How Afrofuturism and Indigenous Storytelling Are Transforming Global Science Fiction
Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor is a genre-blending novel, which was published in 2010, but unlike work from authors of western science fiction, it does not open with spaceships or futuristic cities, but in sun scorched deserts. No spaceships, no metal utopias, no, there are spirits, ancient deities, a young woman who comes to realize that she can change the world with her magic. This work by Okorafor was an eye-opener to the readers with a Euro American background in science fiction: for many western readers, Okorafor redefined speculative fiction.
The conditions of the possible have been redefined by a new generation of Nigerian writers, artists and filmmakers whose storytelling is deeply rooted in cultural memory. Their stories are mythological and technological, invoking family memory and the future of information technology. This has been described as Afrofuturism, but is broader; this movement has made Nigerian creativity lead the world’s speculative fiction.
The future, to a Nigerian creator, is not just the preserve of the West or whiteness, which is why their novels, short stories, films, comics, and video games are helping them to kill that idea. What they are asserting is that the imagination of tomorrow can, must, speak Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Tiv, Pidgin.
Beyond Afrofuturism: To Africanfuturism
There has been much discussion about Black speculative art that has been based on the term Afrofuturism, a paradigm that was coined in the 1990s to describe the fusion of Black identity, technology, and futurity. That categorization has been extended and complicated by Nigerian writers.
Africanfuturism was proposed by Okorafor herself in 2019, to differentiate between the continent-focused visions that African makers were producing at that moment and the diaspora-focused visions of Afrofuturism. According to her, Africanfuturism is founded directly on African culture, African history, mythology, and viewpoint. It neither privileges nor centres the West.[1]
It is a semantic change but it is radical. It changes the subject of speculative fiction to the realm of inclusion and perseverance rather than trauma and displacement. The village, the city and the spirit world are equal places of potential in Africanfuturist works.
Take into consideration Lagoon (2014) by Okorafor, who imagines the invasion by aliens into Lagos. Rather than a catastrophic invasion, it is more of a reform with the camera lens capturing the spectacles of the Nigerian lingo, pandemonium, and humor. The novel is buzzing with the sensual overload of the megacity, the honking of the danfos (yellow buses) in the traffic, preachers screaming on corners, the smell of suya smoke on the street grills. Lagos becomes one of the stages as well as a protagonist, a living and unpredictable being and setting, in which human and non-human fates collide.
The Aboriginal Motor of Story
The metaphor of Western speculative fiction is often considered to be mythology. Nigerian narrators turn their mythology into a reality.
The oral traditions have never drawn a line between the physical and the metaphysical, the past and the present in the diversified array of cultures in Nigeria. The orishas of the Yoruba cosmology, the Igbo concept of chi (personal spirit), the Hausa epics of Bayajidda, all these are both myth and reality.
Worldview is speculative writing per se. The ghosts in these stories are not symbolic, but actual. Ancestors intervene. The past breathes.
One example is the Rosewater trilogy (2016-2019) by Tade Thompson that creates a radicalized Nigeria in the near future, where an alien fungus is able not only to heal the sick, but corrupt the mind. Beneath its science-fiction surface is a Yoruba undertow of philosophy of interconnectedness and awareness. British-Nigerian writer Thompson has said that he had a desire to create a work that does not reflect back but paves forward.[2]
Similarly, the duology War Girls (2019-2021) by Tochi Onyebuchi visits a nuclear war-torn Nigeria that is united by sisterhood, memory and reclamation. His dystopian mechs and drones are driven by the phantoms of civil war - the potential war and the historical trauma that does exist.
Such authors are re-using the Western tropes, and they are re-programming them. Masquerade costume transforms spaceship, aliens turn out to be ancestor, apocalypse is turned into a metaphor about the expropriation of colonialism.
Lagos the Metaphor and the Machine
Nigerian speculative fiction is also dominated by Lagos not as a setting, but as a representation of the multiplicity. It is a nonlinear time zone, in which past and future are commixed in traffic jams and information cables.
In the short stories Light by Dele Meiji Fatunla and David Mogo, Godhunter by Suyi Davies Okungbawa (2019) Lagos is mythic as well as mechanical. Next to the gig workers is a god walking the streets, there is a power cut off and the lightning of gods.
