Icebergs in Africa

In April 2018, a plan was announced to solve Cape Town’s water crisis by towing an iceberg from Antarctica to South Africa. Proposed by Nick Sloane, a local marine salvage expert, it rekindled an idea that has been around for decades if not centuries (Leith, Reference Leith2019). Despite the waning of the Capetonian drought (Ziervogel & Joubert, Reference Ziervogel and Joubert2019), there is widespread consensus that Southern African water shortages will gradually worsen, as a result of both climate change and population growth (Boretti & Rosa, Reference Boretti and Rosa2019; Conway et al., Reference Conway, van Garderen, Deryng, Dorling, Krueger, Landman and Dalin2015; Cameron & Katzschner, Reference Cameron and Katzschner2017). Iceberg plans are again gaining attention and corresponding promises of financial investment in both Africa and the Middle East. Sloane’s seemingly outlandish idea has become the “Southern Ice Project,” backed by two South African banks and a Swiss company called Water Vision. South African Antarctic glaciologists and oceanographers are part of the project team (Winter, Reference Winter2019).

Unfinished stories of towed icebergs bring into focus the relationship between Antarctica and Africa, a relationship of proximity yet paradox. The two continents evoke contradictory stereotypes of heat and ice, poverty and wealth, blackness and whiteness. This is an imaginative problem, reflected by a dearth of cultural production linking the two continents, in turn the result of a history of exclusion and marginalisation. When the Treaty was signed in 1959, most African nations had not yet achieved independence from European colonialism – although Ghana’s independence in 1957 was followed by a wave of independence declarations just the year after, in 1960. If the Treaty “froze” territorial claims to Antarctica, then it has also effectively frozen anachronistic colonial and Cold War geopolitics exemplified by the case of African decolonisation. A letter to the editor of the New York Herald Tribune in 1959, the year of the signing of the Antarctic Treaty, acknowledges the analogy:

This intriguing counterfactual possibility could be revisited prospectively as well as retrospectively, prompting us to imagine an independent Antarctica (free from claimants) as well as alternative, interlinked African futures.

This is critical because, as we advance further into what is being called the Anthropocene era, political and imagined geographies are shifting due to melting ice and rising seas. Africa is widely predicted to be the continent worst affected by climate change, an effect of both continental proximity and politico-economic vulnerability, which is in turn the result of racialised histories (Hulme, Doherty, Ngara, New, & Lister, Reference Hulme, Doherty, Ngara, New and Lister2001; van Sittert, Reference van Sittert2015). Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are uniquely implicated as crucial mediators for changing global climate and currents, rainfall patterns, melting ice and sea level change. Antarctica could therefore be determing for Africa’s future, whether in terms of drought or drowning (as an example see Hoogendoorn, Grant, & Fitchett, Reference Hoogendoorn, Grant and Fitchett2016).

In its 60th year, the Antarctic Treaty System now has 54 members from across the globe, in which none of Africa’s 54 countries is included, other than South Africa. Apartheid South Africa was the only African signatory to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, and post-apartheid South Africa remains the exclusive representative of the African continent to Antarctic affairs, whether in politics (as represented by the Antarctic Treaty System) or science (as represented by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research). But despite their history of racist and colonial exclusion from Antarctic affairs, African states such as Zimbabwe and Congo spearheaded the UN debates on the “Question of Antarctica” in the 1980s and 1990s, which asked awkward questions about the manner in which the polar continent was governed (Beck, Reference Beck2006; van der Watt & Swart, Reference van der Watt, Swart, Roberts, van der Watt and Howkins2016). The economic potential of Antarctica including its living resource potential is a matter of concern not just to South Africa but also to others such as Namibia and Mozambique (Reason, Reference Reason2017). In the early era of southern polar exploration, port cities such as Cape Town were crucial stepping stones for the European colonisation of Antarctica. Cape Town in this view becomes not only a slaving and imperial port city, site of colonial incursions into the rest of the continent, but an “Antarctic gateway city,” a jumping-off point for continental engagement with Antarctica and the Southern Ocean into the future (Hofmeyr, Reference Hofmeyr, Bystrom and Slaughter2017; Roldan, Reference Roldan2015).

Importantly, as South African novelist Mohale Mashigo (Reference Mashigo2018) argues, any alternative futures need to be imagined at least in part by and “for Africans living in Africa.” Can we reimagine Antarctica from Africa without reproducing the marginalisation of Africa from the governance of the polar south, and despite the resulting absence of Antarctica from Africa’s cultural production? What, for instance, could a counterfactual Antarctic Black Consciousness look like, or a speculative Pan-African Antarctic (perhaps based on geological notions of a Pan-African belt; see Kröner, Reference Kröner, Schandelmeier and Thorweihe1993)? In this short intervention, I outline two areas of investigation which may act as a provocation to further research in literary and cultural studies: literary perspectives looking south from southern coastlines, and speculative fictions of the two continents’ interlinked climactic futures.

From Southern Africa looking south

One avenue for exploration is to read African literature for southern perspectives – from southern coastlines looking south. Much Southern African literature looks to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, as passageways to northern and eastern populations, with the Cape as the convergence point between the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Scholars have elaborated “thinking from the Cape,” as an intellectual position emphasising mobility and creolisation (Samuelson & Musila, Reference Samuelson and Musila2011). But thinking from the Cape becomes more complicated when looking north to terrestrial Africa. Harry Garuba (Reference Garuba2011) describes this view as symbolised by a statue of Cecil John Rhodes which rests on a mountainside in Cape Town, in which Rhodes is seated on a rearing horse and looking greedily to potential imperial possessions in the north. But what if we look instead over Rhodes’s shoulder? Rather than thinking Africa from the Cape, imagining the far South from Africa.

