African writers are traumatized. They forever have to defend
their work. If it’s not someone questioning why they are not tackling the
problems of their societies, it’s someone wondering why they only write about misery
and gloom in the continent. When they discover that African writers are
churning out stuff like speculative fiction, they say ‘copycat’. Or something worse.
The something worse happened to me. Shortly after my book came out, a Ugandan
living in the UK asked; ‘Are you really Ugandan?’ I said yes, and she said, ‘But
your names….’ And I said Is your name Margaret (anonymised) more Ugandan than mine
(Dilman is Asian, Dila is Luo/Nilotic)? And her next question, ‘But surely, you
didn’t grow up in Uganda. No one who grew up in Uganda can write such stories.’
I stopped responding.
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| A muti market in Durban, South Africa, where you can buy any charm. |
In recent years, there has been a burst of activity with regard to SFF in Africa. Some liken it to Afrofuturism, but I don’t like
that idea, for African Americans (our children :-D) operate in a slightly different world. I’d prefer
the term AfroSF/Horror/Fantasy, etc, or African SFF, so as to market products
that are from the within continent. African Americans, and Africans in the
diaspora, though disadvantaged compared to their siblings from the other mother
(whites), enjoy a richer pool of resources and opportunities compared to us who
work and live in the continent. (See? The Caine Prize is often dominated by
people in the diaspora)
In writing this article, I want to add my voice to those that
stress that scifi is not alien to Africa. Why? At this early stage we are
trying to win an audience, thus talk of AfroSFF being a mimic can put readers off.
True, some stories are imitative of popular Western films and books. We can’t
ignore that influence, it would be hypocrisy. I often site Stephen King and
Margaret Atwood as having big influences on my work. I wrote one of the stories
in A Killing in the Sun, The Yellow People, right after reading The
Tommyknockers and encountering a spaceship buried under the ground. When I started
to read Zoo City, I at first thought of Philip Pullman's Nothern Lights, but after the first
page, that comparison stopped, for I was lost in an alternate Joburg, with a
very fascinating heroine and her sloth. So if anyone is to look at the surface,
and not go into detail to appreciate the characters and worlds we create, that
person is doing us a disservice.
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A genetically modified karoli (marabou stork),
maybe created to clean up man's garbage,
graces the cover of the recent issue of Lawino Magazine |
A recent article even went so far as to claim that when we
create superheroes, we are merely copying x-men and Superman, that we should
invent something unique the same way Western scifi has the ray gun, but this article
forgets that our works are only starting to come out, and they have not hit the
popularity levels of Western or even Asian products. With time, our creations will be part of the popular culture, but we won’t get there if myopic detractors keep nibbling at our efforts.
The simple fact is that human stories have always been
speculative stories. Branding stories as scifi, or fantasy, or literary, is a recent
phenomenon. It probably came about with capitalism, as the volume of written
works grew and publishers needed a way of selling to various readers. African societies
were not unique. They too told scifi stories. I’ll cite two examples from Acholi folk tales. These stories do not use magic, or the supernatural,
but feature technology that does not exist in the world of the characters,
which I believe is ultimately what makes a story scifi.
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| The first issue of Omenana |
In both, Hare is the hero. In the one I love, the king sends
his best and strongest warriors to bring Hare to justice over some mischief. Warriors
like Elephant. Surely, mighty Elephant would have no trouble beating Hare, but
Hare devised a weapon. I think a gourd with fake brains stuffed in it. When it
struck Elephant’s head, the fake brains stuck to Elephant. It must have caused Elephant
enough pain that when Hare said, ‘Look, I’ve smashed your head and your brains
are hanging out,’ Elephant believed, and fled before Hare could do more harm.
The other story has the village digging a well, but Hare
refuses to participate. To punish him, they set guards to watch the well and
ensure he doesn’t drink from it. Hare gets into a calabash, which he modifies
so he can hide in it, and roll in it. In a way it was some kind of vehicle. He
then comes rolling toward the well, while singing ‘Oh people of the well let me
drink water.’ The gourd amplifies his voice until it sounds like he is a
terrible ghost. When the guards hear this, they flee, and Hare get his drink.
Of course, these tales were not labeled as scifi, but in
writing stories like How My Father Became A God, in which an African scientist,
living at time before Europeans arrived, invents a super weapon, I’m not
thinking about all the cool weapons like ray guns and heat rays. I’m simply
thinking of this crafty Mr. Hare, as I remembered from my grandmother.
Same goes with superheroes. Again, I can name one who did
not use any kind of supernatural powers, Kibuuka, but he was able to fly and
shoot arrows from the sky. The Baganda, after he died, deified him. The other
is Luanda Magere, a man made out of stone. So when I craft a superhero story
like The Flying Man of Stone (coming soon in AfroSF 2), I’m not thinking of Superman,
or Spiderman, or Captain America, but of these two people who I met before I met
these Westerners.
And space travel, many societies around the world link our
ancestry to aliens. The famous ones are the Dogon in West Africa, and the
Sumerians in the Middle East. A couple of years back, while researching about
European missionaries coming to East Africa, I came across a paragraph in a
book, The Wonderful Story of Uganda, of course written from a European
Christian point of view so they were belittling the belief, but I could see
beneath the ridicule, and I found something that makes me think the Baganda too
believed their ancestors were aliens from outer space. Not only that, they could visit
these ancestors before death, as in they didn’t have to die to travel to the
sky. The Baganda have no gods as we know it. They worship ancestors, who become
deified like Catholic saints, and if there was a way of going to join the
ancestors in the skies, before one dies, doesn’t that allude to star-travel?
 |
How to go up into the Sky.
