African Speculative Fiction in a Digital Landscape: Tariro Ndoro

Tariro Ndoro at the launch of Moving On and Other Zimbabwean Stories
Photo courtesy of Mgcini Nyoni

I’ll begin this talk with a quote from a poem by Denice Frohman and Dominique Christina. “The quickest way to silence a voice is to treat is as though none has come before it.”[i]

Growing up, I wasn’t exposed to much African speculative fiction. In fact, I wasn’t exposed to much African genre fiction either. Barring a few adventure books that were marketed for children by Dandaro Press, the vast landscape of what I (and presumably many other African children) was exposed to was literary fiction.

In her essay, “African Science Fiction is still Alien,” Dr Nnedi Okorafor blamed this on the success of Chinua Achebe’s “serious novels” that set a precedent for literary fiction in Africa.[ii] Sadly, this has been vastly perpetrated by the politics and economics of publishing. Literary fiction is from Africa is taken as the norm while writers of genre fiction are generally expected to have a deep reason for writing. In the words of Wole Talabi, “I don’t think any group of writers is called upon to justify and defend the existence of their work as often as science fiction and fantasy writers are.”[iii]

In her essay, “Emerging Trends in African Speculative Fiction,” Chinelo Onwaulu points out that the vast majority of African speculative fiction is open mainly to Nigeria and South African and even within that narrow landscape, most South Africans in the genre are white and most Nigerians in the genre are male, owing to historical advantage and patriarchy.[iv]

This state of affairs give us the danger of perpetuating what Chimamanda Adichie would refer to as the single story i.e. a single way of looking at black narratives, black characters or black settings.[v] To make an example of cinema and screenwriting, I’ve watched three different movies namely, Hotel Rwanda, Shooting Dogs and Sometimes in April that would all fall under the category of literary fiction if they were books. All three movies are about the Rwandan Genocide. In the landscape created by these movies, it easy to imagine a violent Africa in which everyone wields a machete at their neighbour, yet it has taken us many years to imagine a black superhero flick that casts black people in a positive light.[vi][vii][viii]

Why does this matter? Because speculative fiction has the advantage of allowing us to imagine our futures or to reimagine our pasts. In the words of Dr Okorafor, “the power of imagination and narrative should never be underestimated. Aside from generating innovative ideas, science fiction also triggers both a distancing and associating effect. This makes it an excellent vehicle for approaching taboo and socially-relevant yet overdone topics in new ways.”

Yet it is unfortunate that we haven’t always been able to embrace speculative fiction for reasons stated earlier. Ivor Hartmann puts it bluntly, “If you can’t see and relay an understandable vision of the future, your future will be co-opted by someone else’s vision, one that will not necessarily have your best interests at heart.”[ix]

Yet because most would-be speculative fiction writers have to justify their stories, we are sometimes forced to navigate the landscape of black speculative fiction as though none had come before us.

Growing up, there were many cartoons I watched with a hint of speculative fiction, my favourite were about giant robots and space cowboys. I didn’t realize they contained elements of SFF, I simply watched them because they were there. In 2001 I watched Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone premiered at with my sister when I was 9 years old. What I remember most is that the cinema was packed to capacity.[x]

For the next few years, Harry Potter wouldn’t leave our lips. Everybody loved it, we gathered to discuss the latest books, the latest movies. Kids identified as being either Hufflepuffs or Ravenclaws. We mourned the death of Dumbledore. Yet there were hardly any people of colour in it barring a few minor black and Indian characters, and Cho Chang who was Harry Potter’s love interest.

This is how I lost interest in both science fiction and fantasy genres. I didn’t see myself in those stories and they lost relevance for me. I didn’t realize this had happened at the time. I concentrated on reading what was available in school libraries, in bookstores and on my mother’s bookshelf. In Zimbabwe, that meant a whole lot of literary fiction, a whole lot of crime paperbacks and the odd mainstream novel. The genre novels were mostly Western and the literary fiction was mostly African. This created a subconscious dichotomy in my head – genre fiction of any sort was for Western writers, if I wanted to be a serious African writer I had to write like Achebe or Soyinka.

