In my work and in this blog, I have used the umbrella term Black/African Science Fiction (B/A SF) to describe a wide range of science fiction and fantasy forms that have been originated by African and African-descended people. These are literature forms which in many ways seek to use the speculative writing of science fiction to centre the experiences, philosophies and hopes of Black/African people. Though I use B/A SF as an umbrella term to point to this collective and overarching goal, in this essay, I want to examine the continuities and points of departure in the origins and composite aims of the subgenres within B/A SF. To do this, I focus on two key strands of B/A SF – Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism. But beyond these are a wide range of related and sometimes overlapping genres from a vast array of artforms that include graphic art, music, fantasy, magic realism, speculative African fiction and Africanjujuism.
Confluences and Departures
So let us start with ‘Afrofuturism’. This is a term coined by Mark Dery (in the 1990s), which ‘studies the appeals that black artists, musicians, critics, and writers have made to the future, in moments where any future was made difficult for them to imagine.’ It is an artistic genre that ‘draws on mythical African pasts in order to envision new black-centered worlds of the future.’ Afrofuturism has been most frequently described as a branch of science fiction, but in its futuristic critique of contemporary realities and cultures, it also extends into political critique, which uses ‘historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs.’ Afrofuturism mostly, but not exclusively, finds expression within the spatial limits of the USA.
On the other hand, ‘Africanfuturism’ as a descriptor emerges as an alternative, a response to the American origins of Afrofuturism, but is also used to describe African writing that predates this description. In her, now famous, 2019 essay, writer Nnedi Okorafor was one of the first people to seriously use the term to encompass Africans writing speculative and science fiction in ways that do not centre the West. In other words, it points to speculative writing by Africans drawn ‘from their own roots’ using their own cultures, histories and mythologies as templates.
Thus, Africanfuturism grants a temporal lens to a spatial question, in response to absences of Africa and Africans in science fiction (even Afrofuturism) – when it asks, ‘Will we still be here as Africa in the future? Will we see the Africa we know in humanity’s future?’ This centring involves repudiating the idea that the past is primitive and stereotypically African and that future modernity must be a uniformity, shorn of supposed African primordiality.
Thus, while Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism are united by their attempts to speculate on Black liberation, from the foregoing, we begin to see how they are driven by different histories, literary tools, experiences and interests. Africanfuturism, despite its more recent naming, has been argued to have older origins. The Rape of Shavi, published in 1983 by Buchi Emecheta, is an example of work that can be described as Africanfuturism. Here, Emecheta uses allegorical writing to describe the impact of colonialism on a fictional African country, Shavi. Another example of older and allegorical writing is Ògbójú Ọdẹ nínú Igbó Irúnmọlẹ̀. Originally published in 1950 and written in Yorùbá, Ògbójú Ọdẹ describes a hunter’s quest in a forest of spirits, extolling the virtues of courage and perseverance.
These two examples illustrate how Africanfuturism’s recourse to African mythology has always been rooted in actual cultural practices and histories of the African continent, though it often branches into the African diaspora through writers who are not or no longer resident on the continent.
Similarly, Afrofuturism also describes modes of writing that predate its naming. Rooted as it is in the Black experience in the United States of America, Afrofuturism is temporally linked to the emergence of African American literature in that country. Afrofuturism’s recourse to mythology is informed both by imagined African pasts as well as literary traditions that are local to the USA and within African American cultures. As such, the works react very directly to the horrors specific to racialisation in that country – for example, chattel slavery, Jim Crow-era lynching, and the intractability of police brutality.
Due to the foregoing, it is argued that in their articulations of the future, Afrofuturists are more concerned with what could have been had these horrors not occurred, while Africanfuturism reflects on what has actually been and what can be imagined from that point. In essence, both of these related genres are concerned with a look to the future, but from different perspectives and with different tools of imagination. Like cooking seasoned food but with different ingredients that are accessible to the cooks.
Consequently, the immediate concerns that animate these genres can differ. Questions of racial identity relating to nationality and citizenship are more likely to be included in Afrofuturism than Africanfuturism. The specific experience of being an oppressed minority means that writers of Afrofuturism are often concerned with the need to reiterate the humanity of Blackness in the face of the persistent anti-Blackness of the state in the USA. As such Black Panther [2018] ends with a philanthropic measure that responds to this structural state violence. Conversely, as Blackness is the norm on most of the African continent, Africanfuturists articulate instead different relations to oppression and want. For example, in Lagoon, Okorafor seeks to use African communal philosophies to reimagine alien invasion as a means to build joint prosperity in ways that do not replicate colonial dispossession and saviourism. This contrasts with the inevitable state-centric nature of Black Panther’s response to deprivation.
