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Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 3(3), pp 265–272 September 2016.

© Cambridge University Press, 2016 doi:10.1017/pli.2016.28

Introduction: African Science Fiction

Moradewun Adejunmobi
University of California, Davis

As recently as 2009, the Nigerian-American writer, Nnedi Okorafor could ask in a

blogpost, “Is Africa ready for science fiction?”1 She followed this up in 2014 with an
equally provocative statement: “African science fiction is still alien.”2 Neither the
question nor the statement represented her own convictions; instead they were
intended as conceits to instigate conversation about a larger concern, namely,
the place of science fiction in African literature and cinema. This special issue
of the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (PLI) on African science
fiction extends that conversation with studies of the work of Okorafor herself, but
also that of Lauren Beukes, Kojo Laing, Frances Bodomo, and Deji Bryce Olukotun,
among others.
Some of the works that will be discussed in this special issue are clearly science
fiction, but with other texts, the links are more tenuous. The goal here is 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. As
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., a leading theorist of science fiction, recently conceded in
speaking about global science fiction, “Sf will be less a kind of text and more a specific
attitude…”3 In agreement with Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., we are probably on a
stronger footing inquiring for sf conventions and sf tropes in African literature and
cinema, than searching mainly for generic conformity. Some preliminary and extre-
mely useful work has already been done to begin laying out the terrain for African
science fiction studies. Thus, and for an introduction to scholarship on African science
fiction, one might look to a number of publications within the past few years.4

1 See http://nnedi.blogspot.com/2009/08/is-africa-ready-for-science-fiction.html, Accessed August 20, 2016.

2 See http://nnedi.blogspot.com/2014/01/african-science-fiction-is-still-alien.html, Accessed August 20, 2016
3 Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., “What Do We Mean When We Say ‘Global Science Fiction’? Reflections on
a New Nexus,” Science Fiction Studies 39.3 (2012), 481.
4 For earlier publications on African science fiction, see Mark Bould, “African Science Fiction 101,”
SFRA Review 311 Winter (2015), 11–18. Bould offers a comprehensive overview of works by Africans that
can be read from a science fiction perspective, although the author himself concedes that he is “neither an
Africanist, nor an expert on African literatures and cultures” (11). Bould also edited a special issue of the
journal Paradoxa, dedicated to African science fiction in 2014: Mark Bould, “Africa SF: Introduction,”
Paradoxa, 25 (2014), 7–15. One of the earliest articles published on African science fiction is Deidre
Byrne’s 2004 article in PMLA: Deirdre C. Byrne, “Science Fiction in South Africa,” PMLA 119.3 (2004),
522–525. A special edition of the journal, African Identities (7.2), in 2009 was titled “The genre of science
fiction and the black imagination”; however, only one of the papers in that special issue focused on
African science fiction, namely Taiwo Osinubi’s “Cognition’s Warp: African Films on Near-future Risk”
(255–274). Other articles in the special edition of African Identities looked to African American and
African diasporic literature to make the connection between the black imagination and science fiction.

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 266 MORADEWUN ADEJUNMOBI

How then do we read African fiction in the early twenty-first century as science
fiction? Within the field of science fiction studies, interest in postcolonial science
fiction has been growing for some time and provides suggestive pathways for reading
African science fiction. 5 At least some of this interest stems from a recognition
of the extent to which the cultural politics of empire helped to incubate the genre of
science fiction. John Rieder notes, for example, that the rising thirst for exploration
of alien worlds in fiction starting in the nineteenth century, cannot be detached from
growing awareness of an impending disappearance of a certain kind of exploration.
He remarks:

If the Victorian vogue for adventure fiction in general seems to ride the rising tide of
imperial expansion, particularly into Africa and the Pacific, the increasing popularity of
journeys into outer space or under the ground in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries probably reflects the near exhaustion of the actual unexplored areas of the
globe…. Having no place on Earth left for the radical exoticism of unexplored territory,
the writers invent places elsewhere.6

This is not to say that science fiction, historically, or in the present has always been
complicit with the interests of empire.7 Nonetheless, the crosscurrents flowing
between representations of alien encounters and the politics of colonialism remain an
enduring subject of interest for scholars as evidenced by the many articles examining
the films, District 9 and Avatar, as allegories of colonial encounters. Indeed, Neill
Blomkamp’s District 9 is arguably the work that first revealed the extent to which it
was possible to bring together science fiction and the problematic of postcoloniality for
those scholars of African literature and cinema who had not previously given any
thought to science fiction as a viable genre for African writers or filmmakers.8
Since then, scholarly discussions of District 9 have proliferated, but not necessarily
in tandem with references to the wider context for African science fiction.9 Gradually
though, a small number of critics did begin to discern sf traits in other African