Then 2015 found me in a Creative Writing class in which some of the readings were speculative. I struggled with them. Not because of the language or the synopsis. In fact, some of the readings were brilliant but as I told one of my fiction instructors, I didn’t see the use of them. Most of these works were written by white writers about white characters and I was there to write my serious African novel.

In 2016, I stumbled upon “What it Means when a Man Falls from the Sky” by Lesley Arimah -- a post apocalyptic sci-fi story set in Africa featuring African characters by an African writer.[xi] My heart came alive. Not only was this narrative fresh and relevant to me, it was also a form of proof that genre fiction by an African writer could be taken seriously – the story had been nominated for the Caine Prize.[xii] I scoured the internet for everything she’d written and I wasn’t disappointed. I’d found a kindred writer.

For the first time I saw that there was someone writing speculative fiction and it didn’t stop there. I loved that she didn’t restrict herself to hard fantasy or hard sci-fi, she played around with language and dabbled with genres picking and choosing what forms to use with each story. She had escaped the proverbial box and her escape charted a path for me to follow. Someone had come before me and therefore I was no longer silenced.

I want to stop here and emphasise that this is the best time to be writing african speculative fiction because although writing industry hasn’t changed much, the internet has played the role of equalizer.

In this digital age, I discovered that there is an entire community of african speculative fiction writers engaged in writing novels, comics and movies. I heard of Octavia Butler and Nnedi Okorafor and several magazines that support African writing, Omenana being the vanguard. There has never been a better time to write speculative fiction in Africa.

Earlier this year, I watched a different movie at the cinema. The room was as full as it was when I watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone 17 years ago. Despite all claims by the men that hold the money, this movie had the highest grossing opening weekend of all time. I saw myself in many of the characters and even in the setting. Although the story was flawed, it was evident that the time for Afro speculative fiction has come and not only is restricted to a few people in the far reaches of the internet, traditionally “mainstream” people also queue to watch it.

Shortly after the Black Panther was released, the remake of a “A Wrinkle in Time” which was directed by a black woman, was released.[xiii][xiv] If we add the Janelle Monae’s futuristic music videos and the fact that two speculative stories were nominated for this year’s Caine Prize short list (Stacy Hardy’s “Involution” and Wole Talabi’s “Wednesday’s Story”), then I think we can conclude that there is not only a critical mass of writers interested in speculative fiction but also a large number of people who are interested in consuming it.[xv]

Is African speculative fiction still alien? Yes. For the simple reason that if I walk into a Harare bookshop today, I probably won’t find a copy of Binti but now that I’ve been exposed to this wonderful storytelling tradition, I think it is time to write until speculative fiction ceases to be alien. This is the best time to be writing nuanced and sympathetic stories with African heroes, African villains and African sidekicks. Let us begin.

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[i] Christina, Dominique and Frohman, Denice (2014, June 9) “No Chlid Left Behind” [Video file] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHSqUyi6GUU

[ii] Okorafor, Nnedi (2014, January 15) African Science Fiction is Still Alien [Blog Post] Retrieved from http://nnedi.blogspot.com/2014/01/african-science-fiction-is-still-alien.html

[iii] Talabi, Wole “Why Africa Needs More Science Fiction.” Omenana 03 March 2016 Retrieved from

https://omenana.com/2016/03/25/why-africa-needs-to-create-more-science-fiction/

[iv] Onwualu, Chinelo  “Emerging Trends in African Speculative Fiction.” Strange Horizons 29 February 2016, Retrieved from

http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/emerging-trends-in-african-speculative-fiction/

[v] Adichie, Chimamanda, N “The Danger of the Single Story.” TED 2009 Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript?language=en

[vi] George, Terry, 2005 Hotel Rwanda Lions Gate Films.

[vii] Caton-Jones, Michael, 2005, Shooting Dogs, BBC Films/Adirondack Pictures, Germany/United Kingdom.

