need to help sudan relation to improve its governance civil and political rights the ambassador was telling me he said look if you want to promote freedom of expression and he said go to america we will build schools we'll provide we can build schools you can provide water you can this is what i mean so you find sometimes they are difficult political decisions to be taken by the state in relation to the situation in which they are and what for example the west i mean at that point if you begin to tell sudanda look what china is doing now is sort of colonialism it will come to hunt you they wouldn't see it that way i mean they want water they want i mean they want a dam to provide electricity they want these things also it has to happen so perhaps maybe down the road it might turn into another thing but now they see china as providing what is needed infrastructure as we we've been saying so thank you very much for the interventions and