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Southern Africannearfutures: Black-tech, Ambivalence, &Speculation in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift & MasandeNtshanga’s Triangulum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2022

By
Jeffrerey G. Dodd
Edited by
Louisa Uchum Egbunike  and
Chimalum Nwankwo
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Summary

AMBIVALENCE AND BLACK-TECH IN AFRICANNEARFUTURES

Storytellers from Africa and its diasporas have been presentingnon-realist imaginative works as long as there were people tohear or read them. The social and (neo-/post-)colonial politicsof how those stories are treated by historians and critics, andthe labels used in discussing them, are an important element ofhow we understand the speculative vein(s) of African fiction(s).The contributions to this volume will analyse many texts fromthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries and pursue vigorousdebates about the labels we might apply to them. For thepurposes of this chapter, I will use the term ‘Africanfuturism’,as defined by its coiner Nnedi Okorafor, and I will pay specificattention to these elements of the sub-genre that Okoraforargues distinguish it from Afrofuturism:

The difference is that Africanfuturism is specifically andmore directly rooted in African culture, history, mythologyand point-of-view as it then branches into the BlackDiaspora, and it does not privilege or center the West.

Africanfuturism is concerned with visions of the future, isinterested in technology, leaves the earth, skewsoptimistic, is centered on and predominantly written bypeople of African descent (black people) and it is rootedfirst and foremost in Africa. It's less concerned with ‘whatcould have been’ and more concerned with ‘what is andcan/will be’. It acknowledges, grapples with and carries‘what has been’. (‘Africanfuturism defined’)

Okorafor importantly acknowledges that Africanfuturist textsgrapple with distinctly African pasts and presents, whileconcerning themselves with potential futures.

Additionally, Okorafor's mention of technology invites aconsideration of just howAfricans’ embrace of, and agency with, technology informpotential futures. Scholar M. Haynes considers this interest intechnology to be a foundation for ‘Black-tech’, a sub-genre ofworks ‘allowing for African Diasporic people to wrestle withscience and the ways that it affects them’. Hayneselaborates:

Texts that explore experimentation on African Diasporicpeople, using them as a form of human technology, or theircontributions to science are right at home in thissub-genre. However, Black-tech also can have positive uses.Due to the distrust many African Diasporic people have ofscience, Black-tech can be used to show that with trainingand focus they can be in control of the very entity thatoppresses them.

Type
Chapter
Information
ALT 39
Speculative and Science Fiction
 , pp. 31 - 42
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2021

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