The Entangled Time Tree is a decolonial futuring heuristic that reimagines the future not as a projection of current trends but as something grown from a multiplicity of pasts. Introduced by Naomi Terry, Azucena Castro, Bwalya Chibwe, Geci Karuri-Sebina, Codruţa Savu and Laura Pereira, it draws on African oral traditions — griots, folklore and indigenous speculation — and on Africanfuturism to acknowledge alternative ways of understanding temporality and to root futuring in place and heritage.
Its visual grammar layers several devices. The Sankofa icon grounds the tree in a past that must be carried forward as the future is navigated; multiple time cones recognise diverse subjectivities rather than a single trajectory; and a cat’s cradle of string figures maps rhizomatic relations between cultures, with no singular dominant viewpoint. The authors frame African storytelling as a critically underexplored form of knowledge for decolonial futuring, operating through three mechanisms:
Stories as power
Narratives that hold and redistribute agency, challenge dominant imaginaries, and shape whose futures come to count.
Stories as healing
Storytelling that metabolises historical and colonial trauma, restoring relationship with land, ancestry and one another.
Stories as diversification
The proliferation of plural visions and pathways, expanding the range of just and ecologically sustainable futures on the continent and beyond.
Also see Sankofa and Three Horizons Model