5 See for example, Jessica Langer, Science Fiction and Postcolonialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011); Masood Ashraf Raja, Jason W. Ellis, and Swaralipi Nandi, eds. The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on
Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011); and Eric Smith,
Globalization, Utopia, and Postcolonial Science Fiction: New Maps of Hope (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012).
6 John Reider, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 2008), 3–4.
7 In the words of Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.: “To say that sf is a genre of empire does not mean that sf
artists seek to serve the empire. Most serious writers of sf are skeptical of entrenched power, sometimes
because of its tyranny, sometimes because it hobbles technological innovation.” “Science Fiction and
Empire,” Science Fiction Studies 30.2 (2003), 241.
8 Earlier forays into science fiction by filmmakers Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Sylvestre Amoussou were
often read as somewhat solitary experiments by these filmmakers, rather than as pointers to a significant
new turn in African literary and filmic production.
9 See for example, Michael Valdez Moses, Lucy Valery Graham, John Marx, Gerald Gaylard, Ralph
Goodman, and Stefan Helgesson, “District 9: A Roundtable,” Safundi: A Journal of South African and
American Studies 11.1/2 (2010), 155–175; John Rieder, “Race and Revenge Fantasies in Avatar, District 9,
and Inglorious Basterds,” Science Fiction Film and Television 4.1 (2011), 41–56; Lorenzo Veracini,
“District 9 and Avatar: Science Fiction and Settler Colonialism,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 32.4
(2011), 355–367.

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 INTRODUCTION: AFRICAN SCIENCE FICTION 267

literature and cinema texts that were already in circulation well before the 2009 release
of District 9.10
With the benefit of hindsight, it is surprising that a science fiction framework for
reading African literature did not surface much earlier. One need look no further than
some definitions of science fiction to understand why the building blocks of this genre
might prove attractive to African artists pondering the unfinished project of post-
colonial liberation. In one of his early essays, for example, Darko Suvin defines science
fiction as a literary genre “whose main formal device is an imaginative framework
alternative to the author’s empirical environment.”11 The familiar sf tropes of alien
encounters, speculative technologies, utopias and dystopias obviously serve to
instantiate this particular device. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. elaborates further on the
idea of an alternative to the empirical environment when he describes science fiction
as attending to the “gap that lies between the conceivability of future transformations
and the possibility of their actualization,”12 and pointing to “a complex hesitation
about the relationship between imaginary conceptions and historical reality unfolding
into the future.”13 The notion of novum, or “a strange newness” is central to Suvin’s
conceptualization of science fiction.14 In later writings, Suvin specified additionally
that the novum “entails a change of the whole universe of the tale, or at least of
crucially important aspects thereof.”15 Even outside the formal scope of science fiction
studies, these particular sf-identified features noted by Suvin and Csicsery-Ronay Jr.
are extremely relevant to certain strands of African literature and cinema. How else,
for example, could one possibly read Abdourahman Waberi’s In the United States of
Africa, except as an illustration of that gap between “between the conceivability of
future transformations and the possibility of their actualization”?16
If, furthermore, the “cognitive estrangement” that Suvin also discerns in science
fiction was already a feature of African magical realist and fantasy narratives,17
ranging from D.O. Fagunwa’s Forest of a Thousand Daemons to Amos Tutuola’s The
Palm-Wine Drinkard and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, it becomes increasingly
clear how long African literature has been on the cusp of science fiction. Although the
speculative worlds created by authors like Fagunwa, Tutuola, and Okri are clearly
indebted to indigenous myth and folklore, these speculative worlds are not depicted as
incompatible with the technologies of modernity such as telephones, televisions,
bombs, and cameras, among others. Occasionally too, the technologies themselves are
speculative as in Tutuola’s well-known figure of the television-handed ghostess. The
decision to include any kind of technoscience in these fantasy worlds is itself note-
worthy, and is a subject awaiting further study, especially in relation to the practice of
speculation and the function of magical resources in the same narratives. That the

10 For example, several of the articles in the special issue of Paradoxa on African science fiction examine
works published before the 2009 release of the film District 9.
11 Darko Suvin, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” College English 34.3 (1972), 375.
12 Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., “The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway,” Science Fiction Studies 18.1
(1991), 387.
13 Ibid, 388.
14 Suvin, “Poetics,” 373.
15 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1979), 64.
16 Csicsery-Ronay Jr., “Theory,” 387.
17 Suvin, “Poetics,” 372.

