Ajadi ends where he began, facing forward. “Afrilition”, he writes, is the light towards a twenty first century African civilisation, a platform for intergenerational awakening. That the African world is ready to express itself fully and to define tomorrow in its own likeness. That the wealth that posterity builds will be measured by the capacity and the practices it leaves for the people who come after. His closing note is both hopeful and demanding, and he knows it. Struggle will come, but dignity, imagination and solidarity are renewable resources, and they renew exactly to the extent that we allow them to.
I. A book that begins with a question, not an argument
Most manifestos begin by telling you what is wrong. Afrilition begins by asking its author something uncomfortable: what kind of ancestor will I become?
That question is the hinge on which the whole book turns, and it is worth sitting with before reading a single page further. It quietly reverses the direction in which most of us think about Africa. We are used to looking backwards, to empire, to the trans-Atlantic trade, to colonial borders and colonial schooling, and measuring ourselves against that wound. Ajadi turns the reader around to face the other way. The people who will judge us are not behind us. They are ahead of us, and they are not yet born.