[viii] Peck, Raoul, 2005, Sometimes in April, HBO Films, Rwanda, France, United States.

[ix] Hartmann, I. (2012) Afro SF:  Science Fiction by African Writers. A Story Time Publication.

[x] Columbus, Chris, 2001, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Heydey Films/1492 Pictures.

[xi] Arimah, Lesley Nneka, 2015, “What it Means When a Man Falls From The Sky” Catapult.

[xii] Caine Shortlist 2016 Retrieved from http://caineprize.com/previously-shortlisted/

[xiii]Coogler, Ryan and Cole, Joe Robert, 2018, Black Panther, Marvel Studios.

[xiv] DuVernay, Eva, 2018, A Wrinkle In Time, Walt Disney Pictures/Whitaker Entertainment

[xv] Caine Shortlist 2018, retrieved from http://caineprize.com/press-releases/2018/5/15/2018-caine-prize-shortlist-announced

Tariro Ndoro's talk was delivered at the Speculative Fiction workshop held at the NUST American Space in Bulawayo - supported by US Embassy in Zimbabwe, the US State Department, and amaBooks Publishers.

Tariro Ndoro holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from Rhodes University. Her fiction has been featured in several anthologies, including in Moving On and Other Zimbabwean Stories and in AFREADA, and her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies including Kotaz, Oxford Poetry and New Contrast.

 

Speculative Fiction Workshop in Bulawayo

The workshop participants along with Walidah Imarisha and Tariro Ndoro

The  African/American Speculative Fiction Workshop took place weekly over the past few months, with sixteen participants chosen through samples of their writing.  Speculative fiction is an umbrella genre encompassing narrative fiction with supernatural or futuristic elements. This includes, but is not limited to, science fiction, fantasy, superhero fiction, science fantasy, horror, utopian and dystopian fiction, and supernatural fiction. 

The workshop, led by Fulbright fellow Dr James Arnett, included required reading of speculative fiction anthologies as well as the participants writings stories for critique. The workshop considered four texts – Blood Child by Octavia Butler, an African-American science fiction writer; AfroSF, an anthology of new African science fiction edited by the Zimbabwean Ivor Hartman; Kabu Kabu by the Nigerian-American Nnedi Okorafor, and Octavia’s Brood, from the US, edited by Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown. Selected stories from the texts were discussed, focusing on style and content and thought was given to the relevance to Zimbabwean social and creative settings. Participants submitted stories to be discussed at the sessions.

Walidah Imarisha

As a separate event, to which members of the public were invited, the American writer and academic Walidah Imarisha delivered a talk “Visionary Fiction and Fantastic African Futures”. The event also featured a short story written and read by Harare-based writer Tariro Ndoro and a personal essay exploring the roots of her interest in science fiction and fantasy. 

Tariro Ndoro

Walidah also hosted a hands-on visionary fiction workshop for the members of the workshop. The purpose, she explained, was to understand how science fiction was a vehicle for imagining more just futures and provided the opportunity for brainstorming creative solutions to real, present problems. Those present were asked to identify issues they were concerned about in Zimbabwe – a list that included universal health care, freedom after expression, the status and belief in African science and medicine, and others. Groups then worked together to create a world and a baseline story from which each participant could branch out.

Walidah, Tariro and James Arnett

Jane Morris and Brian Jones of amaBooks gave a presentation on the different routes to getting published and were able to attend most of the workshop sessions and were impressed by the quality of the writing produced by the participants. It is hoped that an anthology of Zimbabwean speculative fiction will be published in the near future by amaBooks.

The workshop was supported by amaBooks Publishers and the Public Affairs Section of the US Embassy in Zimbabwe.

