THE ETHICS OF FUTURE INTELLIGENCE: HOW AFRICAN LITERATURE CAN INFLUENCE AND ENCOURAGE LOCAL KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION

This paper argues that African literary traditions offer a crucial yet underrecognized foundation for shaping ethical, culturally grounded technological futures. While African writing has long theorized identity, power, and possibility, its insights into “future intelligence” including AI, collective intelligence, and indigenous epistemologies remain marginalized in global discourse. African narratives, spanning oral, realist, and speculative forms, encode relational, ethical, and ecologically informed models of intelligence that challenge reductive, technocentric assumptions. Excluding these epistemic resources narrows conceptions of intelligence and perpetuates technological inequities, undermining local autonomy and epistemic justice. By reframing literature as a mode of technological thought, these texts illuminate theories of agency, responsibility, and communal futurity, providing analytic tools and generative frameworks for envisioning socially accountable, locally rooted technological systems. In doing so, African literature offers a blueprint for an interdisciplinary paradigm that integrates storytelling into policy, education, and technology governance, affirming cultural specificity, intellectual sovereignty, and the right of African communities to author their technological futures