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 268 MORADEWUN ADEJUNMOBI

possible parallels and areas of coincidence between African magical realism and
African science fiction, have been frequently overlooked until recently, can be
attributed to the fact, observed by Ken Gelder, speaking about the genre of horror, that
scholars of postcoloniality have often been more interested in high-brow rather than
low brow and popular fictions.18 Thus, for example, the spectrality of African magical
realist fictions from Okri to Kojo Laing has been a more attractive subject than the
science fiction dimensions of work by the same authors in African literary studies.
There are of course significant areas of probable divergence between sf and the
problematic of postcolonial liberation as imagined by African writers and filmmakers.
To start with, the power and promise of technoscience are rarely realized in the
African postcolony. But this might be the reason why for a growing number of African
authors, representations of functioning technologies belong more so in the realm of
speculative fictions than in realist works, whether such fictions address the future, or
adopt a backwards glance, seeking to create what Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, one of the
contributors to this special issue, calls a “speculative history.”19 More problematically
for African science fiction, the enforcement of a strict separation between works
incorporating supernatural or magical elements and those works exploring the out-
comes of speculative technologies has a long history in sf studies. No less a scholar of
sf than Csicsery-Ronay Jr. has confessed that for a long time, he “resisted expanding
the term sf to cover writing that does not exclude ‘supernatural’ motivations.”20 And
while in the same article, he was willing to admit the emergence of a global sf blending
the “folkloric, mythological, supernatural” with technoscience,21 scholars in African
cultural studies are likely to protest when he also diagnoses the mixing of “cyber-skills
with witchcraft” among the Sakawa Boys of Ghana as evidence of a premodernist
sensibility.22 To the contrary, it is precisely modernity and futurity that are at stake in
these combinations. As Jean and John Comaroff have aptly put it with respect to the
functions of beliefs in magical powers in a neoliberal South Africa, this actually
amounts to “a retooling of culturally familiar technologies as new means for new
ends.”23 Three of the five contributors to this special issue (Hugh Charles O’Connell,
Ian MacDonald, and Brady Smith) write about works where supernatural abilities
associated with indigenous spirituality interface with technoscience. And, Ian
MacDonald goes so far as to bestow an original term on this coupling: “jujutech”
which might apply to many other works of African science fiction and fantasy.24
The proposal for this special issue on African science fiction grew out of a panel
titled “African Sci-Fi and Horror” organized at the annual convention of the Modern

18 See Ken Gelder, “Introduction: Global/Postcolonial Horror,” Postcolonial Studies 3.1 (2000), 35.
19 Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, “Afronauts: On Science Fiction and the Crisis of Possibility,” Cambridge
Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3.3 (2016).
20 Csicsery-Ronay Jr., “Global Science Fiction,” 480.
21 Ibid, 481.
22 Ibid, 482. For more on the Sakawa phenomenon, see Alice Armstrong, “‘Sakawa’ Rumors: Occult
Internet Fraud and Ghanaian Identity,” Working Paper No. 08/2011, UCL Anthropology Working
Papers Series (2011).
23 Comaroff, “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African
Postcolony,” American Ethnologist 26.2 (1999), 284.
24 Ian P. MacDonald, “‘Let Us All Mutate Together’: Cracking the Code in Laing’s Big Bishop Roko and
the Altar Gangsters,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3.3 (2016).

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 INTRODUCTION: AFRICAN SCIENCE FICTION 269

