Shadows of the past, visions of the future in African literatures and cultures

Abstract

In a curious paradox, one of the best-known recent statements about African futurities itself seems to vanish into a permanently receding future. Rem Koolhaas famously wrote of Lagos: "Many of the much touted values of contemporary global capital and its prophetic organizational models of dispersal and discontinuity, federalism and flexibility, have been realized perfectly in West Africa. This is to say that Lagos is not catching up with us. Rather, we may be catching up with Lagos." (qtd in Nuttal and Mbembe 4)

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