Reflections: My participation at the Maputo Fast Forward Festival 2024

From the 18th to 26th of October 2024, I had the privilege to attend the Maputo Fast Forward biennale festival.  The Biennale brings together artists, academics, businessowners, young people, and other stakeholders to reflect collectively on local and global issues. The event is organized by 16NetO, an organization that works with arts in Mozambique. This year’s festival’s title was “Proposals for the Post-Anthropocene” which brought together researchers, policymakers, artists, businesspeople, creators, and other actors from Mozambique and abroad to tackle the complex issue of reimagining life in and after the Anthropocene—a proposed geological epoch when humans are found to be a major force turning the clocks of earth away from the late Holocene Terra. This conversation took place as Mozambicans awaited the election results, which opposition leader Venâncio Mondlane was already contesting, calling for protests. On October 19, two lawyers from the opposition party, Elvino Dias and Paulo Guambe, who were involved in organizing a court appeal against the election results, were brutally killed. This tense political backdrop significantly influenced the festival’s organization and shaped life in Maputo.

The highlight of the festival was the opening talk by the Cameroonian historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe and the radical feminist writer from Eswatini Patricia McFadden on the 18th of October 2024.  Their opening session was titled “How to listen to the planet?”, a pertinent question challenging us to pay close attention to multiple voices including those of the multispecies that compose the planet.

Figure. 1 Opening session: Achille Mbembe to the left, Isabel Casimiro in the middle and Patricia MacFadden to the right.

 

Patricia MacFadden, drawing on her own experiences, proposes an ecofeminist politics of care as a way of listening to the planet. Achille Mbembe, in turn, argues that we already have the tools needed to listen; first and foremost, we must take African archives—historically marginalized and silenced—seriously. He suggests that African cosmogonies offer valuable pathways for repairing a damaged planet. Mbembe emphasizes that such a shift requires a new kind of pedagogy, one that recognizes all living entities as interconnected, symbiotic composites. For Mbembe, we must view humans and other beings as a single lifeform, aligned with the philosophy of ubuntu. Additionally, he advocates for teaching how to reopen African archives in their many forms, as this is our best chance at a shared, healed planet. Market forces, he asserts, cannot fulfill the promise of planetary healing.

Mbembe’s talk resonated much with another talk that occurred on the 17^th of October 2024, during the EHS seminar series where Mamphela Ramphela stated that Africans must embrace our origins and engage with our rich heritage to tackle 21^st century challenges, including the Anthropocene and coloniality.

However, while the calls to reopen the African archives are indeed necessary and urgent, questions emerge that need serious scrutiny: Who gets to open those archives? What matters of concern frame that opening? What is African in the African archives in the 21^st century interconnected world? These nagging questions have empirical implications. For example, one of the artistic events was a musical, headed by “New Kids Teaser” that happened on the 18^th of October 2024. It combined music dance, spoken word, and theatre. The convoluting and disconcerting movements of the female dancer provided a great opportunity to think about black bodies as they are exposed to different kinds of social and ecological violence and forced to act several claims including as being receptacles or depositories of knowledge to heal the maladies of the Anthropocene.  However, the spoken word bit of the performance was not as convincing and revealed some of the concerns around reclaiming “African archives” “African roots” and the “African past”.  The male artist repeated a much-criticized notion of a harmonious past, a past where the “neighbors did not have conflicts”, a time when the “past was good”, as opposed to the neoliberal present with its many occult economies, disenfranchisements, disenchantments and atomization. In my view and that of many Anthropologists [1], this kind of ahistorical depiction of the past does more harm to the opening of the “African archives” than it helps.  It essentializes a diverse and rich past to produce a sense of an essentialized “Africanness”.

These are the pragmatical, methodological and ontological challenges that make me very excited to see how Achille Mbembe’s work will move from the “We must open the African archives” to opening the archives. That African archives need to be taken seriously is an argument that early Africanist Anthropologists, historians, artists, writers, etc., have made[2].

