Ten years ago, approximately fifteen years after the advent ofthe term ‘Afrofuturism’, Nnedi Okorafor (author of Who Fears Death, The Book of Phoenix, AkataWitch, Binti) askedcompatriot and filmmaker Chikere, if Africa was ready forscience fiction. In response Chikere points to the difficulty ofcreating a futuristic imagination, when everyday essentialsremain unmet, saying further that ‘Africans are bothered aboutfood, roads, electricity, water wars, famine, etc., notspacecrafts and spaceships’ (Okorafor ‘Is Africa Ready forScience Fiction?’). This brusque assessment of African culturalproduction results from a single but problematic fundamentaldiscursive script regarding African literature: that thehistorical trajectories of most African states – of colonialism,engagement with postcolonialism and the contemporaryexploitative capitalism, coupled with the socio-politicalconditions – make for an unfertile ground for speculativefiction. It implies that narratives from and of Africa haveother overriding agencies that would fit poorly in a futuristimagination.

Several writers, however, have pointed to the ubiquity ofspeculative motifs in African storytelling in general; anobservation that echoes Ytasha Womack's assertion that she was‘an Afrofuturist before the term existed’ (Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and FantasyCulture: 6). That speculative elements in Africanstorytelling are not novelties is further highlighted as amission statement by Omenana, anonline literary magazine for speculative fiction whose firstissue was published in 2014: ‘In our folktales animals talkedand the gods walked among men; what is called fantasy today wasas real as night and day’ (‘What We’re About’). Not only werespeculative elements in storytelling prevalent, but they alsoformed a core component of African narrative compositions, withnatural, supernatural and preternatural motifs, employed asstrategies of defamiliarization in the context of socialcritique. Critics have since recognized these narrative elementsas more people now have greater access to Africa and Africancultural productions and are better able to hear more storiescoming out of the continent. So, while speculative fiction mightbe new in the canon of ‘conventional’ African literature – anaspect of cultural production that is dependent on internal andexternal and sometimes oppositional discourses – their motifsare not new in African narratives.