Can literature change the future of our planet? Nsah Mala thinks so. He presents five short stories produced thanks to two foresight workshops organized in Yaounde, Cameroon, in September 2024
The world’s second largest tropical rainforests are found in the Congo Basin in central Africa.
And the Congo Basin is in serious danger!
Wars for critical minerals. Commercial agriculture and logging. Infrastructural development. Demographic growth and urbanization. Climate change and wildlife trafficking …
These and many more are factors endangering the Congo Basin.
Literature to save the Congo Basin
In 2022, I defended a multiple award-winning PhD Thesis at Aarhus University (Denmark) focused on the Congo Basin. Among others, my thesis won the prestigious Prix de theses francophones en Prospective (Prize for Francophone Theses in Foresight and Futures Studies) from Fondation 2100 (France) and Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF) in 2022. In the thesis, I discussed how literary texts (plays, poems and novels) can help in saving the Congo Basin.
The visions – both dystopic and utopic – in the literary texts I studied are designed by single authors or writers for the most part.
Participatory approaches
As a result, I realized that participatory approaches are needed to design collective visions for the Congo Basin. But how could I make this happen? Then came two sources of funding.
First, the School of International Futures (SOIF) awarded me its highly competitive Next Generation Foresight Practitioner (NGFP) Fellowship in 2023 as a Judges’ Choice. With funding from SOIF and NGFP, I began facilitating online participatory foresight workshops on #CongoBasinFutures.
As I had anticipated, the online workshops were not very effective. Turnout was quite timid! And this was mainly due to reasons such as frequent power cuts and unreliable internet connection for most of the participants from the Congo Basin, notably from Cameroon. Meanwhile, an onsite foresight workshop on the Congo Basin I had facilitated in May 2024 in Leiden (Netherlands) – during a conference called “And Then What? From Narratives and Scenarios to Climate Action” – with European non-dwellers of the Congo Basin was very engaging and insightful.
Onsite workshops needed
Therefore, it became clear that I needed to organize onsite workshops in at least one of the six countries of the Congo Basin (namely Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, DR-Congo, and Equatorial Guinea). Given that most participants in the online workshops (via WhatsApp and Zoom) were from Cameroon, the choice became obvious.
But where would the funding for such onsite workshops corne from?
Second, I turned to the University of Cologne (Germany) where I am the Hub Coordinator for a Thematic Hub on Planetary Wellbeing within the UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Coalition. And I secured competitive, generous funding from the Seed Funding for the University of Cologne’s Application for a Cluster of Excellence called Sharing a Planet in Peril (SAPP).
With the funding from SOIF through NGFP and the University of Cologne through SAPP, I was able to organize participatory foresight workshops on #CongoBasinFutures and #RoyalAnimalsFutures in Yaoundé, Cameroon, on Saturday 7 September 2024.
Dystopia and utopia
In these workshops, we used foresight and futures thinking approaches to explore both undesirable (dystopic) and preferred (utopic) futures for the Congo Basin.
Among others, workshop participants in Yaoundé included writers, filmmakers, journalists, environmentalists, teachers, students, security workers, health personnel, local policymakers, and traditional indigenous leaders (kings or fons).
The presence of Kings (Fons) from Ajung, Din, Oku, and Mbessa – as well as the moral support of the North West Ho use of Chiefs/Kings within the North West Regional Assembly (NWRA) – was of particular significance. With their presence, we were able to explore a very sensitive biodiversity issue in Cameroon’s grassfields indigenous kingdoms (fondoms): the use of some special animais as royal and sacred animais. Most of these royal animais – which include elephants, cheetahs, leopards, tigers, lions, Bannerman’s turaco, cowries, porcupines, etc. – are either nearly extinct or critically endangered species.
Accordingly, the #RoyalAnimalsFutures workshop used foresight methods to explore how to protect these royal animais for present and future generations.
Insights and recommendations from the #RoyalAnimalsFutures workshop are included in a forthcoming peer-reviewed article. And other avenues are explored for disseminating the insights and recommendations, including sharing the recommendations with relevant local and national policymakers in Cameroon.
Short stories
Meanwhile, from the online to the onsite workshops, participating writers were encouraged to draw inspiration from the collectively designed future visions and write short staries as artifacts from the futures of the Congo Basin. Other insights and recommendations from the #CongoBasinFutures will be published in a separate foresight report.
That said, at this point I am very delighted to introduce you to five beautiful stories of the future from the Congo Basin. Stanislaus Fomutar wrote three stories in English. Lapeube Palou Absolo wrote one story in French (which I translated into English). Absolo also wrote two poems in French (which I translated into English) and both the English and French versions of his poems will be published with other poems in a bilingual poetry anthology I am editing: Congo Basin Poetry Anthology -Anthologie poétique du Bassin du Congo. Stanislaus Fomutar and Lapeube Palou Absolo participated actively in both online and onsite workshops. Curtis Kack, who took active part in the onsite workshops, wrote one story in English.
The five interesting stories you will read here depict both dystopic (undesirable) and utopic (preferred) future visions for the Congo Basin, with more emphasis on Cameroon – for obvious reasons. The onsite workshops took place in Yaoundé, Cameroon, and all the three writers included here are Cameroonians.
Hope and despair
As the stories of despair from Kack and Absolo suggest, if nothing is done to protect the Congo Basin now, its continued deforestation will lead to devastating droughts in the southern parts of Cameroon. And also exacerba te the desertic conditions of the northern parts of Cameroon.
Fortunately, there is more hope than despair in the stories from Fomutar. His stories alternate between despair and hope, with hope triumphing in all situations, sometimes after long periods of calamity. In one story, the Fon (King) and his community reconcile themselves back to Nature after an initially unsustainable relationship. In another story, poor waste disposai in some public-transport buses and streets of Cameroon is transformed through sustainable waste management. Yet another story features a multispecies creature facilitating communication between humans and the rest of Nature.
Without further ado, I will now let you plunge into the futures of the Congo Basin and Cameroon through these stories. As you enjoy your reading, kindly reflect and strategize on what should be done to save the Congo Basin! And feel free to share your reflections, strategies, visions, stories, poems, and other artefacts for the Congo Basin using the hashtag #CongoBasinFutures. Enjoy
Nsah Mala
This text has been published by Next Generation Foresight Practitionners. Header and subtitles have been added by Afriscitech.
The short stories will be available on Afriscitech in the very next weeks.