Okungbowa calls his work fantasy which could only have been Nigerian.[3] Indeed, David Mogo, Godhunter takes place after the apocalypse of deities known as The Falling when Lagos is struck by thousands of deities. We witness the transformation of the city into a circle of divine bureaucracy and existence. It is a parody of postcolonial anarchy--where all the people, alive or dead, are trying to pay their rent.
On one occasion, Okungbowa claimed that Lagos itself is speculative.[4] The future is the future in an uneven manner. This unbalanced futurability is a typical theme of the speculative art of Nigeria. Such worlds rarely have a smooth, idealistic technology, but instead it is hacked and made domestic.
This picture is a rejection of ideal Western futurism. It dictates that the future will be lived and not invented.
Page to Panel: Nigerian Comics
Nigerian artists are also rethinking speculative storytelling in other fields that do not rely on words through the use of comics and graphics novels.
Comic Republic, YouNeek Studios and Vortex Comics publishers in Lagos have produced rich superhero worlds that are inspired by African mythology. Their characters like Guardian Prime, Iyanu: Child of Wonder and E.X.O.: The Myth of Wale Williams balance the strength of the past with the conflict of the present.
In Iyanu, by Roye Okupe, a young Yoruba girl discovers her divine connection with old gods. The series is based on Yoruba folktales, and adapts the folktales into an animated series by Cartoon Network, as a story of fate and heroism. Meanwhile, E.X.O. reinvents Lagos in a high-tech state of moral decadence and one of the disillusioned characters must rescue the situation.
These comics are not local, but they certainly have the local tone and atmosphere. They are also reflective of the shift in generation: the young Nigerians create their myths with the help of digital tools, and in some cases, they do not rely on the traditional means of publication at all.
Cinema and Speculative Futures
The next frontier is the breakthrough of the Nigerian speculative cinema (also called Nollywood Noir).
C.J. "Fiery" Obasi examines the water goddess of West Africa in the shape of a mother in a matriarchal village of the coast, in his film Mami Wata (2023); it is shot entirely in black and white. It is a film that is hardly known outside the country, so it was possible to attribute awards at Sundance and Venice to its gorgeous visual appearance. Obasi, director of Ojuju (a zombie thriller set in Lagos) has indicated that he hoped to come up with a kind of visual language of African spirituality. Meanwhile, such films as The Lost Okoroshi by Abba Makama (2019) and Hello, Rain by C.J. Obasi, based on the short story by Okorafor, do not adhere to the conventions of the genre in the slightest. In Hello, Rain, three Nigerian witches use magic wigs, which are both magic-based and science-based to bring havoc in Lagos. The film’s aesthetic, a mixture of afrobeats, neon and folklore, is indicative of the delirious Nigerian identity in the modern world.
These films are not trying to ape Hollywood science fiction; they are making African surrealism a grammar; such films make a space in which the ghosts of the dead and Bluetooth communications are coexisting on the same spectrum.
Developing a Counter-Western Imagination
Throughout the biggest portion of the twentieth century world science fiction was an Anglophone initiative with western anxieties: nuclear war, artificial intelligence, the space race. The African worlds were just exotic landscapes or allegories of the Western paranoia.
The artists of Nigeria are turning this script the other way around. Their imaginary art is not demanding its place - it is usurping the power.
The future that has been imagined out of Lagos or Enugu is not the Martian colonizing future but the decolonizing future. It encompasses recovering the enchantment between man and nature, society and technology, the past and the future.
This decolonial turn reverberates all over the world. As climate change, human migration, and AI change the lifestyle of humankind, new epistemologies, patterns of knowing and surviving, are offered by Nigerian speculative literature, which is not conducive to the myth of linear progress.
In Noor (2021), Okorafor tells a story of a disabled woman, Anwuli Okwudili, who succeeds in surviving the Nigerian society, relying on cybernetic limbs and cleverness. The novel reidentifies cyborg identity differently, non-transhumanistically, but in the meaning of resilience. Technology here is not transcendence, it is, on the contrary, adaptation--so very human, so very African.
Everyday Futures: Lagos as Laboratory
Outside fiction, the speculative is inherent to the life of the Nigerians. The tech-boom in the country, its hustler culture and its improvisational urbanism all resonate with the creativity of the speculative art.
