‘This Thing is Alive’: Cosmic Encounter and Epistemic Liberation in Wesens (2020)

Abstract

This article examines Wesens (Muller 2020), a South African found-footage film set during the Space Race, as a site of Afrofuturist critique and decolonial inquiry. It argues that the film reconfigures the UFO encounter from a narrative of extraterrestrial rupture into an ontological confrontation with suppressed indigenous cosmologies. Drawing on Afrofuturist theory, film studies, and decolonial thought, the analysis situates Wesens within the Cold War techno-scientific imaginary, where outer space is framed as a frontier of conquest and progress. Against this, the film deploys archival aesthetics, mediated visuality, and sonic dissonance to expose regimes of surveillance, epistemic control, and apartheid-era anxieties around race, power, and sovereignty. The enigmatic object at the centre of the narrative is read not as alien intrusion, but as ancestral return, with the emergence of Khoisan figures whose appearance destabilises distinctions between alienness, indigeneity, and being itself. This process culminates in the appearance of a Khoisan woman who identifies herself as Kaang, staging a decolonial rupture that challenges colonial notions of knowledge, being, and historical time. In this way, Wesens demonstrates how Afrofuturism in African cinema functions as a form of epistemic disobedience, reclaiming suppressed pasts to imagine alternative, decolonial futures.