When African Voices Imagine Tomorrow
Close your eyes for a moment. Picture the future — a film, a game, a book, anything that came to mind. Who do you see in it?
Share your mental image with your partner. What's similar? What's different?
What patterns did you notice across the class?
Essential Question:
Who gets to imagine the future — and why does it matter?
The Missing Question:
What happens when the people who were colonized and enslaved get to imagine the future?
"What would the world look like if African civilizations had been allowed to develop without colonization and slavery?"
Civil Rights, 1960s
Demands for equality and full inclusion in American society
The Space Race
America sent white men to the moon while Black Americans faced legal segregation
Sci-Fi Explosion
Genre boomed — but almost no Black characters or Black writers in mainstream publishing
The Recognition: "If you're excluded from the present, you're almost certainly excluded from most visions of the future."
Today's Parallel: How do current economic, racial, and geographic exclusions shape who gets to design and benefit from new technology?
The fundamental shift: What if advancement meant community empowerment rather than individual achievement?
The Thought Experiment:
What would an African civilization look like if it had developed for centuries without European interference?
Compare to Wells: The Traveller's future Earth is ruined. Wakanda imagines an African future that flourished. Same speculative logic — opposite political imagination.
| Dimension | Wells — The Time Machine | Lang — Metropolis | Coogler — Black Panther |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technology does... | Enables individual escape through time | Industrial production / exploitation of workers | Enhances and protects the community |
| Who controls it? | One privileged individual | The capitalist elite (Joh Fredersen) | Shared within the nation, led by innovators like Shuri |
| Social result | Class division hardens over millennia | Brief mediated reconciliation | Collective responsibility and uplift |
| Underlying value | Individual superiority / escape | Class mediation / compromise | Liberation and empowerment |
How does who controls technology change what technology can do?
Case for Isolation
Case for Engagement
Where do you stand? Drag the slider.
Selective Engagement
He is a villain because...
He is a revolutionary because...
Class Vote — click to add responses:
Wells (1895)
Technology for individual advantage — the Traveller alone in his machine
Lang (1927)
Technology as industrial domination — machinery that consumes workers
Coogler (2018)
Technology as community empowerment — innovation in service of collective wellbeing
"Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu"
Zulu/Xhosa proverb: "A person is a person through other people."
Often translated: "I am because we are."
How This Changes Everything:
When community wellbeing is the foundational goal, technology and power serve entirely different purposes. Compare this to the Traveller's lonely escape — or Fredersen's isolated tower of control.
Pattern & Textile
Traditional African designs integrated into high-tech environments
Natural / Technological Harmony
Organic curves in architecture — Wakanda built with, not against, the landscape
Vibrant Colour Palette
Contrast with the grey and brown industrial tones of Metropolis
Ceremony & Technology
Rituals that incorporate advanced technology — the past and future are not opposites
Cultural Identity
Traditional body modification, lip plates, scarification as markers of belonging — not erased by modernity
Real African Languages
isiXhosa, Xhosa, Swahili — deliberate choice to use authentic African languages, not invented ones
Advanced civilization does not have to mean abandoning cultural identity or natural harmony
Wells: Women are largely absent from the future vision. The female Eloi are passive, decorative.
Lang: Maria exists as a spiritual / symbolic figure — an ideal to be fought over by men.
Black Panther: Women are active agents with political, military, and technological authority. The Wakandan future is explicitly co-created by women.
With your partner:
Name one artist, film, song, or game you've seen or heard that you think fits the Afrofuturist description. What gave it away?
The film deliberately places its story in a global context. Notice these locations and what they represent:
Discussion: What responsibility do successful communities have to struggling ones? Is Wakanda's initial decision to hide morally defensible?
EQ 1: "How do the stories we tell about the future shape the choices we make today?"
Wakanda has inspired real-world conversations about African development, reparations, and the possibilities of Black leadership in technology and politics. Stories create possibilities.
EQ 2: "Whose voices are heard when we imagine the future — and whose are missing?"
Black Panther explicitly centres African and African American perspectives — including women, traditionalists, revolutionaries, and scientists — within a single vision.
EQ 3: "What happens when entire groups are left out of visions of the future?"
The film demonstrates what becomes possible when excluded voices are included: a fundamentally different model of technology, power, and civilization.
Enduring Understanding: "When marginalized voices are excluded from future narratives, entire possibilities for human progress are lost."
Each cultural perspective reveals possibilities the others couldn't imagine.
Final question for the unit: How might other excluded voices — Indigenous, Asian, Global South, LGBTQ+, disability communities — imagine the future differently? What are we still missing?
1. One thing you now understand about Afrofuturism that you didn't at the start:
2. One question the discussion raised that you want to bring to the film:
3. Which character's position on Wakanda's dilemma do you find most interesting — and why?