NB: This is a rough draft of our idea. We discovered the competition late, and ideally, we'd love to turn this into an animated short video. In the interest of time, here's what we've got. We hope you enjoy it.
Most afro-futurism art pieces are a western representation of what the future of Africa should look like. It's based on making ancient Africa look cool. It has no depth outside of the cool factor.
This representation of afro-futurism has become an essential part of pop culture, as seen in movies, music videos, arts. More artists, even African artists, represent the future of Africa the same way.
It's similar to representing futuristic America as a technologically advanced version of ancient native American civilisation. I.e. with the same dressing but futurist, the same buildings but with futuristic elements.
Art is a known activator of innovation. This representation permeates into innovation in Africa, where most entrepreneurs copy ideas that have worked in western countries and bring these ideas as innovation in Africa.
The problem here is, this solves problems for only the wealthy Africans, those who can already afford to do these things leaving out the vast majority of the population.
To solve the problems of the masses in Africa, one needs to look beyond the solutions in the western world and look deeper at the issues in Africa, the culture of the people and find creative ways to solve them.
With this piece, we aim to represent the problems we are currently facing today in Africa and provide a glimpse of a future we want to live in that solves these problems.
This is what afro-futurism should be about.
A story in 5 frames about Osun.
It's about a utopian future for a malnutritioned Nigerian girl saved by advancements in affordable meal pills.
She then acquires Harvard-level education thanks to advancement in mobile MOOE (Massive open online education on mobile).
And finally, thanks to the Nigerian people, having protested to move political elections onto the blockchain for fair and unrigged elections, she becomes the first female president of Nigeria voted in by 99% of Nigerians on the Ethereum blockchain.
Osun's age:
As cliche as it sounds, charity organisations in the developed world use this topic as a means to raise funds. Unfortunately, a considerable part of the fund raised is used to run the organisation. The reality, however, remains valid. There are millions of malnutritioned kids in Nigeria. The kids are usually very skinny with a bloated stomach. This condition is known as Kwashiorkor.