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Architecture can make an imagined elsewhere tangible: a place shaped by ancestry, spirituality or speculation that also helps people read the present. In her October 6, 2026 ArchDaily essay, Maisa Elamein uses Africanfuturism to interpret buildings, films and speculative art as spaces where cultural memory, technology, ecology and power meet. Her readings of historic buildings are contemporary interpretations—not evidence that their makers called them Africanfuturist.
What does Africanfuturism mean in this architectural context?
Science fiction and fantasy author Nnedi Okorafor coined the terms Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism to distinguish ideas she felt were obscured when Black speculative writing was grouped under a US-centered umbrella. In a 2022 Publishers Weekly interview, she describes Africanfuturism as “more directly rooted in African culture, history and mythology, which includes the Black diaspora.” She describes Africanjujuism as acknowledging the blend of existing African spirituality and cosmology with the imaginative.
The Library of Congress similarly characterizes Africanfuturism as future-focused writing rooted in African culture, history, mythology and point of view, and Africanjujuism as a blend of African spiritualities and cosmologies with the imaginative and speculative. These terms remain part of an active cultural and critical conversation, not a universally fixed taxonomy.
Architecture is not the only medium for either concept. Elamein uses Africanfuturism as an interpretive lens: she asks how a space can carry a cultural worldview into material form, or project that worldview into a possible future. The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Center for 21st Century Studies reproduces Okorafor’s longer definition of Africanfuturism, which includes interest in technology and futures, a perspective rooted first and foremost in Africa, and a predominantly African-descended authorship. The university page also describes “slow futurism” as prioritizing ancestral knowledge, ecological harmony and layered rather than purely linear time; that is the page’s framework, not Okorafor’s term.
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How do folklore and belief shape the essay’s readings of buildings?
Elamein moves between cultural narratives and the spaces she interprets through them. In both cases below, the relationship is her reading of the building, not a claim that the historic designers used the contemporary label Africanfuturism.
Kasubi Tombs: ancestry and cyclical time
The essay begins with Kintu, a figure in Buganda legend, and the belief it describes that kabakas do not die but disappear into a spiritual realm. It connects this account to the Kasubi Tombs in Kampala, a royal burial place and place of worship, and to Muzibu Azaala Mpanga, its monumental thatched structure.
Elamein draws attention to the building’s fig-wood central support, circular frame, barkcloth, reeds and spiraling roof. She interprets the circular form and concentric rings in relation to cycles of life and Buganda clan unity, and reads the materials and spatial organization through beliefs about kingship, ancestry and spiritual transition. These are site- and community-specific interpretations; they should not be generalized into a single account of African architecture or belief.
Al-Nilin Mosque: a civic space beside the Nile
In Omdurman, Elamein reads Al-Nilin Mosque as joining Islamic design with civic gathering and education, and as responding to the Nile’s presence. Her account connects Sudanese folklore about spirits protecting the river, and the river’s sound in everyday life, with the mosque’s riverside arrangement, open undercroft and elevated pavilions. Recitation carried downstream becomes part of her interpretation of the site.
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- Over 200 paintings, sculptures, photographs, and conceptual pieces
- Length: 7.75in / 20cm, Depth: 2in / 5cm, Width: 6in / 15cm
- By Hans Werner Holzwarth
- Hardcover
- 696 pages
The essay describes architect Gamar Eldowla Abdelgadir’s 1970s design as a geodesic-like dome and a civic and educational center. Its exterior, Elamein suggests, can evoke a space-age aesthetic. These observations are the author’s contemporary reading; the essay alone does not establish them as independent heritage or architectural documentation.
What do film and animation make visible about designed futures?
Pumzi: the cost of a sealed environment
Wanuri Kahiū’s 2009 film Pumzi depicts a post-apocalyptic East Africa after a “Water War.” Its residents live in Maitu, a subterranean environment shaped by controlled systems and machinery. Elamein reads this enclosed architecture as both a response to ecological collapse and a prison: survival depends on a tightly managed interior.
The protagonist, Asha, tries to regenerate the earth outside. Her effort makes the exterior more than a setting; it represents a possibility of ecological connection and personal autonomy that the bunker cannot provide. The contrast asks what protection means when a built environment also restricts movement and separates people from the systems of life beyond it.
Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire: futures that adapt
The 2023 animated anthology Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire imagines cities drawing on Ugandan, Zimbabwean and Egyptian settings. In “Herderboy,” directed by Ugandan filmmaker Raymond Malinga, Elamein connects Bachwezi mythology and King Ndahura with cattle-herding lineage reimagined through cybernetic augmentation. She also identifies a tower inspired by the traditional ngalabi and patterns derived from Ugandan basket-weaving.
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Elamein describes these futures as imperfect, changing “protopias,” contrasting them with Black Panther’s Wakanda while noting that both imagine hybrids of advanced infrastructure and vernacular forms. The comparison belongs to her analysis: it highlights not a single blueprint for an African future, but different ways of joining inherited forms and advanced technology.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How does speculative art connect architecture to inequality and belonging?
Olalekan Jeyifous: juxtaposed Lagos
In Shanty Megastructures of Lagos, artist Olalekan Jeyifous places wealthy real-estate development beside enormous vertical slums. Elamein reads that contrast as making unequal access to sanitation, electricity, health care and modern communications visible. The imagined city acts as a spatial critique: who receives investment and infrastructure, and who is left to make a home amid their absence?
Rayan Elnayal: imagined sanctuaries
Rayan Elnayal’s Digital Sanctuaries layers cultural motifs and futuristic forms through magical-realist techniques. Elamein sees the work as imagining safe habitats and belonging for marginalized communities. Rather than treating the future as a neutral backdrop, these spaces ask whose lives and cultural references are allowed to shape it.
What can these examples teach us about architecture?
Across Elamein’s examples, the useful question is not simply whether a design looks futuristic. It is what the space translates, who can use it, how it relates to ecological systems, and what present-day power relations it exposes or reimagines. This is an editorial way to compare the examples, not a formal taxonomy.
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- Memory can be material. A building’s form, materials and organization may carry meanings tied to a particular community’s history and beliefs. Those meanings need to be described with care and grounded in the relevant context.
- Technology is not automatically liberation. The controlled interior of Pumzi and the cybernetic world of “Herderboy” suggest different relationships between technology and agency: one emphasizes confinement, while the other reworks inherited traditions within an adaptive future.
- Ecology and access are spatial questions. The imagined bunker, the Nile-side mosque and Jeyifous’s unequal Lagos direct attention to how environments, infrastructure and public life are organized—and for whom.
- Futuristic form need not erase cultural reference. The essay’s examples bring vernacular forms, cultural motifs, folklore and advanced systems into contact rather than treating them as opposites.
For construction and design, the practical implication is to look beyond an aesthetic reference. A meaningful translation considers the cultural source, the intended users, the site’s ecological relationships and the distribution of access. Elamein’s essay does not turn its examples into a universal design recipe; it shows how architecture and imagined spaces can help make those questions legible.
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