African sf: An Introduction (original) (raw)

PROJECT MUSE*

African SF: An Introduction

Ezeiyoke Chukwunonso, Peter J. Maurits, Gibson Ncube, Ruth S. Wenske

Science Fiction Studies, Volume 51, Part 3, November 2024, pp. 353-359 (Article)

Published by SF-TH, Inc.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sfs.2024.a938528

• For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938528

Ezeiyoke Chukwunonso, Peter J. Maurits, Gibson Ncube, Ruth S. Wenske 1{ }^{1}

African SF: An Introduction

In T.L. Huchu’s short story “Egoli” (2020), the elderly protagonist walks through her village reflecting on the imminent departure of her grandson Makamba into outer space. Centering on space travel, the story is unquestionably a work of African science fiction. But what do we make of the legend embedded in “Egoli,” the story of Emperor Chirisamhuru of the Rozvi empire, whose subjects decided to “plunder the heavens and present to their emperor the moon for his plate” (Huchu 6)? While it is tempting to label Chirisamhuru’s story as a supernatural folktale, it is equally fitting to read it as science fiction: according to the legend, the Rozvi people set out to build a tower to reach the moon, which eventually collapsed after termites devoured the mighty wooden structure. This technological and imaginative premise of reaching the stars-the embedded story’s science-fictionality-is mirrored in the futuristic world that “Egoli”'s frame narrative depicts, where Makamba travels to space “to mine gold and other precious minerals” from “some gigantic rocks somewhere in the void beyond the moon but before the stars” (Huchu 7). Together, the frame and embedded stories in “Egoli” collapse the boundaries between the stuff of legends and the stuff of science. It also marries space travel with mining, and the terrestrial with the extraterrestrial and the subterrestrial, thereby imagining African futures through a web of material and imaginative histories that span the earth and beyond.

For us, Huchu’s “Egoli” is emblematic of the main question that occupies this special issue: thinking through the distinction between African science fiction and African speculative fiction (henceforth, African sf) as reflective of the tension between the specificity and typicality of global science fictions. The surge of African science and speculative fiction publications took readers and critics by storm around the 2010s, and the genre has now established itself on the global sf stage. Examples are abundant: films such as Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (2009) and Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009), as well as novels including Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland (2008) and Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) have become classics of sf in general. African sf short-story anthologies from AfroSF (Hartmann 2012) to Africa Risen (Thomas, Knight, and Ekpeki 2022) are widely read, and novels such as Tade Thompson’s Rosewater (2016) and Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019) have won prestigious global literary prizes. All major sf magazines, from Clarkesworld to Asimov’s, have published African sf, just as most major publishers have one of its authors on their books. Disney’s Marvel adapted the work of Mohale Mashigo and Tochi Onyebuchi to comics and screen, HBO is adapting Okorafor’s Who Fears Death (2010), and Netflix released Malenga Mulendema’s Supa Team 4 (2023-). In short, African science and speculative

fiction have become integral parts of global sf, and the distinction between them is more often than not blurred. The following is a brief overview of the debate that has led up to this question of formal definitions.

Scholarship on African sf has flourished alongside the genre’s surge in popularity. This includes numerous special issues (Bould, Adejunmobi, Ryman, Barbini, Clarke, Burger, Egbunike and Nwankwo, and Mangeon and Chavoz), collections on African futurism (Arndt and Ofuatey-Alazard, Okoro), and a multitude of essays exploring various works and themes. Initially, the debate focused on the mechanics of the genre’s upsurge. Byrne, Wood (“South”), and Bould provided extensive overviews of recently published works, and the latter demonstrated that if “African sf has not arrived, it is certainly approaching fast” (Bould, “Introduction” 7). Wole Talabi compiled an exhaustive database for the African Speculative Fiction Society (ASFS, “About the ASFS”) listing well over a thousand works (ASFS, “List of Published African SSF”), and observed a “rapid increase in published works [that] begins in 2011, peaks in 2016, and has somewhat stabilized since” (Talabi “Preliminary”). Geoff Ryman provided a periodization of the upsurge, noting that “Things really took off about 2012. The earliest flickerings were about 2003-though deep roots go back to earlier fantastic writing, and all the way into millennia of African culture.” While the question of whether sf was alien to Africa was still prominent at the time (Okorafor “Africa,” Dilman), evolving insights into the genre’s upsurge and its long history on the continent rendered this issue increasingly irrelevant (cf. Onwualo). Instead, the question arose as to why it gained traction at this particular time (Wood “Monday,” Ryman, Barbini).