Working in Stillhaven garden

Tariro Ndoro

The audience at Walidah and Tariro's presentation

Visionary Fiction, Fantastic African Futures

All Welcome at the American Space, 55 Jason Moyo Street, Bulawayo

Looking into the Future of African Creativity

from https://www.herald.co.zw/looking-into-future-of-african-creativity/

by Stanely Mushava Arts Correspondent

James Arnett with Tinashe Tafirenyika, photo courtesy of Tafadzwa Gwetai

In a good year for African heritage at the box office, “Black Panther” has flared up discussions for its daring, optimistic and controversial reinvention of the continent. While the top-grossing movie has made Afrofuturism pop worldwide, literary Africa has been also warming up to science fiction as a platform for floating big ideas about a century tangled in big problems. The Bulawayo Science Fiction Reading/Writing Workshop, incepted in November last year, is one such initiative.

Between April and June this year, James Arnett, a visiting literature professor from the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, conducts the second and final season of the workshop at the NUST-American Space. Arnett, who currently teaches in the NUST Journalism and Media Studies Department, registered his presence on the Zimbabwean literary scene last year, giving an Afrofuturism-themed talk at LitFest and Intwasa, in between studies on the Bulawayo book sector and Zimbabwe-raised Nobel laureate Doris Lessing.

Aspiring science fiction writers will interact with classic texts, local publishers and the visiting scholar whose interest in African writing has found expression in journals such as African Literature Today, Genre, Ariel and LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, with a view of coming up with their own future-leaning stories. Bulawayo-based author Stanely Mushava (SM) sits down with workshop convener James Arnett (JA) for a wide-ranging interview on the workshop and Afrofuturism.

SM: Welcome to Wakanda!
JA: Wakanda forever.

SM: What’s happening at the Bulawayo Science Fiction Workshop?
JA: For the second iteration of the workshop, I wanted to expand the nature of it to include reading influential American science fiction writers, and develop our critical reading abilities to sharpen our own writing abilities.

SM: You went to Litfest and Intwasa last year preaching the gospel of Afrofuturism – the idea of science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction breathing new energy into Zimbabwean literature. What makes Afro-futurism “that thing”?
JA: Afrofuturism is a way to apply a kind of natural Afro-optimism, I believe. It’s a way to use exploratory, imaginative thinking to pose and solve problems, project future issues, imagine alternative outcomes to present narratives.

SM: We have seen Afrofuturism approvingly reassessing the myths, cosmologies and self-concepts that we lost in the colonial crusades, and challenging the cold tyranny of history and science. How does this moving of the centre enrich literature and the arts?
JA: I think that Afrofuturism allows for a pragmatic embrace of modernity – I’ve never seen a country wield cell phones more potently than in Zimbabwe – as well as a way to pull through traditions and knowledges from precolonial cultures.

SM: Let’s talk Zimbofuturism. Which of our writers anticipate high-concept fiction and how do their pioneering contributions expand the canon?
JA: The first, most sustained Zimbabwean (Rhodesian) explorer of speculative fiction was the Nobel-winner Doris Lessing. Although her experiments in science fiction and space opera are often tedious and difficult to read, she also sometimes strikes a rich vein. I’m particularly fond of her Mara and Dann, which explores Africa (“Afrik”) in the future, after climate and conflict have done irreparable harm to the planet.

SM: How fair is it to suggest that the wheels of culture only begin to turn when the metropolis points the way? Cultural innovators working outside big tents and big phases seem condemned to toil away in the underground. 
JA: I understand that that’s a common feeling, but so long as literary publishing and the mass culture industries are intertwined, all creators of popular art get swept into prevailing currents until a new disruptor is crowned, and a new strain of imitation emerges. I think that African cultural producers have to jostle hard against market forces (God, how chilling to think) that privilege certain forms and genres of writing at certain times. Zimbabwe has produced writers adept at merging with emergent tastes – Yvonne Vera, during the era of postcolonial trauma narratives; Petina Gappah during this Afropolitan phase. Zimbabwe has a long history of producing terrific writers; and I think the time has come for Afro-SF.

SM: What partnerships have made the Bulawayo sci-fi workshop possible?
JA: Happily, the US Embassy in Harare, and Bulawayo publishers amaBooks are sponsoring the event, and I’m thankful to the American Space, Bulawayo, for its donation of space and time and technology, as well as to the NUST Departments of Journalism and Media Studies, and Publishing Studies for providing a home for my research and teaching this year.

