Ancestrality

Ancestrality is Bayo Akomolafe’s counter to a progress story that empties locality and treats the past as something to leave behind. In Bayo Akomolafe: The Untimely, he defines ancestry not as romantic return but as the immediacy of other bodies in the room.

The concept matters because it challenges catch-up narratives. When Africa or any place is judged by how quickly it becomes more like the West, Modern Time Discipline turns local presence into deficiency and makes progress depend on shedding relations that are already active.

Key Claims

• Ancestry is not merely a museum past or nostalgic identity.
• Progress narratives can require people to abandon locality, relation, and inherited presence.
• The Untimely depends partly on sensing more bodies and times than modern progress allows.

Connections

• Bayo Akomolafe - speaker defining the concept in the Q&A.
• Yoruba Twin Cosmology - earlier source frame for non-linear relation among birth, age, and successor roles.
• Modern Time Discipline - progress and catch-up order the concept resists.
• Attention As Weather - adjacent frame for which bodies and insights become perceptible.