With clearer understanding of the current rise of African sf, the focus of the debate has shifted towards understanding the genre within the context of global sf. Two key issues have emerged in this regard: genre naming and indigeneity. The first culminated in Okorafor’s concepts “Africanfuturism” and “Africanjujuism,” which respectively serve as subcategories of science fiction and fantasy with African roots (“Africanfuturism”). These concepts were explicitly defined in contrast to “Afrofuturism,” which is rooted in the USA. This has led to the publication of African sf anthologies (Talabi “Africanfuturism”), essays (e.g. Oku), and monographs (Cleveland) under the Africanfuturism umbrella, and that term has not just gained widespread adoption, but has also partly come to replace the terms “African sf,” “African speculative fiction,” and so on.

The second key issue is indigeneity: “African sf” has formal implications that are specific to the African context, yet raise questions pertinent to sf writ large, as exemplified by Huchu’s “Egoli.” Deirdre C. Byrne demonstrated in her early examination of African sf that “science fiction [that] is indigenous to South Africa … bears the imprint of a unique country and culture” (522). Specifying a continent-wide focus, Delphi Carstens and Mel Roberts suggested that African sf writers “re-articulate oral histories whilst engaging with and creating a future for Africa,” and thus not only concern themselves "with the articulation of techno-enhanced futures, but also accommodate

mythic journeys into the distant past" (81). Wanuri Kahiu, speaking about her sf film Pumzi, wrote that, if “you listen to the stories that have been told for generations, elements of fantasy and science fiction have always existed within them… I am just a new generation of storyteller, using cinema as my tool.” Bould remarked that this raises questions: how “are we to read [African sf works], understand them, categorize them? Can we move beyond European models of fiction, without neglecting the long history of interactions and influences between continents?” (11). For Moradewun Adejunmobi, in her special issue the goal was “not so much to prove that all the creative works under consideration are science fiction, but to determine how African authors use sf (science fiction) elements to interrogate the sociopolitical arrangements that inform the African condition in the current age” (265). She adopted Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.'s notion that sf is more an attitude than a kind of text. With this in mind, it is perhaps unsurprising that the ASFS preferred “speculative” in its name, to include “Science Fiction and Fantasy, [as it is] the broadest possible definition” (ASFS “About”).

This special issue on African sf locates itself firmly within the outlined tradition. It brings together six essays on African sf works that collectively shed light on the development and evolution the field has undergone, while engaging contemporary questions that transcend both geographic and generic boundaries and explore African sf’s engagement with themes of gender, intersectionality, ecology, and climate change. 2{ }^{2} At their core, all the essays address the sf genre itself. With Adejunmobi, we understand this against the backdrop of Csicsery-Ronay’s account of the shifting sf landscape. For him, science fiction is no longer a matter of strict generic boundaries separating the scientific from the fantastic, but rather “more and more models of the fantastic flow together from different artistic and folk traditions,” so that science fiction “will include more and more assemblages involving incongruous ontologies of motivation” (480-81). Building on and supplementing that thesis, this issue scrutinizes how African sf challenges and redefines previous understandings of the genre; how prominent themes including temporality, community, embodiment, relational interconnectedness, and the use of African cosmology problematize the boundaries among science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, realism, and even autobiography from an African perspective.

We have chosen to use the overarching term “African sf” to intentionally confuse the boundary between “African science fiction” and “African speculative fiction”-which for us includes Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism-reflecting that in our view they are inseparable, and expanding the “science” in sf to include Indigenous technologies, including architecture, art, herbal knowledge, language, divination, memory, and narrative. Aligned with this choice, the authors in this issue revitalize existing or coin new concepts, not to describe the genre as a whole in a different way, but rather to highlight specific narrative dynamics that engage science fiction conventions and tropes. Thus, Megan Fourqurean returns to the concept of literary realism and Gibson Ncube combines “speculative sankofarration”

(Brooks et al. 2017) and “reflexive nostalgia” (2001). Joanna Woods suggests the term “metallic mode,” Keren Omry creates the concept of “allotropic temporality,” Marta Mboka Tveit proposes “meshwork ecology” and Ruth S. Wenske coins the term “near-omniscient narration.”