SM: I understand you are bringing a speculative fiction writer to the workshop.
JA: Yes! We’re still working to confirm her visit, but when we do, we’ll make an announcement.

SM: What would be your essential reading list for an aspiring writer approaching Afrofuturism for the first time?
JA: There are some obvious classics, mostly American, as that’s the cradle for Afrofuturism. A terrific origin point is the jazz musician and poet Sun Ra’s Space is the Place – a documentary of his ideas; and a good follow-up is his syllabus for a class at UC-Berkeley in the early 1970s. Samuel R. Delany is another classic African-American science fiction writer, whose works are really cerebral and challenge a lot of underlying assumptions about the workings of the world. And Octavia Butler is the third is this triumvirate; her novel Kindred uses time travel to explore and challenge American attitudes about race and gender; and her two Parable novels, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents are both really prescient speculative works.

SM: How do you plan for this workshop to live on?
JA: Students will always be encouraged to submit their work to appropriate venues, and calls for stories will be circulated. Ideally, we’re hoping that we can produce an anthology of contemporary Zimbabwean science/speculative fictions, together with established writers, some from the diaspora, for a well-rounded and eclectic collection.

SM: What have been some of your observations on Bulawayo’s book sector, and Zimbabwe’s? 
JA: I think that Jane and Brian of amaBooks are founts of energy who do a lot to keep the literary scene going; John Eppel has hosted workshops and readings in the area; book launches have happened at Intwasa and over the course of the year. There’s an active literary scene, all told, even if it is a little sparse and a little estranged.

SM: Things are looking up for Afrofuturism. We are looking at popular inroads by distinctly Afrocentric voices like Nnedi Okorafor, and publishing incentives for writers on the continent in the form of fantasy-themed awards, magazines and workshops like your own. Do you foresee speculative fiction becoming the next big phase of African literature?
JA: I think that as we move through the Anthropocene – the term for the latest geological age, defined by the irrevocable intervention of man onto earth, often contiguous with colonialism’s history – we are trying to learn to express and explore our anxiety. I think that speculative fiction is a way of struggling with the feelings of the inevitability of a deeply altered future.

SM: The Anthropocene is coming up more often in discussions of the future like a horseman of the apocalypse. Who must lose sleep over this creature?
JA: The Anthropocene goes by several names – the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene (after HP Lovecraft’s amphibious demon). Under any guise, it’s the scientific and social-scientific consensus that humankind has interfered so dramatically with the natural produce, function, and systems of the earth, that it is a whole new era of geology. In one reckoning, the Anthropocene starts when fossil fuels are burned for the first time, accelerating man’s emergence into “modernity,” in others, the nuclear era with its long-lived isotopes that will never leave our earth and atmosphere. But the Anthropocene is putting a name to the comprehensive evidence from all areas that modernity has exacted a steeper price than we are willing to pay, but that we will have to pay for our sins anyway.

SM: It feels like the shadow of the apocalypse is stretching everywhere. This feeling that Earth will give in any day now under misanthropic stress. What is speculative fiction doing to inspire hope?
JA: I think there are writers like NK Jemisin who are exploring hard-fought ways to better futures through, in her case, fantasy that is deeply engaged with questions of race and otherness, gender and sexuality. In some accounts, Wakanda is utopian. Although, on the other hand, a panel at the National English Literary Museum in South Africa pointed out that under apartheid much black literature was concerned with the apocalyptic, inasmuch as living conditions often approached it. So it’s an ambivalent force.

SM: Can you think of distinctly African traits that literature can benefit more from in the Anthropocene?
JA: All oral traditions and folk mythologies carry with them knowledges pertinent to lives lived where they arise; and so I think any literature that engages with traditional knowledges about the land and its produce is beneficial to a people. And, more to the point, I think African science fictions can bring science into folk knowledge, and the synthesis can be really powerful.

Stanely Mushava is an award-winning Zimbabwean writer and a teaching assistant at the National University of Science and Technology. He can be reached at stanmushava@gmail.com