Is Africa Ready For Science Fiction?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had some interesting conversations with award-winning Nollywood director Tchidi Chikere about science fiction.

Chikere has written, produced, and directed over 50 films. He also published a collection of rather chilling short stories titled Strangers in Paradise. The collection includes a novella called “Daughter of the Cave,” which is essentially a fantasy piece. Chikere sought me out after my novel, Zahrah the Windseeker, piqued his interest. Needless to say, I was delighted and honored to hear from him.

During one of our conversations, we discussed my own work and whether it could be translated to film, particularly African film. “Is Africa ready for science fiction?” he asked me. We debated this for a while. Naturally, I believed Africa was ready…ready enough, at least. Notwithstanding my own contentions, Chikere had other ideas.

“I don t think we’re ready in the primary sense of the word,” Chikere said. “We can hide it in other categories like magic realism, allegory, etc, but we’re not ready for pure science fiction.”

“Science fiction films from the West are failures here. Even Star Wars!” he said. “The themes aren’t taken seriously. Science fiction will come here when it is relevant to the people of Africa. Right now, Africans are bothered about issues of bad leadership, the food crisis in East Africa, refugees in the Congo, militants here in Nigeria. Africans are bothered about food, roads, electricity, water wars, famine, etc, not spacecrafts and spaceships. Only stories that explore these everyday realities are considered relevant to us for now.”

Naunihal Singh, a professor of comparative politics specializing in conflict, civil-military relations, and the politics of Sub-Saharan Africa at Notre Dame University (and a fan of speculative fiction), had some similar comments about science fiction in Africa.

“Science-fiction will have to adapt itself to the local market,” Singh said. “I don’t think there’s the sensibility for it right now. I remember seeing the Matrix in a mixed crowd of Ghanaians and Americans, this was in Ghana. Even though the room was dark, and there were some 40 plus people there, I could tell who was from where by their reactions to the movie.

“The Ghanaians just weren’t connecting to it. Bring the Terminator to West Africa, and he’d stop running in a day. He’d sit there and glitch. It’ll be hard to make people afraid of a future where computers take over the world when they can’t manage to keep the computers on their desk running. These are very western stories. On the other hand, classic science fiction, like space exploration stories, would probably work better…assuming it was adapted for the audience. Africans would love to see stories about Africans on a space ship. The idea that Africans might be dominant in the future would resonate so well with nationalism.”

As a writer of African speculative fiction whose work is also published in Africa, I took all this to heart and mind. After really thinking about it, I realize that I fully agree with both Chikere and Singh. And I believe their comments apply to literature, too…probably even more than to film.

Much of my previous work unconsciously tapped into my Nigerian background (along with my American background). It was intuitive. However, when I consider my recent short story in Seeds of Change, “Spider the Artist” (a story where volatile A.I. robot spiders guard oil pipelines in the Niger Delta), this story was different and I felt the difference as I was writing it. I was consciously writing toward an African audience.

In “Spider the Artist”, the focus was not on how the spider-shaped A.I. robots operated or why they decided to break free of human control. The focus was instead on the main character’s life as an abused wife living in the volatile Niger Delta region; on her anxiety over being childless in a culture where barrenness is the worst thing that can happen to a woman; and on her need for love which eventually leads her to befriend a robot. It’s quiet, backdoor science fiction that might better appeal to African audiences.

My forthcoming adult novel, Who Fears Death, is similar in this way. In this novel, there were even moments where my American sensibilities were offended or deeply strained. I’m very interested in moving further in this direction and seeing how things shape up.

Let me stop and state here that there IS a handful of African science fiction out there. There are novels, short stories, and a film or two. This handful is tiny but it exists. However, I didn’t write this essay to tell you about them. They’ll get their due … just not right now. This essay isn’t going to become a bibliography. For now, I just want to bring this issue to the table. Also, I’m aware that I am generalizing when I speak of Africa as a whole. It’s a big super -diverse place. But for the sake of discussing this topic, please allow me to do a bit of generalizing.

In my observation, in Africa, science fiction is still perceived as not being real literature. It is not serious writing. As Chikere said, African audiences don’t feel that science fiction is really concerned with what’s real, what’s present. It’s not tangible. It’s sport. Child’s play. I can see how science fiction can be foreign to many Africans. Technology tends to play a different role on the continent. There is a weird divide and connection between the technologically advanced and the ancient. For example: People will have cells phones in rural villages yet have no plumbing or electricity or one will opt to buy a laptop instead of a desktop computer because a laptop has its own power supply, most useful for when “NEPA takes the lights”.

But there’s another layer to the issue: Colonialism and the colonizers existing attitudes about what is literature and what is not. The foundation of what great literature is in Africa is too often defined by the West and the West still has trouble viewing genre fiction as true literature. This is why I felt it my duty to raise such a stink about the criteria for submitting to The Penguin Prize for African Literature (from Penguin South Africa).

In the criteria, they wrote that they sought “novels of freshness and originality that represent the finest examples of contemporary fiction out of Africa.” Then on the same page, they wrote: “Submissions in the children’s literature, science fiction or fantasy genres will not be considered.”

I can sort of understand the “children’s” literature bit. Sort of. There is plenty of children’s literature that is great literature. But the “no fantasy or science fiction” part? For a prize in AFRICAN literature? All kinds of problems with that.

Read the rest of this blog entry at Nnedi’s Wahala Zone Blog!

Guest Blog by Nnedi Okorafor, PhD. Originally published on Nnedi’s Wahala Zone Blog and The Nebula Awards website.