Evidently, there is a certain tension between these two genres, with their contemporary writers sometimes involved in disputes about which genre is the tributary and which is the source. For example, in Intruders, Mohale Mashigo argues that Afrofuturism is not made for Africans who live in Africa, as it is not linked to their experiences, philosophies, or aspirations.
This type of contention, I think, links to the wider diaspora wars that fly in the face of the dream of Pan-Africanism, which posits that Black people in the world have a common origin, common aims and a common future. This is an ideal that can help the writers of the genres work towards common aims and continue to be a constant communal conversation through their works.
Ultimately, Africanfuturism, Afrofuturism, and other forms of B/A SF are connected genres because they can and do use the above connective ideal to provide transcendental, shared and ultimately political spaces and devices for Africa and her Diasporas to collectively confront, question, unveil and reinvent the nature of humanity and Euro-modernity in ways that centre the reality, interests, pasts and futures of Black people. This could involve using the tools of BA/SF as a lens to give new life to both African and African American literature.
For example, some writers have reimagined previous literary works to question the linearity of time. An example of this reimagination is Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which tells the story of Okonkwo – a man caught in between the colonial and precolonial worlds of late nineteenth-century south-eastern Nigeria. His tragic flaw is his strict adherence to the indigenous customs that are being forced out by the British colonial occupiers. Egbunike reimagines this as a story of alien invasion – colonising powers doing in actuality what the writers of mainstream science fiction merely imagine may be done, erasing local customs, imposing new laws, and annihilating resisters.
This reimagination takes inspiration from African fantastic and magical realism that rely on alternative interpretations of time. These are exemplified in the ancient Asante depiction of Sankofa – an image of a bird that reaches backwards for the egg of the future on her back. Thus, time travel has always been an integral part of B/A SF, confronting the unrelenting linearity of Euro-modern organisation of time.
In essence, despite the divides between these genres, points of confluence are found in their futuristic aspect as they seek at their very heart the end of racism and the flourishing survival of people racialised Black. Collectively, these genres also recognise the role of Euro-modern law in enacting racial injustice and anti-Blackness. As emancipatory devices, they can imagine a different future from what epistemological genocide and contemporary intellectual engagement with Blackness predict. This necessitates directly confronting the role of law as the keeper of the colonial ever-present.
What’s Law Got to Do With It? Working Together against Regenerations of Racial Injustice
B/A SF has, in part, developed out of both the inadequacy of neoliberal legal structures to account for Black trauma as well as the failure of mainstream science fiction to account for Black possibility and futurity. This has led to an increase in B/A SF that directly responds to the obvious broken promise of neoliberalism and Euro-modern law. This broken promise becomes very manifest in the failure to recognise how present-day racial injustice relies on historical yet continuing structures.
Consequently, writers and users of this genre frequently have had to directly respond to erasures and racist science fiction. For example, Okorafor’s Lagoon responds to Blomkamp’s District 9. Blomkamp’s pseudo-docudrama, set in South Africa, explores themes of xenophobia, apartheid, and racism through extending tropes of refugee treatment to aliens who have crashed to earth and are then segregated by local authorities. Blomkamp uses tropes of savagery and cannibalism to depict the thinly veiled Nigerian characters in the film. Okorafor responds in the Africanfuturist Lagoon with a story of a similar alien crash in Lagos, Nigeria. Her story humanises Nigerians by drawing on local myths and legends to explore the complexities of human existence in Lagos and the possibilities of alien-Nigerian collaboration beyond the common stereotypes used to define Nigerians and other Africans.
One could argue then that, unlike mainstream science fiction, B/A SF writers very intimately recognise the entanglement between enslavement, colonial dispossession, capitalism, and present racial injustice. They seek to subvert mainstream expectations and inevitability by going to the core of colonial logics’ redefinition of the body and space-time, and unsettling those redefinitions.
In fact, mainstream science fiction, through constructed and futuristic stories of alien abduction, the oppression of women, the exploration of new worlds, and the civilising/destruction of alien peoples through technological advancements, often adopts, very strongly, the same colonial logics of enslavement, first contact, conquest, policing, and surveillance that have already characterised Black peoples’ racialised experiences on earth. Therefore, constructed dystopias have been criticised for creating their hellscapes by merely extending to white people the modalities of life which racialised, colonised and indigenous peoples have continuously endured.
