The Africa that comes: from Humiliation to Afrotopia

If colonialism instrumentalized knowledge and ignorance to colonize territories and minds, this pretension was later replaced by “development” policies (progress, reason, growth and order). From a place where a worldview of hierarchical order was staged par excellence and where Africans were humiliatingly objectified (at the First Portuguese Colonial Exposition, 1934), let’s look for what Africa has been teaching us every day and for many centuries.

Subverting the logic of racial inferiority, which sustained the European fallacy and program of “civilizing” the other (as the one who should absorb the values of a supposed European civilization), and in the antithesis of the one and indivisible national and imperial sovereignty of Portuguese colonialism, we will make a journey through communitarian, utopian, lived and imagined meanings, with Afrotopia (2016) by the Senegalese thinker Felwine Saar, on the horizon.

Marta Lança, taking on the projections and effabulations, leads us through words and images in the corners of the gardens, to help us think about this Africa that comes and the metaphors of a future of balance between the economic, cultural and spiritual dimensions.
With a degree in Portuguese Literature and a PhD student in Art Studies, Marta Lança has been investigating post-colonial issues, memory disputes and knowledge production in collaborative platforms. She is self-employed in the fields of culture and journalism, regularly working on projects in Cape Verde, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea and Brazil. She created and edits, since 2010, the BUALA portal.

Photography: Renato Cruz Santos