Artisanal cobalt and lithium mining in southwestern Nigeria operates under conditions Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe would recognize as "necropolitical", zones where human life and ecological survival are subordinated to global capital. The financial architecture sustaining this extraction is headquartered not in Africa but in Toronto, Canada, the undisputed global hub of mining finance. This Research-Creation thesis intervenes at that geographic intersection, asking what a genuinely decolonial technological alternative would look like if designed from within the systems it seeks to challenge.
To answer that question, this thesis introduces the Decolonial Foresight Method (DFM): a three-pillar methodology that combines Africanfuturism as epistemological grounding, Local Foresight as a participatory strategy, and a Material Translation as a variable output mechanism whose form is determined by the deployment community’s context. In this iteration, Material Translation takes the form of Speculative Design and immersive VR prototyping. While existing frameworks, including Escobar's autonomous design and Mohamed et al.'s sociotechnical foresight, identify the need for community-accountable technological methodologies, the DFM operationalizes this need through a structured process: expert interviews translate indigenous cultural values into engineering specifications, which are then tested through immersive digital prototyping.
The methodology produces the Oko Ayo, a biomimetic hexapod mining device whose spider-form draws on the Akan figure of Anansi, whose haptic telemetry reframes extraction as a somatic dialogue with the earth, and whose closed-loop mesh network ensures geological data remains the sovereign property of the local mining community. This device is materialized within an interactive Virtual Reality documentary set in a speculative reclamation zone in southwestern Nigeria.
While this specific thesis applies the DFM to spatial computing and technological hardware, the methodology’s structure is inherently variable, designed to support decolonial innovation across multiple domains, including policy, governance, and institutional design.
The DFM's transferability is propositional at this stage, tested against a single cultural epistemology and a single industrial sector. It is offered as a replicable methodology demonstrating that high technology is not bound to the continuation of colonialism.