A Subterranean Anthropocene

«Africa’s rock art is the common heritage of all Africans and all people. It is the common heritage of humanity”. With these words, the former Secretary-General Kofi Annan (2005) Former UN called for the protection of Africa’s rock art in an increasingly fragile world. Art on rocks and in caves provides testimonies of humans on Earth, almost as spikes signifying humans’ appearance on geological timescales. Such rocks and caves are sites where human- and geohistory intersect, or where the boundary between cultural and geological heritages blurs. In this paper, we discuss the African-centered perspective on the Anthropocene introduced by the Nairobi-based collective of architects Cave-bureau (https://www.cave.co.ke/). By engaging with their influential rethinking of the Anthropocene (https://www.cave.co.ke/origin), we will scrutinize caves as sites of epistemological struggles about humanity ‘being’ on Earth: “As we look today at the postcolonial African city, ‘caves’ made by both men and women have broadened onto a rural and urban network with varying degrees of complexity” (https://www.cave.co.ke/opening-a). Whereas a universalizing discourse on caves as humanity’s ‘common’ heritage geologizes colonial visions of an African immemorial past, Cave-bureau reflects on alternative ways of knowing, opening up caves as sites for decolonial knowledge and practices. For Cave-bureau, African caves are promising sites for reinventing the link between deep time and the colonial archive, thus unsettling Western notions of the Anthropocene.