Understanding Afrofuture
Since the death in 1996 of African photojournalist Mohamed Amin, an inconspicuous back room in Nairobi, Kenya has been locked off from the public, maintained only by two solitary sentries stationed between file cabinets in a windowless, climate-controlled vault. Now, after years of frame-by-frame cataloging and the digitization of thousands of hours of raw video footage, the Mohamed Amin Collection has opened its doors to the world for exploration. This Afrofuture archive represents one of the world’s greatest unexplored historical artifacts with a timeless work of art featuring culture, conflict, political upheaval, wildlife, entertainment collections, and an unparalleled visual chronicle of the daily life of millions of Africans.
On August 21, 2021, Strong collaborations were made to tokenize Afrofuture, a mission-driven social currency underpinned by a vault of highly valuable digital African assets. These were made believing that bringing the Mohamed Amin Collection onto Ethereum through NFTs would unlock new funding and distribution opportunities for African artists while catalyzing conversations about Africa’s rich and cultured history.
Understand that Africa has many talented creatives, yet historically has lacked the infrastructure, capacity, and support network to commercialize its talent and provide them access to global markets. Afrofuture is creating the foundational digital infrastructure to support the creative industries increasingly being put in place, accepting the time is now to organize efforts to put Africa’s creator economy at the forefront of Web3 innovation.
How Afrofuture works:
Each quarter, 5 images from the Mohamed Amin Collection are dropped into the Afrofuture Vault, providing an underpinning value to the Afrofuture token. Immediately after each quarter’s drop, everything in the Vault is opened for auction for 48 hours.
Now whenever an image is purchased, 20% of the purchase price is sent directly to the Afrofuture treasury with the other 80% sent to the Mohamed Amin Foundation.
Concurrently, each quarter up to 5 African artists are commissioned to produce NFT artwork within the theme of Afrofuturism. These will be unveiled, sent into the Vault, and auctioned off during the subsequent quarter’s drop. 40% of the purchase price for each art piece is sent directly to the Afrofuture treasury with the other 60% sent to the artist.
Through their NFTs and the Afrofuture social token community, this ingenuity is catalyzing dialog about the stories and context behind amazing historical African artifacts, while using the social token to organize creative efforts towards producing Afrofuturistic style art.
Gradually moving their governance into a DAO structure with Afrofuture holders taking the lead in proposing and making decisions for the DAO and deciding the treasury management strategy. It becomes pertinent to understand how African NFTs are gradually being mainstreamed for the global stage.
What Afrofuture revolution means for Africa
Afrofuture means the barriers to promotion and distribution are scaled-down and now African Artists can thrive in a global marketplace. They can revel in the delight of sharing their work, while also reducing the hassle of distribution.
Afrofuture movement enables both the creative and brand to reach much broader audiences and further monetize their art. For example, Contemporary artists in the Nigerian hinterlands no longer have to solely depend on foot traffic and an ever-dwindling tourist influx.
Sculptors who capture the essence of typical African sculpture in clarity of form, balance, symmetry, smoothness of finish, and resemblance to deities or human beings can now trade their wares with the world through the eyes of Afrofuture. According to the head of Bitscale Capital, Zurab Kazhiloti, “Collectors can get amazing art pieces without leaving their home, and artists can reach much broader audiences and further monetize their art.”
For artists, it also gives them a way to sell this art for which there would otherwise have been no market. Take an instance of Osinachi — a Nigerian digital artist who has also created his cryptocurrency called Osina. He is the first African artist to auction non-fungible tokens through Christie’s Europe and in collaboration with the 1-54 African art fair. Five of Osinachi’s works, which reimagined a 1972 swimming pool painting by David Hockney, sold between £40,000 and £60,000 each in an online-only sale of October 5-19 2021. The works, which can also be bought with ether or bitcoin, primarily address work-life imbalances but also have a black protagonist, something that is “very significant to his highly personal work”, says Isabel Millar, a Christie’s specialist.
Afrofuture and setting of a new horizon may be more relevant than ever. Its vision can help guide Africa out of the rubble through the eyes of artists while helping the continent to consider universes of better alternatives.
When most people think of Afrofuture today, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Wakanda comes to mind, an African country that hides advanced technology from the world. Within Wakanda, Afrofuture manifests most explicitly in the award-winning fashion and set design, a hypnotic blend of African traditional art and dress, cyberpunk, and space opera.
Renowned sociologist Alondra Nelson, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and pioneering scholar of Afrofuture, offered a tidy yet illuminating definition: Afrofuture describes “visions of the future—including science, technology and its cultures in the laboratory, in social theory, and aesthetics—through the experience and perspective of African diasporic communities.” In all of Afrofuture’s many forms, questions are projected about the Black experience into the future
Sources
Mohamed Amin Foundation (2021) Inside the Mohammed Amin Archive https://artsandculture.google.com/story/inside-the-mohamed-amin-archive/kAWBxrRdULUo8g
AllAfrica InfoWire (2021 MAY, 1) NFT Launch of Mohamed Amin Images https://allafrica.com/stories/202105010377.html
Gerlis.M (2021 SEPTEMBER 30) Osinachi to offer first African artist’s NFT at Christie’s Europe https://www.ft.com/content/5c9a3698-cb90-48ee-bcfd-1ff5fe42496c
Kim. A. S (2021 February, 2021) How Black Storytellers Are Using XR and Afro-Futurism to Explore Ancestral Identity https://www.indiewire.com/2021/02/artificial-intelligence-racial-bias-1234619875/