One example is Lindsey Collen’s Boy, a novel set on the African Indian Ocean island of Mauritius and translated from the original Mauritian Kreol. In it, the boy of the title circumnavigates the island until he reaches a southeastern promontory that is the site of both slave memory and newfound maturity:

The oceanic expanse of the southern Indian Ocean both provides a sense of spacious freedom – “A word comes into my head now, from the thought of that distance. Free.” (Collen, Reference Collen2005, p. 71) – and paradoxically, geologic connection to the far south.

Another example is Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller (Reference Mda2006). In the novel an itinerant protagonist, the eponymous whale caller, wanders along the South African Cape coastal cliffs, watching for a particular whale among the many southern right whales (Eubalaena australis) returning from Antarctic feeding grounds to the shelter of the Southern African coastline. The novel stages an interspecies encounter that extends the geography of the novel (and the continent) both towards the far south and beneath the surface of the sea. The novel links colonial whaling on the Cape coast to older indigenous histories of whale utilisation captured in the archeological record (for a longer discussion, see Samuelson & Lavery, Reference Samuelson and Lavery2019). While the narrator’s perspective is land-based and coastal, the whales trace a circling itinerary from Antarctica to Africa and back again, signalling a submerged connection to those who know where and when to look.

Cold, wet African futures

Other than shared geological histories, Africa and Antarctica are perhaps most intimately connected via weather. The Capetonian drought with which I started was marked by weather maps showing how seasonal storms bringing rain from the Southern Ocean were dissipating before striking the coast, a vivid reminder of oceanic-climatic links. Historically, South Africa’s concern with Antarctica was motivated by weather, a point of intense concern for the white state’s agriculturally based electorate (van der Watt & Swart, Reference van der Watt and Swart2015). Even more so, swiftly progressing climate change calls for creative (re)readings of both canonical and speculative African narratives of rain, drought, cyclones and rising seas as linked to Antarctica-derived weather patterns.

Set on the same stretch of coast as The Whale Caller, “somewhere after Hermanus and before the Eastern Cape,” Mohale Mashigo’s short story “Floating Rugs” (Reference Mashigo2019) describes a related set of submarine connections between the two continents, although directed towards the future rather than the past. The story is told by a young woman who lives beneath the waves of the Cape shoreline, part of a secret community who draws on their knowledge of the sea gained through ancestral “poaching” to become what the narrator ironically calls a “lost conservation tribe” engaged in marine stewardship. In this story, set in the near future after the “snow faraway [has] melted,” seaside holiday homes that had been abandoned due to sea level rise are turned into an underwater resort, only to be abandoned again to become the ramshackle submarine homes of the former fishers and poachers. As in Mda’s novel, Antarctic migratory whales interact with the protagonist, but here the interspecies divide is further narrowed by a shared ecological vulnerability and submarine oceanic home.

This wet future is the climate-changed flip side of the planetary drought depicted in Wanuri Kahiu’s well-known short film, Pumzi. In the film, set “35 years after World War III – ‘The Water War’” in “Maitu Community, East African Territory,” the few remaining survivors are confined to high-tech bunkers where even sweat is mopped up and recycled as precious drinking water. The film explicitly links the catastrophic drought of the future to present climate change by, in the first seconds of the film, panning across framed newspaper headlines announcing rising global temperatures and melting Antarctic ice. Unusually, it also depicts the technological innovation required for survival as coming from the African continent rather than outside (for a longer discussion, see Pereira et al., Reference Pereira, Moyo, Lavery, Selomane, Sitas, Sitas, Trisos, Kemp and Andersson2020).

Other stories depict sea-risen cities from further afield, like a sunken Lagos in “The Last Lagosian” by Wole Talabi (2016), or narrate sudden changes in climate, such as “A Winter in Lagos” by Saratu Abiola (Reference Abiola2014), which depicts the formerly tropical city as snow-bound in arctic conditions. While this new speculative strand of African futurist fiction has rich potential for transcontinental literary exploration, more canonical or realist fiction can also be reread for weather and environmental change (one thinks of Charles Mungoshi’s Waiting for the Rain (Reference Mungoshi1975), for example). Linking both of these, Zambian epic novel The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell (Reference Serpell2019) situates rivers, dams and water at the centre of its narrative, in a productively historical-speculative mode that links dam-building of the colonial past to the dam-busting of a drought-ridden future.

Conclusion: decolonising the African Antarctic Imagination

Exploring the imaginative relationship between Antarctica and Africa is part of a wider call to imagine a postcolonial Antarctic, or to decolonise Antarctic science, history and art (Dodds, Reference Dodds2006; Dodds & Collis, Reference Dodds, Collis, Dodds, Hemmings and Roberts2017; Howkins, Reference Howkins, Mar and Edmonds2010; Scott, Reference Scott, Dodds, Hemmings and Roberts2017). The Antarctic Treaty is by no means devoid of colonial and racial hierarchies. But Antarctica is nevertheless becoming more central to the earth’s and particularly Africa’s future in a time of planetary change (Leane & McGee, Reference Leane and McGee2019). Ongoing and growing entanglements with Antarctica provide rich cultural possibilities, and urgent motivation, for imagining alternate Antarctic and African futures.