INTRODUCTION

Helon Habila declares that The Granta Bookof African Short Stories should be canonized ifafter ten years of its publication it still ‘illuminates thepreoccupations and concerns, literary and social, of the times’(10). Although his test of time as a measure of literary meritis vastly shorter than the standard 100 years, I agree thatthematic relevance and stylistic innovativeness are robustgrounds for canonization. Using Habila's yardstick ofcanonization, I strongly recommend for the inclusion of InnocentAcan's ‘The Machodugo’, Lillian Aujo's ‘Where Pumpkin LeavesDwell’, and Dilman Dila's ‘The Last Storyteller’ in the Ugandanliterary canon. My justification for their inclusion is due tohow their respective authors deploy tropes of speculativefiction to showcase Ugandan dystopic social collectives.Furthermore, I argue that the speculative fiction motifs of theselected texts enable their writers to become Wale Adebanwi's‘social thinkers’. Adebanwi argues that writers are ‘not merelyintellectuals whose work mirror or can be used to mirror socialthought, but are social thinkers themselves who engage with thenature of existence and questions of knowledge’ (‘The Writer asSocial Thinker’; 406). The essence of Adebanwi's argument isthat writers do more than faithfully imitate the reality oftheir societies. They use their work to discuss and take a standon pertinent issues affecting society. African writers may nottell readers how to think about important societal issues, buttheir work raises consciousness concerning what issues are worththinking about.

The importance of writers in distilling profound insights aboutsocietal conditions is a point of agreement between Adebanwi andHabila. It is this role of writers that justifies the inclusionof any author's works in the canon of his/her society. Myproposition to include Acan's ‘The Machodugo’, Aujo's ‘WherePumpkin Leaves Dwell’, and Dila's ‘The Last Storyteller’ in theUgandan literary canon recalls Janice Radway's argument that‘works are selected on the basis of aesthetic achievement’(Reading the Romance: 3). Shegoes on to note that canonized texts may not ‘necessarily berepresentative of the large section of the population that hadnever read them’ (3). In these quotations, Radway makes twoimportant comments.