Vector African and Afrodiasporic SF
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Vector African and Afrodiasporic SF No. 289 Summer 2019 Contents 1 BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION VECTOR Was founded in 1958 and is a non-profitmaking organisation entirely staffed by unpaid volunteers. African and Afrodiasporic Science Fiction Registered in England. Limited by guarantee. Company No. 921500 VECTOR Torque Control Writing and publishing ‘complicated Editors: Guest editor Michelle Louise Clarke 2 stuff’ in an African language Polina Levontin Masimba Musodza 59 Jo Lindsay Walton [email protected] Looking Forward Through the Imagination of Africa A personal perspective on South Guest Editor: Anwuli Okeke 15 African Comics: From Superheroes Michelle Louise Clarke to Ordinary heroes Designer: Nick Wood 63 Jana Kleineberg African Science Fiction and Literature Chinelo Onwualu 20 FOR MORE ARTICLES VISIT: THE BSFA REVIEW AfroSF Vol 3 edited by Ivor W. Hartmann Editor: Vector interviews WWW.VECTOR-BSFA.COM Susan Oke Andy Sawyer 72 Dilman Dila 24 [email protected] FOCUS African SF in conversation ‘We have come to refuel your future’: Wole Talabi and Louisa Egbunike 74 Editor: Asphalt Afrofuturism and African JOIN OR RENEW YOUR Dev Agarwal ANNUAL MEMBERSHIP AT Futurities [email protected] Gemma Field 31 Come and visit my spaceship! WWW.BSFA.CO.UK Arab Futurity and the Art of BSFA AWARDS Mounir Ayache UK £29 Administrator: Afrofuturism in clipping.’s Splendor Joan Grandjean 82 Clare Boothby & Misery UK STUDENTS/UNWAGED £20 [email protected] Jonathan Hay 38 OUTSIDE UK £45 Bleak Futures in PRESIDENT Two East African Films LIFE MEMBERSHIP £500 Stephen Baxter Vibranium, Nigerium, and Lidia Kniaź 88 the Elements of a Pessimistic MEMBERSHIP SERVICES CHAIR (NEW) Afrofuturism [email protected] Allen Stroud Kate Harlin 45 [email protected] Afro- versus Africanfuturism in Nnedi Okorafor’s “The Magical Negro” and “Mother of Invention” Päivi Väätänen 52 Published by the BSFA Ltd © 2019 ISSN 05050448 All opinions expressed are those of the individual contributors and not BSFA Ltd except where expressly stated. Copyright of individual articles remains with the author. Editorial: Clarke 3 issues of science and technology before many Ghanaian authors had even begun to move away from nationalist rhetoric of post-independence Ghana (Klein, 2007). In terms of genre, Laing’s work has been variously described as postmodern, utopian, or Torque Control magical realism. Ngaboh-Smart (1997) identifies Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars as using Guest editor Michelle Louise Clarke “conventional science fictional motifs” to explore the effects of science and technology on human- ity, and mentions the inclusion of “galactic travels” o introduce the theme of this issue of Vector, we’ve been extraordinarily lucky to work The logo of the African Speculative Fiction Society and “adventure.” This hesitancy and ambiguity (www.africansfs.com) Twith guest editor Michelle Louise Clarke, a scholar of African SF at SOAS University, is not uncommon in discussions of speculative and to benefit from the experience of Anwuli Okeke, founder of Hacking Africa, and fictions from Africa. Mark Bould (2015) suggests South Africa, which have become a cyberworld that one can come across science fiction from Chinelo Onwualu, co-founder (with Mazi Nwonwu) of the pioneering African SF magazine where physical existence is deemed unnecessary. Africa mentioned by critical journals that refuse Omenana. This editorial by Clarke is followed by essays by Onwualu and Okeke that These virtual superpowers have decided that the to use the term, or “would at least prefer not together provide a general introduction to this huge subject. The rest of the issue is filled ‘Third World’ is no longer relevant to their moder- to, deploying instead a de-science-fictionalized with articles focusing on specific aspects of African SF or specific works of literature, film, nity, having been used as a toxic dumping ground, discourse of utopia and dystopia, and labelling a place for germ warfare and genetic engineering anything irreal as some kind of postcolonial magic art, or music. This issue got big, so Stephen Baxter and Paul Kincaid’s regular columns are and nuclear experiments. The city Achimota fights realism or avant-gardist experimentalism”(13). taking a break, but will be back next issue — including a special double-length edition of to recover the rest of its disappearing country, So SF from Africa faces contradictory chal- Kincaid in (not so) Short on Iain. (M.) Banks. Next time we’ll also be hearing from Phoenix and to exist independently of Europe’s rhetoric lenges. It must fight on the one hand to be read Alexander, the newly appointed Science Fiction Collections Librarian at the University and portrayal of it as primitive, reasserting its as SF — and not just something SF-adjacent — to own worth and agency in the face of neocolonial be given full use of the genre’s rich megatext of of Liverpool. domination. tropes and conventions. On the other hand, it The