Africa invents her future

It is quite ordinary to claim that Africa is at the crossroads at the beginning of this new century. But the question remains: what are Africa’s possible paths amongst the ones that are recommended or suggested? And on the paths that seem preferable, where lie the traps and from where do favorable winds blow? These are some of the questions that Africans have to ask themselves, as would any other travelers or navigators who find themselves in a similar spatio-temporal, territorial, and historical configuration.

Answers to these questions were never as urgently needed as today, when the course of history, far from having come to an end, is accelerating, and the time lost through bad choices or rather the absence of choices, carries a high price. Never before was answering these questions so difficult. The increasing entanglement of the variables that make up the current and future situation of the continent, the changing characteristics of the territorialities that question traditional notions of borders and citizenship, the multiplication of the actors and decision-makers of African environments, and the unequal understanding and hence absence of mastery over the dynamics of change, have reached today a point at which the only certainty is that “the future is not what it used to be”.

In this context, prospective thinking is a necessity more than ever. Indeed, when we are driving on an unknown road at high speed, we require powerful headlights in order to avoid hazards and to stay on the road. According to Gaston Berger, who introduced this image, prospective thinking provides these headlights. Not that it can deliver clear-cut and definitive answers to what the future will be: there is not one human being or discipline that owns the capacity for foresight because of the single reason that the future is not determined and cannot be predicted. The future will always be richer, more complex than the explorations one can make with the help of scenarios; no matter how sophisticated they are, they cannot foresee the colour of tomorrow’s dawn, as a certain African wisdom puts it. Nonetheless, no actor or decision-maker should be disinterested in the exploration and images of the future, for whether they are feared or desired, these images always inspire our daily decisions. Prospective thinking that allows for this exploration is essential in that it reduces uncertainties, anticipates change, and prepares for it – all indispensable intellectual processes for serene decision-making and action.

This necessity for foresight has been adopted in the business world in which pro-active thinking has been elevated to a cardinal virtue and where considerable investments have been made to create capabilities for anticipation and prospective thinking. This necessity is today increasingly recognized in the public sector, because as the history of development in the 1950s teaches us, only countries that have equipped themselves with a vision of the future and that have deliberately concentrated their construction on a long term perspective, achieved accelerated and enduring development. Be it in the business world or in the public sector, the development of prospective capacities, the only means that allow for a pro-active attitude, is not conceived of as a luxury for a few researchers – even though prospective thinking calls on accomplished researchers mastering several domains – but rather like a tool for men and women who desire to act, to innovate, to increase their breathing space, to launch business projects or projects for society, and who are aware that in order to avoid the dictate of emergencies, one has to anticipate and to position oneself as a strategist.

This necessity has been imposed upon the African continent, whose weakness has forced it to adopt reactive strategies. Two decades of strategies, called ‘adjustment’, have seriously undermined the capacities for long term thinking in the public sector; these capacities require reconstruction. To anticipate change, and to use the results of these efforts of anticipation for action, constitutes a major challenge for Africa if the continent wants to stop the current process of marginalization, if it wants to stop being a plaything of world powers and an object for dissertations for afro-pessimists and/or afro-optimists; if it wants to assume full responsibility for its future and to give shape to what we can call afro-responsibility; if the continent wants, in one phrase, recapture the historic initiative.

It is this conviction that motivates the promoters of the international association of African Futures, a group of men and women of different nationalities, different disciplinary profiles, and of professional and political-ideological differences but moved by an unlimited love for Africa, an unshakable will to be implicated in her battle for a renaissance, and all sharing the desire to let prevail on the continent what one of her sons called “an ethics of the future”.