The other event that was quite remarkable and brought us back to who gets to open the African archives was the highly engaging debate between Tiago Borges Coelho who is the director of the NGO called Alma working with recycling plastic waste in Tofo, Inhambane province, and Jaime Lima, working for the private company TOPAK which does plastic waste recycling, upcycling and downcycling for income generation. Both talks highlighted the deleterious impacts of plastic, its colonial history, and how it has become so pervasive in contemporary human life to even gaining presence in human embryos—this is not the plasticity we talked about! However, it became clear from the talks and approaches that these activities while helping to reduce plastic waste, they too felt like hamsters running in the capitalistic hamster wheel to the tempo of NGO and donation funding and to the tempo of income generation and wealth accumulation.

 

Figure. 2 A pallet made of recycled plastic.

As the presenters recognized, these projects are not the solution. They are more like Band-Aids, even though they were framed as green and part of the circular economy. This greening of activities within the hegemonic mode of capitalist production has been called elsewhere as greenwashing[3] . In my view the circularity was in continuing the pernicious plastic production economy, only with cheap or free black labor power that must deal with toxicity and more waste: for example, we learned that recycling plastic uses the same energy as producing plastic from the scratch. Then, questions like what happens to the pollutants when plastic is burnt? How much water does the recycling industry uses? Where is the wastewater dumped? What kind of treatments is carried out on that water? What kinds of pollutants are the waste gatherers exposed to? How do their precarious labor support them with dealing with risks associated with their cheap labor? Etc. In other words, we need to rethink environmentalism in Africa in ways that do not only shift the problems from one place to another but tackle them from their roots.

The festival’s topics oscillated from conceptual and policy debates to more phenomenological and localized talks about touch, body rootedness, to more digital engagements, including Virtual Reality, documentary, cloth weaving, and sounds, providing a rich and broad experience to the participants.

Figure 3. Me holding a vinyl with Mozambican songs (top).

The MFF festival holds great promise. It is the product of a dedicated team that mobilizes diverse networks and resources in a country with limited investment in research and cross-disciplinary collaboration. A distinctive aspect of MFF is its provision of small grants to researchers and artists, allowing for the creation of new works presented at the biennale, making it a space for both artistic and scholarly production. However, the question of translatability remains significant. In a conversation with Yara, manager of Neto 16—the organization behind the festival—I asked what the event aimed to achieve and how knowledge might translate into action. While perhaps an unfair question, she suggested that the festival’s greatest success might lie in creating a space for networking, from which various projects could emerge to produce alternatives for the post-Anthropocene. Still, the festival might consider ways to include beneficiaries and community members, addressing criticisms of elitism raised by some participants.

Figure 4. Photo showing Avenida Milagre Mabote. Fumes of a burning tyre show in the horizon in the Maxaquene which was the most active in the manifestations. The neighborhood is also one of the poorest in the city.

As festivalgoers contemplate potential alternatives to the Anthropocene, the reality outside paints a stark picture: the recent killing of two lawyers, ongoing contestations of election results, protests that paralyzed Maputo and the festival for several days, violent police responses, injured protesters, smoke from burning tires, tear gas used to suppress dissent, cries for change and revolution, and hopes for democracy. All these events seem to echo the same message: transformation is urgently needed. The current economic model has failed to deliver well-being for all, instead widening the gap between rich and poor, governors and the governed, and leaving landscapes ever more degraded. It’s hard not to feel the disconnect between these harsh realities and the idealistic conversations about transformation in spaces like MFF and academia. Bridging this gap is a challenge that demands reflection and action from all of us. The event was cut short due to the manifestations, and MFF manifested its solidarity with the people and their struggle in a communiqué. One thing remains true to both MFF and the manifestations taking place in Mozambique, transformation is needed, but what kind of Mozambique will emerge on the other side remains a frugal.

Reference

 

Choudhury RR, Islam AF and Sujauddin M, “More than Just a Business Ploy? Greenwashing as a Barrier to Circular Economy and Sustainable Development: A Case Study-Based Critical Review” (2024) 4 Circular Economy and Sustainability 233

de Freitas Netto SV and others, “Concepts and Forms of Greenwashing: A Systematic Review” (2020) 32 Environmental Sciences Europe 1

Fabian J, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (columbia university press 2014)

Gell A, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Clarendon Press 1998)

Hamilton C, “‘Living by Fluidity’: Oral Histories, Material Custodies and the Politics of Archiving” [2002] Refiguring the archive 209

Vansina JM, Oral Tradition as History (Univ of Wisconsin Press 1985)