book has been praised as vivid and imagi- must fight to be permitted to transform the tradi- native, but also characterised as unusual, compli- tional conventions of the genre, to make SF do cated, and unclassifiable (Ryman, 2017; Klein, 2007; new and different things. It must also often contest Ngaboh-Smart, 1997; Wright, 1996). T.R. Klein with the preconceived and reductive notions of The Speculative Turn in African Literature: Realism and Resistance (2007) describes Laing’s work concisely: “Once Africa nurtured within the Western imagination. the initially introduced ‘innocent’ reader decides Jennifer Wenzel (2006) explains that Western against prematurely tossing away Laing’s difficult readers who encounter ‘strange’ literatures from “Over the last two decades, Achimota close groups of any other fruit trees, books and is willing to accept an encounter with elsewhere often impose a binary between ”the City’s fast new geography had so many guavas and oranges. There cartoon-like images, allegories, and projections West and the rest,” and between “a singular devoured Accra almost completely was fruit in the toilets, fruit in the rather than full-fledged, realistic characters, s/he European modernity and multifarious worldviews, while at the same time most of the halls, and fruit in the aeroplanes, so will be rewarded with the experience of a unique variously described as pre-modern, prescientific, rest of the country had inexplicably that you could eat the city.”. conjunction between technological and aesthetic pre-enlightenment, non-Western, traditional, or vanished, land and all. Thus, by the Kojo Laing, Major Gentl and the modernity in African literature” (55). indigenous” (456). New readings of classic works year 2020 Achimota was a truncated Achimota Wars (1992), p.3. It’s unfortunate that Laing’s work has so often such as Laing’s, alongside emerging work from city bursting to survive and to find been overlooked and underappreciated, as it has Africa, are paving the way to a more nuanced map the rest of its country soon. The three golden cockroach, a Grandmother Bomb, plenty to contribute to debates surrounding genre of Africa’s diverse speculative literature. This issue elders of government, each with a elders with beards shaped like letters of the and ‘authenticity’ within African literature. He at of Vector explores varying definitions, and show- beard the shape of X, Y or Z, had A alphabet, and a carrot millionaire are just a few once defies generic pigeonholing and challenges cases just a few examples from Africa and its dias- shepherded the city over this deep of the eccentric characters which fill the pages established norms of the Anglo-African literary pora across various mediums: from Nick Wood’s crisis, directing history as if it were of Kojo Laing’s surreal classic of African SF, Major canon. His unique prose “confidently defies simple exploration of the South Africa’s comics scene and mad traffic. They had rules which Gentl and the Achimota Wars (1992). Laing’s novel reduction to a single larger theory, agenda or Joan Grandjean’s research into the Arab-futurist helped to form the new ways that the is set in the distant future of 2020, at a time when narrative” (Klein, 2007: 38), with its usage of words art of Mounir Ayache, to Jonathan Hay’s study of century demanded. Fruit was law: the Ghanaian city of Achimota is locked in the and phrases from across languages including Afrofuturism in hip hop and its political aesthetics every street had to have dwarf banana Second War of Existence, battling Europe and English, Ga, Haussa, and Italian. He also addresses built on science fiction tropes of aliens and space- trees in belts and lines, buckled with Editorial: Clarke 5 ships. Like artists everywhere, creators of African that as African SF in English and French gain more identity, yet it offers insight into a larger cultural SF aren’t simply imagining worlds to escape to, attention, Afrophone texts will also become more phenomenon called Arab-futurism, which is itself but also exploring contemporary and historical visible. transcontinental, encompassing both North Africa reality through the lens of fiction. Gemma Field’s This issue of Vector pays particular attention and the Middle East. ecocritical reading of Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon to African literatures in terms of the relationship acknowledges the slow violence of the oil industry between genre, technology, and science. This Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism in Nigeria. Masimba Musodza’s article opens up could easily encompass such works that could also important questions about genre, language, and be defined as horror, alternative history, fantasy, Moving from transcontinental to specifically trans- elitism within the African SF genre, through his magical realism, Afrofuturist or Africanfuturist. atlantic, let’s say a word or two about Afrofuturism. experiences in writing and publishing his works Their ‘science fiction’ elements could explore Afrofuturism is an aesthetic exploring the intersec- in ChiShona.