Instructional text found in an old book about Uganda |
This way of star-travel was preserved orally, I’m not sure
anything about it exists anymore. But telling scifi stories orally continues
today, and not just the folk tale kind. I grew up in Tororo, a small town in Uganda,
unlike what the reader above thought, and I fed on strange urban legends. At
that time, in the eighties, there was no TV, no Internet, and the biggest
source of news was Radio Katwe, which was slang for rumors. Like that of
Akii-Bua. He was the only Ugandan to win an Olympic gold medal. When adults talked
about him, they said things like, ‘He can run faster than a car,’ and that ‘He
went to compete in the Safari Rally. The white people came with cars, but he ran
so fast that he left all the cars far behind him.’ These were adults telling
each other tales, and we children would eaves drop. One time, while my
parents were complaining about a broken down bridge, a bus driver said, ‘In
Kenya, they have planted a tree in such a clever way that the branch grows over
the river. So there is no need for a bridge, you just drive over this branch and
you get to the other side of the river.’ They believed him, for he was a bus
driver, a man who sees the world.
So when some claim that the genre is alien to Africa, that
Africans don’t consume scifi, that there is no audience, I want to ask; which African
community are you talking about? When they say Africans are not ready for scifi, what do they really mean? I think such people are based in the diaspora and are completely out of touch with the streets of the continent. Africans won’t relate to Captain America, or
Star Wars, or Spiderman, but they’ll relate to stories of John Akii-Bua running
faster than a rally car, or to stories of trees whose branches are living
bridges strong enough for buses and lorries to drive over, or, as we see in
Nollywood films, they pay to watch alternate worlds spiced with juju fantasy.
I grew up with such stories, and I did not encounter books until
I was about ten years old and eligible to borrow books from the library. The
first I remember reading was called Yoa (or Yao?) and the Python, about a boy
(West African?) who befriended a python. I did not encounter Western stories
until much later on. I read Peter Pan when I was already fourteen, or fifteen.
I did not get to read Little Red Riding Hood until three years ago, when I
visited a friend and saw it in a pile of her children’s books. I’m lucky in
that sense, for I believe the best writing is heavily influenced by childhood. I
never understand why someone would question my background simply because I
write a certain type of stories.
|
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A herbalist (muti) market in Durban, South Africa
|
I’ll end with a piece of advice to writers: Set your stories
in the continent. Create characters who are deeply rooted in the cultures you
are familiar with, whether urban, rural, traditional, or modern, you won’t come
off as a hack if you do. If you are in the diaspora and have never been to
Africa, but want to write AfroSFF, welcome, but then, do research, and more research,
and some more research, until your story comes out as uniquely African. Hint, fellow
writers, there is a plethora of monsters and yarns that are doing the rounds in
the streets and village paths of your homes. Don’t ignore them. Those are the
kinds of materials that will win you an audience.
That said, I’m pessimistic. I’m wary of this ‘new wave’ of
AfroSFF, of this growing interest in the genre. Of course I’m happy. For the
first time in my life I’m not afraid to write what I like. In fact, I’m so motivated
that I’ve written two scifi scripts in three months and I plan to shoot one
before the year ends, using my own money. I hope the interest continues to grow
until the genre finds a firm foundation. But you heard of what happened to the
horror genre? Following the success of Stephen King, everybody wanted to write horror,
and then came a deluge of terrible, awful, ridiculous, and crappy books that put
off readers. Soon writers became afraid to tag their books with ‘horror’. It happened
with vampires and werewolves. Many publishers won’t touch those creatures. It
might happen to AfroSFF. Are my fears unfounded? Nope. It’s happened before.
You can’t sell a child soldier story now because at some point
everyone was writing about child soldiers in Africa. I’m afraid this new
interest will attract all sorts of gold chasers and wannabes and people seeking
a quick road to fame, and the deluge of crappy imitative work will kill the
genre.
My fears were confirmed recently when I got invited to judge an international science fiction screenplay competition. I can't name it for the process is ongoing. Some of the entries from Africa are truly original, very exciting to read, but a lot of them are hack jobs, putting black faces on, and using Africa as a backdrop for, stories already told elsewhere. It can happen and such a deluge can kill the genre.
Unless the publishers, producers, editors, and other gatekeepers, prevent
it. How? Simple. Don’t publish just because AfroSFF is selling. Use editors who
know the genre pretty well. I’ll illustrate. I wrote a novella for AfroSF 2,
edited by Ivor Hartman. I’ve never seen Lost, the TV series, but Ivor pointed
out that a creature I had created resembled the Smoke Monster, so readers
would simply say, ‘See, this African is copying Lost.’ I thanked him for it. I re-imagined
my creatures and I hope they are as original as can be. But that’s the crucial role
editors and other gatekeepers can play, to ensure that AfroSFF works are as unique as possible. Only
then can we hope to win an audience.
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Labels: Africa, literature, Science Fiction, writing