Language Association of America in 2015. The five contributors to this sf cluster read
selected works of African literature as science fiction, or for science fiction, but they
also enter into dialogue with multiple strands of theorizing on science fiction in the
writings of Donna Haraway, Darko Suvin, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Kodwo Eshun,
and Fredric Jameson among others. At the same time, their contributions exhibit
familiarity with questions relevant to a broad spectrum of African literature, extending
well beyond African science fiction. In short, these papers represent a further step
towards centering science fiction scholarship in African literary studies.
Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra’s article in this issue of PLI addresses a nexus of concerns
that is usually held as a defining feature of sf, namely technological advancement and
the deployment of speculative technologies, in three novels and two visual works.
Space exploration is the speculative technology in play in Deji Olukotun’s Nigerians in
Space, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, and the two visual works: Cristina de
Middel’s The Afronauts and Frances Bodomo’s Afronauts. While Sony Labou Tansi’s
Life and a Half focuses on a different kind of technological advance; what it has in
common with the other works discussed, is the incongruity of placing projects
dependent on advanced technologies in an African setting. The presumed incom-
mensurability between deployment of advanced technology and an African setting is
the starting point for Armillas-Tiseyra’s discussion of how a novum can be generated
in relation to an African context. As she rightly notes, “At stake here are assumptions
about “Africa”—as a set of ideas about the continent—and its relationship to
technology as well as to “modernity,” as defined by the global North.”25 The fact that,
a planned voyage to the moon, the “speculative technology” featured in four of the
works is in fact no longer speculative in the early twenty-first century is directly
relevant to Armillas-Tiseyra’s argument about speculation and the novum. All of the
works in question were produced decades after the space exploration race of the Cold
War. For Armillas-Tiseyra, this rewriting of a real history in which Africa had no place
is itself a “utopian gesture” and a way of creating a speculative history.
In her paper, and even more so than Armillas-Tiseyra, Nedine Moonsamy takes
up the sf trope of utopia, and in this instance, technologically produced and sterile
utopias. Her study of three short stories from the Afro SF: Science Fiction by African
Writers Vol I (2012) anthology,26 considers how the friction between the emancipa-
tory potential of an imagined utopia and the danger of contagion from known and
unknown contaminants comes to stand in for the project of postcolonial liberation in
African science fiction. In each of the three stories by Sarah Lotz, Tendai Huchu, and
Nick Wood, a techno-scientifically engineered utopia presents human subjects with a
choice between mechanistic efficiency, chemically induced euphoria, and the possible
decay associated with contamination. For Moonsamy, Lotz’s story confirms the
conservative and nationalistic turn that Prisicilla Wald has diagnosed in many con-
tagion narratives.27 By contrast, and in the stories by Huchu and Wood, the uncertain
rewards of contagion outweigh any conjectural hazards, prompting protagonists to

25 Armillas-Tiseyra, “Afronauts.”
26 Ivor Hartmann, ed., AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers (Johannesburg: Storytime, 2012).
27 Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2008).

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 270 MORADEWUN ADEJUNMOBI

seek escape from the security that technoscientific utopia promises. Nonetheless,
Moonsamy finds that in different ways, all three stories problematize the tech-
noscientific and sterile utopia of many sf narratives. For Moonsamy, the selected
works of African science fiction, “contaminate the notion of utopia itself” through
their questioning of the desire for a world made free from what are perceived to be
social pollutants.28
In his article, Ian MacDonald undertakes a close reading of a novel that has been
described as “sprawling,” and “most difficult.”29 Indeed, future readers of Kojo Laing’s
Big Bishop Roko will be highly indebted to MacDonald for providing a helpful entry
point into this complex narrative. MacDonald’s essay approaches Big Bishop Roko as a
sequel to an earlier work by Laing, namely, Major Gentl. Both novels explore what is
now commonly described as the digital divide. According to MacDonald, Big Bishop
Roko presents a reflection on the ethical implications of advances in genetic engi-
neering and cloning for humankind, as well as the possible outcomes of these
advances for societies in the Global South. MacDonald’s title “Let Us All Mutate
Together” alludes to the problem that these advances in scientific practice pose for
those who are excluded from access to new technologies, by virtue of their subject
locations. In the novel, and as a handful of individuals in the “developing world” begin
to mutate into genetically superior and networked cyborgs, the rest of the population
is reduced to mere humanity, without connection to the emerging cyber networks.
In MacDonald’s words, “the Global South becomes the repository for a suddenly
antiquated, primitive mode of being: that of being human.”30 The African protagonist
of the novel embraces some mutations from the Global North which are already
occurring, but also adopts what MacDonald calls “jujutech,” the fusion of indigenous
practices and new technologies that also become a means for advancing genetic
engineering on the local front. MacDonald interprets Laing’s novel as an inquiry into
how communities around the world might respond to differential experiences of
technological advancement, rather than as a critique of technoscience necessarily, or a
plea for the continuing relevance of beliefs in magic. As MacDonald himself
acknowledges, the technomagical world revealed in Laing’s novel makes for a different
kind of science fiction, but science fiction, nonetheless, which engages with questions
pertaining to genetic modification and posthumanism that not infrequently attract
speculation in global science fiction.
Drawing from scholarship on postcolonial urbanity and ecocriticism, as well as
his own interest in “speculative urbanism,” Brady Smith’s essay examines trends in
African speculative fiction, with examples from two novels by Lauren Beukes.
Specifically, Smith proposes a preliminary reading of Beukes’ Moxyland and Zoo City
in relation to theorizing on the Anthropocene.31 While both novels clearly ponder the

