In the mid-1990s, Mark Sinker, Mark Dery, John Akomfrah and others concocted a mutagenic virus called «afrofuturism». It spread like wildfire and changed everything. It made the invisible visible, and taught us to see differently. It rewired our synapses, encoding a counter-history in our minds. Where previously there had been the work of disparate authors, artists and musicians of colour, it fabricated a tradition – a living one, altering our reality and creating new futures.
And so it is really no surprise that now, when African science fiction suddenly seems to be everywhere, the media, as prone to amnesia as they are averse to research, presume it did not exist before they condescended to notice it and blithely label it «afrofuturism». But African science fiction can be traced back more than a century, at least as far as Egyptian Muhammad al-Muwaylihi’s timeslip satire, ‹A Period of Time›, which began newspaper serialisation in 1898, and South African Joseph J. Doke’s 1913 lost race novel, ‹The Secret City: A Romance of the Karroo›.
Depending on your definitions, African science fiction includes some of the most highly regarded of the continent’s authors. Algerian Mohammed Dib’s ‹Who Remembers the Sea› (1962) offers an estranged vision of French colonial occupation, while South African J.M. Coetzee’s ‹Waiting for the Barbarians› (1980) enfables the colonial frontier and the kinds of encounter possible in a nexus predicated on such violence. Congolese Sony Labou Tansi’s ‹Life and A Half› (1977) and Kenyan Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s ‹Wizard of the Crow› (2006) are dark comedies of life in the fantasticated postcolony. South African Nadine Gordimer’s ‹July’s People› (1981) imagines an end to Apartheid, and Djiboutian Abdourahman A. Waberi’s ‹In the United States of Africa› (2006) imagines an alternate world in which African nations colonised Europe. Fantastical Yoruba landscapes, from D.O. Fagunwa’s ‹Forest of a Thousand Daemons› (1939) and Amos Tutuola’s ‹The Palm-Wine Drinkard› (1952) to Ben Okri’s ‹The Famished Road› (1991), frequently verge on the science-fictional. At the pulpier end of the genre, African secret agents, more or less explicitly based on James Bond, saved the continent in early 1980s novels by Kenyan David G. Maillu and Nigerian Valentine Alily. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the radio adventures of the white superhero Jet Jungle were broadcast in South Africa and then-Rhodesia; black superhero comics began to appear in the 1970s, with Nigeria’s Powerman, aka Powerbolt, and South Africa’s Mighty Man, who also featured in an IsiZulu movie, and Supermask.
Recalling this long history is not to deny that there is currently an upsurge in African science fiction and in the international attention it is attracting. In 2010, the first Kenyan science fiction movie, Wanuri Kahiu’s ‹Pumzi›, won Best Short Film at the Cannes Independent Film Festival, and South African Neill Blomkamp’s ‹District 9› was nominated for four Oscars, seven BAFTAs and a Golden Globe. In 2011, Nigerian-American Nnedi Okorafor’s ‹Who Fears Death› won the World Fantasy Award and South African Lauren Beukes’s ‹Zoo City› won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. In 2012, Zimbabwean Ivor Hartmann edited ‹AfroSF›, the first anthology of science fiction by African writers – and it has been followed in rapid succession by ‹Lagos 2060›, ‹Jalada: Afrofutures›, ‹Terra Incognita›, ‹African Monsters›, ‹AfroSF 2›, ‹Imagine Africa 500› and the online magazine ‹omenana›. Right now, Miguel Llansó’s ‹Crumbs›, the first Ethiopian science fiction movie, is busy winning awards on the Circuit festival in Barcelona. Calling this outpouring «afrofuturist» has a certain click-baiting, search-engine-optimising value, but adopting it requires careful reflection – and those outside the continent need to be really wary of imposing it. South African musician Spoek Mathambo resists the label because of its apparent emphasis on futurity: «Through sound and film, I am trying to articulate a very current reality. My vision of where we are now. I have a rich history and an exciting present. That is where a reading of my work and energy should lie.»There is, however, a strong disjunction between afrofuturist works and the connotations of the term. Afrofuturism is an alchemical crucible in which past and present and future burn together and smelt and alloy. It is precisely as preoccupied with futurity as science fiction is with science – that is, only sometimes and, even then, depending on who you ask.
But there is another, stronger reason for caution. Dery described afrofuturism as «speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture – and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically-enhanced future». This definition accomplished at least five important things. It cast the afrofuturist net wider than just science fiction, so the handful of genre writers (Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Steven Barnes, John Faucette, Charles Saunders) and others writing in speculative modes (John A. Williams, Ishmael Reed, Amira Baraka, etc.) were recontextualised in relation to each other, to science fiction and to literary fiction. It constructed a field that reached far beyond the prose fiction emphasis then typical of science fiction studies – it was about signification, about sounds and images as much writing. It articulated marginality (and a moral high ground) in terms of appropriating – poaching, hacking, détourning – white culture. It laid claim to the future for peoples of African descent. And it focused very specifically on African American experience, which although far from monolithic does have some specific major determinants.
This definition has expanded in the intervening quarter century. In 2003, for example, British-Ghanian Kodwo Eshun wrote that the conventions of science fiction «function as allegories for the systemic experience of post-slavery black subjects in the twentieth century» and that afrofuturism therefore recast science fiction «in the light of Afrodiasporic history». Such an expansion beyond America to the whole diaspora can be understood as a response to the work from new writers who foregrounded the intersectionality of post-colonial identities. For example, Jamaican-Canadian (by way of Guyana) Nalo Hopkinson’s ‹Midnight Robber› (2000) reworks the American science fiction tradition of the planetary romance in a distinctly Caribbean mode, not least in its evocations of rebel Maroon leader Nanny and Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture. British-Trinidadian Anthony Joseph’s ‹The African Origins of UFOs› (2006) mashes up cyberpunk, interplanetary science fiction, and drug-induced timeslips back to ancient Iëre and contemporary Trinidad, into a heady afro-psychedelic noir.