The Handmaid’s Tale is just one example of this, which subjects racialised white women to the conditions of rape and dehumanisation that Black women experienced during racialised enslavement. The description and celebration of The Handmaid’s Tale as a futuristic dystopia inadvertently suggests that human existence has always been dystopian, but dystopia only becomes of universal concern through the white experience.
Thus, in response to Euro-modern law’s distortion of time and temporality, B/A SF writers envision new futures that break from the repetitions of history and rely on devices that tell us, ‘Time can be created, reclaimed, resourced, and redeemed’. How else do we overturn what is considered natural except by embracing what is perceived as unnatural, outlandish and fantastical? Thus, B/A SF writers provide us with devices to posit counterfactual questions about legal knowledge and practice that specifically reference and address the law both as keeper of colonial time, but also as containing the potential to overturn this nature. In other words, much of B/A SF’s political work is done by ‘enlisting readers to consider various possibilities, to speculate upon the idea of the future’. This we can do together.
B/A SF goes beyond speculating on the future into troubling our lenses of the present. By conflating humans and monsters and their spaces, times and temporalities, B/A SF collapses our perspectives of reality to unveil what is hidden behind the fiction of benevolent Euro-modernity. This is why B/A SF is understood to have political and jurisprudential purposes at its core.
On a smaller scale, the literary spaces of B/A SF also present themselves as concrete sites of contemporary resistance in which those facing racial trauma in the present can find not just the space to create these art forms but also rest, retreat, community, validation, and rejuvenation.
Therefore, despite the divergent origins, tools and interests, Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism (and related genres) serve very similar purposes, which can be deployed to the advantage of legal scholars. Ultimately, B/A SF writing is directed to questions of racial justice within the field of law and literature because it categorically asks for a refusal of the racialised disasters that law’s continuities of time predict.
Using B/A SF to cultivate legal knowledges for the future can call into clearer question the very nature of justice itself and the role of the lawyer within it. B/A SF almost exclusively arises from a position where the concept of justice is the opposite of intrinsic to society; the lawyer within it may be a corporate figure but is quite unlikely to be heroic. The law here is not innocent.
As Capers tells us, Euro-modern law is often the thing that the genre seeks to overturn.
Within that goal, B/A SF writers also re-imagine physical and digital borders. Increasingly entrapped into legal knowledges is the rising regulation of digital technologies, such as machine learning, algorithms, biometric data collection, facial recognition, etc., that surveil, criminalise, and bolster the physical border. Without reckoning with the colonial ordering of space-time, this increase exemplifies an abject failure to reckon with the racial and other body-politics of digital technology. The proponents of these technologies, by claiming artificial technological objectivity, presuppose that these non-human technologies must be just and fair and that they operate within linear timelines and singular temporalities. However, their purported objectivity often merely replicates the law’s inability to read the complex text of the human body, whose conditions are produced by the social structure and space around it. These digital technologies trap Black life into a repetitive loop of trauma by maintaining racial disparities in different agencies of the law, e.g., incarceration rates and border surveillance, as well as skyrocketing stop-and-search levels.
Looking Forward, Forward-Looking
In response to the increasing necropolitics, carcerality, and dehumanisation of Euro-modern law, B/A SF writers seek to project into the consciousness of agents of Euro-modern law images of utopian radicality, diversity and the mattering of Black life. Through this, they hope to unsettle the way law constructs memories of racial injustice and the legal histories that indwell and order human society.
Writing the past in the future-present may reveal how Euro-modern law’s manoeuvring in time traps humanity into a loop of the colonial ever-present. If law brews time, has brewed our current times, it can be re-brewed once more to produce different futures. So that all Black lives matter, wherever they may be from. The future is the goal.
References
Shah, Sahar, and Foluke I. Adebisi. “See Justice Done: The Problem of Law in the African American Literary Tradition by Christopher Michael Brown.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 26, no. 2 (2025).
Capers, Bennett. ‘Afrofuturism and the Law’. Critical Analysis of Law 9, no. 1 (2022): 1.
Zamalin, Alex. ‘Afrofuturism as Reconstitution’. Critical Analysis of Law 9, no. 1 (2022): 1.
Samatar, Sofia. ‘Toward a Planetary History of Afrofuturism’. Research in African Literatures 48, no. 4 (2017): 175–91.
Mashigo, Mohale. Intruders: Short Stories. Picador Africa, 2018.
Okorafor, Nnedi. Who Fears Death. Penguin, 2011.