According to sociologist Ato Quayson, Lagos is in itself an infrastructure of imagination.[5] Its citizens find their way around power failures, congestion and financial unpredictability with a resourcefulness that can often be described as futuristic in nature. “Na condition make crayfish bend,” says a common Pidgin proverb, (It means that tough situations, circumstances, or "conditions" force people to change, adapt, or behave differently). This is an improvisational energy which enlivens the speculative production of the country. It is not escapism, but it is projection. Nigerian artists do not dream of escaping reality, but pushing its limits.
Why the World Is Listening
When, in 2025, the Nebula and Hugo Awards released their longlists, three out of ten short stories on the lists were written by African or diaspora authors. Two of them were Nigerian. That's no accident.
The worldwide audience is thirsty to read about the theories that make the future more complex. Nigerian writers are providing such stories - full of rhythm, language, and local contradictions.
Masobe Books and Cassava Republic Press are fostering a new generation of speculative writers and foreign publishers are increasingly demanding African voices. The film festivals, also, are paying attention: the success of Mami Wata is an indicator that people are now willing to watch African mythic realism being narrated without the interference of the West.
The most radical thing about Nigerian speculative art is possibly its unwillingness to adhere to western expectations. It does not require verification, it demands self-definition.
These stories do not represent the African variant of other stories, as Okorafor stated in her essay “African Science Fiction Is Not Afrofuturism,”[6] and they also have their center; one grounded in African realities, language and future.
Towards a Nigerian Theory of Imagination
Where Western sci-fi poses the question of What if? the Nigerian speculative storytelling poses the question of What now?
It is an urgent issue of the current world: climate catastrophes, youth movements, political ups and downs. The speculative lens is not only a criticism instrument but also a hope instrument - a mirror that reflects the spirit world that is right below the asphalt.
In this regard, Nigerian futurism is not of escape but rather of coming back, of re-connecting with the knowledge of the ancestors and the collective possibility.
Young Nigerian artists are fomenting the possibilities of imagining as they create digital folklore collections, webcomics, and by merging masquerade imagery and 3D animation. They are showing that the future is not just elsewhere--it also is being written, drawn, and filmed in Lagos traffic, in Enugu classrooms, in Benin studios.
Those tales might talk in tongues, but then combine to say one thing:
Nigeria has always had its future.
Abraham Aondoana is a writer, poet and novelist. He holds a degree in Law. His works has appeared in Ink Sweat and Tears (UK), Renard press Interwoven Anthology, Rough Diamond poetry and elsewhere. His first children’s non fiction book is scheduled to be released in 2026 in the United States. He enjoys reading and writing.
Notes
[1] Nnedi Okorafor, “Africanfuturism defined,” 20 October 2019: http://nnedi.blogspot.com/2019/10/africanfuturism-defined.html?m=1 .
[2] Sofia Samatar, “An Interview with Tade Thompson,” Interfictions Online, issue 7 October 2016: http://interfictions.com/an-interview-with-tade-thompson/
[3] Tonya Moore, “Interview: Suyi Davies Okungbowa,” 4 December 2023: https://skiffyandfanty.com/blog/interview-suyi-davies-okungbowa-by-tonya-moore/
[4] Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong, “Suyi Davies Okungbowa on the spirit of Lagos and the changing faces of fantasy,” KUOW , 5 November 2019: https://www.kuow.org/stories/suyi-davies-okungbowa-on-the-spirit-of-lagos-and-the-changing-faces
[5] O'Connor, M. (2005) “From Lago to London and Back Again: The Road from Mimicry to Hybridity in the Novels of Ben Okri,” PhD dissertation ((University of Cadiz, Spain, 2005).
[6] Ainehi Edoro, “The Exhaustion of Explaining Oneself: Nnedi Okorafor and the Battle to Define Africanfuturism,” Brittle Paper, 3 March 2025: https://brittlepaper.com/2025/03/the-exhaustion-of-explaining-yourself-nnedi-okorafor-and-the-battle-to-define-africanfuturism/
Chukwuebuka Ibeh, ““Africanfuturism” Added to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction,” Brittle Paper, 5 May 2022: https://brittlepaper.com/2022/05/africanfuturism-added-to-the-historical-dictionary-of-science-fiction/