While such remarkable texts strain the definition of Afrofuturism to breaking point, arguably there is still a common experience underlying and continuing to shape Afrodiasporic culture. According to Edouard Glissant, the brutal dislocation of the slave trade forestalled the possibility of Afrodiasporic «historical consciousness [being] deposited gradually and continually like a sediment». Others have argued that this particular experience of historical space-time inspired a diasporic black aesthetic that can be understood in terms of scratching, dubbing, breaking, mixing and remixing.
But an aesthetic cannot be separated from content, and a common experience can never be uniform. Kenyan-Canadian Minister Faust, whose own fiction frequently riffs on Egyptian mythology, emphasises the extraordinary diversity of the African diaspora, noting that the effects «on self-conception that the American continent-wide rape gulag had on the West Africans who became the African Americans (…) were profoundly different from those experienced by the so-called indentured servants, that is to say, the millions of European slaves». Consequently, it is no surprise that African-American science fiction frequently returns to particular experience of diaspora: lost African history in Pauline Hopkinson’s ‹Of One Blood› (1902) and Sun Ra’s Astro-Black Mythology; the colour line in W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‹ The Comet› (1920) and George Schuyler’s ‹Black No More› (1931); the neo-slave narrative in Delany’s ‹Stars in My Pocket, Like Grains of Sand› (1984) and all of Octavia Butler’s novels; revolution in Martin Delany’s ‹Blake, or The Huts of America› (1850), Sutton Griggs’s ‹Imperium in Imperio› (1899), Schuyler’s ‹Black Empire› (1936–38) and the black power sf of the 1960s and 1970s; ghetto confinement and the new Jim Crow in Steven Barnes’s ‹Street Lethal› (1983) and Tony Puryear and Erika Alexander’s ‹Concrete Park› comics (2014–).
But what of the science fiction of those who were not «Taken Away» but «Left Behind»? Ugandan filmmaker Dilman Dila, whose ‹A Killing in the Sun› (2015) is arguably the first single-author collection of African science fiction short stories, is concerned with the complex identities produced in the postcolony. His fictional worlds are determined by long histories of colonialism and anti-colonial struggle, slavery and emancipation, ethnic hierarchy and métissage, hypocrisy and hybridity. Characters are often adrift in the confusions of war, or subjected, not always willingly, to alien symbioses and other ambivalent compromises. His protagonists integrate traditional ecological knowledge and the empirical method into everyday life while eschewing both spirit worship and the capitalist technoscientific apparatus. They refute any supposed return to a pre-colonial Africa, even if such a thing could be recovered, since there was never a monolithic Africa or Africanicity or négritude.
Okorafor’s ‹Zahrah the Windseeker› (2005) is set in the Ooni kingdom, where technology is based on plant-life and some of the plants are intelligent. In ‹The Shadow Speaker› (2007), a bio-magical Peace Bomb unleashes transformative magic, dislocating spatiality and giving humans superpowers. In ‹Akata Witch› (2011) a quartet of magical tweens, including the albino African-American protagonist, must hone their skills to defeat a serial killer preying on Nigerian children. Each of these young adult novels involves a quest and a coming-of-age in a world in which revenant colonial power relations are imbricated into West African postcolonies, into worlds – like those of Tutuola – in which the mythical and supernatural is part of every reality. ‹Who Fears Death›, which explicitly references ‹The Palm-Wine Drinkard›, is set in a post-apocalyptic Sudan. The story follows Onyesonwu, a child of wartime interethnic rape shunned by her mother’s people and subjected to female genital mutilation, as she develops the magical powers with which to defeat her evil sorcerer father.
There is sorcery in Llansó’s ‹Crumbs›, too, or at least a witch who sanctions Candy’s quest through a post-apocalyptic Ethiopia, in which the apocalypse might just be indistinguishable from colonialism. The film starts among the exquisitely infolded mineral structures found in the volcanic landscape of Dallol, a potash- and sylvite-mining ghost-town, above which a derelict citadel-spaceship hovers, and moves through highlands and down along abandoned rail lines into deserted cities. Humanity is dying out, leaving nothing but débris to be salvaged, history to be misremembered and repurposed, record albums and plastic toys to be traded and written into legend (and a global archive of film, everything from Tarkovsky and Kubrick and ‹The Texas Chain Saw Massacre› to the 1979 Turkish Superman knock-off, to be woven into its intertextual web).
Salvage is central, also, to the work of and South African Ralph Borland and Kenyan Cyrus Kabiru. The former’s ‹African Robots› project takes the contemporary street art of crafting three-dimensional forms from electrical wires, fencing and decorative scraps of metal, wood and plastic, and adds basic electronic components to transform and animate them. Kabiru is probably best known for his C-Stunners, elaborate eyeglasses – made from trash, particularly e-waste, found in the streets of Nairobi – that look like masks for some fabulous steampunk / cyberpunk junkyard ball. In the postcolony, the street finds its own uses for things. «I try to give trash a second chance», Kabiru says, «I change it to be something else, which is like it will stay for more than 100 years now.»These are just five of the many science fiction creators currently working in Africa. To label their work afrofuturist would not, as Mathambo fears, burden them with simply futurological orientation. But it would risk subsuming and subordinating them to a first world perspective – an episteme, a teleology, a neo-colonialism – and it would force a not-necessarily-helpful colour-line to be erected within African science fiction.
Of course, calling it African science fiction has just as many – and some of the same – problems.