28 Nedine Moonsamy, “Life is a Biological Risk: Contagion, Contamination and Utopia in African
Science Fiction.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3.3 (2016).
29 See Bould, “Science Fiction 101,” 14.
30 MacDonald, “‘Let Us All Mutate.”
31 In this respect, Brady Smith’s article shares somewhat similar concerns in common with Matthew
Omelsky’s 2014 article on Post-crisis African science fiction also published in PLI, though each author
examines a different corpus of texts and approaches the Anthropocene from a different perspective. The
Anthropocene/speculative fiction nexus is evidently an area of investigation likely to generate continuing

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 INTRODUCTION: AFRICAN SCIENCE FICTION 271

question of human agency in an African future experiencing increased coincidence of

nature and humanity, this article also establishes why Beukes’ writing should be read
alongside theorizing on science fiction in addition to ecocriticism. Like several of the
papers included in this special issue, Smith zeroes in on future technologies, but which
somehow seem to take us back to past spirituality. His argument here is that unlike
some sf trends elsewhere in the world, Beukes’ depiction of new technologies of social
control and the mixing of speculative technology with indigenous spirituality is not
about nostalgia or about a desire for return to uncontaminated nature; rather it
anticipates a postcolonial future which will always be hybrid in its expression.
Furthermore, declares Smith, this notably postcolonial future mirrors the anticipated
future of humanity in the age of the Anthropocene. In this future world of hybrid
technologies and life forms, ancestral worship migrates to new media technologies,
instead of disappearing, and humans become one with both nature and infrastructure.
Accordingly, and even when new technologies reign supreme in the imagined future
South Africa, the allure of old “technologies” does not wane, nor does reliance on
advanced technologies alone suffice to resolve the social tensions inherited from an
earlier age.
With Hugh Charles O’Connell’s paper, we return to the novum, one of the more
prominent concepts elaborated upon in the field of science fiction studies. In his
paper, and using theorizing about sf conventions from Afrofuturism as a point of
departure, O’Connell argues for reconsidering how distinctive moments operate as
nova in African and African Diasporic narratives of speculation. Given the weight of
history, recounting alien encounters set in a postcolonial context from the vantage
point of a postcolonial subject produces particular challenges. If the novum represents
something new that cannot according to O’Connell “be known ahead of time,”32 how
then can newness be adduced to second contact encounters with “alien aliens” in
narratives that appear to replay the very trajectory of stories about first contact with
alien colonizers or alien slave traders or more recently alien philanthropists and
saviors? Second contact narratives will yield limited novelty where memories of first
contact have not yet dissipated. O’Connell’s discussion of this conundrum focuses on
Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Lagoon which seemingly recounts a typical sf encounter
between technologically sophisticated and seemingly benevolent aliens and merely
human subjects set in Lagos, Nigeria. To accept the aliens in Lagoon at face value as
benevolent agents equipped with technology would be to remove the work from the
realm of speculation, and to deprive the narrative of an emancipatory potential. In his
reading of Okorafor’s novel, O’Connell proposes, instead, that the encounter with
aliens be viewed mainly as a placeholder for interrogating that which is not yet known,
and cannot yet be imagined. Like Moonsamy in this special issue, who concludes that
African speculative imaginations of utopia wear away at the very notion of utopia,
O’Connell finds that in African and African Diasporic writing, the critical edge

and considerable interest in African science fiction studies as the field of scholarship expands. Please see
Matthew Omelsky, “‘After the End Times’: Postcrisis African Science Fiction,” Cambridge Journal of
Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 1.1 (2014), 33–49.
32 Hugh Charles O’Connell, “‘We are change’: The Novum as Event in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon,”
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3.3 (2016).

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 272 MORADEWUN ADEJUNMOBI

sometimes associated with sf conventions can best be uncovered when the conven-
tions themselves are made subject to reinterpretation.
Together, these five papers contribute to the scholarship locating African science
fiction and African horror in relation to postcoloniality, as well as neoliberalism and
globalization. They establish a preliminary framework for explicating African science
fiction with respect to other trends in African literature. And finally, they help to
advance a basis for mapping the interrelations between African science fiction and
related genres from around the world, depicting subjects from communities frequently
associated with experiences of marginality, exclusion, and subordination.

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