El Duende | Communist Party of Ecuador
Abstract
The dominant narratives about Africa oscillate between two equally reductive extremes: structural backwardness or the demographic future of the planet. Both readings share an implicit assumption: that Africa is still an ‘incomplete’ reality that must reach a civilisational form already defined elsewhere. This essay proposes a different reading. Applying an ontological methodology that distinguishes metabolic, symbiotic and symbolic processes, it argues that Africa does not represent a prior stage of modernity, but a space where the modern separation between life, territory, technique and meaning never fully closed off. That condition—historically violated and today extremely vulnerable—also constitutes an unprecedented civilisational potential at the contemporary ecological-planetary threshold.
Africa Outside the Linear Time of Progress
The radical difficulty in thinking about Africa stems from a framing error. It has been conceived as Europe’s ‘past’, as the ‘backwardness’ of global capitalism, or, more recently, as the ‘future’ owing to its demographics and resources. In all cases, the continent is placed outside the historical present, as if it did not inhabit the same time as the rest of the world.
This temporal displacement conceals the essential: Africa is not a space where life is less organised, but one where life was not totally reorganised according to the ontological parameters of Western modernity. The problem is not the absence of state, market or technique; the problem is the violent superimposition of these forms onto pre-existing vital configurations that never ceased to operate.
Thinking about Africa today requires abandoning the development/underdevelopment axis and situating it directly at the civilisational threshold: that point where the dominant form of organising life enters into contradiction with its own continuity.
African Metabolisms: Life as Open Circulation
Africa harbours some of the most important metabolic systems on the planet: the Congo Basin, the Great Lakes, the Nile, the Sahel, the savannahs and the deserts. These systems do not function as isolated reserves, but as open networks of circulation of energy, water, soil, fauna and human mobility.
Unlike the modern industrial metabolism—closed, intensive, extractive—many African metabolisms have historically been extensive, mobile and regenerative. Nomadic pastoralism, rotational agriculture, seasonal mobility: not as ‘inefficiencies’, but as fine adaptations to variable environments.
The contemporary crisis appears when these open metabolisms are forced to fit into logics of closure: fixed borders, exclusive property, monoculture, concentrated extraction. The collapse is not ‘lack of development’, but the destruction of functional metabolisms.
Africa does not lack metabolism; it lacks sovereignty over it.
African Symbioses: Coexistence Rather Than Domination
In vast African regions there persist—though eroded—forms of relationship between humans, animals, plants and territories that do not rest on absolute domination. Symbiosis is not a metaphor: it is the practical organisation of life.
This is visible in:
• human-animal coexistence in savannahs
• communal land management
• the centrality of cycles
• mobility as a principle of equilibrium
Modernity introduced a lethal device for these symbioses: territory administered without life, conservation without inhabitants, agriculture without diversity. The result was not order, but the rupture of coexistence systems.
Contemporary African conflict is not primarily ethnic or religious: it is symbiotic. It is the constant friction between relational forms of life and devices that demand separation and control.
The Symbolic: When Being Does Not Separate From Relation
Reflection on Africa usually ignores the symbolic dimension, or reduces it to ‘culture’. However, a profound ontological difference is at stake here. In many African cosmovisions, being is not conceived as an isolated entity, but as a relational node: with the community, with the ancestors, with the land, with the non-human.
This does not imply idealisation or permanent harmony. It implies something simpler and more radical: life is not thought of outside its bonds. Language, rite, memory and the word function as symbolic technologies of equilibrium.
The colonial and post-colonial trauma produced a specific wound here: not only material exploitation, but ontological disarticulation, imposing rigid identities where fluid relations once existed.
Africa does not need to ‘recover an identity’; it needs to defend its relational ontology against its commodification.
The National State: A Form That Does Not Organise Life
The modern nation-state, inherited from colonial cartography, appears in Africa with extreme dislocation. Not because the continent is ‘ungovernable’, but because the state does not coincide with the real scales of life.
Fixed borders cut routes, peoples, ecosystems. Centralised states administer territories that produce no sense of belonging. The result is not an absence of order, but a superimposition of incompatible orders.
Here the limit of the state is not a theoretical thesis; it is an everyday experience. Many Africans live in regimes of functional interdependence that the state neither recognises nor articulates.
The question is not how to ‘strengthen’ the state, but how to reduce its ontological violence against forms of life that exceed it.
Technology Without Totality: The African Leap
Africa is today living a singular phenomenon: the massive adoption of digital, financial and communicational technologies without having completed industrial-state totalisation. Mobile payments, digitalised informal networks, distributed connectivity.
This leap is neither backwardness nor miracle. It is ambivalent. It can become:
• a shortcut for capture (data, control, extraction)
• or mediation of pre-existing interdependencies
The difference will not be technical, but ontological: whether technology reinforces living relations or replaces them with external platforms.
Africa does not need to become Silicon Valley. It needs technology not to destroy what sustains life.
Unconscious Interdependence and Extreme Risk
Unlike Europe or North America, Africa never stopped living in interdependence. But that interdependence has historically not been recognised as political, which makes it vulnerable.
When interdependence does not become conscious, it can be exploited, fragmented or governed from outside. The African risk is not the lack of community, but the lack of political translation of that relationality.
Here the threshold is at stake: either interdependence becomes an explicit criterion of decision, or it will be extracted as a cultural and vital resource.
Africa and Ibero-America: Two Non-Identical Mirrors
The dialogue with Ibero-America is instructive. Both regions:
• concentrate planetary life
• suffer from exogenous states
• suffer the capture of vital flows
But there is a key difference: while Ibero-America must reconnect what was separated, Africa must protect what was never fully separated.
This nuance is decisive. There is no model to copy. There are ontological resonances that allow us to think of alliances that are not geopolitical, but civilisational.
Conclusion: Africa Not as Future, But as Decisive Present
Africa is not the future of the world. It is its unclosed present. On a planet that has closed almost all its ontologies under the sign of growth and control, Africa shows—without romanticism and under enormous pressure—that other ways of dwelling remain real, though threatened.
The threshold is not yet to come. It is already here. And Africa is not behind it, but exposed at its most fragile and revealing edge.
What is decided about Africa in this century will not say how developed the world is, but whether it is still capable of living with itself.
Methodological Note
This essay adopts an ontological and relational analytical perspective to examine contemporary configurations of life, territory and power in Africa. The methodology is based on the analytical—not hierarchical—distinction of metabolic, symbiotic and symbolic processes, understood as inseparable dimensions of the social and ecological reproduction of life.
The text engages transversally with political ecology, relational anthropology, African philosophy and postcolonial critique of the modern state, without adhering to a specific theoretical school or proposing a closed normative framework. The aim is not to offer a total explanatory model, but to contribute to a situated reading of the current civilisational threshold, attending to the historical and ontological particularities of the African continent in the contemporary planetary context.
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[AI Use Statement]
The author used natural language processing artificial intelligence tools as support in tasks of linguistic editing, style revision and structural organisation of the manuscript. The conceptual content, the analytical framework, the arguments developed and the final version of the text are of human authorship. The author critically reviewed and assumes full responsibility for the integrity, originality and accuracy of the content presented.
