Tangible Evidence that Africa is the Future
Written by Bulumko Napakade
As long as Africa’s history has been written by the ink of a western pen, Africa has been framed as the world’s backward counterpart whose very survival depends on aid, void of the intellectual creativity to bring about her own development. This false narrative propagated by this Eurocentric smudging draws a veil over historical evidence such as the fact that the world’s first libraries and universities find their genesis in African soil. The western world never have and never will have a monopoly over knowledge that echoes high modernist visions of the future… not as long as the majority of the world’s youth population are in fact African. A youth whose colourful, vibrant and unsurpassable creativity has been the single most powerful influence on modern fashion, pop culture, and the area closest to our souls and the focus of this article, the music.
The internet has connected African youth to one another and the rest of the world, producing an African child with a global perspective when it comes to their tastes in fashion, and music; these influences had a heavy impact on the sounds that have enjoyed international popularity from music that came out of the South African scenes... but not in West Africa. Here we find a youth so immersed in their roots, where Western influences don’t dominate, but rather represent creative borders that exist to be broken and trends that are to be disrupted by an unapologetic Afrocentric identity, so authentic that it cannot be replicated or ignored... an energy so themselves!
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