African Climate Futures

This is a book about how climate-changed futures are imagined in Africa and by Africans, and how these future visions shape political debates and struggles in the present. Scientific climate scenarios forecast bleak futures, with increased droughts, floods, lethal heatwaves, sea level rises, declining crop yields, and greater exposure to vector-borne diseases. Yet, African climate futures could also encompass energy transitions and socio-economic revolutions, transformed political agency and human subjectivities, and radically reparative more-than-human climate politics. This book has an original and interdisciplinary approach. It studies official climate policy strategies and fictional texts side-by-side, as ecopolitical imaginaries that envision low-carbon, climate-changed futures and narrate pathways from ‘here’ to ‘there’. It discusses net zero strategies from Ethiopia, The Gambia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe and climate fiction by authors including Lauren Beukes, Wanuri Kahiu, Doris Lessing, Alastair Mackay, Nnedi Okorafor, Chinelo Onwualu, Tlotlo Tsamaase, and others. Drawing on postcolonial, feminist, and queer theory, the book argues that Africanfuturist climate fiction can inspire more radical, reparative, more-than-human ecopolitical imaginaries, and change how we envision the places, temporalities, ecologies, and politics of climate futures. These stories can help us to understand the debts we all owe, imagine what reparations might entail, and explore the contours of living convivially alongside more-than-human others in heterotopian, climate-changed futures.