Africanfuturism

Tropes and genres
Related tropes/genres	science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, magic realism, music, art, colonialism, postcolonialism, history, feminism, Afrofuturism
See also	African Speculative Fiction Society
Related articles on Fanlore.

Africanfuturism is a genre of science-fiction, speculative fiction, magic realism, and related forms of literary and creative arts. It is frequently interpreted as extending an African perspective on the future based upon past or present conditions: history, slavery, colonialism, feminism, African diasporas, etc.

It was a beautiful sunny day, and yet Anwuli knew the weather was coming for her.

By Nnedi Okorafor, The Mother of Invention, 2018.

When the boy opens his housing unit’s steel door and the incandescent lights pour into his face, he does not blink away. “Little suns” — this is what everyone calls them. The massive disks hover in the atmosphere, spilling streams of radiant light to the ground.

By Somto Ihezue, Like Stars Daring to Shine, 2022.

Africanfuturism is a reinterpretation of Afrofuturism because it concentrates more upon a global and authentically African range of perspectives and avoids a predominant focus on American diaspora interpretations or inspirations.

Scholar Jane Bryce posits:

Kodwo Eshun, in a seminal essay, [argues] that, while the “practice of countermemory as... an ethical commitment to history, the dead and the forgotten” has traditionally relegated futurism to the sidelines of black creativity, this has been progressively challenged by “contemporary African artists... [for whom] understanding and intervening in the production and distribution of this dimension constitutes a chronopolitical act”... The paper proposes that this chronopolitical act (what in literature we now call speculative fiction) has its roots in African modes of storytelling that draw on myth, orality, and indigenous belief systems that lend themselves to the invention of personal mythologies, the rewriting of history in the light of future realities, and the use of extra-realist or magical phenomena as part of the everyday. Since these elements characterize many novels not thought of as speculative, this suggests that futurism has been a strain in African writing from its inception. (p. 1)

Wole Talabi explains why science fiction should be seen as vital for Africa:

Today, Africa is considered to be technologically underdeveloped. We consume technology from other parts of the world, of course, but how many original, paradigm-shifting scientific and technological ideas originate from the African continent? Not many. One could get into a lot of historical, political and sociological back and forth about why that is, but in the end what matters is – it is.

So what can we do about it? A lot. For example: we can try to increase literacy and improve the quality of education on the continent (there are already several initiatives such as the Literate Africa Project and UNESCO’s efforts), we can demand better governance from our leaders, and we can inspire the coming generations to aspire to a better Africa than we currently have. That last point is where I believe African science fiction can and should contribute significantly...

... Africans already seem to know the importance of science fiction. When asked if they believe science fiction is useful to people in STEMM careers, 84 percent of all respondents, including those who said they had never read science fiction before and were never influenced by it, answered “yes.” When responses were restricted to only those currently living in Africa right now, it was even higher at 92 percent. And when they were restricted to only those who read science fiction as children, or who read science fiction now, that percentage spiked to a solid 100 percent. This from people across a fairly broad range of STEMM careers...

The problem may be, as I stated earlier, that we predominantly consume western iterations of the genre without thought of our own. This is something that author Tade Thompson touches on in the Q and A session between AfroSF contributors and students of Maria Barraza’s World Literature 202 class at Simon Fraser University when he says “Our folk tales, our proverbs, our art, our culture, all of it has science fictional elements. We have just been trained to only see a certain kind of science fiction which is mainly of Western origin.” Dilman Dila’s story "How My Father Became a God in Terra Incognita" is an modern example of this kind of science fiction reclamation and creation.

Definitions

Afrofuturism is generally interpreted as having been initiated by Mark Dery in "Black to the Future"(1994) which popularised the term and the concept:

“The notion of Afrofuturism gives rise to a troubling antinomy: can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? - Mark Dery, 1994, p. 180.

Afrofuturism is seen as having some antecedent roots in earlier African American culture and science fiction.

Africanfuturism, by contrast, was proposed in 2019 by Nnedimma Nkemdili Okorafor as a more authentic and global African perspective:

Africanfuturism is similar to “afrofuturism” in the way that blacks on the continent and in the Black Diaspora are all connected by blood, spirit, history and future. The difference is that africanfuturism is specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view as it then branches into the Black Diaspora, and it does not privilege or center the West.

By implication, this has antecedents across African times and cultures that predate and are more inclusive than US diaspora viewpoints.

See Also

• “Write your story, and don’t be afraid to write it” — a sci-fi writer talks about finding her voice and being a superhero, 17 October 2018.
• Africanfuturism : Disrupting Science Fiction - Nnedi Okorafor with Yvonne Mbanefo - Igbo Conference, 18 June 2020 (YouTube).
• Hope Wabuke, Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and the Language of Black Speculative Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, 28 August 2020.
• Edafe Onerhime, Black, Gifted, and Represented — Africanfuturism & Afrofuturism, Medium, 17 June 2021.
• Nnedi Okorafor, Sci-fi stories that imagine a future Africa, 23 Nov 2017, TED (YouTube).
• Nnedi Okorafor is GoH at Glasgow 2024 (Worldcon) Convention.
• Applied African SF Project.