The articles in this special issue are thus all invested in exploring the specific stakes of African sf as they examine canonical texts by Nnedi Okorafor, Akwaeke Emezi, Namwali Serpell, and T.L. Huchu, lesser-known ones by Nick Wood, Mame Bougouma Diene, Temitayo Olofinlua, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, Tlotlo Tsamaase, and Andrew Miller, and artwork by Patra Ruga. Ultimately, they engage a question that has long captivated sf scholarship, for as Carl Freedman has argued, “It is symptomatic of the complexity of science fiction as a generic category that critical discussion of it tends to devote considerable attention to the problem of definition” (13). Joanna Woods’s article follows in that tradition, suggesting that we think of the affordances of metal as a metaphor for “the formal changes that the ASF mode brings to speculative fiction at large.” Woods explores the connection between mining and scrap metal in the Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift and Andrew Miller’s Dub Steps (2015), showing how metal’s malleability, ductility, conductivity, and recyclability suggest a metaphor for African sf’s ability to “undergo and withstand significant rupture and re-formation as it makes and remakes itself in conversation with literary conventions such as Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism” (396). This penchant for literalizing metaphors is characteristic of sf in general, as well as what Harry Garuba calls “Animist Materialism,” a theoretical framework on which many articles in this special issue draw, demonstrating the inherent science fictionality of African narration.

Using the affordances of natural elements to think through the generic properties of African sf, Keren Omry’s article adopts the concept of allotropy-the property of elements to exist in different forms but in the same physical state-to think through historicity, temporality, and reliability in Southern African sf. Examining works by Serpell, Tsamaase, Wood, and Ndlovo, Omry centers on the dynamics of mutual obligation, or ubuntu, as a community-centered rationale, and develops the concept of “allotropic temporality” to describe futural narratives that resist the binaries of utopia and dystopia by developing ethical alternative futures grounded in community.

While Omry’s readings demonstrate the centrality of community to imagining African futures, Gibson Ncube’s article explores how ancestors embody the interconnectedness of past, present, and future in T.L. Huchu’s “Egoli” (2020) and Temitayo Elofinlua’s “The Last Brown Roof” (2022). Against the stories’ futuristic settings, Ncube centers on the elderly protagonists in the two stories, arguing that the grandmothers embody ancestors whose physical bodies always already reject the dichotomies between life and death, past and future, physical and metaphysical. Arguing that, paradoxically, the ancestors-rather than the youth-are the future, Ncube uses the term “speculative sankofarration” to trace how the stories’

manipulation of futurism is at once science fictional and rooted in traditional African cosmologies.

The centrality of climate-related issues in African sf is evident in the texts analyzed by all the authors in this volume. Yet Marta Mboka Tveit’s article places the most sustained focus on environmental concerns, arguing that sustainable futures lie at the heart of contemporary African sf, as it registers the environmental ethos of Indigenous African ways of life. Tveit explores the concept of “meshwork ecology,” based on work by Diene and Ruga, to examine how these works interrogate colonial histories, emphasize human and non-human interconnectedness, and challenge modernist temporalities. By highlighting the relationality and interdependency of all beings, the essay argues for new ecological perspectives in African science fiction to address climate change and environmental justice.

Megan Fourqurean’s article engages with the concept of the ogbanje-a spirit-person who exists in between the physical and spiritual realms-to reflect on the boundaries and definitions of African sf. Using Emizi’s Freshwater as a case study, Fourqurean suggests the possibility of reading the genre as a realistic narrative, showing how such a reading foregrounds African (Igbo) ontology in a world that often invalidates such cosmology. At the same time, this reading offers an agential queer futurism that encompasses the interconnectivity of human and the non-human in a kinship.

Finally, in the essay that opens this special issue, Ruth S. Wenske introduces the notion of “non-human near-omniscience” to describe narrators with super-human knowledge in African sf, as exemplified in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon. Wenske argues that these narrators draw on African animist traditions characterized by relationality rather than absolute power, and that such near-omniscience also informs the representation of technology in the novel as localized, embodied, and focused on agency (what things do) rather than essence (what they are). Non-human omniscience foregrounds interconnectedness and self-reflexivity, highlighting its relevance to contemporary and broader epistemological questions in African sf. In doing so, the special issue joins a growing body of works that theorize African sf on the world stage.

NOTES

1. The names of the editors are listed in alphabetical order. All editors have participated equally.
2. The articles in this issue came together through two panels organized by the guest editors: a double panel titled “African Speculative Fiction: Alternative Futures, Alternative Pasts” at the 2022 annual conference of the Science Fiction Research Association (University of Oslo) and a three-day seminar titled “Embodying the Future: (Meta)Physical and Metaphoric Bodies in Africanfuturism and Afrofuturism” at the 2022 annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association (National Taiwan Normal University, online).

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